Comic Review: Star Trek – Lower Decks #6

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The culprit of who has been messing with time is revealed! It’s Mariner.

OUR TAKE

That wraps up this time travel two-parter, but while the first one was pretty fun and used a lot of tasteful callbacks to Trek’s long and varied history with time travel, the resolution here ends up feeling kinda rushed. The one who Freeman’s team was tracking was clouded in mystery last issue, but mainly because there were so many jokes to throw around that it really didn’t matter at the time. But pretty much once I saw the skin tone of the hooded figure who pushed them on the Titanic, for me, the game was up. It was either Mariner or her mom, the only black characters in this group of characters, and Mariner going kinda nuts and/or causing trouble is basically the first assumption most characters have during a crisis, often rightfully so. So yeah, in addition to finally giving Lower Decks a time travel story, we also get our third AU bad Mariner. The one from the fifth season premiere who took over the Cerritos, this, and the holo-deck version Vindicta…who was really only Mariner pretending to be a villain, so I guess it’s just those two, which is not as fun to say. Not the hardest mystery, or really the most satisfying conclusion.

That’s not to say the comic itself wasn’t fun, it was perfectly within fun parameters, but the first one of these was definitely the better time reading. I know this is as much meant to be poking fun at time travel stories, but having the villain’s motivations be just the bog standard “my future was bad so I came back to change it in a weird way” just makes it feel like they gave up and just wanted to move on. Yes, other Trek villains have had similarly sparse motivation and levels of rationality, but I suppose I was expecting the modern day comic to be more clever than that, which I suppose was my mistake. Ah well, with us already six issues in, there were bound to be some flubs here and there by this point. This has still been a more than adequate series to keep on now that the show is done, which is hopefully only territory. And it seems the next two-parter will be a bit like time travel, though really only through flashbacks, as we get an account of Freeman’s days of youth as a lower-ranked officer!