Comic Review: Star Trek Lower Decks #9

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Tendi reveals to the crew a dark secret from her past…she has student debt.

OUR TAKE

Lower Decks continues to live on in comic form with a Tendi-focused arc! In fact, it’s the first arc of this series that focused solely on one of the lower deckers! Issues one, two, five, and six were all group stories, seven and eight were about Freeman, and three and four were about Tendi AND Rutherford. So, you could argue that Tendi has been a focus character in this series more often than any other character. Nay, the MAIN CHARACTER of this series. Which is a good choice, because Tendi is funny and cute and has a neat backstory as the first Orion in Star Fleet, and using her well taught pirate tactics while trying to be an upstanding officer. I’d say she’s probably my favorite of the main four, if I’m being frank. And her being raised by swindlers and thieves only adds to the hilarity as Tendi is tangled into a rather modern problem: student loan debt. Since this is the utopian (asterisk) future of Star Trek, no one in Star Fleet actually has any money, but that doesn’t stop outside cultures like the Ferrengi from scamming people into something like it. Personally, I was lucky enough to not have to deal with student loans, but I’m well aware of how easily exploitable they are and how people just trying to get a higher education can end up trapped for the rest of their lives trying to pay back what they can never afford.

Now, as I’ve mentioned before, this is a dubious canon comic with an arc that will be concluded next issue, so the solution to this situation will no doubt be found in the following part. That said, this is a pretty clever way of tying in a problem of today into Star Trek, even if it’s not a pointed political commentary like some of the show’s best installments have been. Though in a way, you could say it’s political in the sense that it is a take down of the capitalist systems that keep people down in the present that the proposed brighter future of the series would have moved on from by that point. And I’m very much interested to see how that all wraps up! So, fun and clever idea, connection to modern issues, focuses on my fave main character, basically has everything I like. It’s only really an eight because I don’t get as much out of these comics as I do the show. But still a good read!