Comic Review: Star Trek – Lower Decks #16

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Freeman and the remaining Cerritos crew recover at the nearest Starbase, but get help finding a new working ship from an unexpected source.

OUR TAKE

We enter the second half of this six issue arc with a bit of a pause in the action, only taking place from the perspective of the crew that managed to escape the fight. The Away Team sadly is designated Killed In Action, but…come on. Unless these comics have been secretly taking place in a separate continuity, we’re going to see Boimler, Tendi, and T’Lyn alive and well by at least the next issue, so THIS one is really just about giving all the named characters left something to get through to get back in the action. Seems kind of contrived in a way to try and justify making these six issues of story as opposed to four or five, but it does at least give us a chance to fold back in some bits from previous issues, in this case specifically the Harry Mudd totally not sex bot Norm (and a bunch of him) from the first issue of this arc and the reintroduction of Doctor Pulaski and the USS Illinois, both present during the seventh and eighth issues that delved into Captain Freeman’s time as an ensign herself. With the hints that we may be getting close to the end of this comic’s run, you might expect them to bring back more things from previous issues, but then you would realize there wouldn’t be a ton to pull from either way, since most of those issues either pulled from references from other shows (like Pulaski, actually) or stuff from the Lower Decks cartoon, so not exclusive to this comic.

I guess you could bring back those aliens that possess you with glowing eyes and call everyone “babes”, though they wouldn’t really fit in this scenario…unless they’re the mysterious alien invaders! Which I don’t really think is likely. So yeah, it’s pretty much just Pulaski and these sex bots as our callbacks. So now the Cerritos crew got briefly taken out of the action and is now headed back in, with who knows how much time has passed since the last one ended. If it weren’t for those main character plot shields, the Away Team would most definitely be dead by now. That just leaves us with two more issues of this arc, and since the solicitations for the eighteenth issue don’t list it as the final one, we’ll just have to see what the synopsis for the nineteenth issue will be so we’ll get a glimpse at what’s coming when this arc concludes in a couple months.