Comic Review: Star Trek – Lower Decks #18
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
The Cerritos crew face their final battle against the invaders and receive surprise help from none other than the Enterprise-E, captained by Worf!
OUR TAKE
After a long delay, we have come to the end of the Lower Decks comic run, for now at least. Indeed, Star Trek as a whole is in a retracting phase right now, as Strange New World and the recently started Starfleet Academy have stopped production and will finish their runs next year. The comics, being cheaper to make, will likely continue for some time, but it’s always a sad time when there’s no Trek TV in the works. As for this particular issue, it works well enough as a finale to both this six issue arc and the eighteen issue series as a whole, bringing back characters and items from previous issues and, since this is Lower Decks, is filled to the brim with references to other Star Trek installments, most notably Worf, the character with the most appearances across the franchise by far, bringing in the Enterprise-E used in three of the movies based on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Apparently the writers of this issue decided to answer a question posed in the finale of the Picard series, which takes place after Lower Decks, as to where the E ended up, with the only hint being that Worf mentions it was “not his fault”. It’s a pretty funny work around, though who knows how long it will remain canon.
The resolution is naturally classic Star Trek, with the reveal that the invaders are actually a third species similar to the sister planets, a MIDDLE CHILD planet as it were, merely seeking attention from its older and younger species, and things being brought to a peaceful end after that. And since most of this series takes place early in the fifth season, we can simply watch the last seven episodes of that to see where things headed from there. Hopefully one day we’ll see more comics of this crew taking place post-series (especially since an animated follow up is highly unlikely), but I am at least glad they got to use this cover to complete their parodies of the Original Series movie posters. Specifically, this one is a parody of Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country, which Worf’s actor, Michael Dorn was also in as Worf’s grandfather. See, knowing a bunch of random Star Trek trivia is useful sometimes. Not most times, but this time. That concludes our coverage of Star Trek for the foreseeable future, but I’m sure we’ll be back soon enough, as we’ll have Infinite Diversity and Infinite Combinations of things to review in the meantime.
