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Star Trek: Lower Decks

Mothra

Mothra

Absolutely loved Fully Dilated, glad to see LD back into the swing of it. This was such a fun and funny concept for an ep.

I liked how the Boimler and Rutherford B plot, by nature, could not be more than a few seconds, so essentially the full ep was just about the mission. Good stuff.
 
Mothra

Mothra

Got a chance to catch up, Fissure Quest was great. Just a fun adventure full of characters we love.

There's too many to list, but I'm in love with how they went back and did a fanfic-fix of every major missed opportunity or blunder in Trek since DS9. You love seeing these characters playing their roles in a world with better writing. I almost feel like this is like, "what if no Rick Berman"

Excited for the last ep.
 
WisteriaHysteria

WisteriaHysteria

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WisteriaHysteria

WisteriaHysteria

The final episode felt like it had two or three separate sequel/spinoff hooks, and I'd be down for all of them. I really hope Sundance gets their shit together fast and can commission more toons from McMahan/Titmouse.
 
Mothra

Mothra

The Lower Decks finale was decent, helped a lot by the characters we’ve come to know throughout the series. It’s a solid end.

Rutherford’s whole thing was weird and bad, and the klingons absolutely did not need to be in this at all. I don’t think this needed a bad guy at all but whenever.

Highlights for me were T’Ana’s lines about the klingon ship designs, the visuals of the chase, the floppy lightning bolt, and the way it all wrapped up at the end. Looking back on the whole series, I think T'Ana and Shax definitely had the highest hit rate in terms of comedy, for me.

Really hope we get more, or at the least some cameos by the actors. It was great having a light Trek show that really loved the franchise.

  • Big fan of the meta-commentary they often did with Boimler, where he would speak about the franchise as a whole. A high point of the show was him talking about how much he liked how dweeby the crew of the Enterprise D was, and how the action movie stuff that eventually took hold was wrongheaded in being embarrassed by Trek. Similarly, his commentary about the multiverse trend in the second-to-last ep is something I feel like a lot of fans are feeling, and it was good to both acknowledge that alt universe stuff is usually pointless re-hashes of existing characters, and to give voice to the possibilities of a Sliders-like show where you could see the same people an infinite number of ways.

  • LD embracing the weirdness and goofiness of Trek is, in my mind, the single best thing the show could possibly have done, and it really gave it the beating heart it needed to thrive. TNG is jam-packed with ridiculous sci-fi shit, and even the clunkiest of concepts were usually made with a genuine idea or vision in mind. LD was a show willing to take that weird fish alien or space whale on its own terms, embrace it, and say, "Yeah, this is a future where dolphins navigate space, they have their own giant pool on deck 6"

  • Spent a lot of this series hoping Rutherford and Mariner would find a good groove for their characters, and I honestly just don't feel like they got there. Both characters did best when they were allowed to make dumb decisions and struggle for it, and Lower Decks was very very often not willing to let them fail. I feel like this was something Tendi and Boimler were allowed to do a lot more, and in both the character-building and comedic sense, they were much better for it. Looking back on it, I can't really recall what Rutherford's story has been at all. He has the implant as just an incidental character aspect, which is fine (cool seeing characters with disabilities), but it never really factors into the story 99% of the time, so you think you're supposed to ignore it, which you do. So beyond that, he is just a very nice guy, and will be endlessly positive all the time, and likes engineering, and that's kind of the whole thing with him actually. He came out of the box a completed character, so it just never felt like he had anywhere to go. I think his most interesting moment was that one time he battled his previous self, I wanted more of that sort of thing with him, but he'd already won all his battles before the first episode, sadly. Mariner, similarly, started one way, and did not change at all until the end of the final season. Compare this to Tendi and Boimler, who both went through a decent amount of character growth, with ups and downs and reinventions, trying new things... it felt very much in the spirit of the original Lower Decks episode in TNG. So yeah, I dunno, I feel like they weren't sure what to do with these two characters.

  • The art direction on this show was gorgeous. Putting aside the family-guy-ass designs, the animation was fluid, the world was colorful and full of life, and it felt Trek. They managed to get the feeling of this taking place in the TNG era very well, and that is not easy to do. Also was a huge fan of any time they would use the animated medium to the fullest, doing episode concepts you couldn't in live-action, and packing as many unique aliens as they could into this world.

  • I've bitched about this before, but the fact that LD has 30 minutes to work with and decides to dice it into A-plot and B-plot storylines ends up meaning that a lot of episodes that could have been good become like, 50% good, 50% filler, and that just doesn't make for an overall great ep. The times in this show they've chosen to break this format (Fissure Quest being the most recent example), it's been a thoroughly enjoyable episode of Star Trek.

  • Early on, we heard a lot of grumbling about how LD would be nothing but references to other, better Trek things. Now, that did definitely happen for like 70% of this show, but the remaining 30% of completely original material kicked ass! I wish they'd had more confidence to do their own thing, and not orbit around a single TNG reference, but this was certainly something the show got better about as it went along.

  • This last season had a rocky start, but it ended up delivering three of my all-time favorite episodes before closing out - Fissue Quest, Upper Decks, and especially Fully Dilated. Fully Dilated is exactly what this show can achieve when it keeps focus on a funny concept, and rides it all the way to the end. You really got the sense LD was just getting cookin', which makes it all the more a shame Paramount took an axe to it now.

  • Really hope we see some of these writers pop up in future SNW or Starfleet Academy eps!
 
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