“Delta shift thinks they’re so much better than us. Just because they’re so much better than us!” -Ensign Tendi, “Temporal Edict”
When Star Trek: Discovery debuted back in September of 2017, it came with enough baggage to fill an entire cargo freighter. Not only was it carrying a 50-year-old sci-fi franchise on its back, but the show’s producers seemed determined to make Discovery its own unique animal. Discovery was to take place in the same timeline as the original Star Trek’s continuity, but writers were now free to abandon the long-held “Roddenberry rule,” allowing them to incorporate interpersonal conflicts between main characters – long discouraged by Trek writers.
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Whether or not you like Discovery – and I’m personally on record for not being a fan – executive producer and current Trek head honcho Alex Kurtzman and company did at least succeed in creating their own unique version of Star Trek that was definitely different than what we were used to. This new version was a dark and violent version of the franchise that preferred stories of evil, revenge, war, and action over the traditionally more thoughtful, diplomatic, and cerebral tales of the past. Over the course of Discovery’s first two seasons, and through a season of Star Trek: Picard, we have seen showrunners repeatedly declare their statement of purpose: We are here to show you the dark parts of Star Trek that we don’t usually see. We’re going to see war and failure and suicide and revenge killings on a scale usually reserved for R-rated action movies. Discovery and Picard sought to push Star Trek down dark alleyways not usually touched by Starfleet’s flagships and the Federation’s ideals.
When the newest show in the series, the animated Star Trek: Lower Decks, debuted back in August, the “Kurtzman mission statement” seemed to be following suit: It was to be yet another “angle” on Trek. But Lower Decks has managed something beyond Discovery and Picard. The showrunner, Mike McMahan, is not merely incorporating dim tones and complex plots that audiences are not used to seeing in Star Trek, but expanding on ideas and little structural minutiae that Trekkies have been thinking about for years. Lower Decks isn’t simply defying Trek traditions to be rebellious, it’s poking gentle fun at some of the sillier aspects of Trek we may not have paid much attention to. And, while doing so, gently expanding Star Trek to the world of Starfleet vessels that, well, aren’t flagships and which aren’t given terribly interesting assignments.
For the uninitiated, Lower Decks takes place after the events of Star Trek: Voyager, and is about a quartet of ensigns who are asked to do the most menial tasks aboard the USS Cerritos, a starship that is constructed with two separated hulls that keep the lower-ranking staff both symbolically and literally far away from where the important decisions are made. The series was named after an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation which was essentially the same thing: What do the lives of ensigns look like on a large starship?
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Throughout Star Trek, we’ve typically been treated to stories about Starfleet’s best and brightest. The Enterprise was the Federation flagship, and the shows were all about Starfleet’s captains who were right on the edge of action, making important decisions, leading during difficult diplomatic problems, wrestling with ethics, and fighting the effects of whatever mind-warping astral phenomenon they encountered that week. While this has always made for good drama, idly overthinking Trekkies have always pondered what was going on in Starfleet that didn’t involve the Most Important Decisions. Surely, Trekkies would ask, there are ships out there simply mapping star systems or cleaning up debris or running really dull experiments about deep space moss or something.
Lower Decks finally shows us the world that, frankly, I didn’t know I had always been thinking about. Trekkies love to overthink their object of affection, pondering how a starship really works from the floor up, as it were. Lower Decks taps into the questions about starships we all perhaps secretly had. For example: Ensigns do not have their own quarters on a starship. On Lower Decks, our four main characters essentially sleep on bunks in a hallway with little more than a cubby to hold their belongings. And, yes, not all Starfleet vessels have the most exciting missions. Sometimes they’re just delivering gifts, following up on First Contact, or aiding more important ships. Indeed, the name of Lower Decks’ California-class starship, the Cerritos, may be named after Cerritos, CA, a broad, flat, uninteresting subsection of Los Angeles best known for its Auto Square (and before you think I’m casting shade on Cerritos, CA, know that the description above was parlayed to me by a citizen of the place).
And, yes, it turns out Starfleet officers can also be petty in that workplace sort of way. In Episode 5, “Cupid’s Errant Arrow,” Ensigns Tendi and Rutherford visit a better-equipped ship, the USS Vancouver, and openly envy their access to a particular scanning/repair widget that the Cerritos doesn’t have. By the end of the episode, both ensigns have managed to smuggle duffel bags of said widgets back to their ship merely to make their jobs slightly more fun. It’s the Star Trek version of getting your hands on “the good broom” at your menial movie theater sweeping job. Yes, even Star Trek has room for tiny, paltry workplace envy.
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Additionally, Lower Decks has finally and openly acknowledged that many of the extraordinary adventures on a Federation flagship have now happened so often in Star Trek that they are dull, workaday phenomena. When passing by higher-ranking officers, the central quartet of ensigns sometimes overhear that their superiors have gone back in time and met famous historical figures. Just another Wednesday for them. When something goes wrong, it indeed crosses characters’ minds that it could just be, say, Q messing with them. Lower Decks takes place in a world where the amazing and expansive cosmos of Star Trek is reduced to workplace grind. And there’s something refreshingly down-to-M-class-planet about that. Trekkies who have been playing attention for the last 50 years know the details of Star Trek so well that it has become somewhat predictable. It makes perfect sense that characters living in that universe would be beholden to the same weary acceptance of the extraordinary.
But Lower Decks’ biggest saving grace – and the thing that’s making it pretty great rather than merely novel – is its good humor. There is a version of Lower Decks in a parallel universe somewhere that revels in its cynicism and banks on the characters being dumb and cruel to evoke laughter. Lower Decks, while happily trudging through jokes about holodeck waste disposal and recalibrating brig force fields, remembers that Starfleet officers are generally principled people who are devoted to Federation ideals and have broad optimism about unity and exploration.
When Rutherford asks to be transferred to another department, as he did in the show’s second episode, “Envoys,” his superior officers all applaud that he is exploring his career and finding his place. He’s doing it for neurotic reasons – in the episode, Rutherford has double-booked himself and needed a new job that allowed him to attend a small social event and not disappoint a friend – but the fact that one can be celebrated for changing tracks on a Starfleet vessel lends Lower Decks a certain warmth and understanding that was commonplace in the Star Treks of yesteryear.
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Lower Decks, then, has found the perfect balance between the seeming edict that new Star Trek must show us parts of the universe we haven’t seen before, and retaining the most important element of Roddenberry’s ethos that Starfleet is a place where people generally get along and are proud of their work. With heads raised and tongues planted firmly in cheek, Lower Decks is – dare we observe – allowing Star Trek to finally boldly go once again.
