{"id":26547,"date":"2024-10-19T21:20:06","date_gmt":"2024-10-19T21:20:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/5e114731-7770-4262-a1ff-f6abddb88a7112"},"modified":"2024-10-19T21:20:06","modified_gmt":"2024-10-19T21:20:06","slug":"star-trek-lower-decks-bows-out-on-business-as-usual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/star-trek-lower-decks-bows-out-on-business-as-usual\/","title":{"rendered":"Star Trek: Lower Decks bows out on business as usual"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article discusses the fifth season of Star Trek: Lower Decks and older Treks.<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s no such thing as \u201cdead\u201d in Star Trek<\/span>, the sprawling, perpetual opus that has thrived in spite of itself for almost sixty years. What started as a cornball space-ships and punch-fights show for atomic-age kids and their parents has become (gestures around) all this. So I\u2019m not writing too much of an obituary for Star Trek: Lower Decks<\/em><\/span> despite its fifth season being its last. Given Paramount\u2019s fluid leadership right now, I can easily imagine that decision being reversed in the future. So this isn\u2019t so much of a goodbye as a farewell for now.<\/p>\n

Lower Decks\u2019<\/em> fifth season picks up not long after the fourth left off, with Tendi still repaying her debt to the Orions. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a spoiler to suggest the status-quo reasserts itself soon after given, you know, all the other times this has happened. The crew of the Cerritos is then thrust into the usual sort of high-minded, lowbrow yet full of heart hijinks that we\u2019ve come to expect. Naturally, I\u2019m sworn to secrecy, but the fifth episode \u2014 where its title alone is a big spoiler \u2014 is a highlight.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen the first five episodes of the season and as with any sitcom, there are a few misses in between the hits. One episode in particular is trying to reach for an old-school Frasier <\/em>plotline, but it falls flat given the thinness of the characters in question. Thankfully, Lower Decks<\/em> is able to carry a weak show on the back of its central cast\u2019s charm. Sadly, as it tries to give everyone a grace note, some characters you\u2019d expect would get more focus are instead shunted to the periphery.<\/p>\n

You can feel Lower Decks<\/em> straining against its own premise, too. A show about people on the lowest rung of the ladder can\u2019t get too high. As a corrective, both Mariner and Boimler use this year as an opportunity to mature and grow. I won\u2019t spoil the most glorious running gag of the season, but their growth comes in very different ways. If there\u2019s a downside, it\u2019s that the show still relies too much on energy-sapping action sequences to resolve its episodes.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s a minor gripe for a show that grew from the would-be class clown of the Trek world to the most joyful interpretation of its ethos. I\u2019ve always loved how, when the chips are down, Lower Decks<\/em> delights in the bits plenty of newer Treks would rather ignore. The show is, and has been, a delight to watch and something for the rest of the franchise to aspire toward.<\/p>\n

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\"L-R,\"L-R,<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Paramount+<\/span><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve been looking for a way to describe Lower Decks\u2019<\/em> target audience for years, but only now has it hit me. It\u2019s a show written by, and for, the people who grew up watching Star Trek in the VHS era. Creator Mike McMahan is just four years older than me, barely a teenager when The Next Generation<\/em> went off-air. So while he\u2019d have encountered Deep Space Nine<\/em> and Voyager<\/em> as first-run, everything else would have been discovered through re-runs and tapes.<\/p>\n

You can almost track that timeline of discovery as Lower Decks<\/em> broadened its range of hat-tips each year it ran. Of course <\/em>we got a parody of the first two Trek films in the first season \u2014 both were ever-present on Saturday afternoon TV when I was a kid \u2014 but it\u2019s not until the third that we get a nod to First Contact<\/em>. As Enterprise<\/em> ran out of gas, you can feel McMahan and co\u2019s delving into the behind-the-scenes lore and convention gossip about those later series.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve seen the series five trailer<\/ins><\/span>, you\u2019ll spot the gag about Harry Kim\u2019s promotion, something the character never got on Voyager<\/em>. If you\u2019re fluent with Trek\u2019s behind-the-scenes drama you\u2019ll know the handful of reasons why, and why it\u2019s funny to nod toward that now. But that\u2019s not the only subtle gag that points a sharpened elbow into the ribs of major figures from the series creative team. I\u2019m sure if you don\u2019t spot them all, Reddit will have assembled a master list half an hour after each episode lands on Paramount+.<\/p>\n

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\"L-R\"L-R<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Paramount+<\/span><\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

I won\u2019t indulge in theorizing as to why a popular and successful show like Lower Decks<\/em> is ending (it\u2019s money, it\u2019s always money). But, as we\u2019ve seen countless times before, it\u2019s not as if it\u2019s hard to revive a successful animated show when wiser heads prevail. Hell, even McMahan told TrekMovie<\/ins><\/em><\/span> he\u2019s prepared for that, and even has some spin-off ideas in the works. But for now, let\u2019s raise a toast to Lower Decks,<\/em> the animated sitcom that became the cornerstone of modern Star Trek.<\/p>\n

The first two episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks season five will arrive on Paramount+, Thursday, October 24, with an additional episode landing each week for the successive eight weeks. The series and season finale will air on December 19.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following article discusses the fifth season of Star Trek: Lower Decks and older Treks. There\u2019s no such thing as \u201cdead\u201d in Star Trek, the sprawling, perpetual opus that has thrived in spite of itself for almost sixty years. What started as a cornball space-ships and punch-fights show for atomic-age kids and their parents has …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26548,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"class_list":["post-26547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gadgets","has-thumb","has-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26547"},{"taxonomy":"hashtags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.worldtechguide.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtags?post=26547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}