I was resistant to the idea of watching Star Trek: Lower Decks for quite some time. I was put off by a combination of some truly terrible trailers, the fairly generic-looking “adult animation” art style it uses, and the fact that its creator had some involvement in Rick and Morty, a show I couldn’t even make it through the first episode of without feeling mildly ill.
But then I got thinking: I fucking hate it when people write stuff off based on superficial things like art style, so I should endeavour to not do that either. And, discovering that the complete run of Star Trek: Lower Decks to date appears to be on Prime Video, I decided to watch an episode or two, just to see what it was like.
And you know what? It’s all right. The first couple of episodes are a bit heavy on the Gen Z-baiting manic energy, but after that it settles down a bit and starts to be a lot more witty and fun. There’s still a certain amount of that 2024 “energy” to it, which I’m sure will turn some people off, but it’s by no means a tedious Seth McFarlane-alike show. In fact, despite having a very different tone to live-action Star Trek, it actually manages to do quite a good job of feeling plausibly like what a comedy set in the Star Trek universe would feel like.
Because that’s what it is. It still has many of the elements of classic Trek: characters with a bit of depth to them; relationships that come to light over the course of several episodes; creative takes on alien races; and, of course, the all-important technobabble. It just has a rather more overtly irreverent tone than live-action Trek; this isn’t to say that live-action Trek was never funny, but rather it tended to be a more gentle, subtle sort of humour, whereas Lower Decks is rather more self-conscious about it.
Of the episodes I’ve watched so far, I think my favourite has been the third one, Temporal Edict, which is a funny take on something my wife and I discuss rather frequently: the amount of time wasted in an average day at a full-time job.
The episode concerns the captain becoming aware of the crew’s use of “buffer time”, a concept where they tell a superior that a particular job will take much longer than it will actually take, allowing them to look like a “hero” when they complete it in a fraction of the time they said they would, and also affording them time to slack off without anyone noticing. The episode explores the disastrous situation that would arise if everyone was well and truly “on the clock” at all hours of the day, and how it would almost certainly be counterproductive to try and micromanage people to this degree. It was a clever episode that, like classic Trek, takes a look at a real-life concept through the lens of sci-fi and invites us to have a good old think about it.
In short, I’m rather impressed with Lower Decks so far, and am pretty sure I’ll watch it all the way through on Prime Video at the very least and perhaps even pick up the series on disc to keep. I guess it remains to be seen whether or not it wears out its welcome by the end of five 10-episode seasons, but everything I’ve heard from people who are already fans seem to suggest that it only gets better from hereon. I’m certainly willing to give it the chance to prove itself further.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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