(courtesy IMP Awards)
SNAPSHOT
In season five of ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks,’ the crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos is tasked with closing ‘space potholes’ – subspace rifts which are causing chaos in the Alpha Quadrant. Pothole duty would be easy for Jr. Officers Mariner, Boimler, Tendi and Rutherford…if they didn’t also have to deal with an Orion war, furious Klingons, diplomatic catastrophes, murder mysteries and scariest of all: their own career aspirations. This upcoming season on Paramount+ is a celebration of this underdog crew who are dangerously close to being promoted out of the lower decks and into strange new Starfleet roles. (courtesy Space.com)
Making the galaxy a better place is a LOT.
And it stands to reason when you are tackling some of the very worst things that various sentient races can do and throw at you, that it’ll be very serious work.
All of which Star Trek has mostly proved to be quite true during a slew of iterations beginning with The Original series back in the ’60s.
But then along comes Star Trek: Lower Decks and it turns out you can be both emotionally meaningful, character-rich, narrative dense *and* funny! Who knew?
Well, clearly the creator of the show Mike McMahan, and the exceptionally clever creative team he assembled around him who, over four impressive seasons to date, have managed to be both incisively thoughtful and galactically clever, paying homage to Gene Roddenberry’s canon-heavy, venerable institution, all while mercilessly and affectionately having a great deal of fun with it.
It’s extremely sad that it’s ending after five seasons – that seems to be Paramount+’s thing now; indeed, many streaming services have adopted the same model – but I am determined to celebrate it on its way out and enjoy saying goodbye to the crew of the Cerritos and their wholly unorthodox but wonderfully entertaining way of boldly going …
Star Trek: Lower Decks season five premieres its first two episode on Paramount+ on 24 October with the remainder of the episodes following weekly thereafter util 19 December.