Star Trek: Lower Decks

Not every joke lands perfectly, but so much of Lower Decks‘ humor is impressively well-calibrated to celebrate this franchise for its quirks, while also poking fun at concepts that are relatable no matter the century, like boring business meetings, professional jealousies, and awkward first dates. It’s not easy, trying to find a new way to sing Star Trek‘s song, but so far Lower Decks has found a way to nimbly balance some tricky concepts and look good doing it.

Lower Decks finds a lot about the long-running sci-fi franchise worthy of lampooning, but mostly it’s a fun, imaginative and clever look at this beloved universe from a very different perspective.

Lively, mirthful and colorful. [17 - 30 Aug 2020, p.10]

Star Trek: Lower Decks is a hilarious look at the people who make Starfleet run and never get credit. And it’s the first Trek product since The Voyage Home to really do a good job skewering the franchise’s self-important streak.

Lower Decks requires a careful balancing act. Lean too hard toward silliness and it stops seeming like Star Trek. But play it too straight and the comedy starts to feel like an afterthought. In the four episodes provided to critics, McMahan and his team consistently get the balance right.

The result is something that’s neither hilariously cynical nor meaningfully sincere—it’s functional, and rarely outright bad, but fundamentally unmemorable. ... There is potential here. A few of the individual storylines show sparks of life, and if the characters ever calm down, they might turn out to be endearing.

There’s a lot of potential there to be both curious and heartfelt, as Star Trek has always been, but push it into some new directions narratively and visually, with the animated format allowing the franchise to reach beyond what has come before. But Lower Decks, for all its raucous pleasures, doesn’t quite rise to that occasion.

Star Trek continues to be the big gun in CBS All Access' streaming arsenal, which has been steady if not particularly inventive. Star Trek: Lower Decks somewhat rectifies the second part of that with an irreverent, Adult Swim-type animated series that likely won't beam up many new subscribers but should mildly amuse a quadrant of the more committed ones.

“Lower Decks” most often exudes the energy of adoring fan fiction, relying on a viewer’s awareness of this interconnected universe for its plot details and its self-referential humor. The meta quality is intermittently witty, but the show struggles to develop an identity of its own outside of those name drops.

Through four episodes, “Lower Decks” feels caught in between. It’s a smooth and zippy package, but it doesn’t register very strongly as either a geekfest or a transgressive satire.

“Lower Decks” has its occasional chuckle-worthy moments, but too often the show opts for wild chaos as a substitute for actual comedy.

The entire show seems to be caught in between extremes. It’s just over the edge of being too adult for kids to watch — Mariner complains that a yeti she once met was “being a dick,” and in one episode gets a punishment detail to clean the holodeck of what’s implied to be semen — but never really delves into truly R-rated Trek content.

It's all packaged in bland-but-amiable fashion with colorful, detail-lite animation from Titmouse and energetic voice work across the board. It's hard to latch onto any of the characters.

In tossing aside the “Trek” earnestness, does somewhat torch that which makes the franchise special in the first place. Its first four episodes contain some laughs and some elegantly done character work. But if the joke of “Lower Decks” is that its characters, on a random ship doing clean-up work somewhere in the galaxy, fall short of demanding a show about their adventures, it’s not hard to agree.

“Lower Decks” loves the tropes a bit too much, lacking any edge or commentary that might cut into the familiarity of this project overall.