My wife Andrea and I have always been all in for all things Star Trek. So we've been following the new Star Trek series on CBS All Access including the new animated comedy series, Star Trek: Lower Decks.
The focus is on life on a Federation starship, the U.S.S. Cerritos, from the perspective of a crew who are not part of the senior staff.
I really want to like this show. The idea of an in canon Star Trek series mining the tropes and traditions of the Trek universe for comedy instead of drama just sounds like its a lot of fun.
But Star Trek: Lower Decks is not an easy show to get to know. It moves at a frantic pace with machine gun dialogue. I'm still not sure of character names so I pulled the Wikipedia page so I can discuss that here.
Beckett Mariner (voiced by Tawny Newsome)
One would expect that the crew in the lower decks are new recruits fresh out of Starfleet Academy and immediately eager to climb that first rung of the ladder for promotion and maybe make it to the bridge where the real action is.
Mariner inverts that expectation. She is not on her way up but rather on her way down, demoted several times. Mariner is an irreverent rule-breaker. She's good at Starfleet stuff but not so much following rules and protocols.
Brad Boimler (voiced by Jack Quaid, "Hughie" from The Boys)
Boimler is all about following rules and protocols. He does pretend "Captain's logs" in his spare time. He wants to be a Captain one day but he needs to loosen up from those rules and protocols a bit and learn to improvise.
Jack Quaid describes Boimler as the kind of guy who would "nail the written portion of the driving test with flying colors but once it actually got to him being in the car, it would be a complete and total disaster". In other words, Brad Boimler is Spongebob Squarepants.
D'Vana Tendi (voiced by Noël Wells)
Tendi is... green.
New to the ship, eager to please.
And she is... green.
All I got.
Sam Rutherford (voiced by Eugene Cordero)
Rutherford is an ensign adjusting to a new Vulcan cyborg implant. Rutherford has a lot of technical smarts but not so much with the social skills, particularly when the cyborg gear glitches and tries to repress his human emotion.
We also get to the senior officers of the U.S.S. Cerritos including Captain Carol Freeman (voiced by Dawnn Lewis) who is also Marriner's mother and not at all happy to have her rule breaking daughter on her ship; and First Officer Jack Ransom (voiced by Jerry O'Connell) who is a lot like Next Gen's Will Riker if Riker was jacked up on Red Bull and totally devoid of shame.
SIDE BAR: Rutherford decides to look at Starfleet career options beyond engineering, including command. Ransom sets up Rutherford with command simulations on the holodeck. The first one does not end well.
"Fatalities of 105%", Ransom announces.
Rutherford is confused by how he could have killed more people than were actually on the ship.
Ransom suggests to Rutherford that when in doubt, go for the Janeway Protocol.
The next simulation involves the ship on a collision course with an asteroid. Rutherford invokes the Janeway Protocol.
Apparently the Janeway Protocol involves driving the ship into a problem. The simulation ends with the ship crashed into the asteroid with all the ship's children (inexplicably just the children) dead and floating in space.
A few nights after I watched that episode of Lower Decks, I happened up an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called "Scientific Method". Voyager's crew is being attacked by an invasive alien threat and Captain Janeway's solution is to take the helm and hurl Voyager at full speed between the components of a binary pulsar which will likely tear the ship apart. The alien threat is expunged, the ship manages barely to survive and we have an example of the Janeway Protocol in action.
It's this kind of attention to the minutia of Star Trek lore where Star Trek: Lower Decks frequently shines.
There may be a temptation to regard the bridge crew as straw men to be knocked over by the junior officers of the Cerritos. They make some bone headed plays sometimes. But the show does convey that most of the problems of Freeman, Ransom and others is they have made their way up the promotions ladder with a firm understanding of the Starfleet rulebook but so far lacking the experience and subsequent wisdom to know when to look beyond the Starfleet rulebook.
Which is a source of frustration (and in the case of Marriner, total impatience) for the officers on the lower decks where the conventions of the Starfleet rulebook are challenged every day.
We're now up to the fourth episode and I think Star Trek: Lower Decks has found a good rhythm where the show feels slightly less frantic.
Andrea and I have decided that since we are in the neighborhood to watch Star Trek: Lower Decks, we might use the opportunity to catch up on Star Trek: Discovery.
The show is another Star Trek prequel series, this time set a few years before the original series.
The show looks good and has a diverse, interesting cast.
But we have problems.
1) The show is about the adventures of the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery during a time of war between the Federation and the Klingons. The ship and it's crew do not appear until episode three. The first two episodes center around Michael Burnham, a human woman raised on Vulcan, and her involvement with the ill-fated mission that sparks that war with the Klingons. It is an important back story but one that could've been told later via a flashback and over the course of 1 hour, not two. The first two hours are virtually wasted introducing us to characters who are mostly all dead by the end of the 2nd episode.
2) The show does not need to be a prequel. The premise for the Klingons in Discovery is that elements of the empire are re-asserting it's warrior self, a development that would've tracked in the "current" time line of the show instead of being relegated to a previous time.
All in all, Star Trek: Discovery is a show with a lot of strong potential but wasted due to poor planning.
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Next week on the Tuesday TV Touchbase...
Well, I've done did it and finished the 3rd season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. More on that next week.
Until next time, stay safe, remember to be good to one another and keep it down, would ya, I'm trying to watch some TV here.
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