The Lower Decks finale was great! Glad they went out on their own terms and showcasing their own characters after getting all the cameos out of the way in the last one. Probably (by default) the third best TV finale after TNG and DS9.
Kinda wild I went from “great another adult cartoon with a drunk party character” watching the trailer and now after years of terrible live action Trek thinking “Star Trek probably won’t be as good as this again” after the finale lol
I ended up really liking Lower Decks. The first season was kind of uninteresting but they really turned things around and I always looked forward to a new season each year. It’s too bad it’s ending but I think they took the central premise as far as it could go.
maybe one of the most insane things my mom has ever told me
The Lower Decks finale was decent, helped a lot by the characters we’ve come to know throughout the series. It’s a solid end.
Rutherford’s whole thing was weird and bad, and the klingons absolutely did not need to be in this at all. I don’t think this needed a bad guy at all but whenever.
Highlights for me were T’Ana’s lines about the klingon ship designs, the visuals of the chase, the floppy lightning bolt, and the way it all wrapped up at the end.
Really hope we get more, or at the least some cameos by the actors. It was great having a light Trek show that really loved the franchise.
I had just rewatched the entire series again before watching the final episode and if I hadn’t, i would have had zero idea who the Klingons even were. And I still sat there wondering why so much of the final ep was spent on these guys. I was really uninterested in that storyline.
But overall it wrapped up nicely and it’s shame it has ended.
Few more thoughts about the series as a whole:
Big fan of the meta-commentary they often did with Boimler, where he would speak about the franchise as a whole. A high point of the show was him talking about how much he liked how dweeby the crew of the Enterprise D was, and how the action movie stuff that eventually took hold was wrongheaded in being embarrassed by Trek. Similarly, his commentary about the multiverse trend in the second-to-last ep is something I feel like a lot of fans are feeling, and it was good to both acknowledge that alt universe stuff is usually pointless re-hashes of existing characters, and to give voice to the possibilities of a Sliders-like show where you could see the same people an infinite number of ways.
LD embracing the weirdness and goofiness of Trek is, in my mind, the single best thing the show could possibly have done, and it really gave it the beating heart it needed to thrive. TNG is jam-packed with ridiculous sci-fi shit, and even the clunkiest of concepts were usually made with a genuine idea or vision in mind. LD was a show willing to take that weird fish alien or space whale on its own terms, embrace it, and say, “Yeah, this is a future where dolphins navigate space, they have their own giant pool on deck 6”
Spent a lot of this series hoping Rutherford and Mariner would find a good groove for their characters, and I honestly just don’t feel like they got there. Both characters did best when they were allowed to make dumb decisions and struggle for it, and Lower Decks was very very often not willing to let them fail. I feel like this was something Tendi and Boimler were allowed to do a lot more, and in both the character-building and comedic sense, they were much better for it. Looking back on it, I can’t really recall what Rutherford’s story has been at all. He has the implant as just an incidental character aspect, which is fine (cool seeing characters with disabilities), but it never really factors into the story 99% of the time, so you think you’re supposed to ignore it, which you do. So beyond that, he is just a very nice guy, and will be endlessly positive all the time, and likes engineering, and that’s kind of the whole thing with him actually. He came out of the box a completed character, so it just never felt like he had anywhere to go. I think his most interesting moment was that one time he battled his previous self, I wanted more of that sort of thing with him, but he’d already won all his battles before the first episode, sadly. Mariner, similarly, started one way, and did not change at all until the end of the final season. Compare this to Tendi and Boimler, who both went through a decent amount of character growth, with ups and downs and reinventions, trying new things… it felt very much in the spirit of the original Lower Decks episode in TNG. So yeah, I dunno, I feel like they weren’t sure what to do with these two characters.
The art direction on this show was gorgeous. Putting aside the family-guy-ass designs, the animation was fluid, the world was colorful and full of life, and it felt Trek. They managed to get the feeling of this taking place in the TNG era very well, and that is not easy to do. Also was a huge fan of any time they would use the animated medium to the fullest, doing episode concepts you couldn’t in live-action, and packing as many unique aliens as they could into this world.
I’ve bitched about this before, but the fact that LD has 30 minutes to work with and decides to dice it into A-plot and B-plot storylines ends up meaning that a lot of episodes that could have been good become like, 50% good, 50% filler, and that just doesn’t make for an overall great ep. The times in this show they’ve chosen to break this format (Fissure Quest being the most recent example), it’s been a thoroughly enjoyable episode of Star Trek.
Early on, we heard a lot of grumbling about how LD would be nothing but references to other, better Trek things. Now, that did definitely happen for like 70% of this show, but the remaining 30% of completely original material kicked ass! I wish they’d had more confidence to do their own thing, and not orbit around a single TNG reference, but this was certainly something the show got better about as it went along.
This last season had a rocky start, but it ended up delivering three of my all-time favorite episodes before closing out - Fissue Quest, Upper Decks, and especially Fully Dilated. Fully Dilated is exactly what this show can achieve when it keeps focus on a funny concept, and rides it all the way to the end. You really got the sense LD was just getting cookin’, which makes it all the more a shame Paramount took an axe to it now.
After finishing Voyager I felt like Enterprise is what I should get to next but I’m wondering if jumping straight to Lower Decks is the better choice. My only hesitation is how many jokes and references I’d probably miss from not having seen almost anything post-Voyager.
there are honestly only a handful of enterprise and discovery references it’s mostly TNG era and TOS/TAS stuff. plus i feel like the show itself is so reference dense that even the jokes about shows you have seen will be such minutiae that you might end up re-looking them up anyway
I’d say Enterprise, because it’s the same type of show as Voyager, so you’d wrap up that Old Trek era and then move on to the New Trek era, but, it’s whatever you’re in the mood for.
When Enterprise is good, it’s more Voyager or DS9. When it’s not, it’s so incredibly clear why the franchise died for a long while there.
A while ago I found each season of TNG on Blu-ray at a Seattle record store for cheap. I got them because of course, but to be honest I didn’t expect I would watch it through with the discs. In actuality, we’ve been doing just that. And I gotta say that deliberately choosing an episode and moving disc by disc through a specific season is really nice. The bonuses on these discs are also great, and the restoration is just gorgeous.
I have been hoping theyd do a DS9 remaster, but maybe I’ll get dvd box set sooner or later since that doesn’t seem likely and watching TNG this way has just been so fun.
Also got the tos movies in 4k as a Christmas gift, and they look great.
ds9 remaster unlikely to ever happen, unless its a god-awful ai upscale. The TNG blurays came out just when streaming was becoming huge, so they didn’t sell nearly enough to justify the costs needed to remaster (they essentially redid ALL the post production, color timing, vfx, etc) and DS9 is still less popular than TNG so no one considers it worth it.
the last I checked, the fan upscales of DS9 were at least being pretty thoughtful about eg only AI upscaling it part of the way and doing a bicubic pass from there since it’s supposed to still look a little soft. it’s not ideal but it’s not nearly as bad as what James Cameron is putting out
oh yeah, the only ai upscales ever worth looking at are the fan ones. I’m only talking official remasters where the live parts are taken from film negatives
I’m still slowly making my way through the unofficial DS9 AI upscale and I think it looks great, generally. Only occasionally does something look off.
The two biggest laughs for me in Lower Decks were
Curious what a betazoid kitten could be 
based on the general vibe of betazed i assume they are simply one of the cats from Cats (2019)
