By Chris Snellgrove | Published
Star Trek fans have always enjoyed the franchise's techno-powered socialist utopia, so it's fitting that the cancellation Lower Decks exposed the big capitalist lie: if you build it, they will come. In other words, we spend our lives being told that success is just a matter of showing your talent and doing amazing work. For this Star Trek fan, Lower Decks it was an almost perfect show, but its cancellation revealed two painful truths: big doesn't mean profitable, and today's Trekkers don't know what they want.
Do Fans Want Star Trek: Lower Decks?
Paramount was understandably loathe to discuss the numbers that prompted them to prematurely cancel the Star Trek franchises. Adoption again Lower Decksboth unexpectedly had to make their fifth seasons their final seasons. The main thought about Lower Decks that is, even though it is much cheaper to produce than similar shows Strange New Worldsit wasn't getting enough views or driving enough new subscribers to Paramount+. And while Paramount's mismanagement of the NuTrek space is partly to blame, I can't help but think that my fellow fans don't know what they really want from this franchise.
Star Trek characters like Michael Burnham love stories like this Alice's Adventures in Wonderlandso I think it's only worth watching Lower Decks according to another children's tale: Goldilocks and the Three Bears. While Adoption ended strong, initially setting off new fans by focusing so much on the old history that it disrupted the existing canon of books about everything from the Klingons to Spock's tangled family tree. Simply put, it's early Adoption it tripped because it tried to focus too much on it they are normal characters and events rather than trying something new.
By comparison, Picard he had the opposite problem. It is reported that Patrick Stewart himself wanted the game to avoid too much contact with it The Next Generationwhich is one reason why the first two seasons were such a hot mess. It was after the failure of those previous seasons that Paramount and Stewart gave the fans what they wanted, turning season 3 into a TNG reunion. Before that killer final season, however, PicardThe biggest failure was that it kept trying to do something perfectly new instead of focusing on what made its title character so great in the first place.
The next big Star Trek series was Lower Decksand managed to achieve the Goldilocks balance fans desired. Each season was full of great nods to beloved characters from Q to Harry Kim, and the show always had some great Easter eggs for older fans to enjoy (I almost spit out my drink when I saw Spock Two's life-size skeleton, which is not clear. An animated series character). At the same time, the show introduced amazing new characters like Boimler and Mariner, which proves it Lower Deckslike Goldilocks' favorite bed, it was “perfect” in its ability to focus on something old and something new at the same time.
So Many Chances
Another thing the show got “right” was finding the sweet spot between delivering silly jokes and creating killer canon. Each episode of Lower Decks delivered its share of light-hearted laughs, but the show wasn't afraid to change the canon in big ways (I especially loved the return of Nick Locarno). And the series finale ended with Starfleet having a stable wormhole in the multiverse, which is an open invitation for future Trek writers to leave entirely. wild with all that sweet narrative power.
As a Star Trek fan who fell in love with the franchise during the TNG premiere, “possible” is a word I associate a lot with Lower Decks. The show lived up to its potential and then some, combining divisive humor with exciting stories that stretch the franchise's boundaries. Honestly, if Star Trek is about Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, Lower Decks deserves a permanent place in Stovokor for being the only NuTrek show (sorry, Strange New Worlds) to fully embrace this Vulcan goodness.
Unfortunately, the early cancellation of the show means that the fandom either doesn't appreciate the best that NuTrek has to offer or, worse, doesn't know what it really wants from this venerable franchise. Star Wars is understandably getting heat for its failure to deliver what fans want, but the general assumption is that Disney executives (for whatever reason) are ignoring a proven, fan-favorite formula to put down their own brand of content that's optimized for the equation. in our throat.
However, Star Trek is now at its worst where it seems no one knows what they want from the franchise, and a world where fans have rejected it. Lower Decks it's one where the franchise is slowly doomed to death. With any luck, Paramount will bring back Mike McMahan's show one way or another to bring back our beloved sci-fi universe. Otherwise, the phrase “Star Trek Into Darkness” will not simply describe the worst film of the franchise. It will also perfectly explain how Gene Roddenberry's universe is dying at the hands of careless bosses who can't stop cheating.
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