The Best Star Trek Show Never Got The Audience It Deserves
Star Trek fans have always enjoyed the franchise’s techno-powered socialist utopia, so it’s only fitting that the cancellation of Lower Decks has revealed the biggest lie of capitalism: if you build it, they will come. That is, we spend our lives being told that being successful is just a matter of demonstrating your talent and doing an awesome job. For this Star Trek fan, Lower Decks was a nearly perfect show, but its cancellation reveals two bitter truths: being great doesn’t translate to being profitable, and modern Trekkers simply have no idea what they want.
Do Fans Want Star Trek: Lower Decks?
Paramount has been understandably loathe to discuss the numbers that motivated them to prematurely cancel Star Trek shows Discovery and Lower Decks, both of whom unexpectedly had to make their fifth seasons into final seasons. The chief assumption about Lower Decks is that, even though it is far cheaper to produce than shows like Strange New Worlds, it wasn’t getting enough views or driving enough new subscribers to Paramount+. And while Paramount’s poor handling of the NuTrek area is partially to blame, I can’t help but think my fellow fans just don’t know what they really want for this franchise.
Star Trek characters like Michael Burnham are fond of children’s tales like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, so I think it’s only fitting to view Lower Decks in terms of another kiddie fable: Goldilocks and the Three Bears. While Discovery ended strong, it initially put new fans off by focusing so much on old lore that it disrupted existing canon regarding everything from the Klingons to Spock’s tangled family tree. Put simply, early Discovery stumbled because it tried to focus too much on familiar characters and events rather than trying something new.
By comparison, Picard had the opposite problem. Patrick Stewart himself reportedly wanted this show to avoid too many connections to The Next Generation, which is just one reason why the first two seasons were a hot mess. Only after the failure of those earlier seasons did Paramount and Stewart give the fans what they wanted, transforming season 3 into a TNG reunion. Before that killer final season, though, Picard’s biggest failing was that it kept trying to do something completely new instead of focusing on what made its titular character so great in the first place.
The next major Star Trek series was Lower Decks, and it managed to find the Goldilocks balance fans craved. Every season was filled with hilarious callbacks to beloved characters from Q to Harry Kim, and the show always had great Easter eggs for older fans to appreciate (I almost spit my drink out when I saw the giant-sized skeleton of Spock Two, an obscure Animated Series character). At the same time, the show introduced amazing new characters like Boimler and Mariner, proving that Lower Decks, like Goldilocks’ preferred bed, was “just right” in its ability to focus on something old and something new at the same time.
So Much Potential
Another thing the show got “just right” was finding a sweet spot between delivering silly comedy and creating killer canon. Each episode of Lower Decks delivered its share of lighthearted laughs, but the show was never afraid to change canon up in big ways (I particularly loved the return of Nick Locarno). And the series finale ended with Starfleet having a stable wormhole to the multiverse, which is more or less an open invitation for future Trek writers to go absolutely wild with all that juicy narrative potential.
As a Star Trek fan who fell in love with the franchise during the original run of TNG, “potential” is the word I most associate with Lower Decks. The show lived up to all of its potential and then some, combining side-splitting comedy with exciting stories that stretched the boundaries of this franchise. Honestly, if Star Trek is all 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 ideal.
Unfortunately, the premature cancellation of the show means that the fandom either doesn’t appreciate the best that NuTrek has to offer or, worse yet, has no idea what it really wants from this venerable franchise. Star Wars understandably gets heat for its failure to deliver what fans want, but the general assumption is that Disney execs are (for whatever reason) ignoring a proven, fan-favorite formula in favor of cramming their own brand of action figure-optimized content down our throats.
However, Star Trek is now in a far worse position where seemingly nobody knows what they want from this franchise, and a world where fans have rejected Lower Decks is one where the franchise is doomed to die a slow death. With any luck, Paramount will bring Mike McMahan’s pioneering show back in one form or another in order to get our favorite sci-fi universe back on track. Otherwise, the phrase “Star Trek Into Darkness” won’t simply describe the franchise’s worst film. It will also describe exactly how Gene Roddenberry’s universe dies in the hands of careless executives who cannot stop failing the fandom.
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