Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ On CBS All Access, An Animated Comedy About A Federation Starship’s Support Staff

The idea of a show where “Star Trek meets The Office” has been floating around for almost 20 years now. The idea of examining how a starship operates like any other workplace has been tantalizing to comedy writers. The Orville has some of those elements, but the closest we got was when the Always Sunny guys wrote a pilot called Boldly Going Nowhere, which was never ordered to series. So who knew that when the Trek TV franchise was revived at CBS All Access that the perfect show about the mundane aspects of a starship would be made under the Trek banner?

STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We hear a voice doing a captain’s log for the USS Cerritos. It’s docked at a space station getting ready for its mission to make “second contact” with the Galedonean high council.

The Gist: The officer making the log explains that second contact involves “getting paperwork signed, make sure we’re spelling the name of the planet right, finding all the good places to eat…”

Into the closet pops Ensign Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), her uniform button undone and drunk off Romulan whiskey. She just busted her more career minded colleague, Ensign Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid) making a captains log, while he claims that every officer has to make a log. “You’re wasting your shore leave in this?” she asks drunkenly. Of course, Boimler is concerned that she has a crate full of Federation contraband, including a Klingon Bat’leth.

Back on the Cerritos, a new group of ensigns come aboard, including science officer Ensign Tendi (Noël Wells). Boimler is supposed to be her orientation officer, but Mariner takes over, showing her cool stuff like the Holodeck instead of boring stuff Boimler likes like the warp core. To Mariner, who has been busted down to the lower decks from previous assignments, being support staff is cooler than being on the senior staff because they do all the hard work, which the senior staff just takes credit for. On the tour, they run into Ensign Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), who was just outfitted with a Vulcan cyborg implant, and doesn’t think he’s nervous enough for the first date he’s going to go on that night.

When an away team led by Commander Jack Ransom (Jerry O’Connell) comes back from Galedonia, he has a strange itch on his neck. Before the lower decks crew lands to do their work, Captain Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) calls Boimler into her office and orders him to keep an eye on Mariner and make sure she’s following the rules. He of course agrees, but in his overzealousness to catch her in the act of selling contraband to the Galedoneans leads to both of them getting chased by a giant spider that the farmers there raise for milk, and when she eats a naked Boimler (don’t ask), Mariner finds out that the spider is just “nibbling”.

Meanwhile, on the ship, the anger virus Ransom brought on board breaks out among the whole crew. Rutherford bonds with his date trying to get to a deck to defend the ship. And the cat-like Dr. T’Ana (Gillian Vigman) shoves an officer’s heart in Tendi’s hands so she can pump it. When Mariner and Boimer come back, Boimer covered in the spider’s goo, T’Ana figures out that the goo can be the antidote to the anger virus.

Our Take: My description above doesn’t even come close to conveying how funny we found the first episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks. Developed by Mike McMahan of Rick And Morty, of course with the support of overall Star Trek showrunner Alex Kurtzman, Lower Decks is the show that Trek fans like me, who always wanted to see the franchise not take itself so friggin’ seriously, have wanted. These starships have crews that number in the thousands, yet we only see the senior staff, all responsible and serious. How about the staff that keeps the toilets from clogging or the replicators working? That’s why we were excited to see the idea of Lower Decks. And, boy, it delivers on the potential of its premise.

It works for two reasons. First, the pairing of the straight-laced Boimer with the insubordinate Mariner works because the chemistry between Newsome and Quaid is evident from their first scenes together (even if they do their parts separately). Also, it helps that there’s almost 55 years of Trek canon that McMahan can work with, which is why hearing Mariner fantasizing over having bumps on her head like a Klingon or seeing Boimler get all dreamy over being on the bridge even though he’s pretty much ignored are so funny. That institutional history of the series and how deadly serious it takes itself most of the time makes skewering those pretensions all the more hilarious.

It just helps to see “normal” people in the Trek universe, people who are selfish or are just worker drones doing their tasks or people who have no more ambition than just not screwing up so royally that someone notices them. The contrast of the down-to-earth lower deckers with the self-important senior staff — a senior staff on one of the most insignificant ships in Starfleet, mind you — will make for lots of funny situations as the series goes forward.

Oh, and one more note: The show uses TNG’s graphics during the opening and closing credits. Nice touch.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After Boimler tells Mariner that he didn’t rat on her (we find out why the Captain was so curious about Mariner at the end of the episode), she says “I’m going to be your mentor!”. She takes him in a playful headlock and starts quizzing him on Starfleet legends like Spock, Kirk and Worf.

Sleeper Star: Noël Wells is always hilarious, and when Tendi yells, “I got to hold a heart!”, we were sold on her character.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing we could think of. Even Rutherford not wanting to go on another date with his fellow engineer because she had a Level 1 diagnostic sitting right in front of her and didn’t do it was pretty funny.

Our Call: STREAM IT. 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.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Star Trek: Lower Decks On CBS All Access