Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Season 4 on Paramount+, Featuring The Continuing (Mis)adventures Of Starfleet’s Proudest Platoon Members

Star Trek: Lower Decks returned to Paramount+ for its fourth season with two episodes dropping simultaneously before the Emmy-nominated hit rolled out the remainder of its ten eps on a per-week basis. Created by Mike McMahan (Solar Opposites, Rick and Morty) as an adult animated comedy seated in the Trek expanded universe overseen by executive producer Alex Kurtzman, Lower Decks concerns the careers of those members of Starfleet who do their work below the bridge, members like fellow ensigns Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) and Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid), whose friendship always outlasts their misadventures. There’s no shortage of those as season four begins, and some of season three’s biggest cliffhangers will find resolution. But could Beckett and Boims also be in line for promotion?

STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS – SEASON 4: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: The Federation support starship USS Cerritos has come out of warp before the imposing mass of a mysterious space station. And while Starfleet hasn’t provided Captain Carol Freeman (Dawn Lewis) with a whole lot of info – Top Secret this, Classified that – mysteries aren’t anything Freeman hasn’t seen before. “Take us in.”

The Gist: Classified or not, the work on any given mission doesn’t really change for a starship’s lowest-ranked officers, and as Mariner and Boimler receive their latest assignments, they engage in some ribbing with the ever-enthusiastic Ensign D’Vana Tendi (Noël Wells) and her new “science friend,” the Vulcan T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz), who joined the crew of the Cerritos at the end of Lower Decks season three. Boimler reports to maintenance duty on the holodeck, where he receives an intriguing visit from Jack Ransom (Jerry O’Connell), the ship’s brusque first officer. What? A potential promotion to lieutenant junior grade? Even after Ransom has personally witnessed the crazy that regularly adheres to Boimler and his buddies? And increasingly eager to please on top of his usual earnestness, Boims promptly steps into the middle of the Cerritos’ latest crisis.

That’s just one of the developing stories at the outset of STLD season four, which finds Captain Freeman and her crew tasked with transporting the mothballed USS Voyager to its new resting place on a display mount near Starfleet Command on Earth. But just because Captain Janeway’s storied starship has been decommissioned, doesn’t mean it’s done with the demons of its past. And before we know it, revived macrocosm viruses are replicating wildly all across the ship. Not only that, but a transporter room mishap on Voyager causes Dr. T’Ana (Gillian Vigman) to be merged with chief engineer Andy Billups (Paul Scheer) at a subcellular level, creating a rogue Caitian/human entity dubbed “T’illups.” With the macrocosms creating chaos and T’illups making even more captive hybrids out of the Cerritos officers, it’s up to Boimler, engineering ensign Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), Tendi, and T’Lyn to try and improvise a solution.

And speaking of Rutherford, his personal journey with the cyborg implant installed over his eye has continued to evolve, to the point that last season, it developed a rival personality of its own. Rutherford also discovered that “Badgey,” a sentient presence he built, went haywire and provided the underlying artificial intelligence to power a fleet of autonomous spacecraft intent on destroying the Cerritos and other California-class starships. Like so many of the crises on Lower Decks, that was narrowly averted. But did Badgey and its evil tendencies really go down with the ships?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? If you didn’t catch the crossover episode Star Trek: Strange New Worlds did with Lower Decks during its impressive second season (episode seven: “Those Old Scientists”), your orders are to fire it up and commence laughing. (Tawny Newsome, in her live-action form as Ensign Mariner, to Jack Quaid’s live-action Boimler, hundreds of years in Trek’s past: “‘Hot Spock’ agrees with me.”) And while it was summarily axed from Paramount+ in a nebulous “data-driven” decision, the animated Star Trek: Prodigy showed tons of promise, brought back Kate Mulgrew’s Commander Kathryn Janeway – whose legacy also figures into Lower Decks – and could still resurface in some form on another network. 

Our Take: With half-hour episodes that zip by at warp speed, and jokes that wrap around character moments with such ease that they become ingrained in how we perceive the individuals in its cast, Star Trek: Lower Decks has found a unique footing in the Trek universe as its first animated series since, um, the Animated Series of 1973-4. That’s due in no small part to the top-notch voice acting here, which never feels one-dimensional or detached from how the characters are rendered. But it’s also a cocktail of whimsy, wild action, and heady fan service. STLD creator is an avowed Trek head, and he and his writers are always prepared to blend what they’ve built with what’s come before in ways that feel natural and oddball all at once. In McMahan’s hands, the “Tuvix” storyline from Star Trek: Voyager in 1996 becomes “Twovix” and “T’illups” and a whole new problem for Captain Freeman, whose dedication to the concept of WWJD (What Would Janeway Do) results in even more mayhem when Trek past meets Trek present on the Cerritos.

And hey, the animation in Lower Decks is clean. It’s cool to see Star Trek environments we’re familiar with – the bridge, the holodeck, the officers’ lounge – depicted in cartoon form, and tech like handheld tablets and phasers emulating the graphics and functionality of the show’s live-action cousins. Even the Klingon Bird-of-Prey that appears briefly in the early going of STLD appears no less menacing and deadly as a ‘toon. All of this helps make the series another winner in the Star Trek expanded universe – not obsessed with fulfilling a demand for new formats and more content, but boldly asserting its relevance as another voice to add to the ongoing Trek narrative. Animation is just another final frontier.

Sex and Skin: Some holodeck-adjacent smooching, but that’s it for the first episode.

Parting Shot: Somewhere in Klingon-controlled space, a Bird-of-Prey starship is about to ignore the unidentified, seemingly unarmed vessel it encounters in the blackness when suddenly its systems fail and the Klingons on board are left defenseless to repel a vicious surprise attack. 

Sleeper Star: Like Strange New Worlds, its counterpart in the Trek expanded universe, Lower Decks remains agile and thoughtful in how it helps its characters solidify their personal standing. Here in STLD season four, the addition of T’Lyn to its core group of ensigns is handled with humor and respect for the Vulcan’s personality, while elsewhere, Mariner reminds her pal Boimler why they’re such a good team. “This is why we can’t keep secrets. One of us always ends up covered in slime.”  

Most Pilot-y Line: Ransom has projected bigger things for Ensign Boimler, such as a promotion to lieutenant junior grade. “As long as nothing goes sideways today.” (And this is such a blatant understatement that Boimler himself calls Ransom out on it.) “You’d have to screw up in a historically significant way to mess this one up.”  

Our Call: STREAM IT. Star Trek: Below Decks is back for more character-driven hijinks in its fourth season, and with a host of innovative new ways to assert itself alongside established canon and within the successful expanded Trek universe. 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges