The first half of Lower Decks’ fifth and final season finds itself united by reminders of the show’s most fundamental theme: all of its kooky heroes being able to just sit down and communicate with each other.
The fourth season of Lower Decks was an excellent course-correction from season three’s aimless conclusion, which felt like it set the show up for a bright new future that truly evolved where the series was going. So imagine our surprise—and that of the collective Trek‘s fandom—when we learned that season five would ultimately be the animated show’s last. The good news, at least, is that the series is bowing out with a lot of that renewed strength it gained last season. But it’s also doing so by reminding us of an important lesson for any Starfleet officer: change is reinforced by remembering your fundamentals.
The first five episodes of Lower Decks‘ 10-episode fifth season see Lieutenants Junior Grade Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Boimler (Jack Quaid), Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), and T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz) all handling their lives on the second-lowest rung of the Starfleet career ladder with aplomb. Bolstered by the trust placed in them all last season, it genuinely does feel like a reflection on how far the show has come that these characters still feel familiar in the kinds of zany fun they can get up to in the Star Trek galaxy, while also feeling like they’ve matured in ways that set the stage for them to truly become the next generation of some of Starfleet’s finest.
It’s a delicate balance the show navigates extremely well—Boimler and Mariner still have electric, goofy chemistry, but they also now recognize and understand when to slack off and when to be upstanding examples to the ensigns that now find themselves below them. T’Lyn’s icy Vulcan exterior has slowly warmed as she grows comfortable with her friends, and Rutherford, made a little rudderless by the surprise choice made by his best friend Tendi (Noël Wells) to leave Starfleet and rejoin her Orion family crime syndicate at the end of the last season, has thrown himself into some unhealthy work-life balance. They’re still the same characters, inherently, but they feel mature in the way they handle themselves, and most crucially when to acknowledge that they’ve messed up or have something they still need to work on.
