{"id":1199214,"date":"2023-11-02T09:00:51","date_gmt":"2023-11-02T13:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1199214"},"modified":"2023-11-02T09:00:51","modified_gmt":"2023-11-02T13:00:51","slug":"star-trek-lower-decks-season-finale-delivers-exactly-what-it-promises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1199214","title":{"rendered":"Star Trek: Lower Decks' season finale delivers exactly what it promises"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article contains spoilers for Lower Decks, Season Four, Episode Ten. <\/em><\/p>\n

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Four seasons in, and you more or less know what you\u2019ll get from a Star Trek: Lower Decks<\/em><\/a> season finale<\/a>. A hefty dose of in-jokes and references that conclude the season arc by pulling the Cerritos crew together. There\u2019s a focus on teamwork over individual valor, and a belief that Starfleet\u2019s mission is the right one. Add in a gag or two about how Star Trek is better when it\u2019s slow and cerebral, add in a cliffhanger that threatens the show\u2019s status quo, and you\u2019re done.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Just because \u201cOld Friends, New Planets\u201d sticks to this formula, it doesn\u2019t mean it isn\u2019t good, and you\u2019ll laugh plenty of times in the half hour. The show\u2019s ability to wheel out a staggeringly left field comic premise like Twaining is one of its biggest strengths. But the episode is full of solid gags that work on a second or third re-watch, including the lampshading about who Locarno (Robert Duncan McNeill) does or does not look like.<\/p>\n

Judged on its merits as an episode of Star Trek, and you\u2019ll find it similarly-winning with great writing and direction. I can\u2019t help but single out Chris Westlake\u2019s score, whose work this season has been just as great as the last. It was wonderful, too, to see Shannon Fill and Wil Wheaton recruited for their cameos in Mariner\u2019s flashback. Who else but a true devotee would make such an effort, and the show\u2019s creative team led by Mike McMahan has an infectious love for Trek\u2019s golden era.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just that there\u2019s also a sense of diminishing returns, or that the show needs to find a higher gear to operate in. The limits of a sitcom\u2019s premise means you can\u2019t do too much to up-end the status quo, but you can feel this desire for evolution. It\u2019s the old trap: You can\u2019t joke that the USS Cerritos isn\u2019t important, and keep putting them in these high-stakes scenarios. Can you go back to fixing a warp manifold if your lead character just toppled a planet-threatening tyrant?<\/p>\n

And now, an intervention.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sadly, one thing bothered me about \u201cOld Friends, New Planets,\u201d which requires me to bring up Star Trek: Picard\u2019s<\/em> dreadful third season. I\u2019m not relitigating matters here, but I am asking why two Trek series opted to do The Wrath of Khan<\/em> homages in the same year. Isn\u2019t spotting duplication like this and preventing it at the pre-production stage part of Franchise Overseer Alex Kurtzman\u2019s job? Sure, he can\u2019t be in every meeting, but surely this is why he\u2019s credited as an executive producer on every Trek series currently running, right?<\/p>\n

It was nice, however, that both series honored the late CGI artist Fabio Passaro<\/ins><\/a>.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help that back-to-back Wrath of Khan<\/em> homages mere months apart look less like a show of admiration and more like a cry for help. When Star Trek\u2019s creative well runs dry, it\u2019s to Nicholas Meyer\u2019s 1982 classic that they run to for inspiration. As I wrote back in February<\/ins><\/a>, the path to Khan is so well-worn I\u2019m not sure there isn\u2019t a single element that hasn\u2019t been strip-mined to oblivion.<\/p>\n

And while creatives pillage that film\u2019s iconography, the person behind it has often been persona non grata in Trek circles. Meyer\u2019s still around, and doing good work<\/a>, but his Trek pitches haven\u2019t had a look-in for a long while. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s ageism, or if he\u2019s awful in real life, but the fact his work is so popular yet he can\u2019t get a look in feels unjust. And we still haven\u2019t heard anything more about Ceti Alpha V<\/ins><\/em><\/a>, the Khan midquel podcast that was announced more than a year ago.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s time that we staged an intervention, and said that Star Trek is no longer allowed, even in jest, to pull anything from The Wrath of Khan<\/em>. In fact, let\u2019s make that broader, and say that we need to leave those toys in the box for a decade or more. And instead, let\u2019s focus on telling new stories that people will be desperate to honor three or four decades in the future.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https:\/\/www.engadget.com\/star-trek-lower-decks-season-finale-delivers-exactly-what-it-promises-130051733.html?src=rss
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\nSource: Engadget – Star Trek: Lower Decks’ season finale delivers exactly what it promises<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following article contains spoilers for Lower Decks, Season Four, Episode Ten. Four seasons in, and you more or less know what you\u2019ll get from a Star Trek: Lower Decks season finale. A hefty dose of in-jokes and references that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99,110],"tags":[98],"class_list":["post-1199214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-engadget","category-unfiltered-rss","tag-engadget"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1199214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1199214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1199214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1199214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}