Star Trek: Lower Decks - Season 1

The problem is it’s not really interested in anything. It’s a comedy show without gags or setpieces. The voice actors do their best to imbue the dialogue with real comic timing.

Its first four episodes contain some laughs and some elegantly done character work. But if the joke of “Lower Decks” is that its characters, on a random ship doing clean-up work somewhere in the galaxy, fall short of demanding a show about their adventures, it’s not hard to agree.

It's all packaged in bland-but-amiable fashion with colorful, detail-lite animation from Titmouse and energetic voice work across the board. It's hard to latch onto any of the characters.

The entire show seems to be caught in between extremes. It’s just over the edge of being too adult for kids to watch but never really delves into truly R-rated Trek content.

There’s a lot of potential there to be both curious and heartfelt, as Star Trek has always been, but push it into some new directions narratively and visually, with the animated format allowing the franchise to reach beyond what has come before. But Lower Decks, for all its raucous pleasures, doesn’t quite rise to that occasion.

The result is something that’s neither hilariously cynical nor meaningfully sincere—it’s functional, and rarely outright bad, but fundamentally unmemorable. ... There is potential here. A few of the individual storylines show sparks of life, and if the characters ever calm down, they might turn out to be endearing.

Not every joke lands perfectly, but so much of Lower Decks‘ humor is impressively well-calibrated to celebrate this franchise for its quirks, while also poking fun at concepts that are relatable no matter the century, like boring business meetings, professional jealousies, and awkward first dates.

This may not be the best “Trek” series ever, but based on the first four episodes it might be the most “Trek” series ever. It isn’t a riff on Starfleet shenanigans, it’s the real deal, raw and undiluted.