Geek Punditry #45: Lower Decks is Higher Trek

November 10, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Mike McMahan, Paramount+, Star Trek, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Writing

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it in this column before, but I’m a bit of a Star Trek fan. I know, I hide it well, but it’s the truth. I love the characters, I love the worlds, I love the alien races and the starships. If I had a holodeck like they have on the USS Enterprise, I would just use it to pretend I was a crewmember on the USS Enterprise.

“Computer, put me in the Famke Janssen episode.”

There have been many iterations of Trek over the years, of course, some that I’ve connected with more than others, but most of them have had something that draws me back and keeps me engaged. Never has there been a version of Star Trek that didn’t at LEAST make me say, “Okay, I’ll give it a shot.” But that’s not true of everyone. There are some folks out there, some alleged fans, who had that attitude when the franchise crept tentatively from the extended television hiatus that it underwent after Star Trek: Enterprise went off the air in 2005. Trek returned in 2017 with the launch of a new series, Discovery, and the promise of two more shows: Star Trek: Picard, and Star Trek: Lower Decks. Without delving too deeply into the ups and downs of the first two shows, it’s the third one that seemed to be dismissed by most fans. Lower Decks, you see, was not only an animated series, was not only a comedy, but it was created by Mike McMahan, a writer whose previous credentials included shows like Drawn Together, South Park, and Rick and Morty. And no matter what your feelings may be on those particular shows, it would be difficult to argue that someone who claimed those as his pedigree would be the right choice for a new iteration of Star Trek.

But people who said the guy who created Pickle Rick was bad for Star Trek have NEVER been so wrong. Lower Decks turned out to be a sincere love letter to the franchise, a show that was steeped in the lore and history of Trek, a show that used humor to enhance the story and characters rather than as a substitute for them. Truth be told, of all the versions of “NuTrek” that we’ve gotten since the franchise was brought back to life, it is Lower Decks that is my favorite, Lower Decks that has stolen my heart, Lower Decks that is most dedicated to the finest tradition of Star Trek, even with the bleeped-out swear words and occasional pixelated area covering an ensign’s nether regions. If you dismissed Lower Decks because it’s “just a cartoon,” then buckle up, because I’m about to tell you what you’ve been missing out on. I’ll try not to spoil every story beat from the first four seasons, but it’ll be impossible to talk about what makes the show so great without some spoilers, so from here on out, read at your own risk.

McMahan originally sold the show as being about the least-important crew on one of Starfleet’s least-important ships. The Cerritos is the sort of vessel that comes in after a flagship like Enterprise establishes first contact with an alien race, then does all the dull administrative work that would inevitably come along with such a mission. “Second Contact” is important, you see, but not sexy, and the same would seem to be true for the crew that mans the vessel. Rather than focusing on Captain Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) and her senior staff, the show’s stars are four ensigns who get the crappiest jobs available: the wild and self-destructive Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), high-strung rule-follower Bradward Boimler (Jack Quaid), science nerd cyborg Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), and newly-minted and extremely eager Orion science officer D’Vana Tendi (Noel Wells). The first season introduces the characters and lets us learn a bit more about them, and in that first season there’s a lot of fun to be had. There are a lot of gags derived from classic Star Trek bits like the crew succumbing to an alien virus, parasites controlling crew members, and bizarre medical conditions happening as the result of upgrades to the ship’s transporter system. It was as if the writers had watched hundreds of hours of Trek and decided to do the funny version of some of the franchise’s most time-honored bits. There have been many, many times while watching this show that I’ve laughed so hard at a gag that my wife – who hasn’t watched nearly as much classic Trek as me – has hit pause and asked me to explain the reference.

Every time I start laughing like Kayshon, she glares at me like Mariner.

It was also great for bringing in actors from the old shows. Over the four seasons of the show we’ve seen actors from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager all show up to reprise their characters, which is perfectly in keeping as Lower Decks takes place right after that era of Trek ended. We’ve seen William Riker and Deanna Troy (Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis) on Riker’s ship Titan, we visited with Kira Nerys and Quark (Nana Visitor and Armin Shimmerman) on Deep Space Nine, and Tom Paris (Robert Duncan MacNeill) made a stop where Boimler geeked out and tried to get him to sign one of his Voyager collector’s plates.

Oh yeah – that’s something else the show does extremely well. The characters are Star Trek fans like us. Not in a fourth wall breaking way, it doesn’t go quite that far, but they’re all as aware of the heroes and the legendary ships of Starfleet as we are. They know the stories that we’ve spent decades watching because they’ve studied the logs the stars of those respective series recorded at the beginning of each episode, and they have their favorite characters. Mariner is an Uhura fangirl, Boimler once dressed as Christopher Pike for Halloween, and Tendi – upon learning that Dr. T’Ana was recommending she train as a science officer – excitedly asked, “Like Jadzia Dax?” (Lower Decks, never missing a chance for a joke, has T’Ana say she doesn’t know who the hell Tendi is talking about, she was thinking more like Spock.)

The show was fun. Callbacks to obscure aliens or worlds was fun. Bringing in elements from the original Star Trek: The Animated Series was FUN. But somewhere in the show’s second season, it became much more than just “fun.”

Once the characters and the tone of the show were established, the stories started to get more intense and we began to see a larger tapestry build up around the stalwart crew of the Cerritos. The Pakleds – a goofy race of space scavengers from a single episode of The Next Generation – not only returned to the franchise but were upgraded to a legitimate threat without becoming any less funny. We began to see hints that the sweet, kindhearted Sam Rutherford had a darker past that even HE didn’t seem to know about. We saw Tendi struggle to get out of the shadow of her race’s reputation of piracy, while at the same time being determined to fight against the bigoted notion that ALL Orions were pirates. The show was touching on larger, deeper themes much the way that classic Trek always did. If there’s one problem with efforts of modern Trek to replicate the socially-conscious tone of the franchise it’s that they will often beat you in the face with a theme instead of weaving into the story. (Discovery in particular is bad about this.) In this regard Lower Decks is better about capturing the feel of the universe of Gene Roddenberry than any of the other shows of the modern era.

But that’s not all. The show doesn’t only bring in themes in a classic sci-fi fashion, they also started to use stories that felt like old-school Trek, not just because they’re recycling aliens or plot devices, but because they’re finding new ways to tell the stories that feel perfectly in keeping with the versions of Star Trek that I grew up with. For example, in the season two finale, the Cerritos is assisting the USS Archimedes (captained by Sonya Gomez, another short-lived TNG character redeemed by this show), when the “more important” ship is disabled by a plasma wave and is in danger of falling into the gravity well of a planet. The only way Cerritos can get through the wave to save them is to detach the outer hull and fly defenseless through an asteroid field. This is NOT the stuff of comedy, this is the kind of badass space adventure that Trek in the 90s would have done if it wouldn’t have cost too much to do it in live action. The rescue sequence is intense, thrilling, and full of magnificent moments for our crew to demonstrate their worth. Boimler risks his life on an underwater mission to help detach the last piece of hull (it’s in the long-discussed but never-before-seen Cetacean Ops section of the ship). Rutherford’s cybernetic implants nearly cause a disaster because he’s been making triple backup files of all his memories after losing his memories of his “best friend” Tendi in a previous episode. Every single beat feels like it was pulled from a season of the old-school Star Trek…and then made funny on top of being made awesome.

When a comedy series runs for a long time, one of two things tends to happen. Some shows just get progressively sillier than they already were. Take The Simpsons, for example. In the golden era of that show, Homer Simpson was a dimwitted but basically good-hearted cartoon dad. Now, three decades in, he’s become a character so ridiculously inept that the only possible explanation for his continued survival is the highly forgiving nature of cartoon physics and biology.

The other possibility is that the show grows and matures. That doesn’t mean it stops being funny, but that the characters transcend the stereotypes they were in their embryonic forms and become truly developed and compelling creatures. By the end of season four, there can be no doubt that this is what’s happening to Lower Decks.

The two sweetest characters on the show, Rutherford and Tendi, each has a darkness to overcome. Rutherford had to face his earlier self – a bitter, nasty version of himself he didn’t even remember existed – and fight to remain the man he wants to be. Tendi, on the other hand, has had to learn to embrace the darkness of her Orion heritage rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist, reconciling with her family and using her past as a tool to help save the day in the season four finale…but not without paying a steep cost that will certainly help propel the show into season five. (Tendi and Rutherford, by the way, have a “will they/won’t they” relationship that is utterly delightful. Rather than the antagonistic form such relationships often take, their friendship is so innocent and charming that neither of them seems to entertain the notion of anything else happening, while at the same time demonstrating so clearly that both of them have deeper feelings than friendship. Watching them dance around their attraction is one of the most rewarding and, simultaneously, most frustrating parts of the show.)

Shipping is kinda dumb. Unless it’s for these two.

Bradward Boimler, as we were introduced to him in the first episode, was the overeager and terribly anxious young ensign who was desperate to do anything to move up the ranks. He was something of a sycophant, once even lying about being from Earth’s moon in an effort to ingratiate himself with the ship’s first officer, Jack Ransom (Jerry O’Connell). At the end of season four he’s gained confidence and learned to trust more in his friends than in regulations. He even gets a chance, in the season finale, to temporarily serve as CAPTAIN of the Cerritos, and he acquits himself – as any Klingon could tell you – with honor. At the end of season one Boimler is given a chance to serve on Riker’s Titan and jumps at it, something that made perfect sense for the character at the time. If that same offer were made to him at the end of season four? I don’t believe for a second he would leave the Cerritos behind again.

Brave as Kirk, wise as Picard, steadfast as Sisko…

And then there’s Beckett Mariner. From the beginning of episode one she seems to be the most stereotypical of the crew – she’s got a bad attitude, a distaste for authority, and it’s implied that she’s been around much longer than the other ensigns, constantly sabotaging her own career and getting busted down in rank. At the end of episode one we even learn that the only reason she’s even on the Cerritos is that Captain Freeman is her mother, and the only one left in the fleet who’ll give her a chance.

Holy crap, does Mariner grow.

“I promise, we won’t let them waste your character like they did Crusher and Troi.”

Over four seasons we watch as she builds bonds of loyalty with the other ensigns and restores her relationship with Freeman. Her attempts to sink her career are themselves sunk when it turns out that her superior officer, Ransom, has true faith in her and won’t allow her to ruin her life any further. And then, towards the end of season four, we actually learn why she’s been so self-destructive. She’s been suffering from years of survivor’s guilt over the death of a friend, someone who died as an ensign, and who she doesn’t want to surpass. The realization is made all the more powerful when we realize the friend in question is also OUR friend, TNG character Sito Jaxa, who only appeared in two episodes but left a powerful impact before her tragic death in the episode…wait, lemme look it up…

Aw, you clever goose, Mike McMahan. Sito died in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Lower Decks.”

You know what? I bet they did that on purpose.

With the way each of these characters has grown and evolved, even being promoted from ensigns to Junior Grade Lieutenants this season, it has become increasingly clear that Mike McMahan lied to everybody when he said that this was the show about the least-important crew members on the least-important ship in the fleet. Far from it – this show is about people able to start from nothing, find their purpose, find themselves, find each other, and become more than they ever imagined, even if nobody else in the galaxy believes they have what it takes. The least important officers? Oh no. This series is the origin story of the next legendary Star Trek crew.

And yet, in all that, the show has never stopped being funny as hell.

If you decided to not watch Lower Decks because it was a cartoon or a comedy, all I can say, my friends, is that you were wrong to do so. If you watched an episode and said it wasn’t for you, can I recommend you jump ahead to the season one finale and give it a try? Because that’s when the show really begins finding itself and starts the transformation into the sublime work of storytelling that it actually is.

Lower Decks isn’t “good for a Star Trek parody.” It’s not even “good Star Trek.”

It’s GREAT Star Trek.

And I’ll follow the heroes of the Cerritos – I BELIEVE in the heroes of the Cerritos – with all the passion and fervor that I devoted to the Enterprise or station Deep Space Nine.

McMahan caused a little bit of a stir a few weeks ago when he said on Twitter that the show’s future is not secured past the upcoming season five, and fans panicked with the belief that it was being canceled. He had to come back a few days later and clarify: he wasn’t saying he’s been told the show is on the chopping block, just that he doesn’t KNOW yet if it will be renewed beyond season five. But the best way to keep it going, in this age of streaming, is to keep watching it and keep talking about it on social media, because the guys with the checkbooks actually do pay attention to that sort of thing. So check it out and let Paramount+ know how much you love it.

It’s already prospering. Now let’s help it live long.

Geek Punditry #27: Death and Taxes-A Streaming Crisis

July 7, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Batgirl, Disney, Fantastic Four, MAX, netflix, Paramount+, Star Trek, Star Trek: Prodigy, streaming

A few days ago, between eating entirely too much barbecue and trying to figure out if there was room for apple pie, my sister and I were talking about movies and TV shows we’d recently watched with our kids. She mentioned a Disney+ original film called Crater, a science fiction adventure about a bunch of kids living on a lunar mining colony. I’d heard of the film before, and I thought it would be something that my son might have an interest in, at least the spaceship parts, and made a note to check it out soon. Unfortunately, “soon” didn’t turn out to be soon enough, because the next day word came down that Crater was being removed from the platform less than two months after its release, and would no longer be available anywhere.

Turns out the title was actually a reference to the film’s chances.

This isn’t the only Disney+ original to get this treatment. The Willow series, canceled after just one season, was also unceremoniously axed, as well as the quirky documentary The World According to Jeff Goldblum, among others. Nor is Disney+ the only streaming platform to do such a thing in recent months. Netflix has removed shows such as Hemlock Grove, Hulu quietly evaporated Y: The Last Man, and before they dropped the “HBO” from their name, HBO Max made headlines by removing a lot of content, including the almost-finished but now never-to-be-seen Batgirl movie starring Leslie Grace and the most beloved man on the Internet, Brendan Fraser.

If the new Betty White couldn’t save that movie, nothing could.

There have been various reasons given for these cancellations: merchandising revenue losses, a lack of viewers, to avoid paying royalties or residuals to the people involved, or most egregiously, some of them were cut so that the studio could use the massive cost of production as a tax write-off to counteract losses elsewhere in the company. Whatever the specific reason, they all boil down to the same thing: the studio believes they can somehow make more money by erasing these films and TV series and pretending they never existed than they can by allowing them to remain on the streamer.

I am not an economist. I don’t pretend to understand exactly how these things work. What I’m seeing is that we are once again seeing creative work being strangled in the name of the bottom line.

Now let me be clear about this: no, I’m not an economist, but I’m not an idiot either. I know that it’s called show business for a reason, and I accept that the people putting out the money have to make money back if they’re going to keep doing it. There are few things in the universe I find stupider than when someone says that an artist or a writer should just do their creative work “for the art” and not worry about the money, as if artists and writers are somehow immune to the need to eat. These things need to turn a profit one way or another, and I’m okay with that in principle. I just wish they would find some way to do it that doesn’t come at the expense of the people who make the damn things.

I write. I try to write every day. And I’m not doing it just because it feels good to push buttons on a keyboard, I do it because I want people (like you) to read what I have to say. When I hear about things like what happened to Crater, I’m thinking about the people who wrote the movie, the director who steered the ship, the actors who performed in it, the set designers and special effects artists and musicians and everybody else who bled for that film, believing that their work would be out there for the world to watch whenever they wanted…except now it’s not available anywhere. That has to be gut-wrenching. Even if a movie or TV show is canceled because it’s objectively terrible, I feel for the people involved. Nobody tries to make a bad movie, after all. I can’t imagine anybody who walks on to a set thinking, “Let’s make this puppy suck.” They’re doing what they can to make an entertaining product so that it will be seen. Even the infamous 1994 Fantastic Four movie isn’t immune to this principle. The movie was literally rushed out as quickly as possible so that the studio wouldn’t lose the rights to the franchise, never having any intention of actually releasing it…but none of the people making the movie knew that. They did the best they could, and honestly, crappy special effects aside, they’ve done better than anyone else with the FF in live action so far.

That’s not even a joke. This is literally the best we’ve had so far.

The issue here is that streaming services are bleeding money. None of them, not even the juggernauts, are making enough to cover the costs of the original content they’re creating, and that’s largely in part to the way the streaming universe has bifurcated. It wasn’t so bad when it was just Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video, and pretty much everything you wanted to find was on one of those if it was anywhere. But then we saw the tentacles begin to reach out as nearly every studio or network decided to create its own service instead of signing with one of the existing streamers: Disney+, Max, Paramount+, Britbox, AMC+, Shudder, ESPN+, Screambox, Apple TV+, Peacock, MGM+…not only did it quickly get unwieldy, but it’s terribly frustrating how over fifty percent of them just stole the “Plus” from Disney rather than trying to come up with an original name.

There are simply too many streamers for the average person to keep up with. Even if they had the money for them all (which the average person does not), keeping track of what’s streaming where or what services have the shows and movies you actually want to watch is getting to be a full-time job. What’s more, there’s the question of signing up for a service just for one series or one movie – nobody sane would do that, right? So instead, people sign up for the free trial and binge what they want, then cancel once they’re finished. The streamers obviously don’t make money that way, and if they don’t make their money they’re not going to keep doing it.

Let’s look at the biggest recent example. Paramount+ (previously CBS All-Access) was, frankly, the house that Star Trek built. The big selling point for the streamer when it launched was that it had every episode of every Star Trek series, and that furthermore, it was going to be launching several new Trek series, bringing it back to television for the first time since the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise twelve years prior. And for a few years, it was working out okay…until a few weeks ago when Paramount announced that the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy was being canceled, that the almost-finished second season would not be shown on the service, and that the existing first season would be removed. And before you could blink your eyes, the crew of the USS Protostar was GONE.

Cheer up, guys. They cancelled Kirk’s show too. Twice.

Now everyone who reads this column knows I’m a Trek nerd. In fact, my inaugural Geek Punditry column was all about how awesome the first season of Prodigy was. So nobody is going to be surprised to learn I’m upset about this. But I’ll bet I’m nowhere near as upset as the cast and crew of that series.

Something funny happened once Prodigy was removed, though. Within 48 hours, the Blu-Ray of the first season was sold out at Amazon, Target, Walmart, Best Buy…pretty much anywhere you can buy Blu-Rays. Sadly, the Blu-Ray only had the first half of the first season, not the second set of 10 episodes, not the cliffhanger ending that may never be resolved now. But the fans mobilized and actually spent the money, which is what Paramount wanted in the first place.

Streaming is a great thing in terms of convenience. It’s fantastic to be able to pull up any episode of Star Trek (except for those 20 episodes of Prodigy) from my remote control without worrying about changing discs or tracking down when it’s going to be broadcast. But as if we didn’t know it already, the unstable landscape of the streaming world means that no matter how much you love something, it can be taken away at the whim of some studio accountant. Supporting the things you love, while important, is only ever going to be part of the equation. What I think we’ve all learned here is that having a permanent way to keep them is more important than ever.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. After he heard about Prodigy getting the ax, he added all of the Star Trek Blu-Rays he didn’t already own to his Amazon wish list. Can you blame him?

Geek Punditry #16: The Case For Star Trek: Legacy

April 21, 2023April 22, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Paramount+, Star Trek, Star Trek: Legacy, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Terry Matalas

You know, I had a column planned this week. Took some notes. Had it mapped out in my brain. And then I went and watched the finale of Star Trek: Picard, the magnificent, joyous finale that was honestly everything I wanted it to be, and suddenly what I was going to write about has gone completely out of my head. Instead, this week, I’m going to look ahead to the future of Star Trek – specifically about Picard showrunner Terry Matalas’s proposed Star Trek: Legacy series, and why it needs to happen. So here’s your warning, friends: after this point there WILL be spoilers for Picard, all the way to the final credits. If you haven’t watched it yet, continue reading at your own risk.

RED ALERT! SHIELDS UP! SPOILERS INCOMING!

After two seasons of Picard that were disjointed and felt forced, the third and final season gave fans what we wanted all along: a suitable ending for the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The last time we saw these characters together in canon was in the film Star Trek: Nemesis, which left us on a bittersweet note that was never resolved. Data was destroyed, Will Riker and Deanna Troi went off to the Titan, and the heroes we’d come to love were scattered to the cosmic winds. In this final season of Picard, Terry Matalas brought back Data and reunited the seven core cast members of The Next Generation (well…EIGHT core members, actually, since he even resurrected the Enterprise-D) so that their story could end the way they deserved. Now, rather than leaving behind our friends in a state of mourning, we say farewell to them as they are together, happy, and in the wake of their greatest triumph. This is something that cannot be said for the characters in any other Star Trek series, and if this is in fact the last time we see these heroes (and I suspect it is at least the last time we see them all together), it is a fitting goodbye.

But Matalas did not JUST reunite the TNG crew. He also built a new crew, combining a few of the characters from the first two seasons of Picard with others created for this season, and we leave them on the bridge of the Titan, newly rechristened as the USS Enterprise-G. It is at this point that Matalas is staring Paramount executives in the eye and challenging them to greenlight a series about this new crew, a series he has been calling Star Trek: Legacy to anybody who’ll listen, even though it hasn’t actually been approved by Paramount.

Yet.

Let’s talk about the reasons that a Terry Matalas-led Star Trek: Legacy is not only possible, but exactly what long term Trek fans are hungry for.

CONTINUING THE SAGA

“Look at us! Here we are! Right where we belong…”

After Nemesis, every Trek series or movie for nearly two decades went backwards in time. Star Trek: Enterprise was about the ship that led to the creation of the Federation, the J.J. Abrams movies showed us the crew of the original series in an alternate timeline, and Discovery started its first season about a decade or so before the original series. Without debating the relative quality of any of these projects, none of them moved forward in the time period that fans had come to love through three series and four movies. That didn’t happen until Picard. And with that series finished, we are once again left without a continuation of that period in live action. Strange New Worlds and the upcoming Starfleet Academy series are in different points in the timeline, and while the animated Prodigy series seems to be in that time period (it’s honestly a little nebulous exactly where it falls), I think most fans probably join me in wanting a flagship series set in the 25th century.

This is the most well-developed era in the Trek timeline, with elements from TNG, Deep Space Nine and Voyager all in play, and so far the only show that’s playing with all these toys is the animated comedy Lower Decks. And while it’s true that eras that have not been explored as much have room for development, that doesn’t quench the thirst for exploration of the storylines, cultures, alien races, and characters we already know. A show set in this time period would allow us to check in with those elements and see where they go in the future – something that would be inevitable with Voyager alumni Seven of Nine as captain of the Enterprise-G and two members of the bridge crew whose parents are members of the TNG crew. (Not to mention the fact that Riker and Troi have a daughter who is currently enrolled in Starfleet Academy, and could easily join the show later if we really wanted to ramp up the fan service).

It would also allow the show to address the one glaring absence from Picard: the characters from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. For the first eight episodes of the season the major threat were the Changelings, the main antagonists from DS9, but except for Worf nobody from DS9 ever made an appearance. I suspect we probably would have seen them if not for the passing of Rene Auberjonois, who played the Changeling Odo on that series – but alas, it was not to be. Regardless of why we didn’t see them, DS9 remains my favorite Trek series, and a Legacy show could (and should) check in on the station, what’s been going on with Bajor since the Dominion War…maybe even finally provide some resolution to the final fate of Captain Benjamin Sisko.

THE ENTERPRISE IS THE HEART OF STAR TREK

There are a lot of letters left in the alphabet.

When the original Star Trek series debuted in 1966, there wasn’t necessarily a conceit that there was anything special about the ship among the other ships in the fleet except that it was the one we were following. Throughout the show and the original movies, though, we got the impression that the Enterprise crew stood out, and by the time TNG launched in 1987, it was declared that the Enterprise was the name given to the flagship of Starfleet. This was codified with the Star Trek: Enterprise series, which retroactively applied that name to the first ship capable of Warp 5, and the adventures of that particular crew led to the birth of the United Federation of Planets. The point is, while the Star Trek universe is vast and diverse with room for many, many stories, the Enterprise is the core of that universe.

True, we have Strange New Worlds, which is set on the Enterprise NCC-1701 in the pre-Kirk years, but that’s kind of the problem. Don’t get me wrong, I love SNW, but the inherent difficulty with any prequel series is that certain elements are closed off as storytelling avenues. At no point in SNW are you ever going to fear that the ship will be destroyed or that any of the characters who show up in the original series, such as Spock or Dr. M’Benga, are in mortal danger. There can be great adventures told with Pike’s Enterprise, but it will inevitably be trapped in the “past” of Star Trek. The 25th century, for many fans, is the “present,” and we haven’t had canonical, ongoing stories of an Enterprise in that time period since TNG went off the air in 1994. The look of the ship can change, the crew can change, the letter at the end of the registry number can change, but the fact of the matter is that without an Enterprise, Star Trek simply isn’t complete. As Jack Crusher observed when the Enterprise-G was unveiled, “Names mean almost everything.”

A CHANCE FOR NEW DANGERS

“Um, you got something on your…on your face…oh, dear God…”

In addition to bringing back the TNG crew one last time, Picard also gave a definitive, final conclusion to the story of that era’s greatest threat: the Borg. When this malevolent race was introduced in TNG it was a terrifying idea: an artificial intelligence that propagated by taking the technology of conquered worlds and transforming the biological inhabitants of the destroyed civilizations into mindless drones, kind of like when Disney buys a new IP. But like many popular villains, the Borg got a little overused over the years (even as recently as season two of Picard). What the finale gave us was one last face-off between the Borg Queen and Jean-Luc Picard, one that was eminently satisfying, but also done in a way that should take the Borg off the table for good.

(I say “should” here because I’m realistic. With any long-running franchise, eventually new hands will take over, and when that happens they often will bring back the elements they loved from the past. Someday somebody WILL sit down in a Paramount boardroom and say, “Okay, here’s how we’re gonna bring the Borg back.” It’s inevitable. But I don’t think it will happen soon and I don’t think that person will be Terry Matalas.)

With the Borg gone, it’s time to bring in new threats, new enemies, new villains. This is a chance to have a fresh start in a familiar setting, which from a creative standpoint can be a hell of a lot of fun.

A NEW GENERATION

“Okay, now that I’m captain, when is it my turn to kill Tuvix?”

Like I said, the way Matalas stacked the crew of the Enterprise-G was a straight-up challenge to Paramount, loading the bridge with characters that matter to us. We already knew Seven of Nine from Voyager of course, but the crew also includes Picard’s former aide Rafi, who after two years finally spent this season blossoming into a compelling character through her partnership and friendship with Worf. We have Jack Crusher, son of Beverly Crusher and Jean-Luc Picard, who seems to have embraced his parents’ philosophy after struggling with it for some time. We have Sidney “Crash” LaForge at the helm, piloting the ship and determined to get out of the shadow of her legendary father. Over the course of this season we grew to care about these characters. Beyond the previous relationship between Seven and Rafi, we also saw Seven and Jack build a rapport which paid off when she named him a special counselor to the Captain. There was also a clear chemistry between Jack and Sidney, and the idea of Geordi LaForge showing up periodically to bristle at his daughter flirting with Jean-Luc Picard’s son is absolutely delicious.

Matalas crafted these characters in such a way that the potential is obvious, and showcased them to make us want more. And just in case that wasn’t enough, he closed the series with a mid-credit stinger in which Jack Crusher meets his dad’s best frenemy, Q, who tells Jack that his own trials are just beginning. Translating this scene into Klingon and back again reveals that what he REALLY means is, “Come on, Paramount+, I double dog dare you to greenlight this spinoff.”

And then there’s the elephant in the room.

LET’S TALK ABOUT SHAW

The most beloved dipshit ever to come out of Chicago.

Liam Shaw, played by Todd Stashwick, was introduced in the first episode of this season as captain of the Titan, and he initially came across as an antagonist. He didn’t like Seven of Nine, even though she was his first officer. He had no respect for Picard and Riker when they came on to his ship and tried to divert his mission. He even insulted Picard’s wine, setting up what would turn out to be one of the season’s best running gags. But by the end of the first episode you knew who Liam Shaw was: an asshole that you couldn’t stand and couldn’t wait to see get what was coming to him.

Then something magic happened.

We realized that nothing Shaw was doing was out of line. These two relics, neither of whom had any official standing with Starfleet at the moment, showed up on his ship and tried to send him off on a very spurious mission with no orders and a half-assed explanation, almost destroying the ship and killing everybody in the process. We, the audience, trust Picard and Riker because we’ve known them since jelly bracelets were in fashion, but Shaw has no such luxury. As for his relationship with Seven, as it turns out he was a survivor of Wolf 359, the most infamous Borg attack of all time (before this one), which happened to be led by Picard himself during the time he was assimilated. The man probably had to deal with PTSD every time he looked at Seven.

Shaw’s abrasive qualities became part of his charm, especially as he continued to show himself to be highly qualified and competent, not only as Captain, but also as an engineer later on in the season. His voluminous ego doesn’t go away, but it also doesn’t stop him from doing the right thing, as we see when he gets injured a few episodes later and immediately transfers command of the Titan to Riker, a man he clearly doesn’t like, because he knows it’s the best chance for survival. Over nine episodes Shaw goes from an unlikable asshole to a tremendously likable asshole.

And then he dies.

Not a pointless, meaningless death, not a Tasha Yar death. Liam Shaw dies to buy Picard and the others time to escape the Borg as they’re taking over the Titan, and with his last breath passes his ship over to Seven of Nine (using her chosen name for the first time). Then, just to rub a little salt in the wound, we later found out that he had already recommended Seven’s promotion to captain even before the events of the season had begun.

But he’s dead, right? So why does it even matter?

Come on, guys. Since when has being dead ever stopped a great character? The entire season was filmed before it premiered, so there was no way of knowing just how much the fans would grow to embrace Liam Shaw when the decision was made to kill him off, but Matalas says he has an idea for how to bring him back if and when the opportunity presents itself. As for the question of what to do with him afterwards…honestly, I’m not sure. They won’t (and shouldn’t) take Seven out of the Captain’s chair to make room for him, and I certainly don’t want to see another series with a painfully dubious chain of command such as has plagued Discovery since the end of season one, but I want more stories with Liam Shaw. And I know I’m not alone.

Hell, maybe he’d be happy to step out of the command chair and become chief engineer.

Let’s take one last look at the most beautiful bird in the galaxy.

There’s an adage in the entertainment business that giving the audience what they want isn’t necessarily the best way to tell a story. But sometimes you go so far in the opposite direction that you wind up with a stupid, chaotic, and utterly insulting mess that seems more like they actively hate the audience that made them successful in the first place, and here I am specifically thinking of what Marvel Comics insists on doing with The Amazing Spider-Man. Season three of Picard has proven there’s nothing wrong with giving people what they want, you just need to find a good story in which to do it. Terry Matalas did that this season, and he knocked it out of the park. He’s earned the right to do it again.

Star Trek: Legacy, Paramount.

Make it so.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He also wants to push his idea for a Star Trek: Fleet Museum animated anthology series, where in each episode a holographic tour guide based on Geordi LaForge tells a story about one of the legendary ships in his museum to a pack of tourists. He’s not kidding about this. Call him, Paramount, you all should talk.