Is Lower Decks Literal Canon?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 พ.ค. 2024
- Star Trek Lower Decks is a cartoon. A very good cartoon in my opinion and one worthy of being counted among Star Trek lore, but how canon is it? From the looks to the events of the show, what and how do things really unfold? Let's look at how it translates when alongside the rest of the Trek galaxy.
Star Trek Online developed by Cryptic Studios and Perfect World.
Star Trek Picard/Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks/Enterprise/Voyager/Deep Space Nine/Discovery and The Next Generation are all owned by Paramount Pictures/CBS and distributed by CBS.
This Video is for critical purposes with commentary.
Outro Animation made by @icarogabriel17 - เกม
I always imagined the series is a future Mariner telling stories to a group of new cadets. Captain Boimler keeps complaining "I did not cry THAT much!"
this 100%
"And then we found out everyone thought he was a little robot..."
"How I Met Your Captain"
Yes unreliable narrator, what you hear is basically true but the details may be a little off. That would work very well!
Perfect !
I've always seen Lower Decks as the retellings the characters give down the pub after the fact.
I like this take.
That's how I take it. Sailors have their sea stories, soldiers have their war stories, and Starfleet has their space stories.
I was gonna make essentially the same comment.
I used to do a comedy/vocal show with a buddy of mine, we would sing songs and tell stories, all the stories were true events that we had embellished to make funnier.
That's what Lower Decks is to me, real events being told in an entertaining way.
That's how I've seen *every* _Trek,_ personally. It's holonovel framing¹ of the greatest moments of Federation history.
¹Try not to think about "These Are The Voyages"
@@GSBarlev Ah that's a very good point. Thinking about it that way, its being told from the accounts of their Logs: Captains Logs and Personal Logs. But we do get insight into the things that aren't put into the official logs.
"Exaggerated canon" has always been my personal explanation, too. If Lower Decks were played straight as a live action 90's Star Trek show, it would probably be similar to TNG, VOY & DS9 but with some lighthearted humor here & there. Like the first two seasons of "The Orville."
i could see that be a thing
This is how I generally feel about it too. The characters and events are all canon, but shown to us through an exaggerated & comedic lens.
Of course, the Moopsy would be even MORE adorable in live action...
@@curlybrace314and more horrifying.
For the whole first season of Lower Decks, one of my favorite games was, "Okay, what if this WASN'T a cartoon? How would this be handled/look?" I came to the conclusion that it would basically be the Orville with the comedy toned down, or something akin to some episodes of VOY. I love Lower Decks, but I really would like to see the Lower Decks of another universe where that was true.
So it's canon because it's too much canon
Honestly, the events on Lower Decks are no more crazy than say, running into an alternate universe that makes crews of starships become the cast of a musical, going warp 10 "evolving" you into a salamander, a seemingly entirely human crewmember "de-evolving" into a spider monster, meeting Space Abraham Lincoln or parasitic aliens taking over several admirals who are then never mentioned again. Some Star Trek stories are just crazy, no matter the medium. It's just part of the franchise, and we love it!
Don't forget how the Dominion is an empire of supersoldiers ruled over by soup... or the Undine being uber-powerful shapeshifters who live in a universe-sized ocean of dirty dishwater..... or how there's enough temporal fighting to make a season or two of Doctor Who.... or the species of aliens who reproduce by resurrecting and mutating the dead... or just Neelix.
this, so much this. i think too many fans these days have lost sight of the fact that trek was always had the strange and wacky filler episodes. especially back when the series was more a loose collection of tales, rather than a major over arching grand story.
also, its meant to be fun and enjoyable. too many people being far too serious for my taste these days.
what episode was the musical one? 1💀
@@ObamaTron Star Trek Strange New Worlds S2E10 "Subspace Rhapsody"
@@herborty8658 Yeah, skipped that one... No thanks! ... Besides, Robot Chicken apparently did a much better job with the Star Trek opera.
If an Enterprise can encounter something strange new and dramatic every week and no one questions it, I'm okay with the Cerritos encountering something odd, unrealized, and comedic each week. Great video as always.
The episodes are weekly! But that doesn't mean the events are
Some of the episodes of The Next Generation and Enterprise made mentioned of time passing between episodes. Also weird things happen when you are going into situations no one has been before.
"Exaggerated canon" is how I always headcanon'd _Star Trek V._ It was a story Scotty told a gathered crowd in Ten Forward off-camera during "Relics."
I personally believe that entire Star Trek V take place in the Nexus. As for reminder Kirk was trapped in mindscape in Star Trek Generations. That also could be explanation for bizarre differences in TOS. Basically those things are Kirk interpretations of actual events.
After half a bottle of green stuff.
I was already to be offended because Star Trek V is one of my favorites, it’s like an episode of the original series on the big screen, but immediately my brain switched into the, Oh my God this could so totally be the way it went down.
speaking of the comics, Shax gets his own one shot set during the middle of a major story arc. It's stylized in the Lower Decks style and features his more animated personality, but it's ending is directly tied to the next issue which goes back to the normal style, and even features proof of his deeds in the background. Not sure how much this adds to the point of the video, but I thought it was worth pointing out
I still have yet to read this one as I want a physical copy, but it sounds like it adds to my point.
Didn’t it just get nominated for an Eisner award?
@@Sk8rToon It did~
Maybe what we see is historical docu-comedies consumed by the far future class that rightfully venerates O'Brien as the most important person in Starfleet.
Or cartoon aimed at teenage Federation kids semi-based on real events.
I think the best way to think of Lower Decks is by thinking of the as crew reports from people, exaggerated in some places, simplified in others.
My headcannon/speculation was always that the show would end with Mariner IRL retelling the stories to new cadets or someone as obvious exaggeration. Like a more serious Boimler eould come up and say something like "you know it didnt happen like that" and Mariner responding "I know, but you know I learned to tell stories from Klingons. It makes it more entertaining..." And the show would end.
Mariner hopping off the command track to avoid becoming an evil admiral and joining the faculty of Starfleet Academy as a Frank the Tank-like figure is totally plausible.
Can add on a suggestion, they actually saw these events on the holodeck, but then ask 'why the cartoony look for the holo deck?' 'Oh just due to this old cartoon I love. Gives it a certain charm does it not?'
I think "same story, different story teller" is how I would reconcile things. If a Lower Decks episode were to be replayed as an episode of DS9 - somehow - we would get a familiar, but very different product.
Episodes like ENTs "Dear doctor" or TNGs "Data's day" came to my mind. Both examples where a different story teller influenced the way a story was told.
I think we ought to extend this "stylized retelling" perspective to *every* Star Trek series.
Every show is canon, but it's also a fictional world that's reinvented with every new iteration, with different sensibilities, budgets, and styles. If we relax how seriously we take every moment we see on screen, we'd find it a lot easier to make this half-century-old franchise coherent and enjoyable
Not every show has to be Canon. Star Wars and Disney proof that the right owner can strip certain shows from Canon with just a presscomment.
That's actually the convention of the scifi anime series Macross. Where there are different versions of many of the stories (TV show sand movies of the same story with divergent details, visual elements being drawn especially from both versions of the first generation which drastcally change the plot, and more). They're all in universe movies and TV shows based on real events. So the broad events of each story happen but we're never seeing the exact way it played out.
@@bofh85 Using Disney as argument is not particularly smart. Trek has this privilege that literally any series do not end in same timeline as it started.
@@TheRezro just because you don't like star wars you can't forbid me to compare. I could have taken any other big Hollywood company with any other kind of franchise who did exactly the same. It stays the truth:if they want to change the official Canon they can and they will
@@bofh85 To be fair, that's not the same situation with Star Wars. The old EU/Legends was always in a gray area for canonical stuff. Lucas was rarely involved outside of very occasional comments, and when he wanted to make something like the Prequels or the Clone Wars animated series, he paid very little attention to what the EU had created to fill some of those details and worldbuilding, and sometimes actively contradicted it (see the whole "Jango Fett is not a Mandalorian, just a bounty hunter" thing that George is the one who pushed). Hell, TCW being the most recent Lucas entry wreaked havoc on massive portions of the EU with different characterizations, fates of characters, backstories, etc to the point that if you really like the EU, there's basically no way to square that series with even pre-Disney TCW.
Whatever your opinions of what they made afterwards, Disney got the IP and had one set of much more publicly well-known canon entries (OT, PT, TCW + other old animated shows) that were clearly connected and another set of canon which while well-beloved by a large number of people, was widely unknown to general audiences and really constrained their plans to do a Sequel Trilogy and other feature films.
Sure, Disney could have just adapted the EU, but in a Star Trek sense, that would be like saying the Star Trek movies *had* to be made to fit the Star Trek novels and be adaptations of them and also feature fan-favorite characters. Did they make the right decision? There's no real answer to that kind of what-if, but it gave them more options to either take bits and pieces of Legends that they liked and wanted to use, or ignore parts they didn't like and do their own thing, and the issues with Disney SW projects aren't tied to it being a new canon, but due to other corporate and management choices that could just have easily have plagued an EU adaptation.
How could it be less canon than Spock's Brain, Plato's Stepchildren, Up the Long Ladder, Move Along Home, that Enterprise episode where Phlox did a genocide? Life is not any one genre and neither is a good show. Comedy moments absolutely work. Pick any two Voyager episodes written by different people. The characterizations there are very likely to be far more different than those between Lower Decks and live action. (Also lots of stuff happening to one ship is ... standard Star Trek stuff seen in every other series? Not sure why that is suddenly unusual now)
I read Voyager and my mind immediately jumped to the joke SFdebris made about the Doctor's Singing, and Italian Language, and Bablefish translation.
" _The Woman is Furniture. The Rice is False._ "
" _Tuvok so moved by his woman furniture breaks into pon farr_ "
Funny that you listed some of the worst Star Trek episodes to compare that cartoon too. Kinda speaks volumes.
@@the7percentsolution Not really. I just went for the obvious ones that are unambiguously worse. There's others, but arguments could be made for those. The ones picked are pretty clear cut. Lower Decks has episodes that stand above generally good live action episodes. Wej Duj is, I'd honestly say, better than The Pegasus, or The Gambit. Either way, those worst Star Trek episodes are canon and Lower Decks is better than them.
Yeah, if I had to complain about one aspect of the video it would be the appeal to the improbability of so many coincidences in the show that enables the comedy. That same complaint could be brought against The Next Generation with regards to the sheer number of crises it experienced over it's run. It's not exactly reality , it's fiction and it needs these kinds of coincidences to have drama. Likewise, Lower Decks has lots of coincidences to enable constant comedy and humor instead. But dismissing it as all exaggeration would be tossing out some of its best dramatic moments too, including basically every one of its season finales. All of them feel like a pretty normal Trek episode, and I wouldn't want to undermine the seriousness of things like Mariner's conversation with the Klingon captain in that cave even if a storm of glass is a pretty ridiculous idea on any habitable planet.
@@formlessone8246 WRT the 'sheer number of crises', I think Janeway said something like 'We're Starfleet, weird is part of the job.' Implying that all the weird events we see happening to the hero ships are pretty much happening to every single starfleet ship out there. Just we happen to be focusing on the Enterprise/Voyager/Cerritos rather than those other ships.
The badge dark outer edge in the live action was a real life representation of the dark lines used to draw the badge.
I’m fine with it as canon. It’s dialogue tempo is obviously much faster and zippy. But the live action shows frequently get pretty goofy and slap stick so in terms of tone it’s not really that much of a stretch.
A good interpretation might be that Lower Decks is specifically Mariner's retelling of events. Given the common use of logs as a framing device in Trek, we can assume that this is the logs of Beckett Mariner.
That said, the unlikely coincidences to make things so comedic all on one ship could easily be changed to making things dramatic and applied to any Enterprise.
I mean what you gotta consider for a lot of this is - it has to be stylised because it's animation. You can't do scene-blocking or shot composition the same as you could in TNG, just in the animation style, say. Everything would look static and wrong in a way that it simply doesn't in live action. But because you gotta make the movements and stuff more exaggerated, you need the vocal performances and writing to match that so you don't have dynamic, bouncy characters reading their lines in a way that clashes with that.
Essentially the conclusion I drew from the crossover is - everything in TLD happened exactly as it happens in the show, people just spoke slightly slower and moved slightly less. Cuz those are the only things that change about Boimler and Mariner when they transition into live action, their personalities and actions stay basically the same - the performance the actors give just suits the medium they're being recorded in.
Older treks all had silly moments with various Space Nonsense but it was happening to top of the line crews. Like the Enterprise in all of the various forms is the literal flagship of the federation. And they get musicals, tribbles, a takeover by the hologram of Doctor Moriarty.
Trek is silly enough for Lower Decks to be canon as is, even unimbelieshed, with a smaller and less top of the line crew
Also as for Shaxs... The Shaxs' Best Day comic should be required reading
That's been my philosophy for every Trek series. The events of TOS looked like advanced technology inuniverse but could only look like 60s tv props in real life.
So in my mind, I'm not looking at a cardboard box covered in tin foil, I am looking at a super computer represented by a cardboard box covered in tin foil.
...is the only correct way to approach all staged fiction, really.
I kind of wished that in future series when revisiting the original series, they retconned the designs of the ships. It's super weird that ships and tech older than the original series (like Enterprise) look more advanced.
@@GoldenSun3DSI always seen enterprise as a timeline problem caused by first contact and honestly atleast the NX looks like a sub in space
@@GoldenSun3DSisn’t that the SNW approach already
@@GoldenSun3DS My headcannon was that there was a trend of designing new things to look retro during TOS. And by the time the other shows came along the trend was over.
I think there is enough room in Star Trek for a ship full of eccentric weirdos and what Lower Decks does is acknowledge how weird and odd Star Trek is and has fun with it. Seriously, they even call it out in a few episodes like the one about Voyager where the joke was that everything in the episode happened in the other series.
As for Shax his behavior change isn't that unusual. The man depicted in the cartoon is a bombastic loud man who knows when to turn it off and go into action when it matters for the crew. He never seems like the type of guy who would entirely let his hot headed nature get to him when its an important mission like what's in the comics.
About that weirdo thing, i imagine there are some star fleet bureaucrats that got bored and decided to put all of starfleets weirdos on one ship. Something similar happend in some books ive been reading; jack campbells lost fleet saga. There some alliance officials decided for shits'n'giggles to man a warship only with people whos last name started with S, and there is a guy whose last name is "Problem" who never gets a promotion beyond the rank of Major.
Right I love this series and Berkeley alone is enough to prove how odd some lower deck folks can be…like enlightenment doesn’t mean all humans act Vulcan sunddenly!
We definitely (and famously by every Vulcans canon assessment of humans) still act goofy etc.
Fav’ moment like this is when mariner gets threaded with starbase 80 duty and someone heckles out from offscreen “DAMN STARBASE 80!” lol😂
Reminds me of military stories. If I remember an incident in the desert, I remember basically what happened to the best of my ability.
If I'm telling it as a serious story, it's like one of the movies. Real serious, fairly accurate, reused props, and plenty of lens flare.
If I'm telling the same story after a few beers, yeah, that's coming out Lower Decks style.
Lower Decks actually feels more realistic than most other Star Trek, but then they slap a comedy filter over it and let it run.
So there I was...
My Sister works on Lower Decks. I forgot what I was going to say about this, but I will comment this anyway as a brag
Gotta feel rad being connected to Trek, even if it's tangential. 'Grats to your sister (and you too)
It's sort of like actually having an uncle that works for Nintendo,
Too bad it's canceled
@@CoralCopperHead Thanks!✨
It *is* pretty rad.
My sister started working on the show in season 3 (partway through iirc).
I’m a season or so behind at the moment, I’m really looking forward catching back up and being able to recognize a scene and say something like “ooh that’s the shot where [that one character] turns around on some stairs! [my sister] animated that!”
Pass along all the thank-yous!
The way I see it, Star Trek in general is a Docu-Drama, and Lower Decks in particular is a Docu-Comedy.
You know if lower decks is canon then we have every chance to pull a Shax with Shaw
D'you think he saw the koala?
@@grungar3x7 he might even know the secrets of the black mountain
Nothing that happens in it is too insane, the people function as actual people, even if we get to see more of their eccentricities than we do of live action characters.
For reference, the black outline you see around certain objects in both the live action and the animated versions of Lower Decks characters, is actually something you see a lot of in early, cel-shaded cartoons due to the process of making them. It's a graphical artifact from production, not an intended look.
The way I understand it, animating cel-shaded toons involved hand-drawn characters and scenes on multiple sheets of clear plastic material, similar to that used in an older, light-based, non-computerized projector.
One sheet was the background, one sheet had the characters, another sheet had the visual effects, etcetera. The way the animator created motion was to slide one sheet past the others. Different sheets would be used for different poses, different backgrounds, etcetera.
A lot of cartoon characters and objects from the era had the same black outline, it's just that the low-resolution scanners of the era made it look non-existent. Therefore, it looks right when viewed in an era-appropriate resolution, but when viewed in a higher resolution (like, say, 1040p versus 144p, high definition versus standard definition) you get that black outline. It's pretty much non-existent in the modern era of CGI except for the few cartoons and anime that are still cel-shaded, like Lower Decks.
A good example of this is Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS). Viewing TAS on a modern PC or TV, you can clearly see the stars sliding past one another in any of the scenes where the Enterprise is at warp.
Speaking of which, TAS is a more serious animation than Lower Decks and is much closer to its' counterpart live-action series (that'd be TOS) when it comes to action, crew shots, etcetera, as to how appropriate the crew is with regards to their behaviors in any given situation. The biggest difference is that the animators were able to do a lot more (albeit with less detailing) due to it being a cartoon, such as the first chronological appearance of the holodeck (recreation deck).
Short answer is. They literally did have crossover episode with Strange New Worlds! As for the tone, it is still point of debate if it is simply weird timeline version like for example this musical episode, what is entirely possible. Or if it is just matter of the presentation. Lower Decks simply focus on weirder events when Picard on more serious ones. But weird things always did happen in Trek. Lower Decks can be as canon as TOS is.
I agree wholeheartedly. I don't see why it wouldn't be straight up canon. It is as much canon as any other nuTrek.
I love that Lower decks shows off some of the more heartfelt moments amongst the crew, the pure joy Shaks has when he finally gets to eject the warp core, the inter personal bonding, and the idea that security have a secondary duty of helping unwind
I was not aware they did a crossover episode. that's fucking hilarious
I realise the question of whether something counts as canon is something we fans have a history of obsessing over, but do we really need something to be part of the official wider story to enjoy it as much as we do? For me personally, LD is great whether the higher-ups acknowledge it or not 😊
If it helps, I’ve never seen the higher ups treat it as anything but canon. With the exception of TAS which took some time for Paramount to embrace, the higher ups are actually usually pretty good about acknowledging every show as canon and valid. Lower Decks in fact helped usher in that full acceptance of TAS as canon. It’s gatekeepy fans who call certain shows into question
I like the theory that these are exaggerated cannon, but to say that all of these events happening to THIS SHIP are statistically unlikely seems to ignore precedent set by other Star Trek shows; Federation ships are always encountering strange phenomena and assorted problems, with the titular ship usually surviving, and guest ships often not. But Lower Decks suggests this does happen more regularly (Poor Ron Emmanuel Docent, Jr.), although it's noted that among it's class, the Cerritos does seem to get in more than it's fare share of scrapes (Although, as we've seen, there are in-universe explanations, Star Fleet is considering promoting Carol Freeman because she's "good at her job" and thus gives her a bit more responsibility, such as Project Flyby, which is derived from her experiences).
I'm not saying every Starship has a time travel experience, but TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY all had multiple, with TOS even experimenting using time travel as a research tool... good thing they shut that down fast. It's not implausible to say that, say, 5-10% of all large Star Trek ships have had some kind of time travel shenanigans by the end of their service, even if it's something as mundane as being tossed a week forward or back in time. I'm not saying Q's visited every ship in the fleet, but he did visit DS9 AND Voyager; is it so hard to imagine he's slumming with the Cerritos?
Cerritos _is_ renowned as “the Enterprise of the California-class” so I wouldn’t be so surprised that other ships go through similar shenanigans. 😅
Great, now I’m imagining “the Enterprise of the Oberth-class” and all the wacky near-death situations that poor ship must have gone thru…. 😅
Some say that the Enterprise of the Obeth class lasted a whole year out of spacedock
I feel like if time travel is actually possible, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of civilizations advanced enough to attempt it, not to mention it just happening because natural phenomena, there's prob a ton of time travel shenanigans that happen in space.
Since Discovery and Picard, most fans have defined their own canon.
They really don't. Most crying whiners do not know actually much about this franchise,
@@TheRezro sure
Given how much of the events in Lower Decks are pulled directly from established Star Trek canon, I actually think it's a lot easier to tie into the canon than people give it credit for. Nothing that happens in Lower Decks is inherently more absurd or unrealistic than anything in the other shows, it's just shown from a perspective that takes that stuff less seriously.
If Voyagers Warp 10 amphibians are canon.....
I wish one day they would just say Voyage was trapped in an alien holodeck. Voyager is the magnetic storm that corrupted the isolinear chip that is the Star Trek cannon-phere.
My personal head cannon, is that all treks are in fact plays put on by people in their period, about real events that happened to them, and the special effects upgrade with time because each time they have more information to add to the halodeck. Lower Decks is basically Drunk History of its time.
Or each show is, essentially, as retold by the main character; TOS is Kirk's tellings (probably TAS too, though that's to people who've heard his TOS stories), TNG is Picard (which is why everything is generally "stuffier"), DS9 is Sisko telling the tales (but maybe its Jake telling that one), Voyager is Janeway, etc... LD is Mariner's retelling.
Across the series, the facts are true- but how they are recounted flavor the stories.
This is indeed a good question. My first answer would be yes because although the show is an animation, it uses the same material as established Star Trek canon ie callbacks from classic characters as well as the voices used. Yes, it is literally canon.
Now, that being said there are elements that keep it wacky and fantastical as an animated comedy should, and that might take away from the live-action counterpart of the franchise. In terms of the ships...it would be nice to see the California-class in live-action Trek.
I'd love to see the Parliament class show up as a guest ship in a live action show. Better yet, I'd love to see one as the main ship. It seems like a design that could fill that role in a similar way that the Intrepid class did for Voyager.
@@wendyheatherwood Yes! It would be interesting to see Parliament-class.
Honestly, Ric, I hadn't given it much thought beyond knowing it was canonical. That's an interesting take, and I love the part of your conclusion where you said (paraphrasing here) each person has their own head canon so it'll be different for each fan as to how it's to be interpreted. I was thinking much the same thing as you were saying it, much more eloquently than I have here, obviously.
I appreciate your work, geek-brother. LLAP
I love that Animation allows older characters to be played by original actors without being forced to age the characters.
Have you considered the possibility of the opposite? What if Lower Decks is the 100% canonical one, but all other shows are toned down official reports? Where they redact and censor things that might put the federation in a bad light?
The real starfleet was the stories we left out along the way.
Objectively funnier theory
Thanks for making a video about what's on all our minds. Very fun
That weird power walk is most definitely a thing in real life. I don't know what it's called, but I saw an old lady walking exactly like that on a state park trail as I drove by.
Fun fact it's implied that mearner was stationed on ds9 off screen so it makes me wonder what she might have done on ds9 examples helping dax move odos furniture around, helped Quark make his advertisement, and helped encourage mourn to wack quark with a bar stool.
I think it ultimately comes down to: "Is everything after Enterprise canon?". This the real heart at the matter and what truly divides the fan base, both on this question and Star Trek itself.
And the answer is yes but people are allowed their headcanons so long as they’re not annoying
Too bad so many of them are annoying
@@Cdr2002I agree, my attitude about headcanon is that they are okay to have, it's fun and a good excercise for the mind.... as long as people kept them privated inside their heads.
@@VandalAudi you can share them with other people in conversation imo but I hate when they’re imposed like the mfers who will say “DISCOVERY ISNT CANON” to any random person discussing the show when whether you like it or not that isn’t a factually true statement
@@Cdr2002 well let's be fair here, if you start a conversation about headcanon in any fandom with random people, which more likely to happen, a chill convo where everyone leaves enriched, or "DISOCVERY IS NOT CANON" rants?
@@VandalAudi true 💀 every convo eventually has the goofy who thinks “haha what sequel trilogy you imagined it” is funny
I agree with others saying the events aren't all that weird. But the way people talk, move, and act definitely seem to be cartoony. And I have trouble thinking the genre savviness or real life references would fit.
I would take it like this: a description of what happens in the show is canon, but you may see things that were overdone.
An insightful view, which matches nicely to my personal view that ALL Trek can be seen as a "dramatic recreation" - that events generally happen but not necessarily EXACTLY as shown. So the actors, the sets, the props, etc. are all approximations of events. With some stories, sets, and actors being less approximate than others.
The captains log was supposed to be the framing device for the show, right? Star Trek is basically a dramatic reenactment of the events recorded by the captain in their log. So, maybe Lower Decks is a comedic reenactment of some captains (or ensigns) log, instead of dramatic. For the pedantic, you could call most Trek a primarily dramatic adaptation with comedy secondary, and LD as primarily a comedic adaptation.
The first line in this show literally an ensign log.
Georgiou's return will be her battling Badgey in a major battle between humanity and AI... ;)
I like the idea that it's effectively historical fiction - a retelling of events that did actually happen but dialed up to be more comedic.
Lower Decks is the best thing that ever happened to Star Trek. I believe it explores and adds to canon.
Cerritos is a California class ship. Californians are eccentric compared to other states. Let's just say that Lower Decks is viewed through a Cali-lens and call it a day.
God help us if Starfleet ever commissions a Florida class....
Wonderful breakdown and explanation. This is a great question for Star Trek Lower Decks.
A really cool end of show plot twist would be to have it all be Mariner talking at Boimler's funeral to a bunch of lower deckers, because she finally grew up a bit and he got too bold in a heroic moment.
I completely agree with your perspective, and that of some of the comments, and I *really* hope it becomes the cannon explaination- It's a retelling of events that is somewhat exaggerated. I have little to no issue with the number/significance of events because I can easily see the Cerritos and lower decks cast as another one of those 'exceptional' crews and ships, which is the *reason* we are being told this story. If you look at TNG or especially Voyager we also see a similar number of similarly significant events so I don't have a particular issue with this crew also being an exception to an exception in terms of the frequency of insane happenings. Where I do think some of the things should be toned down are events that are too comical for the situation (i.e. Shax ejecting the warp core, in battle, with casualties, and everyone cheering him on) or *maybe* some of the actual events that are a bit too far fetched like in the Voyager episode where they basically have mini retellings of half the wacky things that happened in VOY, perhaps instead they had a the "Tuvix" incident happen again but the rest of the stuff either nearly happened or was exaggerated because they were already on Voyager.
I'm *really* hoping they go this route because it would allow me to fully welcome Lower Decks into cannon and mesh it with all other Trek super well. It would also help account for any inconsistencies in the lore, and could even be used to help clarify lore in the universe too.
To a certain degree I've always loved the way the Battletech animated show was worked into the setting: It's also an animated kids show there.
I've always viewed LD as a "TV Show" set within the Star Trek Universe, just based on real characters and events and hyped way up. So much so, that some of the guest stars (ie. Riker or Quark etc.) could be the real people popping in for a cameo. Something along the lines of when a big sports star pops into a sitcom to play themself.
So my headcannon is that Lower Decks takes place in a reflection dimension that is animated, similar to how the musical episode in Strange New Worlds mentioned that the music came from a dimension in which everything was a musical.
And so what I mean by reflection Dimension is that it's a dimension that for all intents and purposes completely mimics the main canon Star Trek dimension, but just happens to be one of the infinite dimensions that is animated. So everything in this dimension has animation physics and comedy, but in broad strokes mimics the main timeline, and any changes in one dimension reflects in the other.
Kind of like how I imagine the musical dimension that SNW tapped into was simply a dimension that mimicked the main timeline but everyone sang instead as just a law of physics.
Since these are reflection dimensions characters from either one can easily cross between them with only minor awareness of the difference in physics but most of it just gets automatically translated to the current dimension's laws.
It's not a perfect headcannon but it works.
I think it brings to the fore the unspoken and invisible extra character: the narrator. Each trek installment is a story about trek to us, the audience. And if you imagine live action trek being "stories" about the events told by someone like a journalist or historian, then LD is more like stories told by your drunk friend who swears they were there when it happened.
I've always seen it similar to 300, there's an unreliable narrator which are the Ceritos crew themselves and they're telling their stories how they remember them, to fit in with your visual and character section, its like a hazy memory which exaggerates features they remember but fades out the background unimportant details. The events all happened but we're not presented them occurring but the memories of them occurring
and everyone else has come to the same conclusion, whoops
Think of it as a retelling of the story, people exadurate when telling a story back, especially after time has passed
Now I want to see Lower Decks episodes 'dialed back' to the normal Star Trek level of seriousness.
I love lower decks, definitely my favorite new trek show. It feels exaggerated but still grounded in reality, just situations dialed up a tad
As ever, I'm reminded of the preface to Roddenberry's novelization of ST:TMP, where 'Kirk' cautions the reader that the excitement and hijinks of the Enterprise's original five-year mission has been spiced up in the retelling by the media. That is, it is heavily implied that The Original Series as we have seen it is not entiiiiirely precise to the (yes, fictional) events and personalities, even if the broad strokes of the missions and their historical effects are the same.
Its like Obrien saying about the accuracy of Kor's story telling, essentially boiling down to who cares if its told well, real or not.
Love this. Also now I have to get that comic
This is great, i love clipping the Lower Decks episode of Strange New Worlds. One thing that really annoyed me about Lower Decks is actually the opening, it was so undignified, but as you say, it's exaggerated for comedic effect, just like everything else. It just feels so incompetent, but then, we get that from the description of the California class duties in any case (second contact, other lower tier official duties, etc).
Doesn't stop me from enjoying the show, mind you, I just feel better about skipping it.
Slightly exaggerated but cannon. If anyone thinks comedy is not part of Star Trek's DNA they have not seen some of the best episodes of TOS or TNG.
I've always figured that the Klingons, Romulans, Tholians, Gorn, etc. run into almost as many strange things as Starfleet on any given day, they just don't actively seek them out as frequently. That is why even Klingon BoPs have decent sensors and scientific analysis capabilities.
My headcanon for years has been that everything we see on screen, whether it's Lower Decks, TOS, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, SNW, Disco, whatever, is a dramatization of events a la historical documentary. This is why the TOS Enterprise is smaller than the SNW Enterprise, even though it's supposed to be the same ship at a later time in its existence. It's why Pike and Kirk and Spock can have different faces in each iteration. It's even why some storylines can disappear or get dropped (brain bugs, anyone?), perhaps those events are still classified, so there's been no documentary made of them yet. We're not watching the actual events, we're watching historically accurate (in the broad strokes) documentaries of them from sometime in the future from those events. If nothing else, this lets us shrug off small canon discrepancies as artistic license of the documentarian telling that particular story.
I always thought of Voyager in a similar way. What we see in that show is the logs of the ship, not what actually happened. This may not be canon or true but it makes sense and speaks to me.
It could also be seeing how character that are not the same level of quality an training as the higher ranking and quality officers of the other series. i mean in the other series we are talking about the top levels of the officers of the station/ships, while lower decks is the junior officers even recruits taking up their first or first few stations before learning the ropes so their logs would be less professional compared to the higher ranking officers would have. The skills and attitude of p[people within Starfleet would be vastly different as you go thru the different levels, decks, and even ship by ship and so logs would vary too which is what the lower deck might be them retelling the events of the day or missions in a event log.
The period piece comparison works quite well with Star Trek, like TNG is Downton Abbey, but Lower Decks is Blackadder, both fictional but equally both constrained by setting
It’s the same thing with Lego Star Wars animated series or specials they may be exaggerated but generally what happens happened
LD is my favorite of the post-2009 Treks, by a long shot. In spite of that, I always viewed it as Paramount responding to the Orville by showing what a Seth Macfarlane TNG would _actually_ be like.
On thenote of the general narrative I think, think that the TNG era's habit of having a given episode dedicated to one or more of the ensemble is very well enjoyed when viewing it with this in mind with this in mind
Take DS9 as an example "In the Pale Moonlight" and "For the Uniform" are as Sisko remembers them, not as say, how Eddington or Garak might remember ie the view which might portray the same events and conversations as told by them might from them show Sisko as a brutal war criminal from Eddington's view or as a sanctimonious from Garak's view (and I say this as someone for whom Sisko is their favorite captain) but since the episode is focused on him, its all about his growth and change and thoughts and how he reacts to the situation.
For more ensemble episodes Ie Sacrifice of Angels, Take Me Out to The Holosuite, Best of Both Worlds (to bring this back to TNG for a bit) its more vague and collectively how the whole crew remember it.
Could just be the whole series is as Mariner, Bomiler, Tendi and Rutherford or the other officers remember and tell it in their logs.
OK, ooold Star Trek fan here. From back in the late 60s. Why is it so absolutely critical if this is "canon" or not? It's the first breath of fresh air and (gasp) humor in Star Trek since.... since when? Is it really that important?
7:10 To be fair, he was _also_ meeting the Emissary and a Legendary Starfleet ... Captain? Flag officer? Admiral? Not sure what Rank Sisko was in that Comic.
And then some other legends as well.
It makes sense he was more reserved at first.
I like the idea that all the Star Trek shows are shows in the StarTrek universe, made by the Federation/starfleet to inform the general public as to what starfleet is doing.
Comics Shaxs IS more reserved than in the cartoon, but there also exists a one-shot comic called "Shaxs's Best Day" where he rides a ship, similar to Burnham in the new season of Discovery, minus the environmental suit.
Edit: Corrections
How’d he do that without an EV suit?
I just went back and read it again, the ship was the Defiant and it was in atmosphere XD
You might also realize that in the comics shanks wasn't in his element. He was with other officers on different ships and different situations where he might have been forced to attempt to be more reserved whereas on the Cerritos he was in an environment where he can feel free to be more himself perhaps. Perhaps a difference in his level of a zuberance can be attributed to inhibition and restraint due to the people and surroundings he was in.
It may seem implausible that one crew has so many comedic things happen, but is it any more implausible than one crew saving Earth/the Federation so many times (and sometimes not even pressing charges!).
I think the live action shows are like the official logs where lower decks is either the personal log or people sitting down together and telling a story.
I think it is.
Star Trek was about the BEST ship in the fleet. After all, there ipso facto has to be a ship which, in hindsight, was the greatest of all time - the 'perfect storm' of personalities, capabilities and events coming together.
But there also has to be a ship which is the inverse of that. One ship HAS to be the silliest, even in Starfleet.
I feel that LD is just a little flexible. Like when people tell a slightly exaggerated story of a real-life event.
In episode 1, we see Marine slice a big chunk of Boim's thigh off. Now we could say that did happen but maybe Boimler exaggerated the size of the wound.
I'm reminded of Admiral Kirk's preface in the "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" novelization, where he mentions that he and his crew were "painted somewhat larger than life" due to the enthusiasm of "those who chronicled our adventures". I feel like the implication that the original series canon was produced by somewhat unreliable narrators has become more relevant as newer projects redefine the style of the TOS era and play with the continuity (which was always rough).
I look at it like a story I'm sure most American sailors (or their friends and families) know. A sailor is part of a detail, moving munitions from one place to another aboard ship. There's an accident, a missile falls on his foot, breaking one of his toes. The sailor's getting taped up in sickbay when he chief comes down to check on him. "Chief, I was struck by a missile. Put in me for a Purple Heart (U.S. decoration awarded for being injured in combat)?" Chief has a good laugh and wants in on the joke, he writes up the form and passes in on to his LT. Who knows better than to not laugh at his chief's joke. And also decides to pass it up the chain of command. It goes the X.O. and then the Captain. Turns out there's an admiral arriving for inspection the next day. Poor swab gets called in before a Captain's Mast (a disciplinary hearing a step down from a court martial). Admiral tears into him for disgracing all brave service men who earned their Purple Hearts, but dismisses him with only the mildest of punishments. Bulkhead shuts behind him, and he hears gales of laughter coming through it. Did it happen? Sure. Was it really an admiral? Probably not.
The answer is that the Lower Deckers are always high on alien booze, like the Enterprise crew happened to be that one time.
And that's why they see everything in such a goofy way.
A story being retold would also explain the reduced detail. The vast majority of people just don’t care about the details of how ships look or what’s on the PADD, they remember the concepts and feelings.
I think the best thing in Star Trek is that almost everything can be canon, explained by paralel universes dimensions, timelines.
As far as I see it, the only Star Trek show which can not be canon is Discovery. Because they force themself into an already existing canon lore and try to change it forcefully.
Meanwhile Lower Decks (as far as I seen) respect already existing canon, and represent it accurately, while add their new stuff into the mix on their own way. And that's perfectly fine. and to me could count as canon.
I love the "prison" for "insane sentient" computers 😀
I'm sure the "real" version would be much more rehab based.
I think it's just as likely that lower decks is what actually happens. Whereas the other series feature stories that are sanitized where everyone is exceptional and has a unrealistic sense of humor and is professional 24/7. Like does no one in the future get excited for pesto!
Then Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and DS9 are the in between where everyone’s a little looser but we don’t get to (usually) see the full honest depiction of their stress like when the LD characters are allowed to just lose it here and there
It's canon, Jim.
If ST: SNW is canon, so is Lower Decks.
We had an episode of TOS where alien strippers stole Spock's brain, a TNG episode where the bridge crew wound up playing Robin Hood's Merry Men, and a DS9 ep with a wish-granting leprechaun. The cartoon might be exaggerated, slightly, but we can take it as an accurate representation of whatever real life is in the prime Star Trek universe.
Think of it like this: we're seeing and hearing an account of real events experienced by a crew who consist largely of borderline eccentrics (because Starfleet, being Starfleet, attracts eccentrics and "nerds" as much as it does OCD hyper-competent officer material), but perhaps filtered through a narrator who isn't *entirely* reliable. it's accurate....*mostly.* The crew's attitude may also reflect that the most incredibly unlikely events tend to happen to people who make their living out among the stars traveling to unknown and poorly-understood places, and not only are they pretty much used to it, their level of technology and understanding actually makes it relatively easy to come out the other side unscathed and intact, so they've mostly learned to just roll with it.
The idea that all of this stuff happened to a ship but maybe not to the Cerritos in particular, taps into a thought I always had about the Original Series. Various cop TV shows starting likely with Dragnet (which began as a radio show in '49) would tout that the episodes were based on REAL police cases which and were "dramatizations of real events" . In my head that was the case for TOS. Everyone on the bridge crew were real and accomplished Starfleet officers but maybe served with each other on different ships or at different times. But in that Golden Era of Exploration a Constitution class vessel did in fact run across an alien civilization that fought all wars via computer complete with mandatory execution chambers. Two other vessels in that same time period encountered an alien space craft from outside the galaxy that destroyed whole planets, with one of the ships being lost with all hands on board whilst taking it down. It may not have happened with USS Enterprise, or with Captain Kirk in command, but it happened. The show is a "dramatizations of real events".
Im still waiting to see candle ghost in a starfleet uniform. He had to have a courtroom episode arguing phantom rights or something.
A lot of media should be considered an artistic impression, rather than literal image of a world.
That also explains retcons and other inconsistancies. I once read an article about something called Scaling Theory in a wiki for a game, which stated that things like travel times, land scale, etc were distorted. The boring bits are cut out in space as well as time, just as you skip the elevators in Star Trek.
If we assume that other StarTrek-Shows are retellings of events by captains or officers logs, it is logical that Lower Decks is "based" on personal logs or even oral retellings by the main characters. Therefore the other shows are a lot more like official reports but in Lower Decks personal impressions of events and other character's traits influence the story.
I think there's a distinction between canon and storytelling lens. I accept that all stories are told through a storytelling lens, and they don't necessarily have to share a storytelling lens just because they happen to share a canon. This goes for live-action as well as animation. The same applies in any other shared canon. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, the View Askewniverse, the DC Animated Universe, Star Wars, the Buffyverse, and so on. The storytelling lens can even shift between individual episodes without canon being affected. These are, as far as I'm concerned, entirely separate factors unless otherwise indicated. If a character for example happens to be recast, unless it's acknowledged in-story that they look different, I simply assume that canonically they look the same even though a change has occurred in the lens that makes it appear otherwise. It's a matter of the fourth wall and suspension of disbelief. The Enterprise bridge in Strange New Worlds and the Original Series is for all intents and purposes canonically the same bridge, and looks more or less the same in-story. It just looks different from this side of the fourth wall because we're seeing it through a different storytelling lens.
I view Lower Decks the same way I view Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures. These events did happen, but they are being retold and embellished with a comedic tone.
I wonder if Shaxs' personality might, in part, be akin to the holodeck character/interface/thought-simulation of Dr. Brahms in "The Booby Trap"? Would that make all of 'Lower Decks' a type of Star Trek level AI, used like many people use what we have today, producing a 2-Dimensional, non-interactive art-filtered experience depicting otherwise canonical events, or what may be called in-universe, "events that are relatively accurate within a scant few plausibility units?"
I could definitely see the Salt Vampire flashback being an exaggerated amalgamation of the various times Ransom's flings have gotten him or the crew in trouble, rather than him literally meeting the extinct species
I always thought of Lower Decks as an in-universe show, based on actual events.