Is Lower Decks Literal Canon?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ม.ค. 2025
- 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
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...
@@Lambda3141and 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
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.
@@JakeSDN some events happen quickly after each other, like 2 days between one event and the next.
We certainly do not see a week by week breakdown of the ships journey.
The main thing is, all the events we see in each series are only the events that we need to see, off screen stuff is generally stuff they preserve for further story telling.
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~
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.
"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.
"Aye and then.... he flew up to catch them!"
"Hold on, Flew?"
"Oh, er, yes! Rocket boots!"
"T...that's not a thing."
"Hm, well maybe not, but never let too many facts get in the way of a good story, lad."
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 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.
@@RickSanchez_85 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
@@RickSanchez_85 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.
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 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.
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.
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😂
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.
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.
Agreed.
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
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
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...
"The sheer level of coincidences that would need to occur-"
Every single Star Trek series ever is literally a series of extreme coincidences.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
@@lydiar4386oh so true!!!! For a civilization that no longer uses currency, what reason do they need to be so damn serious?
I love that Animation allows older characters to be played by original actors without being forced to age the characters.
I just prefer animation as a medium so you don't have use actors that might not be able to act well, but can be good in combat, or heck animation doesn't limit you to what your characters are able to do period!!
08:25 I would go one step futher, chiming in with Bermans comment. NOTHING we see in all of trek is a literal observation of "historical events". It ALL a "retelling" / "reenactment". This explains away any inconsistencies whatsoever.
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
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.
I was not aware they did a crossover episode. that's fucking hilarious
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 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
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
@@TheRezro Do you always cry when you form an opinion?
@@El-Adrel I actually do know this franchise. Fun fact. Ships from Discovery are Phase 2 design, seen during Wolf 359.
@@TheRezro you want a medal?
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
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Lower Decks is the best thing that ever happened to Star Trek. I believe it explores and adds to canon.
Georgiou's return will be her battling Badgey in a major battle between humanity and AI... ;)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Same, also people are too damn serious!!! You can't tell me there wouldn't be a slacker ship that wouldnt be a awesome cartoon!! I havent watched much star trek, but what I have watched makes me know, it is all too damn serious!!!
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.
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
Most Star Trek series are told from the perspective of bridge officers, while lower decks are told from the perspective of lower deck officers. This could also explain the difference in humor. The lower deck officers are less careerist, therefore less serious and somehow more human, while bridge officers seem more formal and serious.
High-ranking officers or politicians also reflect events differently in reality than the common people.
Such an approach would also be a good explanation for the fact that the names of many Red Shirts were never mentioned in the various series. They do not seem relevant for a formal report. Numbers, on the other hand, are relevant - math is an asshole.
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.
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....
maybe it's like enterprise when the whole thing was revealed to have been a movie: everything you see DID happen but it's being viewed in a more entertaining way.
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 love lower decks, definitely my favorite new trek show. It feels exaggerated but still grounded in reality, just situations dialed up a tad
Theres also the factor of what the creator chooses to show of what can only be implied to be a larger universe populated with complete beings that exist beyond their roles in the narrative. Coarsely put, its a choice to not show every character in the franchise using the toilet 3-5 times a day, that doesn't mean that pooping isnt a part of their reality.
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!).
Thanks for making a video about what's on all our minds. Very fun
I always felt that all of the stories in Star Trek are told with a certain bias and style. Like how the real-life shows could be a more dramatic version of events when compared to the "reality" of what happened. Especially since most of the stories seem to be told as a kind of re-telling based off on personal and official logs.
I want your view on the TAS series. Regardless of the time it was produced do you perceive it as Canon?
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.
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.
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 own explanation is that Lower Decks is a cartoon in-universe too, and we are watching it from the POV of a citizen of the Federation in the 25th century. It's a Federation propaganda cartoon which is exaggerated to make the jobs and lives of a lower deck officer on a utility cruiser seem more glamorous than it actually is, but with the provisio that the stories are all true...just heavily embellished for recruitment purposes. No doubt the Cerritos did engage a Pakled Clumpship and barely escape in one piece, or Tendi really did disable a Kareman freighter using some Latinum to do it. But the specifics of how these events occurred were probably ever so slightly more mundane.
That said, I am probably wrong. There's an old post from forever ago about "How Humans are basically the Team Hold My Beer, I Got This of the Trek universe" where people talk about the distinct possibility than Feds, specifically humans, are just crazy. It's likewise probably BS but I choose to believe in it because when you think about it, you never do actually hear about the things that happen to Federation vessels and crews happening to ANYONE else. Romulans, Klingons, and even Vulcans don't accidentally punch a hole into parallel universes with anywhere near the frequency that Humans do - or again, if they do, we don't see it on screen. I just assume this is true. Once you do, a lot of Trek suddenly makes a lot more sense.
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).
In the battletech fandom, there is a cartoon series that it's been decided is specifically exists as a cartoon within the universe. It's a propaganderised portrayal of events meant to be shown to children.
I kind of feel like Lower Decks is a cartoon made in the universe 30-40 years after it is set about a ship that a LOT of shenanigans happened to, but not quite as many as portrayed. Possibly to boost starfleet recruitment numbers as most people will end up working on the lower decks.
So this is a great video, because this is how I see not only Lower Decks, but ALL the Star Trek shows and movies.
I started forming this viewpoint after the Voyager episode Living Witness, where we're treated to holographic recreations of one of Voyager's escapades from through the lens of an alien race. I realized after watching that viewing the entire canon through a similar lens is a joy. What we're seeing are recreations or re-tellings of the "actual events" of the canon. Why does the turboshaft in Star Trek 5 have so many decks? Because when Bones was telling the story about it, that's how it felt to him, that the turboshaft went on and on forever.
Why is Threshold never mentioned again in Voyager? Because Janeway was so embarassed she erased every mention of it from all logs except for the event itself (as that was probably needed for the record).
Why is the TOS Enterprise not the same as the SNW Enterprise? We got more accurate plans of it since.
Every minor inconsistency in every show and movie is explained away if we view things this way.
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.
All fiction is told through the lens of whatever medium and writing it's in, and these each impart a tone. Comic books do this all the time: you can have a very serious drama around Spider-Man, or a light-hearted comedy aimed at kids. That doesn't mean one is more canon than the others, it's just a different angle of looking at the same thing, a different expression of it.
And as you've noted, when characters cross over between Lower Decks and the other shows, they still behave largely the same, they're the same people with the same background. It's just the way the story is presented to us is different. You could remake a LD episode in the style of DS9 and it'd have the same plot, but take on an entirely different tone; but it's canon either way.
Lower decks is 100% the true canon of trek. All the live action shows are de-exaggerated retelling of events in a “band of brothers” “saving private ryan” style story telling
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 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
I feel like Lower Decks is Boimler and/or Mariner recounting their story to an old friend. It's told in a jocular manner, with exaggerated personalities as if you are impersonating someone you both know, but the seriousness of some situations shine through.
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.
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.
This is exactly what i thought from the beginning. Its canon. But its like its being told at a quarks where everyone gets drunk on romulan ale and theyre like „lol remember when THIS happened?ß“
It has to be a bit exaggerated. There's no way Mariner would have just slid on drunkenly threatening another crew member with a lethal weapon, swiping at them multiple times some right at their head, and mortally wounding them (even with 24th century tech that wound to the inside thigh would be touch and go if not on a comedy cartoon) and that's from like the opening moments of the show.
2:07 What class is the foreground ship?
Parliament Class
@@CertifiablyIngame Thanks.
I always take Lower Decks as a "fish tale" of actual in universe events. They historically happen but this retelling is embellished to a degree or some elements did not happened at the same time as told here. like a minor but noteworthy element in one of the episode was the only highlight of an otherwise boring week. But instead of retelling that week they insert the element in the narrative of another more interesting event.
Grandpa Bradward telling stories to the grandkids.
There is a reason why Q loves messing with the Cerritos. He's having fun! He is bothering a ship initially considered bottom tier. And they have proved they are anything but that.
Heck Boimler beat a simulated Borg Queen with emphathy or blowing the Borg Cube from the inside. Picard has shown both are possible.
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.
I take it as a comedic retelling of Canon. Major events happened but not in the literal way we see it.
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.
I love the "prison" for "insane sentient" computers 😀
I'm sure the "real" version would be much more rehab based.
I had thought the cartoon was maybe an in-universe telling of stories. Do you think maybe that the Packleds aren't really the threat, but are a stand-in for a more dangerous opponent that the Fleet doesn't want people to freak out about? I doubt Packleds could be a major threat... but what about Kzinti? And when telling the story, maybe the Fleet felt the falsehood was safer? Just a thought...
"Exaggerated canon" is a nice way to put it. The way I've always head-canon both Lower Decks and TAS, is more like Media made from the ship logs of the time. Think of TAS as a propaganda-based production that Picard might have even grown up watching, designed to target children the way G.I. Joe had been, except stylizing events from the ship logs. I see Lower Decks in a similar vein, though maybe a holoprogram (or a series of) that Bloimer has written. Kind of like, SPOILERS the "Young Sheldon" finale concept and how by pulling an ENT-Finale by making it a memoir, means that some creative license was likely used.
It amazes me people actually want THIS SHOW to be "not canon" when it's the only modern Trek show that respects canon, but are cool with the Abrams films, Discovery, SNW & Picard being canon despite them using canon as toilet paper. Probably the same Trek fans that think Keiko O'Brien is a charming character & that she was right to tell off the Bajorans about their faith...
I have been steadfastly agaisnt all of it
Charming? No. Correct to tell off the Bajoran church for interfering with emperical evidence? Yes. They're not mutually exclusive; You can still be correct while also being a legitimate bitch.
To suddenly decide your head canon is that it's exaggerated reality because all of this couldn't happen to one ship and crew... What about every other series? Every ship and crew that has lead a series has experienced way too much crazy for one ship and crew.
This!
I think the show is literal canon, and just happens to be from our perspective a comedy series. It’s not sillier than more “serious” efforts from the franchise (Move Along Home, most of TOS and TAS). There doesn’t need to be some special rule for it mad because it’s a comedy cartoon. This is what the adventures of these characters are like. The other shows are what the adventures of those characters are like. That’s it.