Spoilers Lower Decks Season 05x10 "The New Next Generation"

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

That was a very enjoyable finale and overall a very good season. But it's a shame it's over! I am gonna miss these characters.

They obviously put the seeds for two shows, one centered on Starbase 80 and one on the Cerritos with the cast now as "upper decks" characters, to to speak.

Not sure how much I enjoy the multi-verse exploration, but I guess from the kind of stories that Star Trek likes to tell, multi-verse exploration and space exploration both work. And they have plenty of opportunity to define the exact rules for their new multi-verse travels.

 

[MarkB]

Yeah, I'm seriously going to miss this show. Would love to see a Starbase 80 series.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Not sure how much I enjoy the multi-verse exploration, but I guess from the kind of stories that Star Trek likes to tell, multi-verse exploration and space exploration both work. And they have plenty of opportunity to define the exact rules for their new multi-verse travels.

I was unimpressed with the multiverse stuff, and glad the Cerritos wasn't exploring that.

Any rules for it are likely to feel kind of contrived, too, and multiverse stuff in general is a bit played out - as I thought the previous episode actually did quite a good job of pointing out. So hopefully that gets left in the same bin as a lot of other "tried it, didn't really work" concepts. It's been used well before, but in really weird and tense situations, not just casual jolly episodic exploring. I don't look forward to it being devalued like transwarp kind of was (thankfully since largely binned).

Also personally the Starbase 80 stuff exceed some kind of silly-o-meter that for whatever reason Lower Decks as a whole does not. I think their best (and funniest) episodes are the ones which could almost have been mistaken for a TNG episode, rather than the totally silly ones.

I'd love to see a show based on the Cerritos crew, though perhaps with more shakeups - this season got close to kind of Flanderizing Ransom re: exercise and sneakiness, and T'ana's whole "I am a cat who is mean" thing is pretty much played out (soz T'ana!), but they seemed to be deliberately softening that recently.

The whole thing with Rutherford's implant and him being so much happier without it somehow felt kind of un-Star-Trek to me, there's something slightly off about it, it's not quite anti-disability, or anti-vax but it's just felt... off. I wasn't sure what they were trying to say there either.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I think the previous episode didn't just point out the problems of the multiverse concept, but it also showed its advantages. If you think Star Trek primarily as a setting with developing characters and story arcs, the multiverse kinda makes all that pointless, because anything happens, good people can be evil, people die and return at random, failures and wins may be negated at a moment's notice. (That is really what Marvel is suffering from to some extent, I think.)

But - if you use Star Trek as a vehicle to discuss ethical and moral dilemmas, as "morality tales", then multiverses can work quite well. In TOS, they found a few alternate Earth or Earth-with-a-twist, all of Star Trek has its "planets of hats" and so on - and this is the kind of story you can do with multiverses, and it might - by today's standards at least - easier to suspend your disbelief than finding an Earth-like planet where you can find the US constitution somewhere in the debris of a post-apocalyptic society or where humans style themselves after 1930s style Gangsters, or stories where someone from the crew is involved in time travel and must bring the timeline back on track.

 

[Mallus]

I really enjoyed the finale, but the previous episode delivered the best and clearest statement of Star Trek’s way of doing science fiction in a few lines of dialogue.

 

[Rabulias]

I kinda agree about the "exploring the multiverse stuff," but it would provide a great way for a new show to bring in a wide array of Star Trek actors and actresses to do voice work (as S5E9 showed us -- who had Lily Sloane and Elim Garak and Harry Kim meeting up on their bingo card? )

 

[Dire Bare]

I was unimpressed with the multiverse stuff, and glad the Cerritos wasn't exploring that.

You and Boimler (transporter clone Boimler) are in agreement!

His comments in the penultimate episode about the multiverse were hilarious!

 

[Kaodi]

I kind of think a permanent multiversal portal is, like, a bit too much in the way time travel in Enterprise was too much . Maybe this was their way of "fixing" possibilities left open by Discovery and the spire drive but... I dunno. I did not think the series finale was as good as the season finale where they took all of the plating off the ship.

 

[Kaodi]

*Though I did really enjoy ersatz kamehameha.

 

[Ryujin]

I kinda agree about the "exploring the multiverse stuff," but it would provide a great way for a new show to bring in a wide array of Star Trek actors and actresses to do voice work (as S5E9 showed us -- who had Lily Sloane and Elim Garak and Harry Kim meeting up on their bingo card? )

And a universe in which T'Pol and Tucker got to have a happy life together. Who'da thought?