The Best Star Tour Show Ever Got The Audience It Deserves

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 10 seconds ago

Star Trek fans have always enjoyed the franchise’s techno-powered socialist utopia, so it’s only fitting that the cancellation Lower Decks has exposed capitalism’s biggest lie: if you build it, they will come. I mean, we spend our lives being told that being successful is just a matter of showcasing your talent and doing amazing work. For this Star Trek fan, Lower Decks It was a nearly perfect show, but its cancellation reveals two bitter truths: being great doesn’t translate to being profitable, and modern Trekkers have no idea what they want.

Do Fans Want Star Trek: Lower Decks?

Paramount has been reluctant to discuss the numbers that prompted them to prematurely cancel Star Trek shows Find out a Lower Decksboth unexpectedly having to make their fifth seasons their final seasons. The main assumption about Lower Decks that is, even though it is much cheaper to produce than similar shows Brave New Worldsit wasn’t getting enough views or driving enough new subscribers to Of utmost importance+. And while Paramount’s poor handling of the NuTrek area is partly to blame, I can’t help but think that my fellow fans don’t know what they really want for this franchise.

Star Trek characters like Michael Burnham are fond of children’s tales like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderlandso I think it’s worth seeing Lower Decks as for another kiddie tale: Goldilocks and the Three Bears. While Find out Ended strong, initially disturbing new fans by focusing so much on old lore that it disrupted existing canon regarding everything from the Klingons to Spock’s comfy family tree. Simply put, early Find out stumbled because he was trying to focus too much on familiar characters and events rather than trying something new.

In comparison, Picard had the opposite problem. It is said that Patrick Stewart himself wants this show to avoid too many connections with her The Next Generationand that’s just one reason why the first two seasons were a hot mess. It was only after the failure of those earlier seasons that Paramount and Stewart gave the fans what they wanted, turning season 3 into a TNG a reunion. Before that killer final season, though, Picardbiggest failure was that he was still trying to do something completely new instead of focusing on what made his titular character so great in the first place.

The next main The Star Trek series was Lower Decksand managed to find the Goldilocks balance fans crave. Each season was filled with hilarious call-backs to beloved characters from Q to Harry Kim, and the show always had great Easter eggs for older fans to appreciate (I nearly spit out my drink when I saw the giant-sized skeleton of Spock Two, unclear Animated Series character). At the same time, the show introduced amazing new characters like Boimler and Mariner, proving that Lower Deckslike Goldilocks’ preferred bed, “right” in his ability to focus on something old and new at the same time.

So Much Potential

Another thing the show got “right” was finding a sweet spot between delivering silly comedy and creating killer canon. All episodes of Lower Decks delivered its share of light laughs, but the show was never afraid to change canon up in big ways (I especially loved the return of Nick Locarno). And the series finale ended with Starfleet having a fixed wormhole into the multiverse, which is pretty much an open invitation for future Trek writers to go completely wild with all that juicy narrative potential.

As a Star Trek fan who fell in love with the franchise during the original run of TNG, “potential” is the word I most associate with it Lower Decks. The show managed to reach all of its potential and then some, combining side-splitting comedy with exciting stories that stretched the boundaries of this franchise. Honestly, if Star Trek is about Infinite Variety in Infinite Combinations, Lower Decks deserves a permanent place in Stovokor for being the only NuTrek show (sorry, Brave New Worlds) fully embrace this Vulcan ideal.

Unfortunately, the premature cancellation of the show means that the fandom either doesn’t appreciate the best that NuTrek has to offer or, worse yet, has no idea what it really wants from this venerable franchise. It’s understandable that Star Wars gets heat for its failure to deliver what fans want, but the general assumption is that Disney execs (for whatever reason) are ignoring a proven, fan-favorite formula in favor of cramming their own brand of action-figure-optimized content down our throats.

However, Star Trek is now in a much worse situation where no one seems to know what they want from this franchise, and a world where fans have refused Lower Decks is one where the franchise is doomed to a slow death. With any luck, Paramount will bring back Mike McMahan’s seminal show in one form or another to get our favorite sci-fi universe back on track. Otherwise, the phrase “Star Trek Into Darkness” just won’t describe the franchise worst movie. It will also describe exactly how the Gene Roddenberry universe is dying at the hands of careless executives who can’t stop failing the fandom.