Review

There is so much to love in this wonderfully fitting season finale. We finally get to see the Titan after it was first teased way back in Star Trek X: Nemesis and a couple times on this show as well. Lower Decks is finally committing to its cameos! But we actually get much more than a cameo here. Riker and Troi get more than a mere bit part like we had with Q in Veritas or the DS9 appearance in Cupid's Errant Arrow. Plus it looks like we might end up seeing a lot of the Titan in the next season now that Boimler has transferred there. Could Lower Decks finally subvert the trope of the cool guest starship not sticking around for longer than a couple episodes the way Battlestar Galactica did with the Pegasus? Let's hope!

Speaking of subverting tropes, much of this story's narrative is taking deliberate aim at Star Trek's tendency to boldly go where no one has gone before rather than flesh out what's already there. Only on rare occasions like DS9, Enterprise season 4, parts of the Picard show, or the occasional episode of another series does Star Trek ever revisit a previous alien planet or alien species to deepen them further and build out the lore of the Star Trek universe in a way that plays nicely in the sandbox. The best fiction series build bigger and bigger sandcastles in the sandbox rather than continually starting new sandcastles off to the side or worse knocking over an old sandcastle to build another like Discovery did with its problematic relationship to canon; particularly visual canon.

Not so here. Lower Decks is showing us that its writers are capable of playing in that sandbox quite skillfully, building up and deepening previous episodes like TOS: Return of the Archons in the teaser, TNG: Samaritan Snare with the Pakleds returning as the antagonist of the week, and TNG: The Quality of Life by featuring an exocomp that has advanced even further beyond the sentience Data had proven they had attained in that episode. The Pakleds are in character trying to steal more technology and Peanut Hamper refuses to go on a life-threatening mission just as her predecessors did in their debut episode. Indeed, the exocomps developing enough to be recognized as people who can serve in Starfleet as equals to the rest of the crew delivers quite profoundly on Data's aspirations for them. You've got to wonder how they fared during the synth ban in the Picard show though. If they were all cowardly assholes like Peanut Hamper turned out to be, perhaps not so well!

This episode does more than just lazily reuse previous planets or aliens though, it also serves as a terrific commentary on the importance of reusing and deepening them. The inhabitants of Beta III reverted to worshiping Landru and the Pakleds became much more dangerous because Starfleet never bothered to check in on them often enough. Freeman even discusses this openly throughout the episode, almost as if she's criticizing Star Trek itself. When Freeman talks about the importance of checking up on these places or people more often, it's as though she's asking the writers of Star Trek to resist the temptation to do more "boldly going" and instead do some even bolder deepening of what's already there in the vast Star Trek universe, just waiting to be fleshed out better.

What a treat. We get a surprisingly impressive set of space battles and action scenes for the animated medium plus powerful, insightful, and effective meta commentary about Star Trek itself all wrapped in a neat little bow. One of Star Trek's finest (half) hours.