As a long time Wars > Trek guy who liked both, Lower Decks makes me think I might have had it the wrong way around. Wars can be just as silly, yet it takes itself way too seriously to allow something as fun as Lower Decks.
I avoided "Star Trek" my whole life because it seemed like a silly, cheap sci-fi show that it's fans took way too seriously. And it wasn't until I came across @carlinspace.bsky.social's tweet-a-thon of "Lower Decks" that I decided to give it a shot, and now I'm on season five of DS9.
It's also one of the horniest franchises in existence. The way they balance the horniness with the warmth, camaraderie, acceptance, and family themes is pretty impressive.
"Regardless of all evidence to the contrary, this thing I like is 100% very serious" is a mindset for teens who want to be taken very seriously, and seen as mature, themselves.
The ability to acknowledge the silly things one likes are, in fact, silly, is a definite sign of maturity.
Star Trek "Fandom" Twitter had definitely hit peak miserableness and insufferability towards the end of my time there. Good to know it's apparently not getting any better.
The lower deckers are really just Star Trek fans who live in the Star Trek universe, so it makes sense they’d wrestle with the stupidity the way we do. “Stop touching masks!”
Optimistic future for space-faring humanity, techno-babble, ethical dilemmas, and humans turning into large salamanders due to traveling at infinite speed. It's all part of the weird and wild multiverse of Trek we all love.
I watch TOS reruns on this cable channel called H&I, and I can appreciate how iconic and groundbreaking it was while laughing at the sheer magnitude of ‘60s cheese on display. It’s just so ridiculous at times!
The advantage of working in a franchise is that you can experiment with almost any genre you want with the setting already established for you. Unfortunately most of nuTrek passed on that opportunity but LD decided to be a screwball workplace comedy and it worked
(Disney Star Wars has the dynamic with Andor standing way out vs the rest of the TV shows; partly because Gilroy is just a more talented showrunner, but partly because they committed to being a political/espionage thriller instead of basically a televised EU novel)
I swear having now seen a good portion of the original, original series most of the episodes must have just come from digging through Desilu Studio's tickle trunk and writing a show around whatever costumes they found.
Comments
TNG Season 8 on Twitter was really fun that way. The Millenium Vulcan on Instagram is kind of spiritual successor..but in a hilariously NSFW way.
The ability to acknowledge the silly things one likes are, in fact, silly, is a definite sign of maturity.
There's a reason why the Enterprise had two episodes a season where they got transported to the Old West