After last week’s barnstorming episode of Lower Decks, expectations for its final episode weren’t just through the roof: they’d gone past the warp threshold and turned into freaky little horny amphibians. If Lower Decks could match those expectations, Star Trek would have one of its greatest ever series finales on its hands, but at the same time, it could never hope to. So instead it did as it always does: its own thing.
While last week put the focus on William Boimler and his motley crew of multiversal heroes, “The New Next Generation” firmly and rightfully passes the baton back to our Boimler, as well as Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford. And honestly, for a final episode, it’s actually surprisingly straightforward in everything it wants to deal with. Sure, the stakes are extremely high—all of reality as they know it is under threat. And even with an extra layering of Klingon complications that serve little reason other than to bring back Ma’ah and Malor from earlier in the season (paying off nicely the ramifications of what remains Lower Decks‘ finest half-hour, season two’s phenonmenal “wej Duj”) and almost threaten to make Lower Decks‘ final episode a little too overly busy, Lower Decks goes out with little in the way of bumps along the journey.
Boimler and Mariner are trusted by Captain Freeman when they go to her with the message William piggybacked onto the soliton beam. Starfleet offers a very simple solution to close the reality-warping breach; it’s only really rendered more challenging by the Cerritos‘ age as a ship. The ship gets there, deals with the Klingons along the way, and seals it. Everyone gets a hero moment, the day is saved, and life goes on.
There are probably versions of this finale that would’ve bigger and wilder, to match the gleefully nerdy cameo-laden highs of the set-up last week. “The New Next Generation” alludes to as much with the reality-warping waves emitted by the breach transforming the Cerritos‘ appearance across a multitude of iconic Star Trek ship classes, including the Sovereign-Class, the heroic cinematic version of the Enterprise (that also groks nicely with the Enterprise-E still likely being the version of the ship in operation at the time of Lower Decks). There are so many moments and allowances provided by these threats where someone huge could’ve come to help save the day—Captain Freeman almost jokingly begs for Starfleet to send a much more heroic ship like the Enterprise on the mission instead of them.
But no amount of reality-changing energy can stop the Cerritos ending this journey as the Cerritos we know and love, a humble, rickety California-Class held together by duranium and the sheer love of its crew. No amount can bring in a Picard, or a Janeway, or a whoever else Lower Decks could check off after last week’s cameo-a-go-go. It’s up to these characters, the heroes we have followed for five seasons, to rise up and deal with this, regardless of what they think their position or reputation in Starfleet is, because at the end of the day, they are also Starfleet officers. Regardless of how dire the threat, they’re going to face it head on and overcome it. And that’s exactly what happens. At this point in the show, we’ve watched all these characters grow and adapt across every kind of mission and strange new world Starfleet could throw at them. Some of them are boring, some of them are awe-inspiring, some of them are incredibly dangerous, and how they’ve reacted to all those things has fluctuated. But it’s prepared them to face the literal end of reality like it’s any other mission because, to our heroes, this is just any other mission.
They don’t know it’s a series finale in the text of Lower Decks. We do, the creative team does, but in the Trek universe, life has to go on, especially as you’ve just averted the chance of life not being able to go on for anyone ever again. After successfully managing to contain the breach as a stable rift that gives Starfleet a whole new frontier to explore, Lower Decks‘ epilogue is a reminder that these stories go on and on beyond our vision of them. Things change in a job like being on a Starfleet vessel: people change assignments and get promoted, people come and go, dynamics shift. That’s the case here, as Captain Freeman is offered the chance to spearhead Starfleet’s research into the rift, leaving the Cerritos in the hands of now-Captain Ransom. Boimler and Mariner get to act as his joint advising first officers, akin to Tendi and T’Lyn’s sharing of the science division’s position on the bridge. Rutherford gets the least change in terms of his position—his whole arc this episode is about remembering his love for engineering a ship as endearingly challenging as the Cerritos—but he at least learns to rely on his human instincts rather than his implant, having it removed entirely. There is no grand ending here, life simply goes on.
It might be a bit anticlimactic, and it could arguably never match the expectation the show put on itself last week. But it shouldn’t be surprising that this is how Lower Decks comes to an end: the focus is on itself, on its characters, and on their love for what they do. Lower Decks has been a show about loving Star Trek as an entertainment franchise at times, but it has always been a show about people who love being in Star Trek. The people who scrub holodecks so they can chart new celestial phenomenon, the people who sort through piles of isolinear chips one day so they can be in phaser fights the next. Its farewell not really being a farewell and just simply the conclusion of one chapter in our heroes’ lives isn’t just a hopeful promise that we’ll see some version of them again in the future, but that being in Star Trek is a perpetual work in progress.
Saving reality is just another day on the job when it comes to the best job in the universe, and Lower Decks‘ stars will have many more days on the job to come, even if we don’t get to see them as regularly. And that is the best ending Lower Decks can give itself, and arguably a better love letter to Star Trek than any number of familiar faces could’ve been.
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