Watched the first two episodes of 'Lower Decks'.
You're supposed to 'rock out' with the death metal loving 'black female lead', while laughing at the danger-hair beta male. The subtext is so obviously woke that I fail to see why some of you tried to give this a pass. Perhaps it will get better later on, but you'll have to suffer through all the 'I got this' college/social media female humor throughout.
The Joss Whedon quippy writing, the uber-competent females, the obnoxious black female captain, the obnoxious black female lead, and the less than impressive male side characters.
This show is also part of the hostile take over of the Star Trek franchise by left-liberal feminist writers.
It's Rick and Morty on the Enterprise. Same dumb shit.
Rick and Morty was actually entertaining though
Was it? Was it really?
the first two seasons and E1 of season 3, yes.
Rick and Morty was much like Firefly, Call of Duty 4, and the Assassin's Creed 1. it pioneered its own genre that inspired a lot of horrible knockoff copycats which eventually made the genre go stale. Rick and Morty itself sharply went stale in season 3 when they brought on new writers and it hasn't recovered.
For a time, yes. Then, as always, reddit ruined it.
you shouldn't
The only correct answer.
With a chainsaw.
It's like mixing fruit loops with meat patty to feed your Dobermann.
Why should you approach Lower Decks is my question.
MORTY MORTY MORTY! I'MMMMMMM PICKLE KIRK MORTY!
By saying screw that and playing Traveller with your friends. Space marginalia is much more fun if you're doing it.
Hadn't even heard of this garbage
Name alone makes me think it’s a Star Trek erotic fanfic
That happens.
The name & concept is based off a great episode of TNG called "Lower Decks" that focused on lower ranked crew members. It had great things like Picard having a briefing with the senior staff that normally we always get to see but this time you stayed with the crew on the bridge wondering what was going on.
The concept for this show isn't bad but it shouldn't be treated as canon.
It was amusing as a stand-alone parody, until I found out it's being treated as canon, and the buffoonery persisted into the live action shows.
TBF the Kurtzman Trek live action shows are already full of buffoonery. SNW had musical & puppet episodes.
Yeah this show was ignorable until it somehow accidentally mentioned that Discovery or SNW wasn't canon, which was a happy accident but still implied that this show was being taken seriously as canon.
Step 1: don't watch it
Star Trek ended with the Enterprise finale and it's never coming back.
Which we thought at the time was a horrible way to end (although those closing shots of the different Enterprises were good) but "The Old Ass Riker and Troi Show (with appearances by the cast of Enterprise)" seems like All Good Things compared to the pure shitshow that followed for the last decade.
It was definitely a bad finale, but it was still Star Trek and it did feel like a send off. We couldn't even imagine they'd be depraved enough to give us Picard at the time.
The people who suggested the show are converged.
Years ago I mentioned that this would happen. It is inevitable.
The reason is because people are starved for social community, and community has been made bereft on purpose by the powers that be.
The zeitgeist promotes degenerate communities, but those communities purposely degrade your mental health, spiritual well-being, and emotional equilibrium.
What ends up happening is that people craving community have to seek it OUTSIDE of their physical residence, and that means attempting to find like-minded people through hobbies and activities you do enjoy, online.
Conceptually, there is nothing wrong with this.
The problem, however, is that almost everything most men enjoy has been co-opted and corrupted by the same zeitgeist fracturing the societal trends that allow for positive male bonding and productive communal growth.
What ends up happening is that as you seek new things to attach to, you find out that most new things are corrupted. This eventually leads to consuming and/or attaching oneself to a lesser evil, since almost all mainstream forms of entertainment or social bonding are out-and-out Liberal Progressive propaganda.
But as each community gets infiltrated and co-opted, it means fewer forms of community building and social bonding around entertainment that isn't converged (particularly for Western culture). Alternatively, you have to start consuming the lesser evil.
People who have settled for consuming Star Trek Lower Decks have settled on what they perceive to be a lesser evil.
There's a staggering number of people out there who haven't grown past the assumption that they must consume some sort of modern content. These people have probably never pirated so much as a 80's Saturday morning cartoon in their lives.
As the content across the board has grown poor-quality, ideology-driven, didactic, a very full, colorful, and blooming garden of rank-smelling trash, these folks have had their expectations lowered and their critical faculties dulled. They've had to either acquiesce to watching agenda-laden drivel with an open (blank, dulled) mind, or are on an ongoing hunt for the least worst content.
I think this is why just about all modern content has that same irreverent tone: If anything was taken at all seriously, it might encourage brains to start engaging, and inviting a critical eye toward the content, and they can't have that. As long as the clown nose is in play, the trash content can always use "Why you taking things so seriously?" as a rejoinder that shields the slop from criticism.
This is so very true for an incomprehensible amount of people out there.
Every time I attempt to bring up the incongruity and nonsensical framing of various events in modern media, people will literally respond with "it's just fiction", and yes, dismiss anyone taking the plotholes and irreverence seriously enough to point them out as detractors.
Thankfully, there have been some people who will chime in to point out the dissonance of the normie-tier reasoning because they'll rightly ask, "If it's fiction, then why not have teleporting fire-breathing zombie dinosaurs attack everyone?' at that point the conversation goes off the rails, but yes, way too many people have been dulled into accepting corpo-slop as the standard and turning their brains off so they don't have to think critically.
It's essentially Idiocracy in real life.
There's your problem.
The first two episodes are the worst episodes of the entire series.
The series really picks up with episodes 3 and 4, to the point I watched all 30 episodes of the first three seasons--all that existed at the time--before I had to cancel Paramount Plus for unrelated reasons.
However, I hear the series' quality fell off a cliff in season 4, including making two DS9 characters gay for each other, despite no evidence of this prior.
So it seems that, by coincidence, I got out at the right time.
I haven't watched even 30 episodes, but I will say that this was the only Nu-Trek I've seen that seemed like somebody on the writing staff actually gave any shits at all about what came before.
That person was also clearly outnumbered.
You said it better than I could. Someone on that writing team at least cared a little.
Now imagine they put that person on an actual project instead of a self-parody that signaled that Paramount didn't view the franchise with any sort of respect.
Would you say, in hindsight, that this was time well-spent?
A fair question.
I would say yes, because my goal was to give the series a fair shot, and I saw there was certainly potential here as a self-parody.
Don't get me wrong, it's nowhere near the greatness of TNG or DS9. It's not even as good as Enterprise. But aside from those first two episodes, what I saw, I enjoyed.
And then reportedly it all came crashing down. That crossover with Strange New Worlds was SUCH a weird idea--though now Jack Quaid has something in common with Matthew Lillard, in that he has played the same character in both live action and cartoon form.
Lillard became the official voice of Scooby-Doo's Shaggy after Casey Kasem couldn't perform full-time anymore, and Lillard was perfect for the role.
Thank you. You never hear this perspective, because 99% of what you can find out easily and quickly is focused on the beginning shit, and still most of those that can get past that find it irrevocably tainted by those episodes.
Where are you at, with Trek--so I can get a feel for your tastes--the different series. Where I am is finally watching TOS fully for the first time, just into the second season, but it's already my favorite. I grew up with and had great affinity for TNG, though as an adult I find it very hit-or-miss, and the miss is surprisingly cringe. Liked the (even-numbered) movies well enough. Watched some DS9, some Voyager, first season of each I'd say, and thought it was okay, but not enough to keep going, mostly because of changing television-viewing habits rather than quality concerns. Hate the reboot movies, hate pretty much all ST content after First Contact, 1996.
I've seen just about all of TNG, about half of TOS, and most of Voyager.
I even enjoyed much of Enterprise, but there's some bias there as I'm a Scott Bakula fan thanks to another show I adore, Quantum Leap. "In a Mirror, Darkly" may be the greatest Mirror Universe episodes of all, though.
DS9 is a big hole in my viewing experience, but I'm going through it now, and am early in season 2.
That isn't saying much, because it ended up with feminist lunacy.
With a 180 degree turn at warp 9
Some episodes were actually pretty funny and these were usually the ones that acknowledged that Mariner is a complete piece of shit who has no purpose being in starfleet as she's a dumb character who frequently self sabotages for no good reason yet the narrative goes out of its way to help her (including manifesting a federation starship for her to steal in one of the finales despite that faction explicitly not stealing federation vessels). Highlights include Mariner being given the only fair holosimulation assessment and failing because she legitimately sucks (the funniest part is this was in season 1 so perhaps the writers were aware of how much of a mary sue she is) or being reduced to a literal knife magnet because she literally contributed nothing otherwise.
There seems to be a lot of confusion on what the writers were planning to do with Mariner and if you haven't inferred from the first paragraph of how inconsistent she is in all aspects of her character other than annoying; the fact that she ends up trying to be rick from rick and morty during episode 1 only for stuff like that to never ever happen again should demonstrate how no one seems to know what she was about. They don't even really do a job of explaining why she is constantly self-sabotaging herself. The best answer given was that she was sad because a minor character in DS9 died on spy mission so this made her anxious about actually doing a good job in the federation because she would be promoted beyond her competence and killed but this is hypocritical because she is basically letting everyone else get promoted and die in her place and its implied she is competent enough to reach high ranks without issue.
It is important to note that season 1 went quite heavy on the woke which mostly went away in later seasons especially as the writers seemed to notice that mariner is a shitty character that is easily the worst character on the show. They still had huge fuck ups (like trying to state that multiverse must be cool because we get to explore the sexuality of existing IP characters... whoops) and the show absolutely cannot do drama or high stakes correctly and often makes huge shortcuts or dramatic failures out of plot necessity rather than comedy (i.e Mariner steals a federation ship that the rebel faction which wasn't stealing federation ships shouldn't even have).
One thing I do have to disagree with OP on is that the show doesn't really do a good job hyping up female leads. There are definitely more episodes where the female leads are only ones doing anything but there are plenty of episodes where the male leads especially Ransom and head of security are all shown to be very competent and at times basically infallible at the job with Ransom's only failings typically consisting of having to baby Mariner or make excuses so she doesn't immediately get fired like she deserves. They also don't feminize the male Klingons IIRC and treat the male Klingon Captain as generally capable.
TL:DR If you were hoping this long ass text would help you figure out if you want to watch lower decks or not... I can't really help with that. I watched the show with my brother as a family activity that he wanted to do and the show when it wasn't doing stereotypical woke shit was actually being funny (it does fail massively at drama). I just wrote this mostly to point out that Mariner is the worst freaking character in existence in the franchise potentially even toppling Wesley Crusher because at least the writers had an idea what they were doing with Wesley Crusher. If you really need to know if you should watch maybe just search funniest clips or read the episode synopsis and pick the episode that don't sound like shit. If those don't work then don't watch. You're not missing much especially since Mariner is a train wreck.
Not even 30 seconds into the first episode, I knew I was going to bail on this series. I can not stand Mariner and her random bullshit.
Extremely annoying tryhard character in the "I'm so cool" category.
By not watching it?
People still give a shit about Star Trek?
I liked the woman captain a lot. Watched most of it back in the day. Then it died for me and that's perfectly fine
Same with X-men after the first few movies. I tried watching the most recent one and... meh.
We will always give a shit about Star Trek. For us Trekkies it was a huge part of our childhood and most of the classic Trek series' episodes still hold up well today.
It was also an important part of the culture. We shouldn't let them just take it.
It was a huge part of mine as well. Borg, that alien race (732?) Khan, Picard, I personally really liked the female captain, Data, the guy who is blind....
... but its been dead for a while. Let it go.
Same with star wars. Its dead.
She's so annoying.
Has 'Current Thing Black Female Role' written all over it.
I don't know if you mean it this way but the "I/You/We got this" is such a Zillennial female phrase, although I haven't seen it in a humorous context. It's the kind of crap you see on LinkedIn and hear from HR retards whose confidence comes from the fact they know they'll land a DEI position.
That's how I meant it.
If a show or movie has "I got this" as dialogue, it can invariably be traced back to an obnoxious female writer.
Is this where they hire a crew of space young adults and you watch them party and hook up with each other and all the drama they creates