Star Trek: Lower Decks – Pilot episode gets off to rough start

Star Trek: Lower Decks brings high-quality animation with poor quality writing in a bizarre series that fails to be unique, or remotely close to Star Trek.

Star Trek: Lower Decks debuted and got the reaction most thought it would; a tepid one. Let’s start things off right, this is subjective. This is not a review that will necessarily tell you how you should feel about the show, only how this specific review felt about the show. It’s ok if you liked it. It’s ok if you didn’t.

What can’t be argued is that the show is off to a bad start. As Rolling Stone’s writer Alan Sepinwall wrote about the show’s inability to work as a comedy, “…maybe it’s that the fundamental sincerity of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek vision can feel at odds with snarkier humor.” Which perfectly incapsulates the series’ crippling issues.

That is however just one portion of a five-prong system of how things should be reviewed. Comedy, like all entertainment, is subjective and anything subjective should not be given a sole point for evaluating a property. That’s a guaranteed way to show a bias that you don’t intend to be there. A show is more than just whether you like it or not.

So we’re going to go through five categories and judge them all independently of each other. First is the acting, or in this case, the voice acting. Did they get the timing right, were accents used well, were you able to tell who was who just from listening and all that jazz. Then there’s the writing. How was the dialogue? Did the situations make sense for the show? The design is obviously about the feel of the show and how it creates its own identity. In a live-action setting, we’d talk about the effects, be it computerized, stunt coordination, that stuff. Yet here, we’ll look at animation in its stead. Lastly, we’ll talk about whether the show landed with this specific reviewer. This is largely a personal opinion category.

All five categories are out of five and at the end, each category will be counted up and whatever the score is out of 25 will determine its overall grade.

So with that said, let’s see how the show did grade-wise.