2. Season 2
This is when Lower Decks started to hit its stride. Season 2 still has a few of the weird parts of Season 1 that didn’t feel overly Star Trek-y, but it also starts really diving into character-driven stories. The nuances of Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford, and even the Upper Deckers are fleshed out, so that they respond to their sci-fi shenanigans as characters, rather than archetypes.
This level of clarity and confidence in this season also makes almost every episode fun in some way. In particular, Season 2 gets a lot of kudos for having one of the best episodes of Lower Decks (and maybe Star Trek as a whole?): “Wej Duj.”
Cutting between our Lower Deckers on the Cerritos and their equivalents on Klingon and Vulcan vessels, “Wej Duj” works because of how firmly established the characters and format of this show are. You really can’t show character parallels if the main characters are not clearly understood in the first place. When they are understood, however, you get an amazing episode like “Wej Duj.”
Of course, my liking “Wej Duj” (which means “Three Ships” in Klingon) is not the only reason why Season 2 of Lower Decks is good. Its choice to make the Pakleds the major threat of the season is really smart. It’s appropriate for the “tier” of issues that this show deals with. Pakleds are largely nuisances, so making them major threats is the kind of inversion that works on Lower Decks.
Overall, Season 2 is a great season of Lower Decks. It is funny while maintaining the feel of Star Trek. Its only real drawback is that it still has some of the out-of-place weirdness from Season 1. Some of this—like the bleeping of curse words—never goes away, but other parts even out enough that it isn’t a huge issue as the show goes on.
(Oh! I almost forgot: This season also has “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie,” which is really cool in showing the idea of an offshoot culture of humans who use advanced technology to render fantasy ideas real. The story itself is a little silly, but that societal concept is cool and worth further exploration.)