The WiC rankings: Every single Star Trek show ranked worst to best

5. Star Trek: Lower Decks, 2020 – Ongoing

Star Trek is made by people who love it. The people in charge are generally good stewards of the franchise. That’s why I personally don’t worry too much when they announce a crazy idea like a musical episode; they know what they’re doing. Even so, an animated comedy set in the Star Trek universe helmed by former Rick & Morty writer/producer Mike McMahan made me a little nervous. Rick & Morty-style humor doesn’t belong in Star Trek full stop, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the show would be a disaster.

With 20/20 hindsight, I can’t believe I worried. Rick & Morty-style humor is too cynical for Star Trek’s utopian outlook of the future. But the behind-the-scenes love for Star Trek is a bulwark against crass cynicism infecting it. If you strip the cynicism and irreverence from Rick & Morty, what’s left is approximately the tone of Lower Decks: clever, raunchy and creative, but not mean-spirited.

The voice cast is perfect. I believe with all my heart that Ensigns Mariner, Boimler, and Tendi were written for Tawny Newsome, Jack Quaid and Noël Wells. The animation merely gives them visual form while the actors do all the heavy lifting in terms of creating the characters. When Newsome and Quaid played the characters in live action in a Strange New Worlds crossover episode, it was near seamless, because Newsome and Quaid are Mariner and Boimler. Quaid even nailed Boimler’s signature frantic dash through the ship’s corridors.

I think of Lower Decks as the opposite of Prodigy. Lower Decks references the wider Star Trek universe so heavily that it could be incomprehensible to a newcomer (I love that there are enough Trekkies out there to sustain a show that appeals to us so exclusively.) But as long as Lower Decks exists, so must a show that welcomes newcomers, or else we’re committing the worst sin in fandom: gatekeeping.