Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 3 is heading to home media in two months, and like the show’s previous releases, you’ll be able to get the animated series’ latest episodes on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital for your personal archives — but this time, there’s a twist.
 
Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first: all ten episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks’ third season will be available on DVD April 25, and the release will include several audio commentary tracks with both the series’ cast, production team, and guest stars — including Jonathan Frakes (Riker), Nana Visitor (Kira), and Armin Shimerman (Quark) on the episodes in which their characters appear.

• Audio Commentary by Jonathan Frakes, Tawny Newsome and Mike McMahan (Ep. 301)
• Audio Commentary by Nana Visitor, Armin Shimerman, Tawny Newsome, Noël Wells, Jack Quaid, Eugene Cordero and Mike McMahan (Ep. 306)
• Audio Commentary by Barry Kelly, Kether Donohue and Mike McMahan (Ep. 307)
• Audio Commentary by Tawny Newsome, Noël Wells, Jack Quaid, Jerry O’ Connell and Mike McMahan (Ep. 308)
• Audio Commentary by Jack Quaid, Dawnn Lewis and Fred Tatasciore (Ep. 310)
• Docking at Deep Space 9 (Ep. 306)
• Lower Decktionary Season 3

Unfortunately, things won’t be as simple when it comes to the Blu-ray release of Season 3 this time around. Possibly due to low sales numbers on the previous releases — remember, Season 2 dropped the Steelbook treatment given to the show’s inaugural year — this season’s Blu-ray release will be a manufactured-on-demand (MOD) production.

These are not ‘cheap’ Blu-ray discs, like burning CDs or DVDs at home in the mid-2000s; MOD Blu-ray releases are simply smaller production runs manufactured based upon specific sales numbers.

As physical media website The Digital Bits puts it:

“This isn’t actually that uncommon these days. For example, Paramount released “Jack Ryan” Seasons 1 & 2 Blu-ray first, then released them on manufactured on demand 4K Ultra HD later. They also released “Station Eleven” and “Reacher” on Blu-ray and DVD, as well as MOD 4K the same day.

 

These are regular manufactured discs (not BD-ROMs), just produced in smaller batch runs as demand requires.”

While you can preorder Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 3 on Blu-ray or on DVD today ahead of its April release.

Star Trek: Lower Decks will return for Season 4 later in 2023.