Star Trek: Lower Decks closes out its fourth season with a finale that sticks the landing and provides a solid 30 minutes of joyful Star Trek adventure. Building from last week’s significant character work,“Old Friends, New Planets” is all payoff from the season’s — and some of the series’ — overall arcs. These two episodes are a great Star Trek two-parter, and will be remembered as two of Lower Decks’ finest episodes.
 
Nick Locarno (Robert Duncan McNeill), the disgraced Starfleet cadet who was expelled for causing the death of a fellow cadet is revealed as the season’s big bad. With a plan to create an independent fleet of ships crewed by “anyone who feels like an afterthought,” Locarno’s plans are quickly thwarted by Lieutenant Mariner (Tawny Newsome) who then requires rescue by the Cerritos before Locarno can find another way to make his plan a reality.
 

Locarno is the perfect choice for a Lower Decks villain, and his arc from “The First Duty” through today is a fitting one. He’s the Lower Decker who has broken bad. In “The First Duty,” Locarno is a self-obsessed jerk who uses notions of duty, honor, and a higher calling to pressure his fellow members of Nova Squadron into covering up their activities and saving his career. In Lower Decks, Locarno is a self-obsessed jerk who is using notions of a higher calling to feed his own ego. It’s the right arc for Locarno, not least because the “Robert Duncan McNeil character who has made mistakes and evolves into a better person” is a space already occupied by one Tom Paris.

Locarno’s arc also contrasts well with Mariner, because the dark side of many of her personality traits could easily have set her on a Locarno-like path. Combined with last week’s revelations in “The Inner Fight,” it makes for poignant viewing. It’s not that Locarno is Mariner’s Khan — even though the episode has a lot of fun with homages to The Wrath of Khan — it’s more that Locarno is what happens if Mariner makes just a few more bad choices.

Locarno is just such a good choice all around for a Lower Decks villain, and I am so happy that Mike McMahan chose to revisit him.

Honestly, this episode is excellent, but it’s totally worth it just for the opening teaser. Returning to Starfleet Academy in the mid-2360s to see Mariner interacting with her hero, Sito Jaxa (Shannon Fill returning!), as she, Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton returning!) and Josh Albert (who we meet for the first time!) discuss the idea of the Kolvood Starburst maneuver for the first time was so wonderful.

It was exactly the right way to bring back Sito, without stepping on the character’s eventual fate in TNG’s “Lower Decks” episode. And to finally get to meet Josh Albert, who is only talked about in “The First Duty” but never actually seen, was an extremely welcome addition to the Star Trek canon. The next time you watch “The First Duty,” you’ll now know that Mariner was just off screen the whole time.

The action set pieces in this episode are so well done, and on par with the best of live action Star Trek. Mariner hiding from the Nova Fleet in an asteroid field, Locarno chasing her through an ion storm, the Cerritos crashing an Orion battlecruiser into the shield protecting the Detrion System… it’s exciting, it’s visually gorgeous, and it revels in the joy of Star Trek’s specific action tropes in the most fun way.

I had a big grin on my face this whole episode, just enjoying the hell out of it and everything that had been set up not just in “The Inner Fight,” but the whole season.

McMahan appears to have intentionally included callbacks to most of the previous episodes this season — even the Mark Twain gag I didn’t like at the time, but chuckled at here — to make Season 4 feel like more of a serialized story than the previous seasons of Lower Decks. While the finale creates a through-line of serialization to the season’s previous episodes, that does not do anything to diminish those episodes as great standalones stories.

The Lower Decks team struck a great balance for the season.

But “Old Friends, New Planets” is not just a big episode for Mariner, it’s a big episode for Tendi (Noel Wells) as well, continuing to evolve the Mistress of the Winter Constellations story arc for her character as we return to Orion and her family (introduced in “Something Borrowed, Something Green”).

The season ends on a question mark for Tendi, who bargained away her Starfleet career to save Mariner, requiring her to pledge her service to her sister back home. I am fascinated to see where Tendi’s story goes next season – what a tease!

Lastly, even though he didn’t get a big share of the focus, this was also a big episode for Boimler (Jack Quaid). His pivotal scene is the obvious one — commanding the Cerritos while the senior staff works to break down the Trynar Shield. The Boimler of the first three seasons would not have been in a position to take command like that, nor politely and firmly dismiss a Starfleet admiral. Boimler has grown a lot, become more confident in himself, and actually began to earn some of the things he has always said that he wanted for himself.

TREK TROPE TRIBUTES

• This episode continues one of my favorite tropes, that Lower Decks has kept to pretty slavishly: if characters are in San Francisco, or anywhere around Starfleet Academy or Starfleet Command, the Golden Gate Bridge must be visible in every single shot.
• This episode uses a Trek Trope that was previously listed as a number one Trek Trope on the TrekRanks Top 5 Trek Tropes episode: when a higher-ranked officer orders our heroes to do nothing — and they disobey that order to rescue a friend — that usually gets the ranking officer to admit they were wrong for trying to stop them. (See Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek: Insurrection, or DS9’s “The Die is Cast” as examples.)

CANON CONNECTIONS

• The opening moments flashing back to Starfleet Academy is set in the weeks prior to the events of TNG Season 5’s “The First Duty,” where Wesley Crusher and Nova Squadron face a tribunal following the accidental death of cadet Joshua Albert.
• This episode marks the first in-canon appearance of Joshua Albert, who died off-screen prior to “The First Duty.”
• Cadet Mariner wears a single rank pip (indicating her status as a first-year cadet) in the flashback scene, putting her a year behind Wesley Crusher (who wears two pips). If Mariner entered the Academy at age 18, this would put her date of birth in 2350 — making her 31 during the events of Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 (set in 2381).
• Starfleet Academy of the 2368 was lovingly re-created in animation, using the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant and its Japanese Gardens — where all the 90s era Star Treks filmed their Starfleet Command scenes — for inspiration. There’s even a tiny Boothby on the grounds in the big establishing shot of the Academy campus.
• Mariner discusses learning about the Preservers (“The Paradise Syndrome”) and the Xindi (Enterprise season 3) in her Academy classes.
• Boimler references the Maquis as being a prior independent fleet operating in the Alpha Quadrant, which is made funnier by the knowledge that the not-quite-Locarno character Tom Paris spent a short amount of time working for the Maquis.

• Goodgey from “A Few Badgeys More” briefly appears while Captain Freeman is addressing the Cerritos crew.
• The ion storm in the Detrion System is level 7; Voyager’s “Once Upon a Time” established that level 8 or higher are the most dangerous kinds of ion storm.
• A number of the shots of Mariner battling Locarno in the ion storm (as well as the  accompanying musical score!) are direct homages to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. As is the shot of the Genesis Device exploding a new planet being created as our hero ship escapes from it at warp. These shots looked gorgeous in animation.
• Boimler’s adoration of Captain Riker is a recurring joke throughout the series (and in Strange New Worlds), so it appears to be no coincidence then that Boimler’s captain’s chair posture appears to mimic his favorite Starfleet officer.
• The Cerritos captain’s yacht appears to be the same design as the captain’s yacht from Star Trek: Insurrection.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• Jerry O’Connell voiced the “Previously on Star Trek: Lower Decks” at the episode’s opening, and even though it wasn’t the classic Majel Barrett Roddenberry introduction it was so welcome to get that voiceover (along with “And now, the conclusion”).
• Continuing the precedent set by “wej Duj,” we see that ships of other races also have a “towel guy,” this time aboard the Tamarian ship.

• Shannon Fill reprises her role as Sito Jaxa, the Bajoran she portrayed in TNG’s “The First Duty” and “Lower Decks.” I am so curious to know how they found her and convinced the actor to return, as her last acting credit is dated 1995.
• Wil Wheaton does a great job of emulating his 1990s era performance as Wesley Crusher, with a slightly exaggerated Lower Decks. This was a nice way to get Wil onto Lower Decks, something that McMahan has previously discussed.
• I really liked the quick, but hilarious way the show nodded to the “Tom Paris and Nick Locarno are two similar characters played by the same actor” thing, with the Boimler/Rutherford conversation during Locarno’s transmission.
• Detrion is a great name for a Star Trek star system. A similarly named system (the Detrian system) was the setting for TNG’s “Ship in a Bottle.”
• The three Bynars don’t get any more character development this episode than they did in their debut a couple of episodes ago, but the indestructable Trynar Shield is absolutely their handiwork.
• T’Lyn’s “I believe the only response in this situation is: Cerritos strong.” feels like a direct play on Spock’s “I believe if I were human my response would be: go to Hell” from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
• The Steamrunner-class ship that Mariner steals from Nova Fleet is the USS Passaro (NCC-52670), named for digital artist Fabio Passaro who made a number of contributions to the Star Trek franchise — including to the line of now-defunct Eaglemoss starship models. Passaro passed away in 2022 at the age of 52, and the ship’s registry number is his birthday (May 26, 1970).
• Mariner pilots the Passaro using the same manual joystick system used by Commander Ransom during the events of “First First Contact.”

• Since Admiral Vassery says that no Federation ships were kidnapped into joining Nova Fleet, I wonder if the USS Passaro is a decommissioned Starfleet ship in use by independent contractors — perhaps Locarno obtained it legally? We have very recent precedence for this from Picard Season 3, as Beverly Crusher’s SS Eleos was a former Starfleet vessel.
• Captain Freeman’s command code override is “06107.2.”
• The Orion names from recent episodes — D’Erica and B’Eth — are hilarious to me.
• We get two new additions to the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition in this episode. Rule 91: “Your boss is only worth what he pays you,” and Rule 289: “Shoot first, count profits later.”
• Migleemo’s down fluffing reminds me a lot of Dr. Phlox’s puffer-fish type instinctive defense from “Home.”
• Love, hate, or confused by the Mark Twain gag, “Illogical tactics can sometimes lead to logical solutions” is a great Vulcan line.
• There’s a lot of Paul F. Tompkins in this episode: he plays Migleemo of course, but also one of the Romulans and one of the Ferengi. He even shares a scene with himself when Locarno is communicating with the Nova Fleet.
• The Ferengi putting a paywall on deactivating the Genesis Device is a delicious and hilarious bit of worldbuilding.

“Old Friends, New Planets” is so great because it feels like an episode that would only have been possible at this point in the show; paying off four seasons of character development and delivering a giant episode of Lower Decks.

I am so invigorated for Season 5!

Star Trek: Lower Decks will return to Paramount+ for a fifth season in 2024.