Star Trek: Two sides of the same coin – why “Lower Decks” is the perfect replacement for SNW!

• We probably have to wait a whole two years for “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” season 3.
• Paramount+ is currently sweetening our wait with “Star Trek: Lower Decks” Season 4.
• The animated series is, in a sense, a complementary piece to SNW, the other side of the same coin. Let’s execute!

Star Trek – All Series: Watch now❯

The second season of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” is now over and the future of “Star Trek” does not look good. After the nasty cliffhanger finale, we’ll have to wait a whole two years for “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” season 3. Luckily, a small but nice animated series comes to our rescue!

Paramount+ is now showing us new episodes of “Star Trek: Lower Decks” Season 4 every week. The series can be seen as a replacement for SNW and is exactly the right thing. The series relies on exactly the strengths that make “Strange New Worlds” so good. If you haven’t given the series a chance yet, you should do it now!

Star Trek: “Lower Decks” and “Strange New Worlds” are two sides of the same coin

The crossover episode has already shown how well “Star Trek: Lower Decks” and “Strange New Worlds” fit together. The humor, the lovable characters and the case-of-the-week structure. The colorful uniforms, the unique character designs and the diverse worlds!

Everything that was so praised about “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” when the live-action series started in 2022, “Star Trek: Lower Decks” had already been implementing wonderfully for some time at that point. The animated series started in 2020.

While “Strange New Worlds” was received almost universally positively, many Trekkies liked the animation style, the focus on humor and the fact that “Lower Decks” is part of the “Star Trek” universe, but also uninhibitedly makes fun of it , a bit strange.

However, those who were able to get involved with the animated series quickly noticed how the series took a familiar structure, the case-of-the-week structure, and familiar Star Trek ingredients and gave them a new coat of paint. Great attention to detail made the series a wonderful place for Easter eggs and nods to the era of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Starship Voyager.

Like no other modern “Star Trek” series, “Lower Decks” throws around cameos and brings back fan favorites that otherwise no longer find a place in live action. It’s a true feast for Trekkies – and a kind of animated mirror of Strange New Worlds.

“Strange New Worlds” doesn’t take quite as much aim at itself as “Lower Decks” and can’t draw quite as richly from a pool of cameo characters, but here too there are plenty of guest appearances by popular characters in the form of Scotty, Kirk and Co.

While “Lower Decks” takes the familiar “Star Trek” formula and exploits it in an animated format, “Strange New Worlds” does exactly that in the live-action format. With musicals, comedy episodes and war dramas, SNW is incredibly diverse. And “Lower Decks” too.

The crossover has already shown how both series can be understood as complementary. At the end of the episode we see the SNW crew in the “Lower Decks” animation style. The scene is not explained further, but it has a profound meaning!

Star Trek: All characters exist in animated form!

Seeing the SNW crew in animated form at the end of the episode underlines once again that “Lower Decks” is not a parody of “Star Trek”, but is just as much part of the canon as other series. The characters themselves note that they are exaggerated, so that, for example, eyes are larger.

This is completely natural when translating live action into an animation style. Illustrated characters are more exaggerated and the comedy stories are exaggerated. The exaggerated nature of the animated series doesn’t want to set itself apart from the other series, it uses the exaggeration to make fun of them. The crossover highlights how the type of character drawing is simply related to the choice of medium, live action or animation.

“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” brilliantly demonstrated how characters can survive in both mediums, with the “Lower Decks” characters being wonderfully fun as live-action variants and the SNW crew members still being the same in the animation style are. Whether drawn or live action, it’s two sides of the same coin!

Of course, if we follow this line of reasoning, all other live-action series can also be found on the live-action side of the coin. But why we’re highlighting “Strange New Worlds” here is for the reasons described above: SNW and LD follow the same premises with their colorful worlds and case-of-the-week structure.

Following the logic of the crossover and the fact that Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and many other characters have already appeared in “Lower Decks”, there should be an animated version of every character in all series. They all belong in the same universe. But neither “Star Trek: Discovery” nor “Star Trek: Picard” follow the typical Trek formula that “Strange New Worlds” and “Lower Decks” follow.

Every Thursday from 9 a.m. there is a new episode of “Star Trek: Lower Decks” in the Paramount+ news program. However, due to the strike and a few questionable decisions by Paramount+, it could be a while before we can expect further new “Star Trek” releases!