Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5
Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4
SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.
509: Fissure Quest 2024 December 12
(First watched 2024-12-12) With the series coming to an end earlier than Mike McMahan wanted, I was thinking whatever became of William Boimler would be left dangling, but here we are. A guy who's been running through so many realities full of variants of the same people over and over he's sick of it. Lower Decks has never shied away from legacy characters, but this gave an especially clean way to bring back some familiar faces and voices with non-canon elements: A T'Pol who was married to Trip Tucker for decades, a Garak and (hologram) Julian Bashir from different universes who got married, a Dax that's still Curzon Dax. Not to mention a variety of Kims. Except for Curzon all with their original actors providing voices, too.
And even their "bad guy" turns out to be another ~familiar face, Lily Sloane voiced by Alfre Woodard. While watching the show I thought she sounded like Dawnn Lewis, but I figured it probably wasn't since they don't have a pattern of recasting notable characters like that.
Interesting that though time travel wasn't directly involved, the "Beagle" reality seems a few centuries behind the other realities while still being similar enough to them to have familiar historical characters. But all kinds of sciency fiency ways to explain that sort of thing.
So the end solution was to potentially doom one reality to limit the damage to others. Aaaaand William sends it to his home reality, because he trusts "himself" and his friends to be able to do something about it on their end too. And... while this is sweet and all, this is still a lot to drop onto some lieutenant j.g.s, if they were even promoted that far before he started hopping realities. There's also that, though this is still Brad Boimler, it's one who left the Cerritos after season 1 and never returned. So his relationship with his Cerritos friends was pretty brief. I guess they left a very strong impression, though.
510: The New Next Generation 2024 December 19
(First watched 2024-12-19) Boom. Not able to have quite the scope of something like the 2 hour series finales some series get, but they kind of nailed it. Big problems, big solutions, with characters major and minor getting their chance to have their moments contributing. Our main characters being respected and believed about this crazy situation, versus the noobs and/or troublemakers they were a few years ago.
And yes, still plenty of blink-and-you-miss-it appearances of other Star Trek stuff. Particular favorite near the beginning, both a Klingon officer and ship changing to that of early Discovery style.
Having a permanent gateway left open to alternate realities seems like kind of a big deal. Like we're leaving off DS9 just as they discovered a path to the Gamma Quadrant. But that was another thing this episode really hit at--this is just the start of even larger adventures for everyone.