Star Trek Lower Decks Season 4 Finale: “Old Friends, New Planets”

Star Trek Lower Decks season 4 finale: what happens

Star Trek: Lower Decks season 4 premiered on Paramount+ on September 7, 2023, with two episodes, and ran for ten episodes. The finale, “Old Friends, New Planets,” arrived on November 2, 2023. Bob Suarez directed it and May Darmon wrote it. The season had been built around one repeating gag with a long fuse: almost every week, an alien ship appeared to be destroyed by the same unknown vessel, and Mariner sabotaged herself in some small way. The last episode is where both threads close.

The regular voice cast is the same group that has anchored the series since it began: Tawny Newsome as Beckett Mariner, Jack Quaid as Brad Boimler, Noël Wells as D'Vana Tendi, Eugene Cordero as Sam Rutherford and Dawnn Lewis as Captain Carol Freeman, with Jerry O'Connell, Fred Tatasciore and Gillian Vigman rounding out the senior staff. Gabrielle Ruiz joins them as T'Lyn, and Paul F. Tompkins voices the Cerritos counselor Migleemo. The finale gives every one of them something to do, and that keeps the hour moving even when the plot sags.

It opens in flashback at Starfleet Academy with Mariner as a first-year cadet and Nova Squadron talking through the fatal maneuver from the Next Generation episode “The First Duty,” which aired on March 30, 1992. That is the episode in which a training accident killed a cadet and the squad's leader, Nick Locarno, was expelled. Robert Duncan McNeill, who played Locarno in 1992, voices him here, and the Nova Squadron scene brings back the original voice actors, which is exactly the kind of fan service the show is known for.

Years later, Locarno has not forgiven Starfleet. The ships that seemed to be destroyed were being stolen by their own lower-ranking crews, who marooned their officers and joined a new independent force called Nova Fleet. That is the reveal of the season, and the show gets some mileage out of it. Locarno has kidnapped Mariner, expecting her to agree with the plan, since she is the forever-ensign who never rose in rank.

The stakes are quieter than the Genesis device suggests. The season opened on a premise that the lowest-ranking people on the Federation's least glamorous ship could carry a comedy, and Locarno's plan is a dark mirror of that idea. If the finale had stayed with that mirror for a few more scenes, it might have found something to say about the redshirts of five decades of Star Trek who died on someone else's orders.

People who search for star trek lower decks season 4 episode 10 usually want to know if the ending pays off. Mostly it does, in the sense that every loose thread is accounted for. The question is whether the pieces fit with anything the show cared about earlier.

Mariner and Locarno

Mariner pretends to go along with Locarno's speech, then snaps into hero mode the moment she gets a chance, interrupts him mid-monologue and flies off with his bargaining chip, a black-market Genesis device. The chase that follows has some clever maneuvers and a few quips, and it looks fine, but it is a predictable scene in which the outcome is never in doubt.

Locarno himself is the problem. A villain defined by a grudge from a single television episode in 1992 could have been interesting if the finale had given him anything to want beyond revenge. Instead Nova Fleet exists, as far as the dialogue explains, because lower-deckers are tired of being pushed around, and Locarno dies a flat death with a last-ditch joke.

The Cerritos plan

The Cerritos plot works better. Starfleet declines to help rescue Mariner because it does not want to upset non-Federation powers, and Captain Freeman goes rogue, with her whole crew behind her. Tendi has a plan for getting past the shield that protects Nova Fleet: borrow an Orion warship from her sister, whom viewers met earlier in the season during the franchise's first visit to the Orion homeworld.

The deal is settled by a fight, and Dr. Migleemo, voiced by Paul F. Tompkins, is the champion because the enormous Orion fighter has allergies. Her wheezing knocks her out, but she faints on top of Migleemo and technically wins. Tendi offers herself in exchange for the ship instead, and her sister accepts, a thread that points toward season 5. Good small moments surround the main plot: Boimler and Rutherford arguing over whether Locarno looks like Tom Paris, a return of the Twains from the fourth episode, Boimler enjoying his turn in the captain's chair, and T'Lyn being T'Lyn.

What works and what does not

• Works: Freeman risking her career for her daughter is the emotional high point, and the Orion negotiation is the funniest sequence of the hour.
• Works: The Nova Squadron opening ties the season to a real Next Generation episode, with the original voices.
• Does not: Locarno and Nova Fleet are one-dimensional, and the show never explores the grievance of low-ranking crews, which is the obvious subject for a series called Lower Decks.
• Does not: Mariner's emotional arc is wrapped up in the previous episode, so her isolation here feels like a gap rather than a development.
• Does not: The chase is pretty, but nothing in it surprises.

Lower Decks season 4 finale review: the verdict

The honest verdict is that “Old Friends, New Planets” is a solid episode of a show that has taught viewers to expect better. Lower Decks spent four seasons proving it could be more than a parody, with real character development and stories that surprised, and a finale this tidy feels like a step back from the season 3 closer.

Part of the trouble is the formula. A different ship vanishes each week, Mariner undermines herself in each episode, and a conclusion to such a setup is almost bound to arrive as a reveal instead of a story. The resolution answers the mystery, and Starfleet's willingness to abandon an officer is the best idea in the hour, but the episode wastes it by turning the lower-deckers into cartoon pirates.

There is also a larger worry. The show was meant to be about the least important people on the least important ship, and its plots keep growing: stolen fleets, Genesis devices, rogue captains. The low stakes of the early seasons were part of what made it feel warm, and that warmth is thin here. Season 5, which Paramount had ordered in March 2023 and which was later described as the final one, has room to bring it back.

Still, the season as a whole holds up. The finale is worth watching for Freeman, for Tendi's bargain and for Tompkins' Migleemo, and as a closer to the mystery it is better than competent. It just is not the one fans were hoping for.

Sources

• Star Trek: Lower Decks, Wikipedia — season 4 episode list, cast and air dates