10 Greatest Star Trek Moments In 2023

10. I Don't See It

A season long mystery had kept every fan guessing. Was the mysterious ship apparently destroying vessels a super vengeful Badgey? Was it a new alien race? The Dominion? Something even more devastating?

Worse than that – it was Nick Locarno and doesn’t he look like Tom Paris? No?

In what has to be one of Star Trek’s best kept secrets and most jaw-dropping reveals, Robert Duncan McNeill returned to Lower Decks. Following on from his appearance in We’ll Always Have Tom Paris he dropped in to voice The First Duty’s Nova Squadron leader. No one saw it coming and perhaps just as brilliant was the return of Shannon Fill in Old Friends, New Planets as tragically doomed Sito Jaxa. It also included the only actual appearance of doomed Nova Squad pilot Joshua Albert - spoken of but never seen in TNG.

Now building his own Nova Squadron from a collection of alien races brought together across the season (and not destroyed as viewers were led to believe), it all came down to an oddly (and brilliantly) familiar ending involving a Genesis device...and a paywall?

Where Voyager had been unable to bring back Locarno as their Maquis bad boy, Lower Decks stepped into the fray to provide a cliffhanger reveal that could equal many of the season finales of seasons gone by – and it wasn’t even the last episode of the year!