Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The USS Cerritos You Need To Know
The Star Trek starship you want to kiss and squeeze, errr we mean, she's a handsome lady.
The USS Cerritos is the latest starship to enter the Star Trek Universe in 2020's (very necessary) animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Embodying the show's focus on the "cool, scrappy underdogs" of Starfleet, the Cerritos isn't exactly the flagship of the Federation we're used to following into weekly adventures in the final frontier. She's ungainly, not really suited for battle, and apparently falling apart on the inside. But she's also got a lot of charm, despite many of us scratching our heads when we first saw her on the teaser poster released back in July of last year.
Vaguely reminiscent of the Galaxy-class Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Cerritos is intended to look a little odd while simultaneously recalling the aesthetics of Trek's 1990s heyday. She's the kind of starship a 90s kid might draw on lined paper in the school library while everyone else is playing four square on the playground... but we're not talking about anybody in particular here.
With the first season of Star Trek: Lower Decks finally (legally) reaching Trekkies worldwide, we're taking a deep dive under the yellow highlights and Starfleet-gray hull plating of the California-class USS Cerritos. It's warp time.
10. California Here We Come
If it wasn't made abundantly clear by the frequent references to the ship's class in Lower Decks' first season, the Cerritos is a California-class starship.
Kind of the workhorse of the Federation, this class of starship is a new creation for Lower Decks, but is intended to have been a contemporary of starships like the Enterprise-D seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation. According to the show’s creator, Mike McMahan: "It’s a California-class ship, which has always existed in Starfleet...they’re the utility support ships."
Still in service alongside the Enterprise-E as of 2380, California-class starships like the Cerritos are apparently ubiquitous, judging by their frequent appearances on Lower Decks (four out of ten episodes feature a Cali-class starship OTHER than the Cerritos) and they seem to be pretty disposable (three of those episodes features the destruction of one of these ships).
Fitting the California-class name, all the ships of the line are named for cities in the state of California: The USS Merced is named for the city in Central California, the USS Alhambra is named for the city in the San Gabriel Valley, the USS Rubidoux is named for the city in Riverside County, the USS Solvang is named for the city near Santa Barbara (great Oktoberfest there btw), and, of course, the Cerritos herself is named for the city in Los Angeles County and... well let's just let Mike explain as he did to Stuart "Captain" Foley and Samuel "Commander" Cockings at Trekyards:
When I moved to Los Angeles... I did a lot of jobs where I had to drive around town and pick up coffee for people and deliver stuff and there was a radio ad that would play all the time for a car dealership, the Cerritos Auto Square. It's kind of a local, famous radio ad and I just thought it would be cool... to give a less noble name to a starship and then expand it from there...