The Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 Teaser Doesn't Feel Like The End

Get that tub of decon gel out and lather up! The teaser trailer for Star Trek: Lower Deck's fifth season, shown this weekend at San Diego Comic-Con, certainly won't be doing anything to deconstruct that 'Orions are all pirates' stereotype, but it was everything we needed in just over two minutes to whet our appetites for the premiere in October this year. To follow Seán in his video breakdown, this may well be the final season for Lower Decks, but we get the distinctly happy impression that this is by no means the series' end.

'Five' seems to be the unlucky leitmotif in the Star Trek franchise these days — one more lucky than those OG decon chamber-dwellers, though, at least. It is a pattern of production peculiar to streaming, and with Star Trek: Discovery, we'd already begun to realise that five might mean the last. Not long before Lower Decks' cancellation, Star Trek head Alex Kurtzman spoke to Mick Joest at CinemaBlend on the current "watch pattern for television in the streaming world" that makes it "unlikely" for any contemporary Trek to reach even 100 episodes, something last achieved, as Joest points out, by Star Trek: Voyager.

It wasn't entirely unexpected, then, though just as sad, when it was announced on 12 April 2024 (the same day as the renewal of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for a fourth season, no less) that Lower Decks had been 'cancelled'. What emerges from San Diego, however, is a sense of optimism. In a way only Lower Decks can be, the teaser trailer is gloriously self-aware, even self-deprecating, though not to the point of self-pity. It starts with an ever knowing, basically shot-for-shot, pastiche of that one teaser trailer for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, pushing pause in characteristic Lower Decks style on the dramatic "Now, you are invited to join them for one last adventure…"

As Beckett Mariner then puts it in her voice-over to a warp-halted Cerritos in the trailer, "We aren't done voyaging… We've hardly even cracked one quadrant yet". With wondrous irreverence, that is the essence of Lower Decks — to boldly continue to have a whole lot of fun whilst making some seriously good Star Trek. We hope they get to make more! With the Star Trek: Section 31 Long Trek on the way for 2025, there's surely an opportunity there for a movie or two for Lower Decks. If not that, we'd certainly love to see some standalone special episodes!

One last point of news from SDCC, there's a whole new comedy live-action Star Trek in the works, to be helmed by lower decker herself Tawny Newsome and writer, director, producer, and actor Justin Simien. The series will be set in the 25th century, so could star any and all of the cast from Lower Decks in bodily form. That worked brilliantly in Those Old Scientists, with a time travel assist. To quote Mariner from the trailer once more, "This isn't the end of the story, it's the beginning".

The fifth season of Star Trek: Lower Decks will premiere with two episodes on Paramount+ on 24 October 2024, continuing weekly to the finale of episode 10 on 19 December 2024.