to elaborate: lower decks gets a lot right, but it does do a few things i don’t want to see in this franchise. it also makes a few changes that could go either way
the first thing that stuck out to me is that the language used is a lot less sylized and melodrama-esque. the dialogue feels almost improvised (thanks in part to the voice cast. not a complaint! they do a good job) which is also unfortunately one of those things that can make a show Feel Less Like Star Trek, because most of the ‘golden age’ shows are written like soap operas. but it lends itself to humour, it feels more organic, and i can relate myself and people i know to the characters more easily.
there’s a moment where mariner refers to boimler as ‘this rascal’ and musses up his hair, which was where the show clicked for me. it was just something about the delivery. it felt like an interaction i’d have with an actual friend
something i do think could be more of a problem instead of being period-ambiguous it’s like... ok hearing a character saying ‘bay-bee’ with that particular cadence is funny but is it really worth being able to carbon-date the show based on the speech and mannerisms of the characters a few years down the line. can you imagine if jake sisko spoke like other teen characters in the 90s. do you want to be the space jam if star trek.
there are also a few... mean moments. like boimler crying after getting gummed around by that giant spider, or that moment in the trailer with mariner being like ‘it was... it was set to stun’. i don’t want this show to be a cruel pessimistic slog and i certainly don’t want the characters to be mean to each other or suffer pointlessly all the time, that would be the worst case scenario
so there’s upsides and downsides to everything. i thought it was genuinely funny, it didn’t just ride on novel circumstances, there were actual jokes in there! so thats good. very fast-paced, almost a little too fast. i hope later episodes give us a little more time to breathe in the more tense moments. i haven’t mentioned the animation but i actually really like it, it’s not as rick-and-morty adjacent as it looked initially, it’s very smooth, nice effects, expressive characters.
tl;dr: pretty funny i guess
