Dominion War? Sito’s sacrifice? Lower Decks went there.
Lower Decks went there. We’re getting used to hearing that refrain. The animated comedy spin-off of the Star Trek Universe is now justly known for holding up a mirror to the foibles that have accumulated over six decades exploring the Final Frontier, from unfortunate Ferengi stereotypes to transporter malfunctions and Q antics.
Now it’s clear the cartoon’s four season have been building up to something specific and significant — something that ties together all the generations, from The Next Generation to Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and beyond. A reckoning with the Dominion War.
Star Trek: Picard’s recent third and final season, for all its accolades, tried to do this. It introduced a rogue faction of Changelings from the Gamma Quadrant, rulers of the Dominion there that take over Cardassia in a bid to fully conquer the same Alpha Quadrant the Federation calls home years earlier in Deep Space Nine, all in the name of safeguarding their shifty society from the chaotic “solids.”
To be fair, Changelings originally built up their empire as a defensive measure after eons of persecution from non-shapeshifters. But it never ends there, does it? The new Changeling menace nearly toppled Starfleet and the Federation, if not for the persistence of the retired crew of the USS Enterprise. At least we finally got to see them engage this fearsome foe …
The Dominion War of the TNG spinoff Deep Space Nine really kicked off as the crew of TNG’s Enterprise ascended from episodic TV to motion picture adventures, and it was always disappointing these missions never really dovetailed with the Federation’s great call to arms on the small screen; Insurrection (aka Star Trek IX) certainly at least tried, writing in references to the Dominion even as the Enterprise crew took on routine diplomatic assignments and pursued more personal aims, and references to the film’s Son’a antagonists were woven into the DS9 Dominion War storyline, if only tangentially. But the larger question loomed: Why wasn’t Starfleet’s Sovereign-class flagship on the front lines of this massive conflict? It really was a missed opportunity to do the “expanded/cinematic universe” thing before its time.
Lower Decks had to go back further, though — before the Dominion War — to really deal with some of these issues. On the older, Galaxy-class Enterprise-D. The TNG episode titled “Lower Decks” that kicked off the animated premise decades later presents us with Ensign Sito Jaxa, a Bajoran introduced in an even earlier episode, “The First Duty,” as part of a cadet conspiracy at Starfleet Academy, including Wesley Crusher, to cover up a hotshot Nova Squadron’s carelessness that caused a young man’s death.
Held back a year and given a second chance on the Enterprise by a benevolent Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Sito joins a risky mission in hostile Cardassian territory from which she never returns — to help a Cardassian dissident working with Starfleet against his own people. Although at one point intended to return as an unlikely survivor in DS9, after the Cardassians have ended their occupation of Bajor but not long before the Dominion War breaks out, she was ultimately never heard from again.
“I’m Bajoran. No one knows better than I do what Cardassians do to their prisoners.”
Sito Jaxa
From their introduction much earlier in TNG, it was clear that the Federation’s tensions and past hostilities with the Cardassians left deep, unresolved emotional and moral wounds. They even drove the great Vulcan diplomat Spock and his ambassador father Sarek further apart.
What does this all have to do with the current Lower Decks series? It turns out in “The Inner Fight” that Jake Locarno, Sito and Crusher’s fellow cadet who took the fall for the Nova Squadron’s misconduct and was expelled, is back in action and putting together a renegade operation of his own for some purpose. What’s more, Lt. Beckett Mariner, the reckless antiheroine of Lower Decks, was a contemporary and classmate of Sito’s, and nearly her entire helter-skelter life has been shaped by the Bajoran’s sacrifice and then the relentless war machine that Starfleet became in the galactic conflict that eventually followed with Cardassia and its Dominion masters.
Could Locarno’s quest mean Sito is really alive? His own re-appearance is something of a catharsis for Star Trek, which repurposed the actor Robert Duncan McNeill as Voyager’s Tom Paris, who begins that spin-off series literally in prison as an irredeemable Jake Locarno simply by another name — only he got his character development and became an asset to Starfleet in the end.
Is that where this is all heading? Redemption for Nova Squad, as well as a final absolution for a war-torn but peace- and exploration-loving Next Generation-era United Federation of Planets?
The Star Trek: Lower Decks season finale streams Thursday on Paramount+.
