It is not my intention to ignite an EMACS/vim war; I will say that I find it baffling that Lower Decks is ending while Strange New Worlds is being continued. I like Strange New Worlds, despite disagreeing with some of the artistic licenses being taken. But if I had to choose between the two shows, it’d be no contest. Not only as a viewer do I prefer LD, but it has to be the cheaper show to produce. The fact that next season is the last (both by design, it only being contracted for 5 years; and announcement) is sad and incomprehensible in the same way the cancelation of Firefly was - except LD is popular and successful, whereas Firefly merely had a fanatical (🖐️) fan base.
I don’t understand it. Yes, you want to end on a high note. Maybe the writers are running out of plot ideas. Perhaps, given an initial life span of 5 years, the actors have all made other arrangements and aren’t available. But I just can’t believe the One Big Plot Arc that’s been building would necessitate ending the series by its resolution.
LD is a strong show. It’s lighthearted. It’s a breath of fresh air after the more decidedly darker, ethically challenging, and emotionally straining runs of TNG, Voyager, DS9. And Strange New Worlds… the Gorn are basically Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise.Who, despite being the existential threat of the show, somehow get entirely forgotten about by the time in TOS.
But I digress. I’m going to miss Lower Decks, badly. How can this happen? And why?
I agree with you. People need to remember that TOS had a terrible third season, ending with a bad final episode and TNG’s final season had a lot of clunkers. And then there were the final episodes of Enterprise and Voyager.
Game of Thrones would have gone down in history as one of the greatest shows in history. Then the last season happened, and it’s an almost forgotten show.
It will be forever hilarious to me just how the end of GoT wiped it from our collective consciousness. There were so many memes and references for years- Hodor, MUH KWEEN, Da king in da norf, R+L=J, “Winter is coming!”- and the second the last episode aired it just fucking vanished.
To your point though, I would argue that had the last season not happened, we would think of GoT as a great show that ended poorly due to the decline in quality for the last couple of seasons.
For a more in context show, Baylon 5 had a great “last season” once the end of the show was rushed and a really lousy one after they decided to postpone the end by another year.
On the other hand we have Futurama.
You may be thinking of TNG’s second season, which ended with the abysmal “Shades of Grey”. The third season ended with “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1”
No, I was thinking of episodes like Masks.