Star Trek: Lower Decks Pays Tribute To Spock With Season 3 Update
They're on their way back!
Ever since the second half of Star Trek: Discovery‘s fourth season began streaming on Paramount+ in February, every week has brought with it new episodes of Discovery, Picard, and/or Strange New Worlds. When the latter series ended its first season last week, it began the longest break we’ve had so far from new Trek content. But that break won’t last long. Star Trek: Lower Decks is on its way back for season 3, and the series announced its return with a new poster that pays tribute to 1984’s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
As reported by Trek Movie, the Star Trek: Lower Decks season 3 poster is meant to mirror the 1984 movie poster. Just as the old poster showed the Enterprise in battle with a Klingon Bird of Prey, the Lower Decks poster shows the USS Cerritos clashing with a Klingon ship. The OG Enterprise crew is replaced with Mariner, Boimler, and Tendi at the bottom of the image. Instead of the face of Leonard Nimoy’s Spock looming larger than anything else on the Star Trek III poster, with rays of light streaming out of it, the face of the cybernetic Ensign Rutherford dominates the more recent image. You can see the season 3 poster, followed by that of Star Trek III for comparison.
The poster for Star Trek: Lower Decks also announces when we can expect the new season. New episodes begin streaming on Paramount+ weekly on Thursday, August 25. The official description from Paramount+ says that we can expect that the new season to challenge the heroes “in (hilarious) ways they could never imagine, starting with a shocking resolution for season two’s epic cliffhanger finale.” Fans of the show will remember that the season 2 finale, “First First Contact” ended with Cerritos captain and mother to Mariner (Tammy Newsome) Captain Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) being accused of aiding Klingon extremists in the destruction of Pakled Planet.
The Pakleds are a race of dimwitted, large, and often surprisingly duplicitous aliens. They made their first appearance in the Star Trek: The Next Generation season 2 episode “Samaritan Snare.” With their limited vocabulary, they’ve proven a natural addition to Star Trek: Lower Decks, and have been recurring antagonists since the first season.
Easily the most irreverent Trek series to date, the animated Star Trek: Lower Decks premiered in 2020 and ever since its references to Treks of the past have proven classic and numerous. Along with Trek mainstays like Jonathan Frakes, John de Lancie, and Robert Duncan McNeill voicing their beloved characters on the series, Lower Decks has managed to make some deep dives into Trek lore. For example, the season 2 finale of the series brought in Lycia Naff to voice Captain Sonya Gomez. Back in TNG‘s sophomore season, Lycia Naff proved to be one of the most infamous disappearing acts of the franchise. In the game-changing “Q Who,” which introduced the Borg, Naff’s Gomez (then an ensign) was introduced as a possible love interest for LeVar Burton’s Geordi La Forge, and then promptly vanished after the following episode.
