With the conclusion of the 10th episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5, somehow the third new Star Trek show to end in 2024 has come to a close. The finale of Lower Decks follows the series finales of Discovery and Prodigy earlier this year, but unlike those two shows, this finale leaves things off with a bizarre new piece of canon for fans to chew on for years to come. While the entirety of Lower Decks Season 5 has been both a send-up of multiverse tropes and also awesome multiverse adventures, the finale ended these storylines with one surprising revelation.
While the big reveal is that the voyages of the USS Cerritos may never be the same, the slightly bigger reveal is that in the final moments of Lower Decks, 24th Century Starfleet was given a new mission.
Spoilers ahead.
How does the Lower Decks Series finale end?
After getting information from his transporter duplicate about the impending collapse of the multiverse, Boimler (Jack Quaid), Mariner (Tawny Newsome), and the rest of the crew of the USS Cerritos have to enter a massive universe-destroying anomaly, with the intention of sealing the rift and saving the entire universe. Though we’re told the Enterprise has been summoned, the Cerritos is the closest ship, and the connection between the two Boimlers is too strong.
After evading some angry Klingons, the crew has to ride through several dimensional waves that change the literal nature of the Cerritos — it becomes several different starship classes for awhile, including Sovereign-class, Oberth-class, and even a Terran Empire warship. All of these changes represent versions of the Cerritos in alternate dimensions, but in the end, the crew manages to fix the rift by... keeping it open.
Essentially, there’s no longer a danger of the multiverse breaking down, but now there’s a permanent portal to other dimensions, just sitting around in space. In order to study this new phenomenon, the ancient base, Starbase 80, is brought to the mouth of the rift, and Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) takes over as commander of that station. This leaves Ransom (Jerry O’Connell) as the new Captain of the Cerritos, and right away, he appoints Boimler and Mariner as his acting co-first officers.
The Cerritos warps away for the last time, though the adventure will continue, off-screen.
How Lower Decks changes Star Trek canon
Interestingly, although the finale was correctly focused on wrapping of several character arcs, the larger impact on the Trek timeline is very interesting. Lower Decks is wrapping up in the year 2382, which is three years before the end of Prodigy and the earliest Picard flashback, which both occur in 2385. After that, pretty much everything we know about the Trek timeline after 2385 happens in the 2390s and early 2400s, which covers all three seasons of Picard.
But now, smack-dab in the middle of this part of the Trek chronology is the revelation that Starfleet created a permanent outpost to monitor the multiverse. This is a fairly big deal since, prior to this, there had been no formal confirmation that Starfleet had a multiverse division. But now, as Boimler’s voice-over reveals: “Starbase 80 is positioned by the rift to explore strange new realities...”
This implies that going forward, Starfleet will be running a robust multiverse operation in the background. Does this connect to Kovich’s operations in the far future in Star Trek: Discovery? Could we see more Star Trek variants in future shows? Right now, Trek has planted a flag and a starbase right in the multiverse, and as far as we know, it’s not going anywhere.
