Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 are ahead!
Prior to joining Star Trek: Voyager as Tom Paris, Robert Duncan McNeil made his Star Trek debut in The Next Generation episode “The First Duty” as Nick Locarno, a Starfleet Academy cadet who was expelled for his role in a classmate’s death. While Tom has obviously become McNeill’s more well-known Star Trek character, Locarno surprisingly returned to this franchise for Lower Decks Season 4’s ending episodes, where he was revealed as this season’s big bad. Tawny Newsome, who voices Beckett Mariner on the animated series, compared Nick’s heel turn to classic Trek baddie Khan while speaking with CinemaBlend, and I totally agree with this connection.
With Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 now available in its entirety to Paramount+ subscribers, I had the pleasure of speaking with Newsome in the aftermath of this show’s latest rounds of adventures and shenanigans. To kick off our conversation, I asked the actress, who was a Star Trek fan long before Lower Decks, how she reacted when she learned Mariner was tied to The Next Generation’s Nova Squadron, which Locarno led when he was at Starfleet, and that McNeill’s first Star Trek character was Season 4’s main villain. She answered:
First part of your question, I was like, ‘This is very cool to tie her to Sito, to tie her to the Lower Decks episode of TNG and “The First Duty,” I was like, this is huge. For me, as a nerd, this was a very cool thing. The Locarno of it, I didn’t find out about until I was reading Season 4 scripts that that was how Mike [McMahan] was tying it all together. It’s so funny, it’s like the Lower Decks version of Khan. It’s like, ‘Oh, that one guy from that one episode becomes the big bad of this huge critically acclaimed movie?’ So Lower Decks did our version of that where we’re like, ‘Wait, that one guy that you kind of remember from that episode. He’s kind of Tom Paris, but he’s not Tom Paris… So that guy is the big bad of our whole season?’ It was such a Lower Decks move, and I just thought it was so genius.
Following her appearance in “The First Duty,” Shannon Fill’s Sito Jaxa returned in The Next Generation episode “Lower Decks,” which is where this animated TV show obviously gets its name. Lower Decks fans learned how much Mariner looked up to Sito when they were at Starfleet Academy together, so that was enough to excite Tawny Newsome. But regarding Nick Locarno, she makes an astute observation about how Lower Decks essentially did for him what Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan did for Ricardo Montalbán’s Khan Noonien Singh.
Remember, Montalbán first played that character in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Space Seed,” which aired on February 16, 1967. While the actor certainly impressed in the role, there’s no question that The Wrath of Khan, which came out in 1982, elevated him from one-off bad guy to one of the Star Trek franchise’s greatest villains, which still holds true over 40 years later. While I don’t expect Locarno to ever get close to Khan’s level of notoriety, I agree it was a solid move on Lower Decks’ part to give him the Khan treatment. As a bonus, like The Wrath of Khan, Locarno’s time to shine in “Old Friends, New Planets” (which also featured a cameo appearance from Will Wheaton’s Wesley Crusher) also involved a Genesis Device.
Star Trek: Lower Decks has been renewed for Season 5, so stay tuned to CinemaBlend for updates on the next batch of episodes and the other upcoming Star Trek TV shows. For your non-Trek needs, look through our 2023 TV schedule and 2024 TV schedule to learn what small screen entertainment is coming up in the near future.
