"Strange New Worlds" and "Lower Decks" are both unmistakably "Star Trek," even though they hail from very different corners of the final frontier. The former plots a similar course to Gene Roddenberry's original series, a live-action T.V. show set on the flagship of the Federation, crewed with familiar characters and steeped in canon.
"Lower Decks" meanwhile, goes where no "Trek" had gone before. Yes, the Animated Series had taken Kirk, Spock and the rest of the original crew into the second dimension back in the '70s, but the veteran franchise had never previously set its phasers so blatantly to fun. The comedy show's setting is also far from traditional, seeing as the U.S.S. Cerritos is in the second division of starships, crewed by officers unlikely to trouble even the footnotes of Federation history.
