Welcome to this Choose Your Own Adventure-style review of Star Trek: Lower Decks—Warp Your Own Way. In this review, you will be able to control the topics under discussion and the extent to which they are discussed. There is an ongoing debate within the critical scene over how much a review should reveal about the work under discussion, and what constitutes “spoilers.” Where on that scale do you fall?
I would like to know something about the work under review
Warp Your Own Way is an interactive graphic novel set in the universe of the Paramount+ television series Star Trek: Lower Decks.
I want to know about Star Trek: Lower Decks
I want to know about graphic novels
I want to know about interactive fiction
Having recently completed its fifth and final season, Star Trek: Lower Decks is a half-hour animated series set within the storied, long-running Star Trek franchise. It is the third Star Trek series launched by the streaming platform Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access), part of its ongoing attempt to generate an endless stream of content from a well-known IP.
I have never watched Lower Decks; tell me more about it
How dare you question my Star Trek knowledge, petaQ; tell me about the book
Animated, huh? Say more about that
Set aboard the USS Cerritos, the series is a comedic look at the history and conventions of the Star Trek franchise. The main characters, who are all junior officers (hence the series title, which is also a reference to a classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode), each represent different aspects of the franchise and fannish attitudes towards it. Beckett Mariner (voiced in the show by Tawny Newsome) is a rule-breaking rebel, frequently critical of Starfleet and its regulations, though her frustration is often shown to have its roots in a profound love of the Federation and its values. Bradward Boimler (Jack Quaid) is an insecure nerd who dreams of commanding his own starship, and meanwhile obsesses over the great captains and ships of the past—who are all, of course, the stars and settings of previous series in the franchise. Scientist Tendi (Noël Wells) and Engineer Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) complete the foursome with their happy-go-lucky enthusiasm for even the most dangerous alien lifeform, or the most inscrutable subspace anomaly. Lower Decks’s stories are often rooted in references to the franchise’s past: they are continuations of classic episodes, meditations on the franchise’s conventions, or feature guest appearances from characters both famous and obscure.
References, huh? Not sure how I feel about that
I love references; tell me about the book
Wait, comedic? Is this a funny book?
Lower Decks’s love of references is at one and the same time the show’s greatest strength and biggest weakness. At its worst, it seems to express the view—common across the entire Paramount+ Star Trek project—that the shows created between the ’60s and early ’00s were the only ones allowed to innovate or move forward within the franchise’s setting, while newer additions are only permitted to color within the lines of established material. It often feels as if the show believes that the only correct way to exist within the Star Trek universe is to be a Star Trek fan, as when Boimler desperately tries to get facetime with a visiting Tom Paris so that the erstwhile star of Star Trek: Voyager can sign his commemorative Voyager plate.
At its best, however, Lower Decks uses its referential quality to comment on the franchise, and remix it into new and unexpected forms. A fourth season episode, “Caves,” is both a loving send-up and serious examination of the many occasions on which Star Trek characters have found themselves trapped in caves (“bunch of rocks always beats centuries of technological progress,” Mariner grouses). Similarly, Vulcan transfer T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz) is easily the best Vulcan character the franchise has fielded in years, precisely because her depiction both pokes fun at, and takes seriously, Vulcans’ unemotional, logical nature.
Warp Your Own Way begins with Mariner deciding how to spend her day off. Each decision she makes, however, somehow plunges the ship into a different sort of peril. If she orders coffee as her morning beverage, the Cerritos is attacked by Khan Noonien Singh. If she opts for a raktajino, it is overrun by the Borg. Further choices create even more scenarios. The ship’s doctor, T’Ana, is carried off by a being who once presented himself to Captain Kirk as the god Dionysus, and is herself transformed by it into a deity; chief engineer Billups is revealed to have been gestating a Gorn hatchling; the entire ship’s complement, except for Mariner, suddenly disappears. Mariner does her best to address each of these crises, but every time, despite her best efforts, the crisis mounts into a calamity, and she dies.
These all seem like wildly disparate plot points
I’m fine with that, but is there a point to it all?
Warp Your Own Way initially seems to be running afoul of its parent series’s love of fanservice. The various perils Mariner finds herself in are very clearly a playlist of the franchise’s greatest hits, and it’s hard not to sigh a little when the action pauses to note the specific Voyager episode from which a current storyline is taken. But as the repetitions pile up, Mariner herself begins to observe that something doesn’t make sense. When Khan attacks the Cerritos, it’s Mariner who points out that his presence, not to mention his newfound vendetta against the ship’s captain, seems borrowed from another part of the franchise entirely.
Eventually it becomes clear, from hints dropped at the end of each individual run through the story, that something more is going on. The repetition of Mariner’s day, each time with different choices leading to different results, is not just something the reader of the book is experiencing, but something that a character within the story is causing to happen, for their own nefarious purposes.
That sounds like a classic Star Trek story
That sounds like a classic metafictional conceit
As Mariner becomes aware of her predicament, and as the reader works out how to bring her to a different sort of ending, a story emerges that mixes and matches some of the most beloved episodes in the franchise. The most obvious reference is to TNG’s “Cause and Effect,” widely credited as the first instance of the now-beloved time loop trope. To list any of the book’s other inspirations would give too much away, but they are also classics of the franchise. This type of storytelling is Lower Decks at its best—taking familiar components and stirring them together, placing at their center a character like Mariner, who is aware of her antecedents but also willing to cut through boilerplate, and producing something that is both familiar and new.
I’ve heard enough! Take me to the conclusion
Hmm, not convinced yet. I want to know more
Warp Your Own Way was written by Ryan North, with art by Chris Fenoglio.
After creating the successful and influential webcomic Dinosaur Comics (2003-), Ryan North embarked on a wide-ranging career. He has written comics, prose fiction, and nonfiction, usually though not always with a comedic slant. Warp Your Own Way is not his first Lower Decks comic, though perhaps a more relevant entry in his back catalogue are two interactive storytelling books, To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure (2013), and Romeo and/or Juliet (2016), both of which retell Shakespearean tales by permitting readers to take their characters on a variety of adventures.
Comedy? So is this book funny?
Interactive storytelling? Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book?
Comics are a visual medium! Let’s talk about the art!
Despite never working in the Lower Decks writers’ room, North captures the feel of the show’s comedy perfectly. There are no shortage of Star Trek-based gags—chief engineer Billups, upon learning that the ship has been overrun by Borg, gravely instructs the officers sheltering with him to open their uniform jackets in order to convey that they are in action mode. Others are simply funny in any context: when the Gorn are released on the ship, Mariner asks who the senior surviving officer aboard is, only for the answer to change, again and again, before the computer can reach the end of the sentence. In other places, North takes great advantage of the comics medium, such as a double-page splash in which Mariner is brought up to speed with all her previous iterations’ adventures, presented in the form of a flowchart.
Most importantly, North captures the voices of these characters with absolute fidelity. If you’re familiar with Lower Decks, it is impossible to read this book without hearing Newsome, Quaid, et al.’s voices—one can easily imagine the demented enthusiasm with which Rutherford, surrounded by Borg bodies, would deliver the line “I didn’t join Starfleet to kill people, but I guess it’s nice to know I’m good at it!”
Wow, sounds like this book really captures the show
OK, but now can we talk about the art?
Lower Decks’s art style splits the difference between cartoonish and naturalistic. The almost stick-figure-like character designs, with their bobble heads and enormous eyes, somehow blend perfectly with settings that look almost exactly like any live-action Star Trek set. The clean line-art suits the Star Trek ethos—there has always been something a bit fuddy-duddy about this franchise, and the fact that Lower Decks holds back on visual flourishes (without, of course, forgoing them completely) is a flourish in its own right, a way of showing off the show’s continuity with the rest of the franchise, despite the change in medium.
It can’t have been easy for Fenoglio (with colorist Charlie Kirchoff and letterer Jeff Eckleberry) to step into the shoes of an entirely different art team, but he shoulders the task with grace. His character and background art are virtually identical to those on the show, while still knowing how to translate animated action into the kind that can be drawn in panels. He is also eager to explore the distinctive tools of the comics medium, as in a series of wordless panels depicting the lower decks gang partying with (an alien pretending to be) the Greek god Dionysus. And, just as animation offers the freedom to depict settings and events that would be prohibitively expensive in live action, Fenoglio takes advantage of his more static medium to occasionally go absolutely nuts, as in a scene in which Mariner tries to break the Cerritos holodeck by ordering it to recreate the ship’s crew several times over, leading to a Where’s Waldo-like extravaganza full of deranged vignettes.
It’s a bit of a backhanded compliment to say that North and Fenoglio have captured the spirit of Lower Decks so perfectly in a different medium, but beyond the stamp that they have both managed to put on the material, I think it speaks to the quality of this book that I could easily imagine it as an episode of the show. In fact, its existence serves to reconcile me, a little bit, to the show’s entirely unjustified cancellation. With teams like this taking over this world and characters, Lower Decks will never fully die.
I’m sold! Take me to the conclusion
That… really didn’t tell me enough about the book. Let’s start over
Choose Your Own Adventure is a trademarked brand associated with a series of children’s books published in the ’80s and ’90s, and therefore can’t be used by Warp Your Own Way’s publisher, IDW. The term used in the book’s front matter is “An Interactive Graphic Novel.”
Interactive fiction purports to allow the reader a measure of control over a story. At set points, the reader is presented with a choice that determines what page they turn to, and what the next event in the story will be. In Warp Your Own Way, the reader controls Mariner, making decisions as trivial as whether to visit the bridge or engineering to kill time on her day off, and as monumental as choosing a strategy with which to fight off a horde of invading Borg.
”The reader controls a character?” Like in a computer game?
The promise evoked by the brand name “Choose Your Own Adventure” implies that the reader has the freedom to determine the course of a story. They can choose the story’s genre, decide if it’s a comedy or tragedy, and pick the characters the hero will befriend or romance. Later examples in the form, such as North’s own Shakespeare-derived interactive novels, draw much of their appeal from the novelty of allowing the reader to do just about anything, whether out of character or genre-busting or physics-defying, in the setting of a well-known story.
That sounds like it could cause problems
That “freedom” is illusory, though
I don’t agree with either of these statements
A result of that freedom, however, can sometimes be a loss of meaning. The reader’s natural impulse will be to “collect them all,” traveling up and down the decision tree in order to experience all stories. But the cumulative effect of that behavior is sometimes to create a sort of un-story. If all choices are possible, then no choice has any significance. The failure mode of interactive fiction is a wallowing in gimmickry, an abdication of the author’s responsibility to give a story shape and meaning.
Of course, there can never be infinite choices, only the ones offered by the author. Even when a story offers the illusion of freedom, it is in fact forcing the reader down preset paths. But without an overarching purpose to those paths, this can end up feeling like the worst of both worlds.
The genius of Warp Your Own Way is in how it uses its quintessentially Star Trek-ish plot to short-circuit some of the pitfalls inherent to the Choose Your Own Adventure conceit. That the different plot strands Mariner goes down are so disparate and seemingly unrelated is, in fact, a clue to what is actually happening to her. And instead of the reader functioning as the protagonist’s tormentor, needlessly taking them down endless avenues of story to satisfy the completionist impulse, in Warp Your Own Way the reader is desperately trying to save Mariner, searching for a path that doesn’t end in disaster for her and the Cerritos.
Sounds like you’re getting into more spoilery territory; I think I’ve heard enough
The more avenues of story you explore in Warp Your Own Way, the more the book feels like a puzzle that you are trying to solve in order to bring Mariner to safety. Interactive fiction has a lot in common with computer games, and as in that medium, there is a delicate balancing act between the reader’s power to control the story, and the author’s responsibility to shape it.
I prefer the reader to be in control
I prefer the author in control
In the case of Warp Your Own Way, this is literally true. Unlike a computer game, the low-tech format of a book gives the reader the power to turn to any page they want. They can read the book in sequence, or leaf through it to find the good ending and reverse-engineer a path to it. Just because the book gives you a certain set of options doesn’t mean you have to go along with them.
For example, you have just used your power to scroll through this review, disregarding the instructions I gave you. Here is your reward.
You can do this, of course, but the resulting experience probably won’t be any fun. Another stroke of genius in Warp Your Own Way is the way it guides the reader towards ways of productively breaking the rules. Like a computer game, you have to work out your own path, but when you do, it will turn out to be the one the author laid out for you, for the purpose they intended.
North’s final insight with Warp Your Own Way is knowing when to take the reader’s choice away. When, for the sake of a satisfying experience, he should take the reins of storytelling back into his own control. By the time this point has been reached, it is obvious that despite the many different storylines we have taken Mariner down, there is in fact only one story, and North is the one telling it. By recognizing this, Warp Your Own Way gives the reader the best of both worlds: the sense of accomplishment that comes from having solved the book’s puzzles, and the security of being guided to a satisfying storytelling climax.
Warp Your Own Way is a clever, delightful book. An excellent Lower Decks story that perfectly captures the show’s setting and characters. And an inventive, surprising use of the Choose Your Own Adventure format that finds new layers in an old conceit. Fans and non-fans alike should seek it out.