The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks Review
Star Trek: Lower Decks finds adventure among the people who keep Starfleet running. Its characters repair equipment, navigate friendships, chase promotions, and occasionally save everyone while their superiors are otherwise occupied. Making those experiences funny, emotionally credible, and recognizably Star Trek requires considerable artistry. Megan Treviño’s The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks pays homage to that work.
Published by IDW, the 344-page hardcover brings together character studies, development sketches, environments, and commentary from the artists behind the Paramount+ animated series. Introductions from Mike McMahan and Barry J. Kelly establish the creative context, but the drawings carry much of the story. They explore how decisions about faces, uniforms, starships, and rooms turned an ensemble of junior officers into people worth following through epic space adventures.
Animation makes every visible detail a choice. Someone decides what a corridor looks like, how a character holds their shoulders, and which expression signals the difference between enthusiasm and impending panic. The fast pace of a Lower Decks episode moves viewers so quickly that they may not notice the intricacies of the artistry. This book gives fans a chance to pause.
The early character designs are particularly valuable because they make character development a visible journey. Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford didn’t arrive fully formed. These explorations invite readers to consider how changes in proportions, expressions, and silhouettes shape our understanding of a personality, and how those choices created the crew fans fell in love with.
Boimler offers a particularly useful connection between character and design. In “I, Excretus,” he becomes obsessed with achieving a perfect score in a Borg simulation. His ambition carries him well beyond the point where most people would consider the exercise sufficiently complete. Capable, anxious, and determined, Boimler brings joy as his overly ambitious inclination to prove himself to his crew and Starfleet matters so much.
His visual characterization must accommodate all his emotions. The audience needs to recognize the nervous junior officer and believe in the competent person emerging from beneath the nerves. Seeing character artwork alongside memories of those scenes makes the drawings more meaningful. Expressions and posture help establish the emotional conditions under which the humor works.
The same consideration applies across the ensemble. Mariner’s confidence and resistance to authority, Tendi’s enthusiasm, and Rutherford’s affection for engineering require distinct visual performances. Their uniforms establish membership in a common organization. Their faces and gestures establish individuality. The artists give the actors and writers a visual vocabulary that lets those differences register immediately.
Treviño also gives the series’ environments room to matter. Following sections devoted to the principal characters, senior officers, and the Cerritos, the book proceeds through all five seasons, with artwork representing every episode. That breadth lets readers appreciate the sustained effort behind the show, including places and designs that pass all too quickly when streaming.
“Hear All, Trust Nothing” offers a particularly satisfying intersection of memory and craftsmanship. The Cerritos visits Deep Space Nine, bringing the crew into the orbit of Kira, Quark, and Morn. Mariner’s previous service aboard the station gives the visit a personal connection, while the familiar locations offer viewers their own reunion.
The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks covers Quark’s bar, Ops, Boimler happily carrying his Quark’s Bar merch, and alternative treatments of Kira, including sketches of her in a Starfleet uniform. Those alternatives are precisely the kind of material that makes a production art book worthwhile. They expose choices that the finished episode necessarily conceals. A familiar character’s appearance becomes a question to resolve, with implications for continuity, identity, and the audience’s understanding of where that person’s life has taken them.
The background work also rewards attention independent of character recognition. The Ferenginar Historic Public Library gets a spread that lets readers examine the setting at a scale television rarely allows. Such environments make the universe feel inhabited. Architecture, furnishings, and color suggest a culture before anyone explains it. Even a setting built to support a joke requires someone to think through how that world works.
For aspiring artists, the inspiration lies partly in seeing the distance between exploration and completion. An early drawing has value even if it doesn’t become the final design. It helps define the problem, test an approach, or reveal something that needs further work. Readers can see creativity as a practice involving revision and collaboration. That makes the finished artwork more impressive and makes Lower Decks feel even more approachable.
My main technical criticism concerns the paper. The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks would benefit from better paper. In an art book, the physical presentation forms part of the experience. These are pages meant to be studied, revisited, and shared. Higher-quality stock would give the collection a physical presence that better matches the care evident in its contents. The artwork deserves that investment.
With The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks, Treviño has assembled a rewarding companion to a series that made room for people who don’t frequent the bridge. The book extends that attention to the artists whose decisions helped make those characters believable. Fans will relish a deeper look at familiar characters and places. They will also see the imagination, patience, and judgment required to create them—and have good reason to watch the episodes again with closer attention to what actually fills the frame.
IDW provided The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks for review. Images courtesy of IDW unless otherwise noted.
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