Star Trek: Lower Decks will return for season 2 this August

The second season of the animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks will officially premiere this summer. During a virtual event in honor of First Contact Day,  Paramount+ announced that season 2 of the comedy will debut on Thursday, August 12.

(For those who don’t know: First Contact Day is in honor of the event depicted in the film Star Trek: First Contact, which established that April 5, 2063, is the day humans first make contact with Vulcans, marking a pivotal moment in space exploration and Trek history.)

Lower Decks is a largely irreverent and occasionally heartfelt comedy that follows the misadventures of a group known as “lower deckers” – i.e. the often unseen support crew – onboard one of the least important ships in Starfleet, the U.S.S. Cerritos in the year 2380.

Ensigns Mariner, Boimler, Rutherford, and Tendi have to keep up with their duties and their social lives, often while the ship is being rocked by a multitude of sci-fi anomalies. The voice cast for the animated series includes Tawny Newsome, Jack Quaid, Noël Wells, and Eugene Cordero. Dawnn Lewis, Jerry O’Connell, and Gillian Vigman are also part of the cast.

CBS released a brief teaser for the series’ second season, which confirms that we’ll be seeing a lot more of Jonathan Frakes’ animated Will Riker.

And that’s not all the Lower Decks news, either. Paramount+ has already handed the series an early renewal for a 10-episode third season, so this will not be the last of our adventures with the Cerritos and crew.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is very much a different sort of show in this franchise. It’s much sillier and more ridiculous than any other Trek property and is aimed squarely at fans of shows like Rick and Morty. But its uncomfortable humor and copious space gore are certainly entertaining and, though it may not ever be mistaken for prestige television, there’s surely space in the franchise for this series.

(Plus, I’m here for animated Riker, and I”m not sorry.)

Are you looking forward to the return of Star Trek: Lower Decks? Sound off in the comments.