Book Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks, Vol. 1: Second Contact by Ryan North

I can confidently declare that Lower Decks is the second best Star Trek series after The Orville. Lower Decks has always been bags of fun with a good emotional core. Now your favourite sci-fi capers are available in handy comic book form!

Second Contact is a compilation of Lower Decks issues #1–6. You get a bunch of stories spread out over 145 pages. The great thing about a comic of a cartoon is that all the characters look identical to their TV counterparts. There's no pesky rights issues to get in the way.

The stories are exactly what you'd expect from Lower Decks. The gang have to deal with aliens, not-too-strange new worlds, and some heavy meta-textual crises. And, yes, it is delightfully meta. There are plenty of call-backs to the show, TNG, and the original animated series. Perfect for nerds like me.

It also introduces some new lore:

Kirk sometimes liked to unwind in his quarters by making a fanvid of his own day. This is canon.

There's also the first(?) appearance of the "Starfleet Corps of Rhetoric Engineers" who, as their name suggests, help provide some much needed exposition for the technobabble.

Oh, and we find out that the noise the transporters make is "SVRRRRRMMMMMM". Which seems about right.

The episodic pacing is nice and there is a genuine laugh-out-loud moment every few pages. It doesn't try to do anything new or innovative with the comic book format - it's pretty much small panels, the occasional bigger art piece, and one double-pager.

On a technical note, the speech bubbles are in text, rather than raster, format - so your TTS should be able to read them aloud.

Second Contact is the sort of comic book which will keep you giggling with glee at the misadventures of lovable misfits.

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy. The book is available to pre-order now - with delivery mid-September 2025.