Is Lower Decks Literal Canon? 

I always imagined the series is a future Mariner telling stories to a group of new cadets. Captain Boimler keeps complaining "I did not cry THAT much!"

I've always seen Lower Decks as the retellings the characters give down the pub after the fact.

"Exaggerated canon" has always been my personal explanation, too. If Lower Decks were played straight as a live action 90's Star Trek show, it would probably be similar to TNG, VOY & DS9 but with some lighthearted humor here & there. Like the first two seasons of "The Orville."

If an Enterprise can encounter something strange new and dramatic every week and no one questions it, I'm okay with the Cerritos encountering something odd, unrealized, and comedic each week. Great video as always.

Honestly, the events on Lower Decks are no more crazy than say, running into an alternate universe that makes crews of starships become the cast of a musical, going warp 10 "evolving" you into a salamander, a seemingly entirely human crewmember "de-evolving" into a spider monster, meeting Space Abraham Lincoln or parasitic aliens taking over several admirals who are then never mentioned again. Some Star Trek stories are just crazy, no matter the medium. It's just part of the franchise, and we love it!

speaking of the comics, Shax gets his own one shot set during the middle of a major story arc. It's stylized in the Lower Decks style and features his more animated personality, but it's ending is directly tied to the next issue which goes back to the normal style, and even features proof of his deeds in the background. Not sure how much this adds to the point of the video, but I thought it was worth pointing out

I think the best way to think of Lower Decks is by thinking of the as crew reports from people, exaggerated in some places, simplified in others.

"Exaggerated canon" is how I always headcanon'd _Star Trek V._ It was a story Scotty told a gathered crowd in Ten Forward off-camera during "Relics."

Maybe what we see is historical docu-comedies consumed by the far future class that rightfully venerates O'Brien as the most important person in Starfleet.

My headcannon/speculation was always that the show would end with Mariner IRL retelling the stories to new cadets or someone as obvious exaggeration. Like a more serious Boimler eould come up and say something like "you know it didnt happen like that" and Mariner responding "I know, but you know I learned to tell stories from Klingons. It makes it more entertaining..." And the show would end.

I think "same story, different story teller" is how I would reconcile things. If a Lower Decks episode were to be replayed as an episode of DS9 - somehow - we would get a familiar, but very different product.

I think we ought to extend this "stylized retelling" perspective to *every* Star Trek series. Every show is canon, but it's also a fictional world that's reinvented with every new iteration, with different sensibilities, budgets, and styles. If we relax how seriously we take every moment we see on screen, we'd find it a lot easier to make this half-century-old franchise coherent and enjoyable

The badge dark outer edge in the live action was a real life representation of the dark lines used to draw the badge.

A good interpretation might be that Lower Decks is specifically Mariner's retelling of events. Given the common use of logs as a framing device in Trek, we can assume that this is the logs of Beckett Mariner. That said, the unlikely coincidences to make things so comedic all on one ship could easily be changed to making things dramatic and applied to any Enterprise.

I’m fine with it as canon. It’s dialogue tempo is obviously much faster and zippy. But the live action shows frequently get pretty goofy and slap stick so in terms of tone it’s not really that much of a stretch.

How could it be less canon than Spock's Brain, Plato's Stepchildren, Up the Long Ladder, Move Along Home, that Enterprise episode where Phlox did a genocide? Life is not any one genre and neither is a good show. Comedy moments absolutely work. Pick any two Voyager episodes written by different people. The characterizations there are very likely to be far more different than those between Lower Decks and live action. (Also lots of stuff happening to one ship is ... standard Star Trek stuff seen in every other series? Not sure why that is suddenly unusual now)

I mean what you gotta consider for a lot of this is - it has to be stylised because it's animation. You can't do scene-blocking or shot composition the same as you could in TNG, just in the animation style, say. Everything would look static and wrong in a way that it simply doesn't in live action. But because you gotta make the movements and stuff more exaggerated, you need the vocal performances and writing to match that so you don't have dynamic, bouncy characters reading their lines in a way that clashes with that. Essentially the conclusion I drew from the crossover is - everything in TLD happened exactly as it happens in the show, people just spoke slightly slower and moved slightly less. Cuz those are the only things that change about Boimler and Mariner when they transition into live action, their personalities and actions stay basically the same - the performance the actors give just suits the medium they're being recorded in.

That's been my philosophy for every Trek series. The events of TOS looked like advanced technology inuniverse but could only look like 60s tv props in real life. So in my mind, I'm not looking at a cardboard box covered in tin foil, I am looking at a super computer represented by a cardboard box covered in tin foil.

Reminds me of military stories. If I remember an incident in the desert, I remember basically what happened to the best of my ability. If I'm telling it as a serious story, it's like one of the movies. Real serious, fairly accurate, reused props, and plenty of lens flare. If I'm telling the same story after a few beers, yeah, that's coming out Lower Decks style. Lower Decks actually feels more realistic than most other Star Trek, but then they slap a comedy filter over it and let it run.

Older treks all had silly moments with various Space Nonsense but it was happening to top of the line crews. Like the Enterprise in all of the various forms is the literal flagship of the federation. And they get musicals, tribbles, a takeover by the hologram of Doctor Moriarty. Trek is silly enough for Lower Decks to be canon as is, even unimbelieshed, with a smaller and less top of the line crew Also as for Shaxs... The Shaxs' Best Day comic should be required reading

I think there is enough room in Star Trek for a ship full of eccentric weirdos and what Lower Decks does is acknowledge how weird and odd Star Trek is and has fun with it. Seriously, they even call it out in a few episodes like the one about Voyager where the joke was that everything in the episode happened in the other series. As for Shax his behavior change isn't that unusual. The man depicted in the cartoon is a bombastic loud man who knows when to turn it off and go into action when it matters for the crew. He never seems like the type of guy who would entirely let his hot headed nature get to him when its an important mission like what's in the comics.

You know if lower decks is canon then we have every chance to pull a Shax with Shaw

For reference, the black outline you see around certain objects in both the live action and the animated versions of Lower Decks characters, is actually something you see a lot of in early, cel-shaded cartoons due to the process of making them. It's a graphical artifact from production, not an intended look. The way I understand it, animating cel-shaded toons involved hand-drawn characters and scenes on multiple sheets of clear plastic material, similar to that used in an older, light-based, non-computerized projector. One sheet was the background, one sheet had the characters, another sheet had the visual effects, etcetera. The way the animator created motion was to slide one sheet past the others. Different sheets would be used for different poses, different backgrounds, etcetera. A lot of cartoon characters and objects from the era had the same black outline, it's just that the low-resolution scanners of the era made it look non-existent. Therefore, it looks right when viewed in an era-appropriate resolution, but when viewed in a higher resolution (like, say, 1040p versus 144p, high definition versus standard definition) you get that black outline. It's pretty much non-existent in the modern era of CGI except for the few cartoons and anime that are still cel-shaded, like Lower Decks. A good example of this is Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS). Viewing TAS on a modern PC or TV, you can clearly see the stars sliding past one another in any of the scenes where the Enterprise is at warp. Speaking of which, TAS is a more serious animation than Lower Decks and is much closer to its' counterpart live-action series (that'd be TOS) when it comes to action, crew shots, etcetera, as to how appropriate the crew is with regards to their behaviors in any given situation. The biggest difference is that the animators were able to do a lot more (albeit with less detailing) due to it being a cartoon, such as the first chronological appearance of the holodeck (recreation deck).

The way I see it, Star Trek in general is a Docu-Drama, and Lower Decks in particular is a Docu-Comedy.

Nothing that happens in it is too insane, the people function as actual people, even if we get to see more of their eccentricities than we do of live action characters.

Short answer is. They literally did have crossover episode with Strange New Worlds! As for the tone, it is still point of debate if it is simply weird timeline version like for example this musical episode, what is entirely possible. Or if it is just matter of the presentation. Lower Decks simply focus on weirder events when Picard on more serious ones. But weird things always did happen in Trek. Lower Decks can be as canon as TOS is.

I was not aware they did a crossover episode. that's fucking hilarious

I realise the question of whether something counts as canon is something we fans have a history of obsessing over, but do we really need something to be part of the official wider story to enjoy it as much as we do? For me personally, LD is great whether the higher-ups acknowledge it or not 😊

I like the theory that these are exaggerated cannon, but to say that all of these events happening to THIS SHIP are statistically unlikely seems to ignore precedent set by other Star Trek shows; Federation ships are always encountering strange phenomena and assorted problems, with the titular ship usually surviving, and guest ships often not. But Lower Decks suggests this does happen more regularly (Poor Ron Emmanuel Docent, Jr.), although it's noted that among it's class, the Cerritos does seem to get in more than it's fare share of scrapes (Although, as we've seen, there are in-universe explanations, Star Fleet is considering promoting Carol Freeman because she's "good at her job" and thus gives her a bit more responsibility, such as Project Flyby, which is derived from her experiences). I'm not saying every Starship has a time travel experience, but TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY all had multiple, with TOS even experimenting using time travel as a research tool... good thing they shut that down fast. It's not implausible to say that, say, 5-10% of all large Star Trek ships have had some kind of time travel shenanigans by the end of their service, even if it's something as mundane as being tossed a week forward or back in time. I'm not saying Q's visited every ship in the fleet, but he did visit DS9 AND Voyager; is it so hard to imagine he's slumming with the Cerritos?

Since Discovery and Picard, most fans have defined their own canon.

Given how much of the events in Lower Decks are pulled directly from established Star Trek canon, I actually think it's a lot easier to tie into the canon than people give it credit for. Nothing that happens in Lower Decks is inherently more absurd or unrealistic than anything in the other shows, it's just shown from a perspective that takes that stuff less seriously.

If Voyagers Warp 10 amphibians are canon.....

Or each show is, essentially, as retold by the main character; TOS is Kirk's tellings (probably TAS too, though that's to people who've heard his TOS stories), TNG is Picard (which is why everything is generally "stuffier"), DS9 is Sisko telling the tales (but maybe its Jake telling that one), Voyager is Janeway, etc... LD is Mariner's retelling. Across the series, the facts are true- but how they are recounted flavor the stories.

I love that Lower decks shows off some of the more heartfelt moments amongst the crew, the pure joy Shaks has when he finally gets to eject the warp core, the inter personal bonding, and the idea that security have a secondary duty of helping unwind

My Sister works on Lower Decks. I forgot what I was going to say about this, but I will comment this anyway as a brag

Honestly, Ric, I hadn't given it much thought beyond knowing it was canonical. That's an interesting take, and I love the part of your conclusion where you said (paraphrasing here) each person has their own head canon so it'll be different for each fan as to how it's to be interpreted. I was thinking much the same thing as you were saying it, much more eloquently than I have here, obviously. I appreciate your work, geek-brother. LLAP

This is indeed a good question. My first answer would be yes because although the show is an animation, it uses the same material as established Star Trek canon ie callbacks from classic characters as well as the voices used. Yes, it is literally canon. Now, that being said there are elements that keep it wacky and fantastical as an animated comedy should, and that might take away from the live-action counterpart of the franchise. In terms of the ships...it would be nice to see the California-class in live-action Trek.

I love that Animation allows older characters to be played by original actors without being forced to age the characters.

Thanks for making a video about what's on all our minds. Very fun

That weird power walk is most definitely a thing in real life. I don't know what it's called, but I saw an old lady walking exactly like that on a state park trail as I drove by.

Georgiou's return will be her battling Badgey in a major battle between humanity and AI... ;)

Fun fact it's implied that mearner was stationed on ds9 off screen so it makes me wonder what she might have done on ds9 examples helping dax move odos furniture around, helped Quark make his advertisement, and helped encourage mourn to wack quark with a bar stool.

I agree with others saying the events aren't all that weird. But the way people talk, move, and act definitely seem to be cartoony. And I have trouble thinking the genre savviness or real life references would fit. I would take it like this: a description of what happens in the show is canon, but you may see things that were overdone.

I think it ultimately comes down to: "Is everything after Enterprise canon?". This the real heart at the matter and what truly divides the fan base, both on this question and Star Trek itself.

Have you considered the possibility of the opposite? What if Lower Decks is the 100% canonical one, but all other shows are toned down official reports? Where they redact and censor things that might put the federation in a bad light?

I completely agree with your perspective, and that of some of the comments, and I *really* hope it becomes the cannon explaination- It's a retelling of events that is somewhat exaggerated. I have little to no issue with the number/significance of events because I can easily see the Cerritos and lower decks cast as another one of those 'exceptional' crews and ships, which is the *reason* we are being told this story. If you look at TNG or especially Voyager we also see a similar number of similarly significant events so I don't have a particular issue with this crew also being an exception to an exception in terms of the frequency of insane happenings. Where I do think some of the things should be toned down are events that are too comical for the situation (i.e. Shax ejecting the warp core, in battle, with casualties, and everyone cheering him on) or *maybe* some of the actual events that are a bit too far fetched like in the Voyager episode where they basically have mini retellings of half the wacky things that happened in VOY, perhaps instead they had a the "Tuvix" incident happen again but the rest of the stuff either nearly happened or was exaggerated because they were already on Voyager. I'm *really* hoping they go this route because it would allow me to fully welcome Lower Decks into cannon and mesh it with all other Trek super well. It would also help account for any inconsistencies in the lore, and could even be used to help clarify lore in the universe too.

The captains log was supposed to be the framing device for the show, right? Star Trek is basically a dramatic reenactment of the events recorded by the captain in their log. So, maybe Lower Decks is a comedic reenactment of some captains (or ensigns) log, instead of dramatic. For the pedantic, you could call most Trek a primarily dramatic adaptation with comedy secondary, and LD as primarily a comedic adaptation.

An insightful view, which matches nicely to my personal view that ALL Trek can be seen as a "dramatic recreation" - that events generally happen but not necessarily EXACTLY as shown. So the actors, the sets, the props, etc. are all approximations of events. With some stories, sets, and actors being less approximate than others.

I think it brings to the fore the unspoken and invisible extra character: the narrator. Each trek installment is a story about trek to us, the audience. And if you imagine live action trek being "stories" about the events told by someone like a journalist or historian, then LD is more like stories told by your drunk friend who swears they were there when it happened.

Wonderful breakdown and explanation. This is a great question for Star Trek Lower Decks.

My personal head cannon, is that all treks are in fact plays put on by people in their period, about real events that happened to them, and the special effects upgrade with time because each time they have more information to add to the halodeck. Lower Decks is basically Drunk History of its time.

To a certain degree I've always loved the way the Battletech animated show was worked into the setting: It's also an animated kids show there.

Love this. Also now I have to get that comic

I like the idea that it's effectively historical fiction - a retelling of events that did actually happen but dialed up to be more comedic.

A really cool end of show plot twist would be to have it all be Mariner talking at Boimler's funeral to a bunch of lower deckers, because she finally grew up a bit and he got too bold in a heroic moment.

So my headcannon is that Lower Decks takes place in a reflection dimension that is animated, similar to how the musical episode in Strange New Worlds mentioned that the music came from a dimension in which everything was a musical. And so what I mean by reflection Dimension is that it's a dimension that for all intents and purposes completely mimics the main canon Star Trek dimension, but just happens to be one of the infinite dimensions that is animated. So everything in this dimension has animation physics and comedy, but in broad strokes mimics the main timeline, and any changes in one dimension reflects in the other. Kind of like how I imagine the musical dimension that SNW tapped into was simply a dimension that mimicked the main timeline but everyone sang instead as just a law of physics. Since these are reflection dimensions characters from either one can easily cross between them with only minor awareness of the difference in physics but most of it just gets automatically translated to the current dimension's laws. It's not a perfect headcannon but it works.

Lower Decks is the best thing that ever happened to Star Trek. I believe it explores and adds to canon.

Now I want to see Lower Decks episodes 'dialed back' to the normal Star Trek level of seriousness.

I think the live action shows are like the official logs where lower decks is either the personal log or people sitting down together and telling a story.

Cerritos is a California class ship. Californians are eccentric compared to other states. Let's just say that Lower Decks is viewed through a Cali-lens and call it a day.

I love lower decks, definitely my favorite new trek show. It feels exaggerated but still grounded in reality, just situations dialed up a tad

Think of it as a retelling of the story, people exadurate when telling a story back, especially after time has passed

I've always viewed LD as a "TV Show" set within the Star Trek Universe, just based on real characters and events and hyped way up. So much so, that some of the guest stars (ie. Riker or Quark etc.) could be the real people popping in for a cameo. Something along the lines of when a big sports star pops into a sitcom to play themself.

LD is my favorite of the post-2009 Treks, by a long shot. In spite of that, I always viewed it as Paramount responding to the Orville by showing what a Seth Macfarlane TNG would _actually_ be like.

Its like Obrien saying about the accuracy of Kor's story telling, essentially boiling down to who cares if its told well, real or not.

I always thought of Voyager in a similar way. What we see in that show is the logs of the ship, not what actually happened. This may not be canon or true but it makes sense and speaks to me.

2:07 What class is the foreground ship?

I love the "prison" for "insane sentient" computers 😀 I'm sure the "real" version would be much more rehab based.

The answer is that the Lower Deckers are always high on alien booze, like the Enterprise crew happened to be that one time. And that's why they see everything in such a goofy way.

The period piece comparison works quite well with Star Trek, like TNG is Downton Abbey, but Lower Decks is Blackadder, both fictional but equally both constrained by setting

Comics Shaxs IS more reserved than in the cartoon, but there also exists a one-shot comic called "Shaxs's Best Day" where he rides a ship, similar to Burnham in the new season of Discovery, minus the environmental suit. Edit: Corrections

This is great, i love clipping the Lower Decks episode of Strange New Worlds. One thing that really annoyed me about Lower Decks is actually the opening, it was so undignified, but as you say, it's exaggerated for comedic effect, just like everything else. It just feels so incompetent, but then, we get that from the description of the California class duties in any case (second contact, other lower tier official duties, etc).

As ever, I'm reminded of the preface to Roddenberry's novelization of ST:TMP, where 'Kirk' cautions the reader that the excitement and hijinks of the Enterprise's original five-year mission has been spiced up in the retelling by the media. That is, it is heavily implied that The Original Series as we have seen it is not entiiiiirely precise to the (yes, fictional) events and personalities, even if the broad strokes of the missions and their historical effects are the same.

Slightly exaggerated but cannon. If anyone thinks comedy is not part of Star Trek's DNA they have not seen some of the best episodes of TOS or TNG. I've always figured that the Klingons, Romulans, Tholians, Gorn, etc. run into almost as many strange things as Starfleet on any given day, they just don't actively seek them out as frequently. That is why even Klingon BoPs have decent sensors and scientific analysis capabilities.

My headcanon for years has been that everything we see on screen, whether it's Lower Decks, TOS, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, SNW, Disco, whatever, is a dramatization of events a la historical documentary. This is why the TOS Enterprise is smaller than the SNW Enterprise, even though it's supposed to be the same ship at a later time in its existence. It's why Pike and Kirk and Spock can have different faces in each iteration. It's even why some storylines can disappear or get dropped (brain bugs, anyone?), perhaps those events are still classified, so there's been no documentary made of them yet. We're not watching the actual events, we're watching historically accurate (in the broad strokes) documentaries of them from sometime in the future from those events. If nothing else, this lets us shrug off small canon discrepancies as artistic license of the documentarian telling that particular story.

I want your view on the TAS series. Regardless of the time it was produced do you perceive it as Canon?

It's canon, Jim. If ST: SNW is canon, so is Lower Decks. We had an episode of TOS where alien strippers stole Spock's brain, a TNG episode where the bridge crew wound up playing Robin Hood's Merry Men, and a DS9 ep with a wish-granting leprechaun. The cartoon might be exaggerated, slightly, but we can take it as an accurate representation of whatever real life is in the prime Star Trek universe. Think of it like this: we're seeing and hearing an account of real events experienced by a crew who consist largely of borderline eccentrics (because Starfleet, being Starfleet, attracts eccentrics and "nerds" as much as it does OCD hyper-competent officer material), but perhaps filtered through a narrator who isn't *entirely* reliable. it's accurate....*mostly.* The crew's attitude may also reflect that the most incredibly unlikely events tend to happen to people who make their living out among the stars traveling to unknown and poorly-understood places, and not only are they pretty much used to it, their level of technology and understanding actually makes it relatively easy to come out the other side unscathed and intact, so they've mostly learned to just roll with it.

I could definitely see the Salt Vampire flashback being an exaggerated amalgamation of the various times Ransom's flings have gotten him or the crew in trouble, rather than him literally meeting the extinct species

I feel that LD is just a little flexible. Like when people tell a slightly exaggerated story of a real-life event. In episode 1, we see Marine slice a big chunk of Boim's thigh off. Now we could say that did happen but maybe Boimler exaggerated the size of the wound.

I like the idea that all the Star Trek shows are shows in the StarTrek universe, made by the Federation/starfleet to inform the general public as to what starfleet is doing.

This is great. Love it

7:10 To be fair, he was _also_ meeting the Emissary and a Legendary Starfleet ... Captain? Flag officer? Admiral? Not sure what Rank Sisko was in that Comic. And then some other legends as well. It makes sense he was more reserved at first.

So this is a great video, because this is how I see not only Lower Decks, but ALL the Star Trek shows and movies. I started forming this viewpoint after the Voyager episode Living Witness, where we're treated to holographic recreations of one of Voyager's escapades from through the lens of an alien race. I realized after watching that viewing the entire canon through a similar lens is a joy. What we're seeing are recreations or re-tellings of the "actual events" of the canon. Why does the turboshaft in Star Trek 5 have so many decks? Because when Bones was telling the story about it, that's how it felt to him, that the turboshaft went on and on forever. Why is Threshold never mentioned again in Voyager? Because Janeway was so embarassed she erased every mention of it from all logs except for the event itself (as that was probably needed for the record). Why is the TOS Enterprise not the same as the SNW Enterprise? We got more accurate plans of it since. Every minor inconsistency in every show and movie is explained away if we view things this way.

It may seem implausible that one crew has so many comedic things happen, but is it any more implausible than one crew saving Earth/the Federation so many times (and sometimes not even pressing charges!).

I've thought this way since the very first episode, I've just never been able to put it into meaningful words. Mind if I just link people to this video whenever it comes up in conversation?

Im still waiting to see candle ghost in a starfleet uniform. He had to have a courtroom episode arguing phantom rights or something.

I'm reminded of Admiral Kirk's preface in the "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" novelization, where he mentions that he and his crew were "painted somewhat larger than life" due to the enthusiasm of "those who chronicled our adventures". I feel like the implication that the original series canon was produced by somewhat unreliable narrators has become more relevant as newer projects redefine the style of the TOS era and play with the continuity (which was always rough).

I look at it like a story I'm sure most American sailors (or their friends and families) know. A sailor is part of a detail, moving munitions from one place to another aboard ship. There's an accident, a missile falls on his foot, breaking one of his toes. The sailor's getting taped up in sickbay when he chief comes down to check on him. "Chief, I was struck by a missile. Put in me for a Purple Heart (U.S. decoration awarded for being injured in combat)?" Chief has a good laugh and wants in on the joke, he writes up the form and passes in on to his LT. Who knows better than to not laugh at his chief's joke. And also decides to pass it up the chain of command. It goes the X.O. and then the Captain. Turns out there's an admiral arriving for inspection the next day. Poor swab gets called in before a Captain's Mast (a disciplinary hearing a step down from a court martial). Admiral tears into him for disgracing all brave service men who earned their Purple Hearts, but dismisses him with only the mildest of punishments. Bulkhead shuts behind him, and he hears gales of laughter coming through it. Did it happen? Sure. Was it really an admiral? Probably not.

A lot of media should be considered an artistic impression, rather than literal image of a world. That also explains retcons and other inconsistancies. I once read an article about something called Scaling Theory in a wiki for a game, which stated that things like travel times, land scale, etc were distorted. The boring bits are cut out in space as well as time, just as you skip the elevators in Star Trek.

On thenote of the general narrative I think, think that the TNG era's habit of having a given episode dedicated to one or more of the ensemble is very well enjoyed when viewing it with this in mind with this in mind Take DS9 as an example "In the Pale Moonlight" and "For the Uniform" are as Sisko remembers them, not as say, how Eddington or Garak might remember ie the view which might portray the same events and conversations as told by them might from them show Sisko as a brutal war criminal from Eddington's view or as a sanctimonious from Garak's view (and I say this as someone for whom Sisko is their favorite captain) but since the episode is focused on him, its all about his growth and change and thoughts and how he reacts to the situation. For more ensemble episodes Ie Sacrifice of Angels, Take Me Out to The Holosuite, Best of Both Worlds (to bring this back to TNG for a bit) its more vague and collectively how the whole crew remember it. Could just be the whole series is as Mariner, Bomiler, Tendi and Rutherford or the other officers remember and tell it in their logs.

The idea that all of this stuff happened to a ship but maybe not to the Cerritos in particular, taps into a thought I always had about the Original Series. Various cop TV shows starting likely with Dragnet (which began as a radio show in '49) would tout that the episodes were based on REAL police cases which and were "dramatizations of real events" . In my head that was the case for TOS. Everyone on the bridge crew were real and accomplished Starfleet officers but maybe served with each other on different ships or at different times. But in that Golden Era of Exploration a Constitution class vessel did in fact run across an alien civilization that fought all wars via computer complete with mandatory execution chambers. Two other vessels in that same time period encountered an alien space craft from outside the galaxy that destroyed whole planets, with one of the ships being lost with all hands on board whilst taking it down. It may not have happened with USS Enterprise, or with Captain Kirk in command, but it happened. The show is a "dramatizations of real events".

Ya, I always assumed it was a little over the top just for fun but that it was canon. Which honestly it deserves to be. While Picard and Discovery did not care at all about the universe they were in Lower Decks does. It respects the world, has inside jokes, the stories are will written, great easter eggs and always gets a laugh. I really wish the group in charge of this little show that Kurtzman actually has noted discontent for was in charge of all of it.

It’s the same thing with Lego Star Wars animated series or specials they may be exaggerated but generally what happens happened

In the battletech fandom, there is a cartoon series that it's been decided is specifically exists as a cartoon within the universe. It's a propaganderised portrayal of events meant to be shown to children. I kind of feel like Lower Decks is a cartoon made in the universe 30-40 years after it is set about a ship that a LOT of shenanigans happened to, but not quite as many as portrayed. Possibly to boost starfleet recruitment numbers as most people will end up working on the lower decks.

A story being retold would also explain the reduced detail. The vast majority of people just don’t care about the details of how ships look or what’s on the PADD, they remember the concepts and feelings.

If we assume that other StarTrek-Shows are retellings of events by captains or officers logs, it is logical that Lower Decks is "based" on personal logs or even oral retellings by the main characters. Therefore the other shows are a lot more like official reports but in Lower Decks personal impressions of events and other character's traits influence the story.

You might also realize that in the comics shanks wasn't in his element. He was with other officers on different ships and different situations where he might have been forced to attempt to be more reserved whereas on the Cerritos he was in an environment where he can feel free to be more himself perhaps. Perhaps a difference in his level of a zuberance can be attributed to inhibition and restraint due to the people and surroundings he was in.

I feel like Lower Decks is Boimler and/or Mariner recounting their story to an old friend. It's told in a jocular manner, with exaggerated personalities as if you are impersonating someone you both know, but the seriousness of some situations shine through.

I wonder if Shaxs' personality might, in part, be akin to the holodeck character/interface/thought-simulation of Dr. Brahms in "The Booby Trap"? Would that make all of 'Lower Decks' a type of Star Trek level AI, used like many people use what we have today, producing a 2-Dimensional, non-interactive art-filtered experience depicting otherwise canonical events, or what may be called in-universe, "events that are relatively accurate within a scant few plausibility units?"

Five-year mission of Enterprise: To boldly go where no man has gone before. Five-year mission of Cerritos: To go in ribaldry where no live-action series dares to go.