Star Trek: Lower Decks voice actor Jerry O’Connell, who voices Commander Jack Ransom, responded to a Star Trek fan claiming that the newly released animated show is not doing so well.
Twitter user StdSucks posted to Twitter, “LOWER DREKS IS SUCH A SUCCESS THAT CBS PUT THE FIRST EPISODE UP ON YOUTUBE FOR FREE. THE RATIO ISN’T GREAT EITHER. #FAKETREK“
They then shared a screenshot of the first episode of Lower Decks having over 650 down votes compared to 1,500 up votes.
O’Connell responded using a number of Star Trek puns. He wrote, “Let’s review the Data. Seems to be for every 40-people who liked, only 1 disliked. That is almost SEVEN OF NINE.”
He continued, “Granted not bullseye but we’re not an Archer here. I would say we are CRUSHER-ING it. Might be time for you to take a Pike. Everything is Chakokay. #LowerDecks“
Related: CBS All Access’ Star Trek: Lower Decks Rotten Tomatoes’ Critic and Audience Scores Revealed
Despite O’Connell claiming Lower Deck is “Chakokay,” the show has a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes from audiences. It currently has a 34% audience score from 268 users with the average rating being 2.12 stars out of 5.
On IMDB, the show fares similarly with a dismal 5.4 out of 10 stars from 1,443 users.
The one demographic that seems to be enjoying the show according to IMDB’s data is females between the ages of 18 and 29 albeit there is a small sample size of only 12 votes.
On Metacritic, the show also performs poorly with the User Score at 2.4 from 36 reviews.
Maybe, the most telling indicator about the show’s struggles is the fact that there just aren’t that many reviews of the show meaning a lot of people didn’t even take the time to watch it.
Not only is the show getting hardly any reviews from users, and the ones they are getting are quite negative, but the show also failed to land an international distributor indicating that even distributors like Netflix, Amazon, and others are staying away from the show.
Showrunner Mike McMahan attempted to explain the lack of an international distribution deal on the coronavirus pandemic.
He explained, “I want everyone in the world to be able to see this show. And I think that, something the internet doesn’t quite calculate into, you know, it’s always a mystery, you’re always seeing like, ‘Oh what is CBS up to?'”
“CBS wants all you guys to see it too. I want to be careful here, because I normally just go radio silent because I don’t want to speak out of turn because this business stuff, the deal-making, is not something I’m involved in. I’m involved in making sure a Trill symbiont is called a symbiont and not a symbiote,” he added.
Finally, he blamed the pandemic saying, “There are, in the works, a way for you guys to watch it. I don’t know the timeline, but the reason you guys don’t know yet is squarely because of COVID… because the timelines for everything we’ve been doing for production have been completely thrown out.”
Interestingly, he then adds, “A lot of what we’re doing [for ‘Lower Decks’] unexpectedly got shifted two months earlier, because they were juggling around schedules and stuff. A lot of the different groups in entertainment — when you shuffle that stuff around, they can’t move as fast as [we in production can].”
What do you make of O’Connell’s comments? Do you think Star Trek: Lower Decks is already in trouble?