The Big Picture
- The Star Trek: Lower Decks finale reveals the surprising mastermind behind the season's mysterious attacks as character Nick Locarno.
- Locarno, a former member of Nova Squadron, has assembled Nova Fleet using the stolen starships and has a troubled past with the forbidden maneuver that ended his Starfleet career.
- The episode also connects to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Voyager, with Locarno originally considered for Voyager but ultimately replaced by Tom Paris, also played by Robert Duncan McNeill.
In a sneak peek of this week's Star Trek: Lower Decks finale, the mastermind behind the mysterious attacks that have plagued the galaxy all season stands revealed - and it's a character nobody saw coming. Robert Duncan McNeill returns to Star Trek to voice Nick Locarno.
Picking up right where the last episode left off, the new clip deals with the fallout from its shocking revelation. All throughout Lower Decks' fourth season, a mysterious vessel has been attacking starships and stealing them, depositing their crew members on an alien world. In last week's penultimate episode, "The Inner Fight", the mastermind behind the attacks abducted Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), and revealed himself as her former friend - one-time Star Trek: The Next Generation character Nick Locarno. The group of Starfleet cadets Locarno belonged to - as did Mariner, as a so-called "junior member" - was Nova Squadron, but as Locarno reveals to the horrified Mariner, he's now assembled Nova Fleet out of the stolen starships. The years have seemingly been hard on Locarno, but he's keeping his past close to his heart - the Nova Fleet insignia on his jacket is a stylized rendition of the Kolvoord Starburst, the forbidden maneuver that ended his Starfleet career.
Who is Nick Locarno?
He's a character who bridges 'The Next Generation' and 'Lower Decks'...and almost 'Voyager'.
Introduced in the fifth-season Next Generation episode "The First Duty", which is also notable for featuring the first on-screen appearance of Starfleet Academy, Locarno was the leader of Nova Squadron, a group of ambitious Starfleet cadets that also included former Enterprise crew member Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton). After a Nova Squadron cadet seemingly dies in a routine training accident, Wesley eventually confessed that it was the result of an attempted "Kolvoord Starburst", an extremely dangerous and illegal maneuver; Locarno insisted that they perform it, and pressured them all to lie about it afterward. Locarno was subsequently kicked out of Starfleet; he was considered for inclusion in Star Trek: Voyager, but ultimately Tom Paris, a character with a backstory similar to Locarno's, and also played by McNeill, was added to the series in his place. McNeill previously reprised the role of Paris in Lower Decks' second season.
Another member of Nova Squadron, the Bajoran Sito Jaxa, has an important connection to Lower Decks. She was featured in the seventh-season Next Generation episode "Lower Decks", which was the first Star Trek episode to explore the life of Starfleet's rank-and-file; the episode served as the inspiration, and namesake, for the animated series. Furthermore, "The Inner Fight" revealed that she was a friend of Mariner's; her death on a Starfleet spy mission was the root of Mariner's compulsively insubordinate attitude.
Star Trek: Lower Decks' finale will air this Thursday on Paramount+. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates, and watch the clip from the finale below.
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