Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5: The Acamarians Explained

This article contains spoilers for the latest episode of “Star Trek: Lower Decks.”

“Star Trek: Lower Decks” has once again proven itself the most encyclopedic “Trek” show in the franchise. The animated comedy has long-since earned its reputation as the in-universe show that is most content when it’s dropping a niche “Star Trek” reference, and its final season continues the trend with a trip to underfunded Starbase 80, home of a splinter Acamarian clan.

Who are the Acamarians? We’d forgive you for forgetting, since the alien species only made one “Trek” appearance before showing up on the new episode of “Lower Decks” season 5, and it was back in 1989. The group appeared in the aggressively just-okay “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “The Vengeance Factor,” a season 3 outing that focused on negotiations (facilitated by Starfleet, of course) between a band of rogue Acamarian raiders called The Gatherers and the group’s more peaceful main faction. Chronology-wise, “Lower Decks” takes place over a decade after that episode, and in the intervening years, the Acamarians haven’t exactly become the unified front that was promised by the end of their “Next Gen” appearance.

In terms of Star Trek species, the Acamarians are a pretty underdeveloped one. They appear in just the one episode of “The Next Generation,” and look fairly human aside from a crease in their forehead and some funky costuming. Viewers learn that the main group of Acamarians has known peace for 100 years, due in part to its policy of letting the raiders roam free across the galaxy. The Gatherers, it’s ultimately revealed, basically committed genocide against other Acamarian clans back in the day, but Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) thinks it’s time for the central faction to let them back into the fold — if only to stop their interplanetary disruptions.

The negotiations do work, but only after a royal taste-tester named Yuta (pronounced just like “Utah” and played by Lisa Wilcox) attempts to assassinate the Gatherer representative, revealing herself to be one of just five surviving members of a clan they’d tried to extinguish a century earlier. The episode attempts to make some commentary on post-war reconciliation, but the script isn’t especially sharp or memorable, and its conclusion — Yuta dies, and the others negotiate a truce — doesn’t drive any point it might have home.

Curiously, the Acamarians are given even less consideration in “Lower Decks,” where they’re revealed to be hanging around the fringes of neglected Starbase 80 due to what Nicole Byers’ diplomatic liaison cheerfully calls “an old negotiation hiccup that surrendered half the starbase to their authority.” Mariner (Tawny Newsome) puts it a different way, concluding that “this place is basically controlled by a knife gang.” So how did the Acamarians descend back into savagery after “TNG”? The answer may lie in the canon-questionable game “Star Trek Online,” which reveals that the Acamarian Ruling Council later forced some clans to outer worlds when the planet became overpopulated. The game took place after the events of “Lower Decks,” and players had to help Acamarians with inter-clan trade negotiations.

Despite this sprinkling of newer lore, the Acamarians still remain one of the more roughly sketched “Star Trek” species. In “Lower Decks,” all they actually do is glare at Starfleet while gathering produce in Starbase 80’s bar and food court area. We know a bit about the species’ history, but aside from Yuta, who was vaporized by Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) after he made doe eyes at her all episode, no one in the group seems to inspire empathy or have strongly written motivations. Maybe someday “Star Trek” will dig deep into the Acamarians, but it seems about as likely as poor Starbase 80 getting all of its maintenance requests fulfilled.

New episodes of “Star Trek: Lower Decks” drop Thursdays on Paramount+.