Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 Finale – "Old Friends, New Planets"
Summary
- Star Trek: Lower Decks highlights the presence of seat belts on Starfleet ships, raising the question of why they aren't used more frequently by bridge crews.
- While seat belts have been seen in some Star Trek projects, their usage is limited, despite being a common safety feature in modern vehicles.
- The lack of seat belt usage on starships is likely due to filming logistics and the desire for dynamic action scenes, rather than a lack of in-universe justification. However, Starfleet officers should consider using seat belts more often.
Star Trek: Lower Decks showed that Starfleet ships have seat belts, but, for some reason, starship captains and crews seem to rarely use this common safety feature. Since Star Trek: The Original Series began in 1966, starship crews have been getting tossed around the bridges of their starships. In the 21st century, even the most basic cars have seat belts, so why don't advanced starships of the far future have them? Starfleet ships are equipped with inertial dampeners that prevent the crew from being flattened every time the ship goes to warp. However, these don't seem to be very effective when the ship gets hit by a weapon or encounters a spacial anomaly.
In Star Trek: Lower Decks season 4, episode 10, "Old Friends, New Planets," disgraced Starfleet cadet Nick Locarno (Robert Duncan McNeill) gathers the ships and crews he has been assembling all season into his new Nova Fleet. Nick claims he has assembled the "first totally independent, unaligned fleet in the Alpha Quadrant" as a way to "liberate" lower-level officers across the galaxy. Locarno kidnaps Lt. Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), mistakenly believing that she would be on his side. While Mariner tries to work against Locarno from within his shielded base of operations, Captain Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) and the crew of the USS Cerritos work to rescue Mariner.
