Star Trek: Lower Decks - Season 2 Review - Part 2

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the second half of Star Trek: Lower Decks' second season. If you'd rather go back to the first block of reviews and read about the first five episodes, then you should click THIS LINK.

Star Trek series often have a big shakeup behind the scenes during their first few seasons... but not this time. They didn't even replace the showrunner! In fact I can't think of much to talk about in this intro so I'll just mention that there'll be SPOILERS for this season and previous Star Trek series, and get on with it.

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Note: I rate episodes on a 1-9 scale, with 5 being around the point where I start losing interest.

Lower Decks - Season 2
2-06	The Spy Humongous		7
Episode: 16 | Writer: John Cochran | Director: Bob Suarez | Air Date: 16-Sep-2021 Captain Freeman has been tasked with arranging a cease-fire with the Pakleds, but is left waiting on their homeworld for a leader with a big enough hat to arrive while a Pakled spy gives Ransom the run-around on the Cerritos. Meanwhile Boimler joins a group of Redshirts working to get promoted quicker while his friends deal with dangerous relics collected by the senior staff. Mariner finally gets sick of Tendi's cheerfulness, driving Tendi to become a furious mantis creature, but Boimler's quick thinking saves her and shows the Redshirts that real Starfleet officers are willing to sacrifice their dignity to get the job done, instead of standing there trying to inspire others to do the job for them One theme that Lower Decks keeps coming back to is that of status, which makes sense seeing as it's all about the people on the lowest rung of the ladder. Characters like Boimler and Tendi want to reach a higher rank, Captain Freeman wants more prestigious jobs, and Mariner's determined to stay exactly where she is. Even the Pakled plot was all about who had the biggest hat. So Boimler's plot about him joining the 'Redshirts' was entirely on brand for the series. The Redshirts club is a little like DS9's Red Squad, as it's made up of officers who believe they're better than everyone else. They are Starfleet, while people like Tendi and Rutherford just work for the organisation. And a crucial part of being better than everyone else is to give speeches and inspire everyone else to do the jobs that are beneath them. It's so obviously not what Starfleet stands for that Boimler doesn't even really learn a lesson here. He just immediately jumps into making a fool of himself to save his friend with a surprising amount of decisiveness and competency. He's never been so Starfleet as he was when he was standing there with a cake all over his head and his arm on fire. To be fair the Redshirts did teach him how to deliver a speech with confidence and then he repaid the favour by giving them a speech about giving their club up. Which they did! Maybe Jennifer's not so bad after all. Plus the Kzin was in the club too and he actually got a speaking role this episode! Speaking of background characters getting more attention, Kayshon got a bit to do this episode in the senior staff's adventure with the Pakleds. One thing Lower Decks is really good at is having something going on outside the windows and the Pakled spy floating the window gave me my first real laugh of the episode. My second real laugh was the ensigns prank calling Armus. They're not really demonstrating humanity's enlightened nature by trolling the poor guy, but Armus sucks so it's fine. Screw Armus! Besides they already showed their enlightened side by making up with Tendi after their argument. They finally got her to stop being fun and optimistic, and it turns out that can be lethal when you're also dealing with a collection of all the crap accumulated from months of Star Trek adventures. They were lucky not to become Redshirts themselves while getting that junk packaged up and sent to the warehouse they store the Ark of the Covenant in. The moral of the story: a starship is a friendship and if you don't realise that then you're at risk of getting sent to clean up after a Pakled takes a crap in one of the airlocks. • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION Boimler's ridiculous padded Starfleet uniform wasn't all that different to the ones the actors wore on the Berman era shows. Even Michael Dorn had padding under his spandex.
2-07	Where Pleasant Fountains Lie		7
Episode: 17 | Writer: Garrick Bernard | Director: Jason Zurek | Air Date: 23-Sep-2021 Boimler and Mariner are tasked with taking an evil computer to Earth, but a shuttle crash leaves them stranded without water or a way to call for help. The computer tries to manipulate them into plugging it into something, showing Boimler that Mariner got him assigned to this mission because she didn't want him to take on a more challenging job. He eventually snaps, stunning Mariner and bringing the computer to the crashed wreck of another ship, but it was all a trick to get the computer to give him the power needed to send a distress call. Meanwhile Billups' mother fakes her death to trick Billups into giving up his virginity and taking the throne of his home colony, but Tendi discovers the deception. Where Pleasant Fountains Lie is an episode about trickery and comfort zones. Boimler got out of his comfort zone when he was assigned to the Titan and he's grown as a result. I mean he hasn't grown that much, he spent a whole episode crawling around in the Jefferies tubes because he couldn't get the doors to open and got his ass kicked by Tom Paris, but he's been the one to save the day two episodes in a row now and he's getting tired of Mariner thinking she's superior to him. It's nice that his short stay on the Titan is still having consequences, even if Mariner's sick of hearing about it now. I suspected that when he snapped and shot Mariner it was all part of a cunning trick, but I also figured she was in on it so I was a bit thrown off when she woke up and assumed he was actually working with the AI. That's cool though, I'm glad they kept me guessing. And I'm even more glad that the two of them never acted like idiots, even after the liquorice and lack of water started to get to them. They just kept doing sensible things, it was awesome. They even Boim'd Jeffery Combs! Meanwhile Rutherford and Tendi had a plot together on the Cerritos, huge shock. Actually they were separated for most of the episode as this was more of a Rutherford and Billups story. Billups actually got an episode! And a backstory! Turns out he's the prince of a ren faire colony, and his real life wife plays his mother! With June Diane Raphael making an appearance on Lower Decks we're now a step closer to having the entire cast of NTSF:SD:SUV:: playing Star Trek characters, and we've finally got the complete set of hosts from the How Did This Get Made? podcast. I thought the story was decent enough, with Rutherford and Billups both getting out of their comfort zone too, and Billups getting back into his in the nick of time. He's not the first Starfleet officer to choose his ship over love or power, but he is perhaps the most chaste. More of a Sir Galahad than a prince, except he's already found his Holy Grail: the giant warp core at the heart of the Cerritos. I suppose if there's anything I can take away from this story, it's that phaser rifles are distinct from phasers because you hold them with two hands. Also it seems kind of disrespectful for the Daystrom Institute to be the place where they store the insane computers, considering it's named after the guy who invented the insane computer in The Ultimate Computer. • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION Recurring Berman-era actor Jeffery Combs has finally gotten to play a role in the Kurtzman-era! That means that his number of roles has increased to 8 (not counting Mirror doppelgangers, Weyoun variants, Prophets, cameos etc.)
2-08	I, Excretus		7
Episode: 18 | Writer: Ann Kim | Director: Kim Arndt | Air Date: 30-Sep-2021 A Starfleet drill instructor arrives on the Cerritos to test the crew, and they don't do well. Fortunately it turns out that she rigged the tests in order to prove their necessity and keep her job, so Boimler keeps his Borg test going to stall for time while the others terrify her into giving them a passing grade by visiting a black hole and bothering a crystalline entity. That... is an unusual title. There have been a few episodes dealing with Captain Freeman's insecurity and her feeling that her ship and crew isn't getting enough respect, but this is the first time their reputation has actually put her in serious danger of losing the Cerritos. In fact everyone nearly lost their positions due to their complete incompetence, and if Lower Decks was more of a goofy Trek parody they would've deserved it. The Cerritos crew aren't actually incompetent though, and we've seen that over and over. They've got their flaws, but a lack of skill definitely isn't one of them, which is demonstrated by Boimler passing a rigged program he wasn't supposed to be able to beat, and then going on to 100% it! Sure he got assimilated and will probably need a bit of therapy, but he stuck with it and saved everyone's jobs. On the other hand, Mariner's used to kicking ass in holodeck programs but here the tables were flipped and she got to be the one who was inept at everything for a change. But that's nothing compared to what she endured during The Naked Time. The character who keeps bragging about how she's seen everything and has the scars to prove it saw more than she ever wanted to see at that orgy and now has some mental scars to go along with them. I know how she feels; I wasn't ready to see Gene Roddenberry's purest vision of Star Trek brought to life in animation either. That is not a suitable use of the crew's likenesses! The gimmick of the episode is that crew are being put through classic Star Trek situations from stories like The Naked Time, Mirror Mirror, Spectre of the Gun, Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock from TOS, and uh Ethics from TNG. I don't remember anything from DS9, Enterprise or Discovery showing up... though I suppose the Borg Queen sort of counts as a Voyager reference. We didn't really get to see the characters face the problems for real however as the tests were rigged. Well, except for Mariner and the horse, that was all her. The way Mariner kept walking into walls and being prevented from being creative reminded me of so many of the overly scripted video games I've struggled with, so I could really relate there. And the points system reminded me of playing Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and getting a report after each mission telling me how much I fell short of a perfect score. We also got a classic Lower Decks reference here, as they dropped the ship into the matter stream from the opening titles! I always thought it was weird how the title sequence shows a series of screw ups, while the crew's generally better than that, but now we know that at least one of the screw ups was deliberate. They were just putting the fear into someone by recklessly diving into dangerous situations... that I guess weren't all that dangerous after all. I mean that other crystalline entity never did get through the Enterprise D's shields. And once again Mariner has come out of a holodeck program with a healthier relationship with her mother. The Enterprise D's holodeck kept malfunctioning and creating sentient beings, the Cerritos' holodeck keeps giving them therapy. I guess because this series is actually able to have characters learn and grow.  • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION I've read that the title is a Space Moose reference. Also the whole episode is a successor to the Animated Series episode Bem, where Kirk and Spock were tested by an alien of the same species (and also failed). This episode was better.
2-09	wej Duj		7
Episode: 19 | Writer: Kathryn Lyn | Director: Bob Suarez | Air Date: 07-Oct-2021 Boimler feels left out when the rest of the crew decides to spend their day off hanging out with a senior officer they're close to. His attempts to join the others all end in disaster so he lies to Commander Ransom that he's also from Hawaii. Meanwhile, on the Klingon vessel Che'Ta, lower decks officer Ma'ah tries to impress his captain enough to be his new first officer. It actually works, but he discovers that he's secretly working with the Pakleds to end the peace between the Klingons and the Federation. Elsewhere, on the Vulcan cruiser Sh'Vhal, lower decks officer T'Lyn has been upgrading the sensors and following her gut, making the other Vulcans feel that she is becoming overly emotional. The captain adjusts course to investigate her readings and the ship finds itself in between the Cerritos and a Pakled ship determined to blow it up. And on a Borg ship the lower decks drones are mostly just regenerating. wej Duj is an even more unusual title! It's the first episode of Star Trek to start with a lower case letter and also the first to be written in Klingon text in the episode itself. It apparently translates as 'three ships' which is strange because the episode is clearly about five ships (with the Borg making a surprise appearance during the end credits). One problem I've had with the series is how it likes to make aliens very... cartoony, but this time around they were absolutely true to the established natures of the different races involved, even though it kind of limited the possibilities for comedy for a couple of the ships. That said, two of the lower decks plots were about a member of the crew acting against their cultural stereotypes and getting punished for it: the very slightly emotional Vulcan and the dishonourable Klingon captain. Telling the stories of three different crews was a fantastic idea and they really did it justice, plus it had the side effect of leaving me with absolutely no clue where the episode was going. I definitely didn't expect it was going to end with dramatic music and the Cerritos finally cutting loose with her weapons. We've seen the ship fire a few shots at Ransom's giant head this season, but here she got into a real fight and kind of held her own. It's funny how this series does space battles better than the current live action series, though I suppose beating the live action series at their own game is kind of Lower Decks' thing. Though weirdly I felt that the story with actual Lower Decks crew was the weakest part of the episode. I definitely wasn't 100% keen on Boimler flying around in Spock's rocket boots and Kirk's shirt, as movie references are so last episode. And the plot of him pretending to be from Hawaii was just trite. We also got a surprise reference to Star Trek VI with the purple Klingon blood. We've seen Klingon blood a few times in the Trek series, both before and after Star Trek VI (they're really into cutting their hands), and it's always been red otherwise, but I guess some people just really like that purple blood. There wasn't a whole lot of chance that episode 9 was going to be as good as the one from last season (Crisis Point), but I kept my hopes up anyway... and it turns out it wasn't! Though the internet seems to disagree with me on that, as everyone loves this story. I liked it too, I just liked it slightly less is all. It was definitely crucial for the overall story, as it reveals who was supporting the Pakleds... right before killing them off. I guess that means this is the end of the Pakled arc then maybe? Other good things: the Vulcan pulling a Spock and delivering "live long and prosper" in way that clearly means "fuck off and die", Shaxs having a meltdown after Boimler mentions Bajor (Rutherford calls him Papa Bear!), the Borg lower decks being 100% what it should be, and Boimler panicking while trying to escape Mariner's holodeck program. I also liked T'Lyn, even though she's such a genius that she single-handedly upgrades the Vulcan ship's sensors and shields... and she's the character the writer cosplays as. She'd be the definition of a Mary Sue if anyone on her ship actually liked her. • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION This is almost the first episode of all of Star Trek where the Klingon characters don't interact with any Federation characters at all (I think The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry got there first). It's also the first episode where we see Vulcans just being Vulcans on their own ship.
2-10	First First Contact		8
Episode: 20 | Writer: Mike McMahan | Director: Jason Zurek | Air Date: 14-Oct-2021 There's some drama on the Cerritos when Mariner tries to sabotage her mother's promotion by leaking it to the senior staff. The ship is sent on a mission to assist the Archimedes in making first contact, but after a freak solar flare + exploding planetoid incident they find themselves having to save the ship from crashing into the planet. To make it through the planetoid debris in time they have to demagnetise the hull, by removing the hull, and Boimler volunteers to be the one to swim down through the dolphin tank to pull the final switch. Meanwhile Mariner is knocked out into space, but she's rescued... by her arch-nemesis Jennifer! The crew save the day and carry out the first contact in the Archimedes' place, successfully! Everything seems to be going well, Tendi's received a better job, Rutherford has fixed his implant, Boimler has finished his banner, and Freeman has decided to turn down the promotion. But then she's arrested for blowing up the Pakled homeworld. Cliffhanger! They finally did Cetacean Ops. People on the internet can shut up about it now! Though now they're probably going to keep going on about wanting to see the rubber duck room instead... and I can respect that. I was ready to facepalm at the whole scene, but it kind of worked I think. Plus it shows that Mariner's grown enough over the season to trust that Boimler can do the job as well as she could! Well okay maybe not quite as good, seeing as he almost drowned, but he did save the the day yet again. And then the beluga whales saved him, because they're Starfleet! You can tell by their uniforms. I really liked how the actual first first contact went great as well. I was worried they were going to screw it up for the sake of cringe comedy, but nope the Cerritos nailed their job here. The episode does a good job of showing where the crew are in their arcs. The lower decks crew definitely isn't ready to move up yet; Rutherford's trying to work around warning messages in his face, Mariner's still a mess and Boimler's making a Captain Freeman Day banner because he thinks it'll make the captain respect him more. But they're able to step up and help the senior staff save the day. We're at the point where the series can make callbacks to itself, with a very familiar shot of the conn officer getting up and pointing at the ship that's flown into to rescue them at the last moment. Except this time it's not the Titan saving the Cerritos, it's the Cerritos saving the Archimedes! It's nice to see the crew be big damn heroes in a way that's absolutely true to their characters. I mean we've seen them do it before, saving California-class ships, but here they're saving a proper Starfleet crew in the proper grey-shoulder uniforms! Deliberately stripping off the hull triggered an 'is this bullshit?' check in my mind, but my brain soon reported that we've seen a hull plate being detached in Enterprise. We've never seen anyone detach the viewscreen though. That was kind of nuts. I guess modern Trek ships wouldn't have a have a reason to as they have a window there. We also got the return of the manual steering column, though in a slightly less ridiculous way than in Insurrection. Lower Decks has no shame when it comes to references, it'll bring back the good and the bad, it don't care, but it does it with love. It also knows its damn stuff. The ship got to fly through rocks on thrusters like in Next Gen's Booby Trap, but here we actually got to see the RCS thrusters firing! Someone in the production crew knew what the yellow shapes on the saucer were for and used them right, for perhaps the first time in Star Trek. Unfortunately the poor Cerritos still got trashed again and now there's no Freeman on board to stop it getting all Sovereign-class'd up in the refit, because she's been framed for planetcide!  The series has made a big impact on Trek canon here by blowing up the Pakled homeworld. Sure the chances of the other series ever visiting Pakled Planet was pretty negligible, but now it's definitely not going to happen. Though now that I think about it, any world that the Pakled settled would be called Pakled Planet.... The episode was full of other shocking reveals as well. We learn that Rutherford's implant has a sinister purpose, Mariner's always mean to Jennifer because she's into her, Boimler was the one who made the Captain Freeman Day banner and not literal children, and Tendi is going to be a Jadzia Dax! Uh, I mean a science officer; she's not getting a symbiont. I liked how we got a tour of Tendi's favourite places of the ship as it reminds us how Tendi has always been working all over the place and was never tied down to sickbay, and it turns out that T'Ana has noticed how multi-talented she is! Also Rutherford and Tendi finally admitted their love... for the ship.  I don't know what's weirder, the fact that Lower Decks pulled off the same jump in quality at the end of the season for the second time in a row, or the fact that I'm not actually surprised. I might have mentioned a few times that the writers of Discovery and Picard don't really have my trust and I'm pleasantly surprised whenever they get something right. The Lower Decks writers, on the other hand, do have my trust. I trust them to develop the characters, I trust them to go too far with the references, and I trust them to stick the landing. Though Sonya Gomez's appearance turned out to be a little bit pointless in the end. Sure she shows us that Next Gen's first proper lower decks character has made it all the way to the captain's chair, but in action she could've been any captain. It did gives us another hint that Captain Freeman served on the Enterprise D during Next Gen however, and it's starting to seem kind of inevitable that we're going to get a flashback at some point. I mean we'd better get a damn flashback! I want to see Ensign Freeman on the Enterprise with her friend Sonya and a teenage Mariner, maybe doing lower decks stuff during a classic episode. • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION Sonya Gomez appeared in two episodes of Next Gen, including Samaritan Snare, which introduced the Pakleds. Unfortunately her purpose in the series was to be Geordi's love interest, to give him a reason to have his sight repaired, and when that plotline was dropped so was she.

CONCLUSION

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At the end of my Lower Decks season one review I said I was a big fan and that I hoped they were going to "continue to fine tune the series in future seasons until it's perfect." Season two is still a fair distance from absolute perfection, but it is a little better than season one I reckon. They've refined it slightly, made the characters a little less one-note, and found ways to incorporate the endless torrent of references a little more organically.

Season one ended with the implied threat of the Cerritos visiting worlds from classic episodes and the series cartooning them up like it did with Beta III and Landru, and I'm glad that didn't happen in the end. Mariner bent the Prime Directive to power-wash some buildings and accidentally turned Ransom into Gary Mitchell, and then they got right back to their typical B-tier Star Trek business. Though TV writers have gotten a lot better at threading themes and character development throughout a season since the 90s, and this is definitely pushing the characters forward... while questioning if they even should move forward. Characters like Freeman, Boimler and Tendi are all chasing promotions and transfers, but by the end of the season they realise they're actually pretty happy where they are. Well okay Tendi does get a transfer to the science division, but she gets to stay on the ship she loves!

Meanwhile Mariner has worked through some of her issues, allowing the series to focus on her other issues for a change. The downside of being comfortable where you are is that you stay behind while everyone else moves on, and the season shows how this has caused her to isolate herself, put up defences and straight up sabotage her friends! She's gotten a little less obnoxious this season though I reckon, because the others are catching up to her in experience and she isn't always the best at everything anymore. She's still mysteriously awesome at things though, and I'm cool with that as I like my Star Trek characters to be competent and skilled; it's a big reason why Trek works for me. Season two has also started mixing up the pairings a little, so she's not always with Boimler all the time, and that helps. Plus I feel like we got a little more focus on the senior staff this year. Not a lot, just enough to let Freeman grow into a more capable captain, give T'Ana a chance to steal scenes, and provide Billups with a backstory. The guy suddenly became an actual character after his episode, it's great.

Man, I love how enthusiastic and alive these characters are, and how friendly and fun the crew is in general. Discovery and Picard have some good actors playing decent characters but they're always too busy with drama to hang out. Everything's always the end of the damn world/galaxy/universe/multiverse in those shows, with the stakes so high that it just becomes absurd. In Lower Decks the stakes can be that the crew might not get into a party, but I care far more about what's happening because I can actually take it seriously. Ironically.

Another problem Discovery and Picard have for me is that they feel a bit like a reimagining of Star Trek, and I struggle to connect them to the universe I'm familiar with. Lower Decks, on the other hand, basically just takes place in a comedically exaggerated version of the Next Gen era where everyone's less stuffy and reserved. It 100% buys into the Star Trek universe in its entirety, all the good, the ridiculous, and the nerdy, so you get a Klingon crew that could've been straight out of DS9, Thaddeus Okona as a DJ, and an accurate depiction of RCS thrusters. Boimler even went swimming with the whales in Cetacean Ops! Some people wonder if the series is canon, and I think the answer has to be 'yes'. It's all of the canon, all of the time. It's the animated version of the Star Trek Encyclopedia.

But is it funny? Does this comedy series ever make me laugh out loud at its jokes? Yeah it does, but only maybe a couple of times an episode. It puts a big grin on my face though, and I didn't laugh all that much at Star Trek: The Next Generation either, so I don't see it as a problem as long as I still enjoy the series. Lower Decks could be better, it could definitely be funnier, but I almost hope it doesn't improve as right now it's getting dangerously close to being my favourite Star Trek series and that's just weird. Plus I already feel like I kind of don't deserve it. How does this series even exist?

I'm still annoyed they turned Kayshon into a puppet though.


My top three season 2 episodes:

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1. First First Contact (8)
2. We'll Always Have Tom Paris (8)
3. wej Duj (7)

Lower Decks is making a habit of ramping up in quality towards the end of the season. I hope it never stops.


Bottom three season 2 episodes:

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8. I, Excretus (7)
9. Mugato, Gumato (7)
10. Strange Energies (7)

These aren't really the three worst episodes, just my three least favourite, so I can't really list all the reasons why they're terrible I'm afraid. Because they are also good.


Next time on Star Trek: Lower Decks:

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What do I want from season 3? I guess we'll be getting a new captain, at least for an episode or so, so I hope they're not a weirdo with a riding crop. I'd say I hope T'Lyn shows up again but that seems pretty inevitable. I hope they keep experimenting with ideas like the three plots on three ships, and I hope they keep adding some drama into their comedy.

And I want them to rescue Tom Riker already!

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NEXT EPISODE

I'll be getting back to Babylon 5 soon, but next on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm returning to Battlestar Galactica, with the 2003 miniseries!

Thanks for reading by the way. I'm sure you don't need me to encourage you to leave a comment but I'll do it anyway. Go on, leave a comment.