And we’re back. A few weeks behind, but we’ll make do. Much Ado About Boimler is… Fine. Just fine. This show still isn’t clicking with me, but they’ve done a good job at toning down the parts I find most grating.
The title of this episode… I really like the cadence of it. But it isn’t really a particularly good fit for the episode. Nearly any of the Boimler-heavy episodes could’ve carried the title better. Boimler’s consigned to the B-plot this week, and while it’s the funnier of the two plot-halves, it’s a fairly modest role.
Every episode of Lower Decks is a continuity-fest, squarely targeting old-school fans and rewarding them for their obsession with trivia. But this one feels particularly heavy-handed on that front. I’d be upset about this, but fortunately, the story manages to be fairly solid in spite of it. The command staff are all sent off on a dangerous black ops mission, leaving the Cerritos in the care of a “babysitter captain”. This is a very straight-up whole-plot-homage to the seminal TNG episode “Chain of Command”, and one of my two disappointments this week is that somehow they managed not to bother doing a “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!” reference. Unlike “Chain of Command”, the episode follows the Cerritos exclusively, rather than primarily focusing on the black ops team. One gag I rather like is that we get basically no details about the mission that has taken the captain, first officer, and security chief, and the one of two we do are incongruous and actively undermine the idea of them being on a high-stakes high-danger mission.
Mariner is incredibly down on the idea, even referencing Jellico, until it turns out that their babysitter captain is another of her Old Friends From The Academy. Ramsay makes Mariner temporary first officer, but Mariner immediately starts fucking up simple tasks in embarrassing ways. Also, there’s a planet whose people look like anthropomorphic axolotls. When the Rubidoux misses a rendezvous, the Cerritos tracks it down and finds it out of power. Assuming they’ve just broken down, Ramsay sends her crew to restore power while she and Mariner look for the Rubidoux’s crew. They find them traumatized and cowering in a storage bay, warning that Rubidoux is infested by a spaceborn lifeform that feeds on energy. Ramsay is unable to reach her crew in time to stop them restarting the engines, and glowing tentacles quickly start to tear the ship apart – in the episode’s central visual easter egg, the creature that finally emerges from the wreckage of the Rubidoux looks to be the same sort of “space jellyfish” as appeared in the TNG pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint”. Fortunately, now that there’s an actual crisis, Mariner snaps back into her usual hypercompetence, quickly orchestrating a rescue by having Rutherford beam the crew to safety with a transporter improvement he’s been testing.
And here, I’m a little disappointed. Because all of Mariner’s mistakes felt like they were born out of insecurity. And I was really hoping this would lead to an admission that while she’s great in a crisis, when she’s got time to think about what she’s doing, Mariner has some sort of anxiety issue that affects her ability to handle mundane tasks – that her irresponsible attitude is really covering for her not being able to handle the “ordinary” pressure of higher-level routine. But no. She’s been fucking up deliberately in harmless-but-embarrassing ways because she’s afraid Ramsay will promote her, because she likes being Lower Decks and is too cool and hip and rebellious to want career advancement.
So basically the exact same thing as when she insulted the admiral’s speech impediment last time. Grr.
Anyway, about that transporter improvement? That’s what kicks off our B-plot, the one that is, in fact, About Boimler. In his zeal to impress the babysitter captain, Boimler agrees to be the first to try Rutherford’s transporter improvement. But it goes wrong, leaving Boimler “out of phase”, though in a way that Rutherford insists is purely cosmetic: he glows, sparkles, and emits a loud hum (The same fate befalls the Rubidoux crew upon their rescue, and is eventually cured off-screen). Rutherford is able to fix the hum, but the visual effects persist, and the doctor has him sent off to Division 14, an elite medical team who handle special cases at “The Farm”, allegedly a sort of health spa.
Division 14 is coded very transparently as evil. Their ship is a terrifying black monstrosity that emerges from a dark storm cloud in space. The doctor commanding the ship is an alien of the same race as the helmsman who replaced Checkov in the Animated Series, wearing a uniform that’s a bit super-villainish. He speaks in ominous, stentorian tones and occasionally breaks into evil laughter. Tendi accompanies Boimler to The Farm, on account of she’s genetically engineered a dog, named “The Dog”. She keeps failing to notice that The Dog is, in fact, a terrifying abomination, who, despite looking like a golden retriever, occasionally displays frightening abilities such as shapeshifting and doing a sort of Silent Hill kind of “flipping all its joints around backwards and climbing up the wall like a spider”. This is one of those episodes where everyone is okay with genetic engineering in principle and only objects when someone makes a terrifying abomination, as opposed to all the other times when humans have an absolute shitfit over genetic engineering even in principle.
On the ship, they meet a variety of freaks, mostly various degrees of references to ’90s Trek. The most straightforward is a giant salamander who they assume had once been human. The de facto leader of the freaks, an officer in a DS9-style uniform whose body is aging in different directions, warns him that there is no Farm, and this ship is really a prison where Starfleet hides its embarrassing abominations (Possibly the fact that his uniform is a generation out of date is meant to indicate how long he’s been there?). He plots mutiny, and though Boimler joins in their chant of solidarity (Which, sadly, is not “One of us! One of us!”), it’s no surprise when they immediately cut to him ratting them out. The captain deals with the impending mutiny by… Locking them all in the room where they already were? But it’s also a room that has an airlock they can open? I don’t know. The “freaks” decide to airlock Boimler, and his case is not helped when he suddenly pops back into phase, thus not even being a “freak” himself any more. But when they open the airlock, Boimler tumbles out harmlessly to find they’ve arrived at The Farm, which is indeed the idyllic resort hospital they were promised. The captain apologizes for how long the trip took, and muses that they really ought to paint the ship a cheerier color. Then he does another big evil laugh, before clarifying that’s just how he laughs.
Tendi says a fond farewell to The Dog, who she doesn’t think deserves any of this, being Just an Ordinary Dog. The Dog tells her it’s okay and wishes her well before flying away, leading to the pretty good punchline that Tendi knew about The Dog’s abilities this whole time, but, being Orion and never having met a dog before, didn’t realize anything was odd about them. The Dog reveals that she, on the other hand, did know that she wasn’t an ordinary dog, and was just being polite. In the coda, Tendi meets a real dog and is grossed out when it licks her.
This episode was inoffensive, and the punchline about The Dog was pretty solid. And for an episode full of freaks, it surprises by not leaning in on the Tod Browning angle. The only real issue for me this week is that it leaves me pretty much entirely cold. Just was not able to elicit much of an emotional reaction in me. So, what, is that the mode for this show now? Offensive or Boring?
continuing the you and me have opposite tastes in Star Trek (and probably by extension sci fi in general). This is the first episode I’d give a failing grade too.