And we’re back to this. As one would expect after a break, we ease back in with a low-key episode. There’s not much that is of major plot-interest: we set things up but don’t take them very far. There’s a flashback to Gwyn’s conception, the Diviner breaking the rules of his people by creating her to ensure he has a successor if he doesn’t live long enough to complete whatever ambiguous mission for salvation he’s seeking the Protostar for. We learn that the Protostar has been lost for more than seventeen years – The Diviner had already been searching for it for some time when Gwynn was conceived. And her peoples’ language is encoded in the ship’s classified records. But the biggest reveal is something we only get the first hint of: the ship was fully crewed at some point before its crash, with Chakotay as its captain.
The real meat of the episode, rather, is Dal obsessively replaying the Kobyashi Maru test in order to prove to himself that he’s fit to be captain. This episode is in its way the most Lower Decks that Prodigy has been so far: very heavy on the love notes to the fanboys. We start out with Dal playing a hopefully-neutered version of that “Put the ball in the hole” game from the TNG episode “The Game”, and the Kobyashi Maru test set aboard the Enterprise-D, with a crew of the finest stock footage. Rene Auberjonois, James Doohan, Leonard Nemoy and Nichelle Nichols appear as Dal’s crew in the form of audio clips (It is logically unsound that Odo, a security officer of the Bajoran provisional government, is one of the character options, but I do not give a damn and neither do you). Gates McFadden recorded new dialogue, making her the only one who sounds remotely realistic (I fully understand why, but there is something deeply unsettling about the fact that voice clips were used for actors who are no longer with us… And Nichelle Nichols). This has to be deliberate, right? I mean, they must have made a choice to make everyone sound super janky and “Return of Chef”? Because I’m sure that the technology to stitch together audio clips better than this is a thing which exists in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two.
I think it kind of undermines the episode a bit that Dal ultimately does beat the test only to lose in an extremely cheap way: after sixty-several attempts, he tries a wild, reckless strategy to stop the first wave of Klingons, only to be confronted by an additional ship – okay, fine. That seems in keeping with the parameters. But he beats that ship by (accidentally) having Spock beam him directly aboard (The assumption, I guess, being that the ship has just finished decloaking and thus doesn’t have its shields up yet), where they defeat the entire crew in hand-to-hand combat… And then Dal puts his feet up on a console, accidentally firing a torpedo at the Enterprise. Spock gives him a speech that, honestly, doesn’t really seem to fit the lesson Dal was meant to be learning this week: it’s primarily about how the captain doesn’t have the luxury of showing uncertainty or weakness because his crew depends on him to be their rock. This… Feels like possibly the opposite of what he was supposed to be learning?
This is a fun little episode and I guess it’s a good way to ease back into the season; we transition a little from the Diviner being the main driver of the plot directly to the Protostar’s own mysterious past. There’s some good stuff about Gwynn struggling with her own identity in the face of her father’s betrayal, and pairing her off with Zero is nice, but ti’s a small part of the episode overall. The bulk of the episode is really just an admittedly touching but ultimately hollow homage to the fans. Also we learn that Murph is indestructible.
I was also raising an eyebrow at the choppiness of the clips being inserted into this situation, and that there’s at least one of the much later Leonard Nimoy being used with the body of the earlier one, and it reminds me of the time when the Oscars used projections of dead actors to advance the show, and the way that Carrie Fisher’s younger self was digitally pasted on with audio at the end of Rogue One, and I have a feeling that so long as some part of a person has been recorded, they may very well find themselves mixed and remixed in computerized ways long after they are gone.
Learning that Murph is indestructible is useful, though.