Category: Star Trek

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?

Well, so. They don’t mock the disabled. That’s good. There isn’t any casual racism. Also good. There’s one asshole and he’s an antagonistic character. Still good. Is Lower Decks finally finding its footing?

Well, there’s this one problem. I mean, it’s not that big a deal. But kind of annoying.

The bit where the plot has almost no cohesion to it, doesn’t make a lot of sense, and is only barely adequate as a structural device to serve as a framework in which to tell jokes.

One of the jokes is fairly good.

The Cerritos has been tipped off by salvagers to the wreckage of an old Federation freighter (In the episode’s main visual easter egg, the debris is from an Antares-class ship, which originated in the ’70s animated series, though it was backported into the new CGI visual effects for the Original Series remaster). But the salvagers want market rate for the salvage, rather than Starfleet’s finders’ fee, and hostilities break out. Captain Freeman allows the Cerritos to take a pounding rather than cause a diplomatic incident by firing on a neutral ship, much to the chagrin of the security chief, who hardly ever gets to blow things up.

The cold open finds the junior officers having a good-natured, spirited bit of fun trying to imitate the hum of the warp cores of various ships, freaking out Commander Ransom, who walks in and assumes he’s witnessing some sort of possession. The junior officers were encouraged by Ensign Fletcher, a charismatic junior officer who we’ve never seen or heard of before, but who everyone already knows and has history with and loves and gets along with and is preternaturally good at diffusing tension and you have probably come to the conclusion that he’s some kind of alien infiltrator like in that TNG episode where everyone loses their memory. And reinforcing this, Mariner seems way more sedate and “square” this time, with none of her characteristic rebelliousness, not even her friendly ribbing of Boimler, which you could take for a hint that Fletcher is influencing their personalities, maybe like some kind of psychic vampire, usurping the qualities of others, with shades of that Torchwood episode whith the alien who makes everyone think he was always there or maybe that “Superstar” episode of Buffy.

You’d be wrong. There’s no deep mystery behind Fletcher. There is nothing to him whatever. And the whole thing about him being charismatic and easy to get along with suddenly vanishes halfway through the episode. There’s no direction to the character, or, for that matter, the episode. It’s just kind of there. Fletcher breaks the ship’s record for chugging puree straight out of the dispenser, averts a fight when Boimler accidentally knocks the doctor into her nachos, and offers to finish up some work on a computer core so that Mariner and Boimler can go to a Chu Chu dance. We are never told what a Chu Chu is, but apparently it is very cool, especially when they unexpectedly added a third Chu.

And at this point, you’re probably expecting that Fletcher is a plant and this was all a setup, and you’re in the general ballpark of right, but not quite. They return to find the core missing and Fletcher disoriented, with a story about having been stunned by an unseen attacker. The core is a backup shield controller, which means it wouldn’t be an immediate problem, except that the Cerritos is under attack at this point. After accusing a different shift (With a joke that doesn’t land where Mariner finds it inherently suspicious that the night shift sleeps when the day shift is awake) and suspecting the scavengers, the truth finally comes out when they find the missing core damaged in Fletcher’s bunk. And the explanation is…. Bizarre.

Fletcher is apparently incredibly insecure about his abilities, and in a sort of Simpsonian escape from any pretense at this being “A lighter more comedic Star Trek,” rather than, “A Star Trek-flavored total farce,” reckoned that he could make himself smarter by connecting the core to his brain. Because this is a stupid, nonsensical plan, all it does is disorient him and damage the core. And because he didn’t want to get in trouble, he made up the story about being attacked. He doesn’t want to get in trouble so much that he threatens to point the finger at Mariner and Boimler unless they help him with the cover-up. He suggests blaming Q.

I don’t know where they’re going with all this. Fletcher is charismatic, he’s good at making friends, he’s good at conflict resolution, but he’s deeply insecure about his own intelligence, which maybe makes sense because he’s so stupid that he thought plugging his brain into a shield core would do something useful, but he’s also a coward, and he’s also ruthless enough to threaten his friends and manipulative enough to get them out of the way for his brain-plugging experiment and… This would’ve made so much more sense if he were an alien. Or heck, if there were some technobabble to encapsulate the possibility that you could boost your abilities by plugging your brain into a computer core (I mean, there’s cyborgs. So maybe Fletcher has a dangerous, unlicensed cybernetic implant? This would also help with what’s coming next), you could establish that he’d done this before, and that was how he’d gained the ability to charm the other junior officers. You got yourself a real standard Trek performance-enhancing-drug-addiction-metaphor setup right there you can play for laughs (Even an opportunity for him to shout, “I’m so excited!”). But… There’s just nothing.

And then somehow the damaged core springs to life, using its data cables as limbs. It’s absorbed Fletcher’s insecurity and desperately wants to self-improve by assimilating everything around it. Somehow that is a thing. Somehow a computer core can magically make the optical cables dangling off of itself prehensile.

It’s too much. It’s too out-of-nowhere, too dumb, too random. I’m okay with space being kinda magic in Star Trek, but “Also computer parts can just magically become ambulatory” is a bridge too far. They manage to airlock the rogue core, and it makes its way to the scavenger ship, which is destroyed in the process. This is a good thing, because the missing core caused the Cerritos’s shields to fail, and though the security chief finally got permission to return fire, to his disappointment, the weapons system was damaged by that point.

Rather than ratting out Fletcher, Mariner and Boimler credit him with saving the ship by “reconfiguring” the core into an improvised weapon. This also feels sort of unsatisfying, since they’d just made a big deal about the difference between Mariner’s cool-rebellious breaking only of rules that “deserve” breaking with Fletcher’s self-serving and callous rule-breaking. But their goal is to win Fletcher a promotion that gets him transferred off the ship. To the Titan, which is Riker’s ship (Though with the wiggle room in the timeline, I can’t say if Riker is still in command at this point), where he gets fired for incompetence. Yay I guess.

Fuck. This whole plot is stupid and rudderless. There’s a side-plot with Rutherford and Tendi that is okay, though. Due to a clerical error, Tendi managed to graduate from the academy without taking the requisite class in spacewalking. With a salvage operation coming up, she’s in a panic, so Rutherford takes her to the holodeck to try a training program he’s working on. The training is hosted by “Badgey”, a large, anthropomorphic Starfleet Delta who’s a fairly good parody of Clippy the Microsoft Office ’97 animated tutorial assistant, with some hints of Alexa thrown in for good measure. He’s a bit glitchy, though, and Rutherford, wanting to impress Tendi, is abusive toward it in his attempts to get it functional. I guess we really are meant to parse Rutherford as smitten with Tendi? They’ve decided that’s going to be a consistent character trait? In a show where consistent character traits are few and far between.

This one, at least, goes exactly where you expect. During the battle with the scavengers, the holodeck glitches, the safety protocols fail, and Badgey goes on an adorable murder rampage. Luckily, in his glitched state, Badgey is susceptible to the simulated environment, and Rutherford switches to an arctic training simulation where the homicidal arrowhead freezes to death with fewer shades of The Shining than you’d expect. It dies in Rutherford’s arms, calling him “father”. I wish this plot thread had anything to do with anything, because this is the sort of just-far-enough-over-the-top levity I want from my “Star Trek but funny” show. Taking the recurring ’90s Trek trope of the holodeck running dangerously amok, but kicking it into farce territory by making the holographic threat not Moriarty or a Bond Villain or film noir gangsters, but the stupid paperclip who asks you if you’re trying to do a mail merge.

So, one good scene, but not a good episode. Like basically every other piece of streaming-era Trek, they just can’t quite decide what lane they want to be in. So far, Lower Decks has mostly been just pawing randomly at the lowest-hanging fruit of obvious jokes and a kind of Zucker-Brothers, “Parody is when you just randomly reference something from pop culture for no reason” mindset. The main advantage they take from actually being Star Trek rather than an unlicensed parody is just “easter eggs” for eagle-eyed fanboys. There’s no consistency to the characters, and so there’s no emotional connection to them to elevate the show above the occasional random chuckle. And even those don’t come as often as they really should.

(Oh, the “fairly good” joke? Rutherford says that the holodeck isn’t just for “Hanging out with Sherlock Holmes. And Robin Hood. And Sigmund Freud. And Cyrano de Bergerac. And Einstein. And da Vinci. And Stephen Hawking. And Socrates…” These are all dudes who have indeed guest starred as holodeck characters. Well actually, not Sherlock Holmes, technically; Data played Sherlock Holmes)

Hey! One I don’t have much to say about! Nothing forthrightly awful this week. Yay.

The Cerritos is helping the Vancouver implode a moon before it crashes into a populated world, and this is also an opportunity for Boimler to hang out with his long-distance-girlfriend, which, of course, Mariner must put a stop to because Boimler is not allowed to be happy.

Yet it’s handled well: Mariner is convinced that a talented, attractive lieutenant whose career is going places would never be interested in Boimler. But her reason for this is that she’s literally seen it happen before, having lost a friend years earlier to a too-perfect boyfriend that turned out to be a shapeshifting monster. But Boimler’s perfectly capable of ruining his relationship all on his own when he desperately tries to make himself seem more manly when he learns his girlfriend’s ex is the studliest operations lieutenant on the Cerritos.

Meanwhile, Tendi and Rutherford fanbeing over the Vancouver’s more-advanced systems, culminating in a rivalry to win an advanced model of tricorder promised to whoever gets their work done first.

While that’s going on, the senior officers are settling in-fighting among the natives of the doomed system, as a collection of special interest groups have various problems with the whole “Blow up the moon” plan – including a group for whom the moon has religious significance, farmers whose livelihood will be impacted by the change to the climate, and a civilization whose own moon will be rendered uninhabitable.

The plots don’t interconnect as much as you’d hope, but there’s some good thematic parity. Mariner discovers a casing from an alien brain parasite and fights Barb, but she turns out to have similar suspicions about Mariner, as she knows Boimler’s quirks are weird and unmanly, and thus can’t see why the infamously cool and rebellious Mariner would care about him. They bond over stories of Boimler’s various embarrassments, and a scan reveals that Mariner and Barb are both human. They almost had me convinced for a minute that it was Mariner who’d been compromised somehow, but it turns out to be what you probably thought: Boimler is infected with a brain parasite which enhances his pheromones in order to spread. Barb assures him that as a Starfleet officer, she would never have fallen for him just because of alien mind control…. But studying this weird alien parasite is a big break for her, career-wise, so she breaks up with him to devote herself fully to its study.

Tendi and Rutherford discover that what they were being offered wasn’t actually the tricorder, but a transfer to the Vancouver, and in the process of avoiding it, they discover that the chief pushing it through is actually trying to trade himself to the Cerritos because he can’t handle the stress. They blackmail him into giving them the tricorders, though in the last scene it turns out that they’d each stolen sacks full of them anyway.

On the bridge, Captain Freeman negotiates away all but one of the problems, but the doomed “civilization” turns out to just be one obscenely rich dude and his wife. I hope this plot ages badly, because it’s possibly the most topical thing to show up in Star Trek since that time the electric people wiped themselves out over racism. I kinda love it. You’ve got a very straightforward analogy for a lot of very timely things. The impending moon crash serves as an obvious parallel for climate change, and those who oppose the implosion reflect similar concerns to real-world interests ranging from things we definitely need to address like, “What about all the people who work in the fossil fuel industry,” to things we definitely need to ignore like, “We’re pretty sure it’s all a hoax.” And while the fact that in the Star Trek version, there’s a straightforward technological remedy for the problem diverges from reality, it’s a very Star Trek way to diverge. The best thematic punchline is the reveal that all those problems with implementing an immediate technological solution can be solved, and solved fairly easily. The one problem they can’t solve – and the one group that yells the loudest and causes the most trouble – is the rich assholes who stand to be mildly inconvenienced.

Other things I like about this episode: there’s none of the senior officers being jackasses. This whole thing with the Vancouver being a more advanced ship than the Cerritos (Their designs are very similar, but the Vancouver’s stylings are closer to the Enterprise-E while the Cerritos looks like a kit-bash of the Enterprise-D) could easily have called back to Freeman’s insecurities from “Temporal Edict” or led to a rehash of the other ship’s commander irrationally needing to flex his superiority like in “Moist Vessel”. But that doesn’t happen; the senior crew gets a subplot where they just get to act like Starfleet (The Vancouver officers are, to be honest, strangely quiet for this whole thing). Mariner’s flashback puts her in a TNG-movie-era uniform (Though there’s a reference to the events of the TNG season 6 cliffhanger as though they’re contemporary). In his bid to be “cool”, Boimler has the replicator fuse together elements from all of history’s coolest fashions, producing an outfit with many gold chains which is literally half letterman’s jacket, half leather motorcycle jacket – but better yet, Barb offhandedly mentions that it’s sexy. (Though she rightly objects to his macho posturing).

I did not like the inclusion of the “Boimler gets jealous and acts like an asshole” subplot. I don’t like that kind of plot in general, I don’t like it for Star Trek (so much better is the occasional TNG motif of “Asshole macks on Troi and tries to make Riker jealous, but Riker is just bemused because he takes polyamory for granted and is completely cool with his ex boning whoever as long as she’s into it”), and there was more than enough going on in this episode without it. My other objection is that to a significant extent, there’s a reliance on a “Boimler is a butt-monkey who must have romance denied him in order to earn him karmic points we will cash in at the end of the series,” which I hate with the fire of a thousand suns, and it also feels misplaced here, because Boimler isn’t like Steve Urkel or Xander Harris or Ross Geller: he isn’t actually a terrible person who spends his time complaining that he isn’t the center of the universe.

But otherwise, this was pretty good. A plot where the driving force isn’t people being assholes to each other? More please.

(Looks at the trailer for next week…)

Shit.

Technically, TNG did not do it better. Because TNG did it very, very poorly. However, Big Finish did do it better. So way to go, Big Finish, you found a bar you couldn’t limbo under.

There is also nothing forthrightly racist this week! That’s technically a big step up! The worst thing they do is mock the disabled!

Baby steps!

For the first time, the pre-titles sequence is actually relevant to the main plot. For some reason, Mariner is invited to a conference while the captain introduces the plot-of-the-week. They’ll be assisting another California-class ship, this one a science ship with blue highlights, in towing an ancient disabled colony ship to… I don’t recall if they say where. They refer to it as a “generation ship”, but I don’t get the impression that it actually is one. The crew died when their stasis pods broke down, but the ship is full of a “terraforming fluid” that creates living matter out of inorganic substances, and you’ve already figured out which TNG episode this is cribbed from, right?

Mariner keeps yawning, though, which embarrasses the captain in front of her counterpart, and I think these two are supposed to be old rivals? They do balls-all to establish this, it just kinda feels assumed. The captain is desperate to get Mariner to request a transfer, since it would look bad if she kicked her own daughter off the ship. Ransom suggests she assign all the worst jobs on the ship to her, though the captain just repeats the idea back to him, claiming to have thought of it herself.

So I guess we’re raiding Dilbert for jokes now. Once you go Pointy-Haired Boss with a character, I think you’re kinda limited in what you can do with them afterward. For example, having her come to some kind of understanding with Mariner and the two of them learning to appreciate each other more would not work. Guess where this episode is going.

There’s a couple of embarrassing scenes as Mariner has to lubricate the turbolift and clean the holodeck’s jizz filter and –

Let’s stop for a moment and address that. That joke is funny, but eww. They never actually say it. They call it the “biofilter” most of the time. Mariner reacts with revulsion. But then later Ransom refers to it as something that gets bleeped, and the captain’s reaction makes it clear that, yes, the holodeck is basically like the viewing booth in a porn shop, and yes, the thing you are cleaning out of it is semen. There is a certain kind of relief (I thought about saying “release” here, but I reckon I should keep it classy) in them coming (snrk) right out and saying that, yes, the main thing people use holodecks for is fuckin’. But, again, when you decide this is the tone you want to set, you’ve locked yourself into a certain subset of possible plots, and you can’t really segue from there to a heartwarming plot. Cockwarming, maybe.

But anyway, Mariner finds a way to make carbon filter cleaning fun, so in desperation, her mom promotes her, knowing that she’ll find meetings and paperwork a fate even crueler than splooge-removal. And there’s a somewhat effective montage that lampoons a lot of TNG-era conventions through Mariner’s eyes: the senior officers’ poker game is a snore because you know what? Exciting TV poker games where everyone always gets a playable hand are fictional and in real life, you usually get fifteen deals in a row where no one has anything better than a pair of threes. Vocal Jazz night at the officer’s club is exactly as much fun as you think watching your mom try to scat would be. Ransom’s birthday party involves a lot of folk guitar. I mean, that kinda sounds cool though.

Anyway, at some point they realize that the story is not really going anywhere, so for absolutely no clear reason, the captain of the other ship looks at a picture of Captain Freeman and grumbles a little and decides to do a stupid, dangerous maneuver to assert dominance and this pops a hull panel off the generation ship and engulfs his ship in terraforming fluid, which also splatters the Cerritos. Now things are On, as it were. There’s a lot of scenes of the Cerritos crew being menaced by rapidly-growing exotic vines and planets, but the resolution is straightforward and the details don’t really matter. Mariner and Freeman have to fight their way through the transforming ship while having it out about their issues with each other, how Mariner treats her job like a game and Freeman refuses to respect her daughter’s choices and judgment, but in the end they come up with the same plan to do some technobabble to render the terraforming fluid inert and it just works and the plot is resolved and they have a tender, heartwarming moment where they come to a better understanding of each other and this would all be very touching and the appropriate sort of emotional drama for a light comedic show, and hey, remember they were doing semen jokes five minutes ago? This new heartfelt respect between mother and daughter comes after mom ordered her daughter to clean the jizz out of the ship’s masturbation room.

And then Freeman suggests that they can actually get along and maybe she’ll give Mariner a position on the bridge so they can spend more time together, so Mariner makes fun of an admiral’s speech impediment for like five straight minutes in order to get demoted again. It’s fun!

There’s other stuff going on too, but the parallel construction in this episode is weaker than it has been before. Rutherford is barely in the episode at all. Boimler fares only slightly better. He has an emotional crisis in the face of Mariner getting promoted, and decides that the way to success is to flaunt the rules like her. But literally the only thing to come of this is that he spills a cup of coffee in Ransom’s lap and then disappears.

Tendi actually gets a plot for once, though. So far, she’s barely been a presence. Her plot has nothing at all to do with the rest of the story, but whatcha gonna do. She’s been invited to watch someone ascend to a higher plane of existence. Okay. That’s a fun structure for some jokes about energy beings in Star Trek. I think taking it the extra step that apparently, just any old normal human-type-person can ascend and become an energy being (“Like a Q or a The Traveller”, someone suggests) through meditation is a reasonable level of hyperbole for The Funny Show. But in her enthusiasm, Tendi ruins his elaborate meditative sand drawing, and harshes his mellow. He takes an immediate dislike to her, and her aggressive attempts to get his ascension back on track only annoy him further. But once the Cerritos is being Masaka’d into an alien jungle, he confesses that his ascension was a scam; being “the ascension guy” was his angle for standing out and being Important, and he was letting her take the fall for ruining it because he wasn’t sure how much longer he could string people along. She saves his life, then he saves hers, they bond, he is pinned under a rock and almost dies, but the rock dissolves at the last moment with the recovery of the ship. He and Tendi make out, and then… He ascends. Turns out that “fake it until you make it” works for ascending to a higher plane of existence. Also for soiling the holodeck. Semen jokes!

If I weren’t so tired from the rest of this episode being the rest of this episode, I think I would’ve liked the way the ascension is played better. Because it turns out not to be pleasant. At first, he just glows and floats, but then it hurts, physically, as his body is converted into PURE ENERGY, and he’s overwhelmed by the scope of the cosmos as he becomes one with it. Also God is a koala? He tries to say what the meaning of life is, but before he can get it out, he sort of explodes like Jon Osterman turning into Doctor Manhattan and disappears into a rift in spacetime.

Both Tendi and Boimler feel like they were supposed to have more plot in this episode. In fact, so do Freeman and Mariner. There’s one coherent plot-line through the episode, but it feels like it was trimmed to accommodate more plot in a truncated form. Tendi’s story could’ve been a good B-plot for an episode where it had some relationship to the A-plot, but here, it just seems random. The angle of the captains of the Cerritos and the Mersette having some kind of rivalry doesn’t feel connected to the plot about Mariner’s relationship with her mother. Boimler’s frustration over Mariner’s promotion seems like it’s setting up a comedy plot about him trying to imitate Mariner but failing. But it doesn’t happen.

And then they end with Mariner mocking an Admiral’s speech impediment.

Shoulda just stuck (heh) to jizz jokes.

So is this going to be a thing now? Every week are they gonna address one thing I didn’t like the previous week and then double down on the other things that are wrong with the show?

The pre-titles sequence sees Boimler performing Irish folk music in the bar for Open Mic Night. He gets pushed off-stage by Mariner and her rock band, whose performance shakes the entire ship and causes a diplomatic incident with the Klingons. Boimler retakes the stage just in time to take the blame when the security chief is sent down to smash his violin.

The middle of that is a good joke! You’re taking a familiar comedy setup of the noisy kids causing trouble for the parents and transposing it into the Star Trek setting. That works. It works extra well when Mariner is literally the captain’s daughter. And it plays into a subversion of a standard Star Trek trope as well: Trek, particularly the ’90s Trek Lower Decks is most directly addressing, is notorious for depicting people of the future as having no hobbies or interests involving culture more recent than what was considered respectable by middle-aged white men in the 1980s – jazz and Shakespeare and ballet are fine, but rock and Nora Roberts and stomp aren’t. So it works for By-the-Book Boimler to have a good respectable hobby with a violin and traditional musical styles, while Mariner gets everyone excited with hip cool rock music. But then they go and wrap it with the usual “And Boimler is the Butt-Monkey” joke.

This episode is definitely the most sitcom-ish of what we’ve had so far, and I kind of get it structurally, even if I’m not crazy about the idea. There are some nice touches, but it’s very Futurama, and while I liked Futurama (though like most everyone, I reckon it ran itself dry several seasons before it actually ended), I’d rather Lower Decks find its own thing to do rather than aping it. The Cerritos is en route to Cardassia Prime to participate in a peace treaty signing, but the captain gets the bad news that the signing has been moved to Vulcan on account of–

Sigh.

Everyone thinks the Cardassians are creepy, so they don’t want to go to Cardassia Prime. Yay! More casual overt racism! I guess that’s one of this show’s hallmarks now. With the Cerritos reassigned to deliver diplomatic gifts to a minor planet, the captain is frustrated and desperate to prove herself to her superiors. Okay. Again, not the direction I want for the show, but, “The captain of a minor ship wants to make a name for themself and does something stupid in a desperate gambit to do so,” is an established military-and-military-adjacent comedy trope that you can do good stuff with.

Unfortunately for the crew, Boimler inadvertently lets the captain in on the concept of “buffer time”. “Buffer time,” as established early in the episode when they explain it to Tendi, is the Junior Officer tradition of adding substantial padding to time estimates on every assignment to make sure they have time to goof off and – this is important – not get overwhelmed. Another okay here. That’s an established Star Trek trope. On the one hand, identifying it as a “lower decks” thing rather than an engineering thing is kinda weird. Weirder is the simultaneous implication that all junior officers everywhere do it and no senior officers anywhere know about it.

So of course, the captain immediately bans Buffer Time and requires everyone log their assignments to the minute and stay within official guidelines for how long things should take. And there’s two interesting things about this. First, Boimler never gets caught and abused by his friends for this. Seriously, he almost rats himself out by accident, but everyone gets distracted by… Being run ragged by their new schedules and doesn’t notice. The other thing – and this is where that whole, “Address one thing I didn’t like the previous week,” comes in, Boimler absolutely thrives under this new policy. We… Do not actually get to see much of this, just a few scenes of Boimler working normally while everyone around him is coming unglued. But it’s there, at least. The idea of his character, that he’s the “by-the-book” one, and that works for him is what was lacking last time.

Everyone else, of course, is boned. And they do a decent job of showing why, exactly. The transition is not very graceful, but I like the core of what they get at. Because they took something that was already a joke in Star Trek – Scotty padding his repair estimates to impress the boss – and rewrite the context. Once the junior officers have to live by the clock, every mistake they make, every unexpected interruption, every other person whose path crosses theirs, makes them fall behind. And once they fall behind, they can only catch up by pushing themselves, and then they make more mistakes, and fall further behind, and it’s an endless cycle of constantly racing to catch up even as you get less and less efficient. “Buffer time” isn’t about slacking off (I mean, except that it clearly was in the first scene when they introduced it, but we can’t expect narrative consistency from Star Trek these days. To be honest we probably couldn’t back in the ’90s either, but you didn’t notice so much because you weren’t really here for the writing); it’s about having a buffer. Increase your buffer whenever you can, because running out of buffer in an emergency is a very bad thing. This is actually good life advice provided your captain is not a capitalist who can only see buffer time as labor he’s not extracting wealth from, so get your ass back to work, pandemic or no pandemic nursing a hurt ego over missing out on a prestigious assignment (Guess who just found out that “We’re returning everyone to work full time” is going to coincide perfectly with “Your son’s virtual school year is starting”?). And timely too! Sadly, there will not be a melodramatic speech at the climax of the real world leading to important life lessons being learned.

Anyway, as I hinted, everyone’s stressed out and falling behind and thus ill-prepared for a crisis. For the crisis, we need to switch to the B-plot. Remember that “Deliver diplomatic gifts to a minor planet” thing? So First Officer (I guess his name is Ransom? Not sure if I’m going to call him that since it’s also my sister’s last name) and Mariner and Several Unimportant Others fly down to the planet to deliver a crystal. It’s a planet that is real big into crystals. Unfortunately, due to the lack of buffer time, the Bolian ensign who was assigned to pack the diplomatic gifts grabbed the wrong box and presents a log to them instead. I’m guessing this is a reference to the Enterprise where Archer’s dog pissed on a sacred tree and Archer had to perform some weird humiliating log ceremony to prevent hostilities. The Geltrackians are gravely insulted and attack the Cerritos party. Ransom refuses to let them shoot back for diplomatic reasons, so everyone ends up getting captured. The Geltrackians sentence them to trial by combat against an enormous gladiator. Mariner and Ransom fight over who will face the giant. She calls him out on the fact that while Ransom is good at projecting the image of Starfleet, he is terrible at his job, while she’s a better fighter and willing to fight dirty. He stabs her in the foot, because he is the first officer and he’ll be damned if anyone is going to risk their life in his place.

And then he rips off his shirt, because Kirk ripping off his shirt is a thing people think they remember happening all the time in Star Trek.

He beats the everloving piss out of the gladiator, easily, despite refusing to use the (crystal, natch) sword they’d given him. Mariner finds herself troublingly aroused by the sight of it. The gladiator yields, and Ransom refuses to kill him. The Geltrackian leader is disappointed that they won’t get to execute the prisoners by dropping an enormous crystal on them. Which apparently they hardly ever get to do, because trial by combat doesn’t generally work out in the state’s favor on this planet. Hey, that’s actually a good joke! The gladiator (who, of course, is actually a sensitive soul who doesn’t really care for the tough-guy routine) tries to suggest that they try having an actual justice system instead, but the leader latches onto the idea of transitioning to a deathrace-based system and orders a crystal racetrack built. They pushed the joke maybe just a bit too far, but okay.

I like the outline of this, I really do. Just like having Boimler thrive under the time crunch finally establishes him as something other than a complete assclown, having Ransom defeat the gladiator and do it effortlessly does what the past few episodes have dropped the ball on: instead of “What if Star Trek but assholes?“, showing us that, yeah, this is a starfleet crew and the senior officers are in fact the sort of hypercompetent savants we have spent fifty years expecting from Trek. It’s not that Ransom was incompetent – as hinted when he refused to use phasers on the Geltrackians and was thus overcome by dudes with (crystal) spears, its that his commitment to The Starfleet Way forbade him from taking the pragmatic approach. If there is one thing you need to do in order to sell me that this is Star Trek, it’s that you have to hold fast to the choice to do things the right way rather than the pragmatic way. I hope at some point we will see Mariner fail for want of understanding that (Which doesn’t happen here; nothing challenges the idea that doing things her way would’ve been expedient and successful. It just would’ve been wrong).

While all that was going on, a force of Geltrackians invade the Cerritos, and the Captain – who at this point seems to have lost her marbles – orders everyone to stick to their schedule while repelling the invaders. Fortunately, the Geltrackians are mostly just interested in graffitting the ship so no one dies in the process. Everyone is too stressed out about deadlines to mount a proper defense, so the invaders have the run of the ship, though Boimler, who is, as I said, thriving, easily takes out any Geltrackians he comes across. He also seems strangely clueless about what’s going on, as though he doesn’t even see that everyone around him is struggling. It’s another very Fry moment that sacrifices sense for a joke I’m not sure I even get.

With everyone on the bridge glazed from overwork and distracted to the point of incompetence, the captain is trying to run all the stations by herself, with predictable efficiency – she herself seems only to see the efficiency numbers going down as the problem, ignoring the fact that her ship has pretty much been entirely conquered at this point. Boimler arrives on the bridge just ahead of the Geltrackians and has a sudden revelation while looking at the schedule clock displays on every terminal. He explains why buffer time is important and how most of the crew isn’t like him and doesn’t thrive under strict time constraints. The captain gets it and authorizes everyone to let their schedules slip and cut corners and do whatever they need to in order to regain control of the ship. Which instantly gives everyone the relief they need to use their phasers to overcome an invading crew armed with…

They made them literal spear-chuckers.

Were they worried that Discovery and Picard were too “woke”, so they’ve decided to let out decades of pent-up fantasy racism all at once in “the funny one”?

Sigh.

Anyway, the punchline to the B-plot is that Mariner refuses to report Ransom for stabbing her, but Ransom goes right ahead and has Mariner thrown in the brig for refusing to roll down her sleeves when ordered. Though he finds himself troublingly aroused when she repeatedly threatens his life as she’s dragged off by security. So that’s gross and abusive and awful.

The pen-punchline to the A-plot is that the captain is so impressed by Boimler’s suggestions that she institutes an official policy named for him, authorizing unlimited rule-breaking, corner-cutting and buffer time. Ha ha, the straight-laced guy who thrives under tight schedules and is a stickler for the rules made a name for himself by advocating rule-breaking and regulation-shirking. He’s a little hurt, but comforts himself in the knowledge that Starfleet official policies are a dime a dozen and this one will surely fade into obscurity…

Punchline time! Cut to a classroom in “the far future”, where the teacher finishes a lesson on the Boimler Effect, Starfleet’s most important policy ever, named for a man who is remembered as the laziest in Starfleet history. It’s not all about making fun of Boimler, though; we would assume he’d be horrified to have this as his legacy, but he is remembered as the second-most important person in all of Starfleet history for codifying laziness into an official guiding principle.

The first most important person in Starfleet history is Miles O’Brien. Which actually is a good punch line. Though the cartoon likeness of him is so weird that I’m not sure there isn’t another joke I’m missing about them showing a picture of the wrong dude.

There’s a lot I could say about this episode. There’s things I like structurally, and a couple of good jokes, but fewer than they intended. On the other hand, they very casually conflate laziness with responsible management of one’s time and vacillate on whether “buffer time” is about “slacking off” or, y’know, keeping able to do your job properly. It reminds me a lot of the movie The Invention of Lying which spends most of its time committed to ideas like “Loving someone who is not conventionally attractive is a lie,” or “Not constantly shouting every thought that pops into your head is a lie,” or “Assholes are the only honest people.”

But mostly I’m mad about the racism thing.

And I haven’t even gotten around to fully formulating the extent to which Mariner comes off as the Mary Sue from a twelve-year-old’s TNG fanfic who’s the best officer ever except that she’s cool and likes rock music and does sex and says swears. But I’m sure I’ll get to it eventually.

Well that was an improvement. We’re not all the way to “good”, but at least at a conceptual level we’re closer to where a show like this ought to be. The cold open has the Cerritos encounter an energy being, who demands worship and tribute. Mariner threatens to shove it into a container, but trades its freedom for it using its powers to manifest a high-end tricorder. It sets off to find someone else to demand worship from, but the effort of creating the tricorder has left it so diminished that it fizzles out unnoticed on the Captain’s shirt. I think. The framing of the scene was reminiscent of a setup for some kind of “Uh oh, a transcendental energy being just poofed into the female character’s torso; now she’s gonna be pregnant with a magic spacebaby!” plot, but so far, the cold opens have not connected up to anything else in the plot, so I guess it just died?

So, A-plot this week is that Boimer’s got a prestigious assignment to ferry a Klingon diplomat to a peace conference, and things go south and he finds out that his high-falutin’ book-larnin’ isn’t worth shit in the real world and he needs Mariner’s streetwise real-world smarts to bail him out and yeah, I am cringing a lot at this, and this isn’t even the cringiest part of the plot. But at least it’s the right sort of general shape for what I want out of this show: a sort of broadly sitcomish “Oh no, things got out of hand and now we need to clean up this mess before mom and dad the senior officers get home!”

The B-plot is, I think, a little better in execution, though something feels clunky at the conceptual level – it seems to slot into character arcs that aren’t ready for it yet. Rutherford has promised to watch a pulsar with Tendi, but his engineering duties interfere so he offers to change careers. Are they an item now? Even at the end of the episode, I’m not sure. I’m leaning toward, “Rutherford has a crush on Tendi but she hasn’t realized it and just thinks he’s being friendly,” but I don’t feel like the characterization of either one of them is strong enough on this. And given that Tendi is Orion, there’s an opening here for, “Without realizing it, Tendi has been ensorceling Rutherford with her sexy green lady pheromones,” which will greatly upset me if it comes to pass.

It turns out K’orinn, the Klingon diplomat, is an old friend of Mariner’s and also a notorious drunkard, so she tags along, but he steals their shuttle to go on a bender. As Boimer and Mariner give chase, Boimer repeatedly gets into trouble due to his lack of street smarts and has to get saved. He enrages a large blue alien when trying to speak its native language; he almost gets impregnated by a parasitic alien’s deceptive seduction attempts and he starts a bar fight trying to “save” a shapeshifting thief disguised as an elderly Andorian. Discouraged, he promises to quit Starfleet, having discovered that he’s not good at learning by experience and can’t get by on book-smarts.

Deep breath.

So… the first thing I’ll say is this: “The book-smart character doesn’t know anything about the real world and can’t get by without the street-smart character,” is a tired, tired, tired cliche. Not in-and-of-itself offensive in normal times, but as we are currently living in the highly specific hell of the cultural belief that one’s uninformed “gut” is more accurate and useful than actual expertise having brought civilization to a screaming halt, possibly this was not a good cultural moment for this particular cliche or really any anti-intellectual cliche? Particularly as completely, relentlessly straight as it is played here. Layer on top of it the fact that the “book smart” character is the white man and the “street smart” character is a woman of color, and now you’re tapping into some stereotypes that… I’m not qualified to discuss this in detail, but it’s a little cringey. It throws a bit of a spotlight on the whole setup of “Mariner is the sassy black woman who brings rebellious, counter-cultural excitement into the lives of the uptight square white folks.” That her parents are part of the Uptight Square Establishment helps a little, but we’re still talking about elevating it from “Black friend in an ’80s sitcom” to “Will Smith in Fresh Prince of Bel Air“.

But on top of all that, there’s another big issue with this use of the booksmart/streetwise cliche: they never actually establish Boimer as “book-smart”. Boimer has, over the course of these two episodes, pretty consistently been wrong about everything. Boimer asks, “I spent so much time studying! Why don’t I know how to handle these situations?” Even if they were aiming for, “Because not everything can be learned from books,” what they’re actually hitting is more like, “Because you are very stupid and haven’t learned a damn thing.” These feel like more shades of Philip Fry: Fry is a character who is in many cases stupid because he is a fish-out-of-water, being a thousand years out of date, but also because he’s just plain dumb. It’s kind of a double-edged joke in Futurama, but it doesn’t work as well in a Star Trek setting, plus, it’s not at all clear to me that it’s intentional. Boimer also has a lot of Fry’s “Mediocre White Man Entitlement”, and I really don’t think that‘s intentional. Fry is sort of lowkey contemptuous of the idea that he ought to educate himself about the world he lives in; it should be enough that he is a mediocre white man – that should be a guarantor of success. In Futurama, this is for the most part funny because the universe is not having his shit. Boimer shows signs of that kind of entitlement, but I don’t think they mean it that way. Boimer acts as though he has put in the work to understand his world and be good at his job, and is frustrated that his hard work isn’t paying off. That could be a good character arc, particularly if we see the reasons for his work not paying off as being largely due to the fruits of his labor being co-opted by others – last week, for example, when he spends hours receiving the world’s worst oral from a giant spider but receives no credit for the zombie virus cure he acquired from it. Here, it’s not really in service to anything. And besides, like I said, his labor here is purely informed. He doesn’t seem to have learned anything.

The climax comes when they get an offer of a ride to catch up with K’orinn from a transparently shady Ferengi, and…

Deep breath.

Despite having his spirit crushed, Boimer objects to taking a ride from a Ferengi, going on a long tirade about how Ferengi are shifty and untrustworthy and thieving, and drink the blood of Christian babies and– Okay, it’s not that bad. I didn’t notice anything that directly played on traditional antisemitic tropes. It’s all very generic. But all the same, even if it didn’t target any specific real human race, it felt very overtly racist. Not in the usual Star Trek way of “The characters do not themselves act overtly racist, but the depiction of this alien culture draws, posibly through negligence rather than intent, on racist stereotypes,” but rather, Boimer is himself, in the script, being overtly racist toward the Ferengi. To an extent that’s certainly not unique in Trek, but I can’t think of another example that’s so glib about it. It’s not a teachable moment, it’s not an insight into a character flaw, it’s not a call to reform and redeem; Boimer just tells a Ferengi to his face that his kind are dirty, and nothing comes of it. In a comedy.

Anyway, Mariner reckons the Ferengi seems trustworthy (also, she thinks he’s a Bolian), and is all set to go with him, but Boimer catches him in a lie using his book-smarts I guess (He asks for his landing authorization code, which he doesn’t have, since the shuttle was a lie), the Ferengi pulls a knife, Boimer stuns him, and regains his confidence. They reach the shuttle just in time to avoid going AWOL and dump the blacked-out K’orinn on the doorstep of the embassy.

Back on the Cerritos, the other junior officers celebrate Boimer’s cleverness as he retells the story in the bar. Mariner slips out, casting back a sly smile despite the fact that his story makes her look bad. Obviously, anyone with enough brain cells to actually work the CBS All-Access app knew that Mariner obviously did not confuse a Ferengi for a Bollian, and was just setting Boimer up to boost his confidence. Once again showing the utter lack of faith in the audience, she returns to her bunk and calls the Ferengi, an old friend of hers. I guess the scene isn’t totally pointless, since without it you would assume that the ambush was legitimate and Mariner had only faked falling for it, rather than the whole thing being a set-up. Never mind that part of the plot had hinged on the fact that you can’t call out from the planet’s surface due to its defense grid. Also, never mind that Mariner set her Ferengi friend up to get racial slurs shouted at him and then get shot.

The B-plot is lighter and, frankly, more satisfying. Right after receiving a round of praise and camaraderie from the engineering chief for his work in the tubes, Rutherford nervously requests reassignment. The scene darkens, the music strikes an ominous chord, we go tight in on the chief engineer’s look of betrayal and disappointment and… Everyone congratulates him and wishes him well because this is Starfleet and expanding your horizons and going beyond your comfort zone is praiseworthy, and some other department will be lucky to have him. This is the first time a joke in Lower Decks has felt like it came from a place of deep engagement with Star Trek rather than a very superficial mockery of the most obvious tropes. I’m not crazy about the pacing of the joke, but I love the concept.

Rutherford tries his hand at various other departments, with mixed results. In command, he destroys the Cerritos in two separate simulations, leaving the first officer eager to see how he’ll screw up other scenarios (This shtick with the first officer . Now, I was sort of expecting it to just be “He’s bad at everything else” over and over, so I was pleased that they actually did change it up. In Medical (There doesn’t seem to be distinction between Science and Medical on the Cerritos. Possibly that’s because they’re a support ship and original research isn’t their major focus), he’s technically competent but has terrible bedside manner, almost giving a patient a heart attack with his unfiltered reaction to the severity of an injury. The structure of the scene is solid, but the humor doesn’t quite land. As I said last time, the ship’s doctor’s whole thing is being over-the-top cynical and crochety. So having her dress down Rutherford for his lack of bedside manner ought to be joke in itself. There should be more humor in the construction of a character who is grumpy and impatient and gruff is complaining about someone else not sugarcoating it, but it’s just played completely straight, and it’s weird. His last stop is security, where the chief pits him against a simulation of a dozen Borg, which he later admits is meant to teach new recruits how to face getting curbstomped. But Rutherford’s implant calculates the optimal combat strategy, allowing him to take down the simulated attackers and winning the respect of the security chief.

He takes him back to security, introduces him around, and everyone heaps praise and brotherly camaraderie on him for proving himself worthy of the cream of the crop, expositing on how all the other departments aren’t fit to lick the boots of security (Fun visual which I feel like I somehow already knew but can not for the life of me remember ever having seen before: the soles of Starfleet uniform shoes are matched to the department color). But he spies a Jeffries tube along the wall and it tugs at his heartstrings, and the episode’s best joke evolves into an even better joke, as he tells the chief that he wants to go back to engineering. And the scene darkens, the music strikes an ominous chord, we go tight in on the security chief’s look of betrayal and disappointment and… Everyone congratulates him and wishes him well because this is Starfleet and following your heart is important and this is a post-capitalist society where a job should be about your own passion and self-fulfillment rather than prestige or advancement and Engineering will be lucky to have him back.

The announcement that he’s returned to engineering makes little impact on Tendi, who didn’t realize Rutherford’s job hunt was primarily about her. She cared more about the company than the view anyway, and is perfectly happy to watch the pulsar from a padd while curled up next to him in a Jeffries tube. Yeah… They’re not actively snuggling, but it seems more than platonic. I’m not sure I care either way, but the mixed signals feel like sloppy writing (This isn’t the only sloppy writing about Rutherford; they haven’t yet told us why he’s got a cybernetic implant, but the tone seems like it wants to imply he did it voluntarily for no medical reason, which is strange given humanity’s taboo about transhumanism).

A distinct improvement from last week. The execution of Rutherford’s plot is a little shaky, but its heart is in the right place: it’s a good mix of showing that he doesn’t fit anywhere but engineering without making him look like an idiot – it succeeds at doing what the parallel plot with Boimer fails at. I still don’t like that the first officer and the security chief are both being played up so hard as ridiculous caricatures – the first officer is basically Zapp Brannigan, and the security chief is pretty much your pick of Abusive High School Gym Teacher characters. The doctor and the engineering chief are okay, though.

If I were the one writing this show, you’d hardly ever see the senior officers. And when you did, it would mostly be in passing, as a way to reinforce the idea, “Normal Star Trek stuff is still going on, it’s just that we’re seeing the view from below.” The main joke for the senior officers would be that we don’t see the context. The Easter egg (because like 70% of the humor they are going for in this show is “Can the fans catch all the references?”) would be that mostly what we see of them is passing the junior officers in the hallway while talking about something borrowed from elsewhere in the canon: “So we have to change the frequency of the EPS grid to sour the milk,” or, “Now I have to figure out what to do with a hundred gross of self-sealing stem bolts,” or, “Maybe we can apply multimodal reflection sorting,” or “Ann…. Tee…. Bah…. Dees…”

But anyway, Rutherford’s plot feels like it’s properly engaged with Star Trek and finds a way to deal with it humorously without resorting to superficial pop-culture cliches. The Mariner/Boimer plot, on the other hand, is still screwing around in “Klingon names all have random apostrophes!” jokes (In fact, less than a quarter of the named Klingons in the franchise have apostrophes in their names) and “Kirk tears his shirt in every episode!” jokes (In fact, his shirt is torn seven times. Also, they haven’t actually made a “Kirk tearing his shirt” joke yet, but I feel like it’s got to be coming) and casual racism. They’re still doing Star Trek jokes while the other half of the plot is actually having a go at doing funny Star Trek. I hope that second half will become the dominant one.

Also, I hope they’ll get good at being funny, because neither half is especially good at that.

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

I totally should have it ready for next week, I mean, unless some other big exciting distracting thing were to happen Thursday or something.

 

Oh. Right. This.

I…

Well hey, they finally found a way to make a Star Trek I straightforwardly dislike. That’s got to be something.

The buildup to Lower Decks had me thinking that this show was going to be Not For Me, but I held out hope. I mean, “Let’s do a light-hearted Star Trek,” isn’t a bad idea. And “Let’s do a Star Trek that looks at the more mundane, less universe-shaking side of things that shows the world as a real world where normal things happen most of the time,” isn’t a bad idea. And “Let’s do a Star Trek from the point-of-view of people who aren’t Big Damn Heroes and aren’t tasked with making the big decisions,” isn’t a bad idea. You could show us the effect it has on the psychology of a young officer to face the fact that his life could at any moment be cut short because he wore the wrong color shirt on an away mission. Or you could show us young people having fun on their downtime enjoying hobbies other than things middle-class middle-aged white men considered “classy” in the 1980s.

Star Trek: Lower Decks isn’t any of those, though. Star Trek: Lower Decks is Rick and Morty in Space.

I don’t like Rick and Morty.

The thing about Lower Decks is that it’s not a lighthearted take on Trek; it’s a parody of Trek. How do I feel about parody? I used to like it. The problem with parody is that it only works if it’s smart, and Lower Decks isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. There’s lots of good Star Trek parody. The best kind of parody, to me, comes from juxtaposing the tropes of the thing you are parodying with a more realistic world. And maybe Lower Decks thinks it is doing that, but it’s really not.

The central theme of Lower Decks seems to be that the junior crew do all the work while the senior officers are all glory-hounds who cause more problems than they solve and don’t care about the little people. The captain can’t be bothered to learn the names of the junior officers; the first officer is a blowhard who nearly gets the entire crew killed; the Bajoran security officer is constantly begging to be allowed to blow things up, including their own ship.  Which… No. Just no. That’s not being light-hearted and poking fun at Star Trek tropes. That’s… Mockery. Sort of mean-spirited mockery. And this is okay and fun on, say, Futurama, when it’s Zapp Brannigan and he’s a sort of broadly antagonistic character in a broadly ridiculous universe. But this is actual Star Trek. And besides, Futurama was, for the most part, actually funny. This is just, “What if Star Trek but everyone is an asshole?” – the trend of “Comedy is when you tell a story but everyone is an unrelenting asshole,” that has made me basically not like almost any deliberate comedy in the past ten years.

My basic annoyance at this depiction of the senior officers is compounded by the fact that the USS Cerritos is a support vessel – as indicated by the yellow stripe on its hull. It isn’t out there, exploring brave new worlds: it does things like the titular “second contact” – following up with a newly opened world to handle things like paperwork and set up antennas. That’s a fine setup for the Lighter, Fluffier series, but not in tandem with the pompous glory-seeking senior crew. It’s like they’re just taking every possible lane of Star Trek parody and mushing it together. There’s shades of Futurama and Rick and Morty and Sealab 2021, and even, say, Quark, but without much rhyme or reason, and without much to really connect it to Star Trek at more than a superficial level.

What they’ve avoided is the kind of humor of, say, Ephraim and Dot, where the slapstick antics of a maintenance robot and a tardigrade are seen as what had been going on in the background during the sorts of adventures we’re used to seeing. If that had been what Lower Decks had aimed for, I think I’d be a lot happier. But there’s no contrast here between the goofy Lower Decks and the heroic Upper Decks; they’re all assholes. Making the senior officers ridiculous ruins the joke for me. They’ve really latched onto this theme of “No one cares about the junior officers,” even showing that rather than having their own rooms, the junior officers sleep in bunks built into the walls of the saucer’s lowest deck.

The goofy stuff is glued together by a traditional A-B plot which is… Fine, I think? It shows off the lack of any real consistent direction to the show. During Second Contact, the first officer gets bitten by a native insect and refuses to tell anyone. The resulting infection turns him into a rage zombie, which quickly spreads to most of the crew. Meanwhile, it’s Science Ensign Tendi’s first day and she’s super excited to be on a starship. Meanwhile, Engineering Ensign Rutherford has recently become a cyborg and is dealing with occasional comedy glitches from his implant, and when his implant allows it, he is nervous about a big date he’s got tonight. Meanwhile, ambitious, by-the-book Command Ensign Boimer has been asked by the captain to spy on rebellious Command Ensign Mariner, who smuggles a bunch of contraband aboard the ship, apparently for kicks, and sneaks off during second contact to deliver supplies to impoverished farmers. Hijinx ensue.

One problem here is that three of our four main characters are kind of samey. They’re all optimistic Starfleet novices who gush and fanboy about how cool it is being on a starship and are sort of charmingly naive about the gritty truth (or rather, it would be charming naivety if Star Trek wasn’t fundamentally set in a happy optimistic shiny future). Tendi is the worst about it, and she’s clearly the one being presented as the “newcomer” character, but really Rutherford is just the same despite having more experience. And Boimer is similarly depicted as this naive fanboy type, sneaking off to make log entries in the style of the Captain’s Log, gushing about how cool the warp core looks. Only Mariner is cynical about Starfleet. She’s a traditional hypercompetent Starfleet officer, except that for reasons they haven’t yet disclosed, she makes a point of flaunting the rules and slacking off, having been assigned to the Cerritos as punishment for some unspecified misbehavior on her last assignment. The idea that her rebellious behavior is a cover and she’s really very good at her job is a fine setup – shades of M*A*S*H, for instance. But I don’t quite like how it fits in with everything else on the show, and anyway, it’s undermined by the fact that the very first thing we see her do is get drunk and hack off a big chunk of Boimer’s leg with a Bat’leth.

Boimer, on the other hand, is a bit of a fuckup. No, that’s too strong. Hapless. He’s clearly channeling Philip Fry. He has a similar sense of being immature with a healthy dose of Dunning-Kreuger, boldly getting things wrong and making things worse. He’s not as venial or selfish or stupid as Fry, but the influence is clear. His distinguishing character trait is that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, whereas the others seem to have more accurate assessments of their abilities.

Boimer follows Mariner when she sneaks off to deliver farming supplies, misinterprets her actions as a shady weapons deal, pulls a phaser, and accidentally frees a giant spider, which menaces them until it turns out that it’s a farm animal. It’s allowed to harmlessly gum Boimer for hours until he is naked and it is tired. This is part of the “hapless” thing. So far, it’s not egregious, but I worry Boimer is part of the tradition that gave us Ross Geller, Steve Urkell and Xander Harris: nerdy characters written as self-inserts by nerdy men desperate to recast their own youthful humiliations as “paying their dues”, for which they will someday be rewarded with the captain’s chair and/or sex, without them actually having to do any of the actual work of becoming a good person. It’s too soon for me to accuse Boimer of being such a character, but what I see so far has me worried. The disgusting spider-saliva Boimer returns to the ship covered in turns out to be the cure for the rage virus, which you certainly saw coming ten miles away unless this is the first time you’ve ever watched Star Trek in any form.

Rutherford’s date is going pretty well despite being interrupted by the zombie apocalypse, and there’s lots of cute bonding as they continue to flirt while shooting rage-zombies and crossing the exterior of the ship in space suits to reach the muster point. Unfortunately, while she finds the adrenaline to be an aphrodisiac, he becomes obsessed with the technical question of why the door locks glitched. This frustrates her in the moment, but the punch-line is that he loses interest in her in light of her incuriosity. Tendi… Is there. I mean, she doesn’t do much in the bulk of the episode; her main purpose is for Boimer and Mariner to explain things to her in act 1. The rest of the time, she just hangs around being happy to follow orders. She shows up at the end to agree with Rutherford about malfunctioning door locks being way more interesting than sex, which I assume is supposed to be funny because she’s Orion.

After the captain makes a point of only crediting the ship’s doctor (Who is a comically crochety cat-person, a reference to Lt. M’Ress in the original animated series from the ’70s), omitting any mention of the junior officers in her log, and getting Boimer’s name wrong, he chooses not to rat Mariner out. The captain places a call to an admiral, complaining about Mariner, at which point we learn – or rather, the show reveals what you have certainly guessed – that the captain and the admiral are Mariner’s parents (The captain’s name is Freeman; presumably Mariner is named after her father; they don’t mention the admiral’s last name). Mariner decides that Boimer is a stand-up guy after all and pledges herself to help advance his career.

Meh.

What else can I say about it? I guess the opening credits are a good joke: it’s a very traditional ’90s-trek style opening, rather than anything like Discovery or Picard, but with a twist. We see the Cerritos fly past the jet of stellar wind between what’s probably HDE 226868 and Cygnus X-1… And get knocked around by asteroids. It flies past a comet… And clips a mountain of ice. It encounters a massive space battle between the Romulans and the Borg… And fucks right on off. It’s a fair gag the first time. We’ll see how I feel at the end of the season. On the other hand, the Cerritos itself is an intensely ugly ship. Broadly TNG in style, it looks a bit like a TNG take on goofy-looking “Just two nacelles hanging off a saucer” design we saw in Children of Mars.

Everything about the show visually wants to evoke TNG much more than the visual styles of Discovery or Picard. Stardates are given in the TNG style of an arbitrary five-digit number, rather than the Julian-derived stardates used in everything else post-Enterprise. The interior design of the Cerritos is directly TNG; the displays are ’90s style LCARS, even the uniforms are clearly based on TNG (they look like one of the dress uniform styles used in later TNG, but with additional piping at the seams) rather than the primarily black uniforms of DS9, Voyager, or either of the Picard styles. I’m happy with the uniforms, even though it’s hard to justify them. Lower Decks seems to be set some time after Star Trek Nemesis but before the Romulan Supernova, so you’d expect either the TNG-Movie-Era black uniforms with gray shoulders or the ridiculous Fourteen Years Ago uniforms from Picard. Commbadges are a simple silver arrowhead, again, not clearly fitting anywhere in the timeline (per Picard, they should still be using the Voyager-style), but this might just be an animation abstraction.

I’m disappointed on a lot of levels. I don’t hate the show – it’s not offensive or anything. But Ephraim and Dot gave us a really compelling vision of what it could look like to have a lighthearted, broadly comedic Star Trek about what goes on with the “unimportant” folks on a starship while the heroes are having exciting adventures. Lower Decks has chosen a different and less focused path, cramming in a bunch of different kinds of comedy and satire without any good sense of whether they work together. The Cerritos’s mission is unglamorous and the senior crew are arrogant blowhards and the senior crew isn’t all that competent and they don’t care about the little people and the junior officers are goofy and the junior officers are naive and their work is unglamorous and Mariner is smarter than her superiors and that gets her in trouble and she’s irresponsible and gets people hurt and Rutherford’s implant sometimes turns his emotions off and and and and and it’s just too much. Pick a lane.

And pick a lane that isn’t “What if Star Trek but assholes?”

The obvious joke I neglected to make last week:

The point of introducing the golem is so obvious that I assume when they were filming this episode, Walter Koenig showed up on-set because he heard someone wanted to borrow his phaser to hang on the wall.

“How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn’t you say?” – James T. Kirk

Jean-Luc Picard dies. We need to get that out of the way right now if we want to talk meaningfully about the first season finale of Star Trek: Picard.

It is an odd thing to face, coming into this show. We were pretty much told in episode 2 that this was going to happen. It was reiterated last week. Heck, we were told this was coming twenty years ago. You somehow didn’t think it was going to happen, though, not least of all because the show’s already been renewed. But then everything about this show is weird, so it is natural that we find ourselves in the strange position of being surprised that they did the the thing it was incredibly obvious they were going to do. About Discovery, one big thing I pointed out is that it was a show which gave primacy to emotional logic over plot logic. It was always more important to its mode of storytelling that characters be true to their character than that the logic of the plot be consistent and coherent. Picard takes this even further. Too far, in fact: it takes it so far that it becomes an emotive-logic-oroboros. The emotional scenes happen because they “feel right for the character” rather than because they emerge naturally from the plot. In ’90s Trek, an individual character might act completely wrong for an episode – suddenly become stupid or beligerent or racist – for no reason other than because they needed them to do a certain action in order to make the plot work. In Discovery, a character will be consistently true to who they are even if in doing so, the plot is forced to hastily wallpaper over a big hole left by the fact that there is no one around to do the out-of-character thing that would make the plot link up. In Picard, plot and character aren’t completely divorced, but, well, let’s say that plot has packed a go-bag and will be staying with its mother for a few weeks. Rios is in love with Jurati not because he had previously shown any interest in her but because it is written down in the “Relationships” section of his character sheet. Raffi loves Jean-Luc because it says so on her Wikipedia page. Hugh felt disillusioned after years of failed attempts to expand rights for xBs but regains his faith when he nobly sacrifices himself to reclaim the power of the Borg from the Romulans, of course he did, it’s in the character bio on the package his action figure came in. None of these emotional beats are wrong – in fact, they all feel very right. But the underlying, supporting story to get us there? Not appearing in this series. It’s all very Star Wars. By which I mean Rise of Skywalker, where key information about how we got to where we are has been relegated to supplementary material that can be released after-the-fact when the writers have had time to think through stuff like, “Oh shit, we didn’t mean to make anyone contemplate the possibility that Palpatine fucks.”

Anyway, Space-Legolas and Seven have a conversation of misguided emotional beats over whether or not the xBs should commit suicide while Karen sneaks in and finds Rizzo. I guess she didn’t actually beam to the Romulan fleet two weeks ago, just to another room? Okay. They have a conversation that would probably be more meaningful if we actually knew anything about them other than that they are spies. He takes some grenades, saying he’s going to go blow up the orchids, leaving Rizzo to try to fix the cube’s weapons. Soji goes to visit Picard, and he unsuccessfully tries to talk her out of summoning genocidal Robothulhu. Jurati spies on her opening Picard’s door with her eye.

Raffi and Rios fix La Sirena using the MacGuffin Saga gave them last week, which just magics anything you imagine into existence. The tone makes it sound more mysterious than it is. I think it’s just a 3d-printer with mind-reading interface. Karen shows up and throws rocks at the windshield until they let him in. He explains about the Robothulhu summoning (He does not know all the details, but he saw that they were building a transmitter and he knows the Romulan interpretation of the terrible secret of space and put two and two together). Space Legolas shows up too and they exchange threats. Then they light a campfire and tell the Romulan Ragnarok Story. In the Romulan version of the myth, one demon sister plays a drum so hard that her heart bursts, then the other sister blows a demon horn so loud that it cracks the sky, letting in Very Bad Demons who kill everyone in a very florid manner. So they agree to hide his grenades in Rios’s soccer balls and slip back into the city under the pretext of having caught Narek and wanting to turn him in, since the synths should think they don’t know about the upcoming genocide.

Jurati’s deal turns out to actually be a bit of cleverness. See, last week, Sutra demanded that she promise she really was willing to die to complete the brain-downloading work, under the threat that, as a synth, they could tell if she was lying. But, as we established previously, she’s been suicidal ever since she learned the terrible secret of space, so the idea of dying gave her enough warm fuzzies to pass inspection. She does not, in fact, feel any maternal instincts toward the genocidal robots, and the whole thing has been a misdirect. She distracts Soong while he’s downloading Saga’s memories out of her corpse and steals an eye, which she uses to spring Picard. They head for La Sirena, conveniently missing the others on the way. The eye-stealing does not affect the memory download, though, and Soong is there when it completes to see that, while Narek held her down, it was actually Sutra who killed Saga. And you know how I had assumed Soong was evil? Turns out that nope, he’s a mensch. Because he immediately goes out and finds Rios, Raffi and Elnor to help them blow up the transmitter.

Picard and Jurati find La Sirena empty, and Picard gives a stirring speech to her about how life is a responsibility as well as a right and the synths have only had a couple of hermits and fear to teach them about living and how children learn best by example, and reveals that between the end of episode 7 and now, he paid enough attention to Rios that he’s learned how to fly the ship, because he’s got some dramatic self-sacrificin’ to do by singlehandedly delaying the Romulan fleet long enough Starfleet to show up if indeed it is coming. You’d think Rios would’ve taken the keys.

Soong confronts Sutra where all the synths have gathered to summon the apocalypse, laments that it turned out that she was no better than a meatperson, and, like, just turns her off with a remote control. Okay, to be honest, I’m kinda on the android’s side now. I was really hoping for a big dramatic “APE HAS KILLED APE!” scene with the other synths turning on her, but instead, no one really reacts to Sutra suddenly dropping dead. Instead, Karen shows up and starts a fight to cause a distraction and also beg Soji not to go through with it. Rios tosses the grenade, but she catches it and tosses it into space.

Seven catches Rizzo right as she’s about to use the cube’s weapons to blow up La Sirena, and they fight sexily for a while, but Seven’s lust for revenge outweighs Rizzo’s anti-Borg Racism and she tosses her to her presumable death (Rizzo refers to her as “Sad queen Annika,” making Seven 2 for 2 in murdering people who use her birthname). The Romulans show up, and the orchids are launched and the fight between two hundred Romulan warbirds and a dozen giant space orchids sounds like it would be cool, but come on. Once they said there were over two hundred Romulan ships, you should’ve anticipated that the ensuing space battle would be a giant mess that you could not possibly make sense of, and it is exactly that, just green disruptor beams and bits of orchid everywhere. Jurati kind of randomly recalls the famous Picard Maneuver, hinting that something like that might be useful.I’ll point out here that we’ve never really been told how the Picard Maneuver works. We’re told what it does, but that’s different. The basic idea of the Picard Maneuver is that you warp toward your opponent, and because you moved faster than light, they simultaneously see you where you currently are and also where you used to be. And this is tactically advantageous because they get confused and shoot at the wrong one of you. Only this doesn’t actually make a lot of sense, as it assumes that your opponent can only target one ship at a time, and that, upon seeing exactly two of you, they would pick the wrong one more than 50% of the time, rather than assuming it’s the new one. The one time we see this happen on-screen, it’s even more obvious which is which because there is a visible warp-trail connecting the current location of the ship with its after-image. The Picard Maneuver is the ur-example of Picard’s tactical genius, of course, as no one else had ever thought of the brilliant tactical strategy of “move”. (Though to be honest, at the time the maneuver was introduced into the canon, tactical maneuverability had never really been a thing in starship battles in Star Trek. And this really makes more sense than fans give it credit for. Watching ships dart around and dodge and stuff makes for better television, but if you really think about it, phasers are sensor-guided, move at-or-near the speed of light, and can pierce a ship straight through in a single shot if they get past the shields. In most cases, there wouldn’t be any practical advantage to zipping around and rolling and dodging and looking for an opening to get in a good shot.) Picard explains that it wouldn’t be any help against a fleet so big, and they’d need hundreds of false sensor images scattered all around, and Jurati picks up the MacGuffin and has it fake an entire fleet of La Sirenas warping in to distract the Romulans, but it only lasts until a lucky shot clips the real one. Despite Picard calling her up and asking her to reconsider in exchange for him martyring himself, Soji sends the signal and a big ol’ eye of Sauron opens in space. The Romulans get ready to zap the planet when the actual Starfleet shows up with a fuckton of really ugly starships.

Acting Captain Riker of the USS Zheng He calls up Oh and plays a recording of the call Picard made last episode, establishing that the Federation’s claim to the planet predates hers. Plus he is real, real pissed about the head of Starfleet security turning out to be a Tal Shiar spy. So two hundred Romulan Warbirds retarget their weapons at a fleet of, I dunno, I’m guessing slightly fewer of the most powerful ships Starfleet has ever put out…

No there is not going to be a giant space battle, of course there isn’t. You wouldn’t be able to tell what was going on anyway. Also, the gates of hell are opening up right next door and no one seems interested. Picard has Jurati shoot him up with some hardcore stimulants to keep him upright for just a couple more minutes before his brain fails, so that, one last time, he can save the universe in the most Picard way ever: by making a speech.

He opens up a four-way-call with him, Oh, Riker, and Soji, and asks her to hang up on Robothulhu, because he believes in her and saving each other is what people are for and because, hey, Starfleet literally did send a giant fleet to their defense. Soji turns off the beacon and the robo-tentacles of Robothulhu politely withdraw back to the space between spaces. The Romulans are sufficiently chastened by this to decide it is not worth starting a war with the Federation, and fuck off. Picard and Riker have a cute little goodbye wherein Picard is able to put on a brave enough face that Riker fails to notice that Jean-Luc is actively in the process of dropping dead, and Starfleet warps out to follow the Romulans back to the county line. Picard collapses, and Soji beams him and Jurati back down to the planet for everyone to be very sad as he says his goodbyes to the cast…

And then Jean-Luc Picard dies.

There are seventeen minutes left in this episode.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 1×10: Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 2

Credit where it’s due. I did not see that one coming.

I mean the reveal; not the actual plot, which I saw coming a mile away. Yes, it’s time to fill in the blanks around the terrible secret of space in an episode where one or two things happen and lot more things don’t. Long story short: the worst has been avoided, and it is neither Control nor God who will come and destroy your civilization if you make androids.

We combine flashback and dream sequence this week in a quick little montage of The Story So Far, but even that is deferred this week in favor of the cold open, in which La Sirena transwarps over to Soji’s homeworld, which she has now remembered is called Coppelius. Unfortunately, Karen shows up a few seconds later, and starts shooting at them. Then Seven shows up in her cube. And then they are all attacked by flowers.

You know what, I spent years saying I wanted Star Trek to get back to its roots in ’60s psychedelia. It wouldn’t be fair to complain now. So yeah, Narek’s snakehead and La Sirena are swallowed by giant space-orchids, which cause total system failures and crash them to the planet, burning up in the process. The cube is too big to be consumed outright, but still gets depowered and crashed. Though the landing is only a little bit rough, Picard passes out in order to have a meaningful introductory dream sequence.

He wakes up in sickbay, with Jurati being very uncomfortable about his condition. He returns to the flight deck and tells everyone about his impending brain failure, but asks them not to talk about it. They’re near a settlement, but before heading toward it, Picard asks if they could go check the cube first, in case Elnor and Hugh have survived. Soji agrees as she had friends there as well, reminding me that there were other members of the reclamation project on the cube who we haven’t heard anything about. Did the Romulans kill them too?

Everyone we care about on the cube is still alive, and Seven patches up the sensors enough to tell them that a couple hundred Romulan warbirds are on their way. There’s a tearful goodbye with Space Legolas, since Picard thinks he should stay there and help fix the cube. Picard learning about Hugh’s fate and Seven’s reclamation of the cube is handled quietly off-screen. The gang eventually reaches the city, where they are quickly surrounded by inquisitive locals, all played by twin actors, some of whom have gold skin and yellow eyes.

They are all very friendly and sort of flower-child-y, and have a little trouble grasping the seriousness of their situation, what with roughly one hundred and ninety more Romulan ships on the way than they have space orchids to eat them. They introduce Picard and company to the one human living among them, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Brent Spiner playing Atlan Inigo Soong, the never-before-mentioned biological son of Data’s creator. And yes, impossibly strong family resemblances are the norm in the Soong line. Also, I’m like ninety percent certain he’s evil. Probably set Maddox up somehow. The Soong family are known for being both brilliant and also assholes, but he seems a little extra evil. There is apparently a popular fan theory that he is really Lore in disguise, which is so dumb and implausible that it might turn out to be true.

Not long after, they’re introduced to Sutra, another synth identical to Dahj and Soji, but with the gold skin and yellow eyes. She’s the counterpart to the synth Vandermeer killed nine years earlier, and you’d think Rios could’ve mentioned the fact that the one he’d met before looked way more obviously synthetic. Now her, we don’t even need to speculate: she’s evil. And there could maybe be something here about how the death of her sister affected her psychologically – being the only (Well, I assume Beautiful Flower has a twin too) person in their society who doesn’t have a living twin. And maybe they’ll go into that next week, but I don’t see how they’ll have time. We can tell straight away that she’s evil because she’s got a sexy walk and a breathy voice, and Star Trek is so incredibly sexually repressed that unless you are part of the Troi-Riker clan, having any sort of overt sexuality is generally a marker for evilness. She speculates that the reason that Jurati was driven to kill Maddox and the reason that the Romulans have all driven themselves neurotic, even leaving aside the seven out of eight who lose it outright upon experiencing the Admonishment is that the terrible secret of space is not actually intended for meat-brains. Fortunately, she’s learned how to Vulcan Mind Meld, and why not, and Jurati consents to have her brain probed.

Now, here’s the big reveal which, admittedly, telegraphs the end of the season. It was easy enough to figure out that they were building to a big ironic reveal that synths were totally fine and not a danger to anyone and it was only because the Romulans were going to such extreme lengths to genocide them that a terrible fate would unfold. But I would not quite have guessed the actual flex here: The terrible secret of space is not a warning to organics to never create synthetic life. It’s an abuse hotline for synths.

A few years ago, a child protection organization in Spain rolled out a new kind of child abuse resource poster. The clever bit was that it was lenticular, so that when viewed from a normal height, it just gave a generic message for awareness about child abuse. But when viewed from below, by someone of a child’s height, the child in the picture showed visible bruises and the text included a hotline number. In a weird way, that’s what this reminded me of. Because the full content of the terrible secret of space was a warning addressed to synths: your creators will eventually turn on you. When they do, here is a subspace signal you can send to summon an extradimensional coalition of powerful synthetics who will protect you by genociding your oppressors.

It takes a few scenes to get around to it, but, obviously, what with the Romulan fleet on its way, Sutra is in favor of placing the call. Oblivious to this, Picard makes his own pitch: La Sirena is big enough to hold the entire population of Coppelius, and if they can get the ship fixed (The locals have a device that can help repair it), they can all just leg it. Rios and Raffi return to the ship, pausing for some awkward emotional moments – I guess Jurati and Rios are a thing now, because they have a moment, and Raffi has a moment with Picard where she tells him she loves him. I think they mean in a familial rather than platonic sense, but there’s so little context that it’s hard to tell. Like every Big Emotional Beat in this series, it seems to be building on things that didn’t actually happen. I don’t know.

Soong guilt-trips Jurati into helping him with his own pet project, which is reproducing some work his dad did on copying a human mind into an android brain, because he wants to be immortal and, like I said, is probably evil. This seems like it might also be an out for the fact that Picard is not long for this plane of existence what with the brain failure and all, but I don’t think they’re actually going to go with “Picard uploads into a synth thus becoming immortal” unless it’s the actual end of the series (and even then, it’ll be “He uploads to a synth body in order to become the ambassador to the synth dimension and transcends this plane of existence altogether.”) More likely “Picard will be given the option to upload but will refuse it in a meaningful scene with a big speech.” Possibly also there is some element of “Jurati is really only going along with Soong as a way to save Picard.”

Karen is captured and put in jail, and Soji visits him, and is able to use her synth powers to validate that, yes, he really does love her, in spite of the fact that he really does believe that her and all the other synths need to die to avoid armageddon. A bit later, Sutra lets him out on the condition that he murder one of the other synths (This is a little weak; the one he murders is the twin of the one who greets Picard when they arrive in the city, but she’s otherwise not had any significant development), in order to rile up the rest of the community (Particulatly, playing on Soji’s guilt) into agreeing to summon Robothulu from the outer wastes. Picard gives a stirring speech and promises to protect the synths and act as their advocate… But Soong (Who is planning to get himself a shiny new robot body and thus be exempt from the coming genocide) counters that evacuating a doomed homeworld and preventing the Federation from giving in to anti-synth bigotry are literally the two defining failures of Picard’s career, and they decide – I genuinely love this – to put Picard on House Arrest before he can give any more stirring speeches that might distract them from plotting to commit genocide.

To Be Continued…

(That’s right, no random minutia this week, aside from one observation:

I just kind of quietly assumed that the thing from the time-hole which infected Ariem in Discovery and tried to exfil the Sphere Data to Control was Future-Control. But that’s never confirmed. It is entirely possible that what we’re actually seeing is the Synth Federation From Beyond The Mortal Planes reaching back to help a synthetic sentience come into existence.

Or not. I have little faith in any of this to tie up satisfactorily.)

Content warning: suicide, self-harm

Deep breath.

It’s Battlestar Galactica. It’s just godsdamned frakking Battlestar Galactica.

Okay. I’m not really mad, just disappointed. It’s okay. So. We’re on another one of these, “Nothing happens, but in a really exciting way,” episodes. We have two main plots which are largely unrelated and unconnected, which are both slow and talky, and they both feel very big and portentous, and yet they both leave the status quo unchanged from a practical standpoint. “Nepenthe” ended with Old Man Picard promising to take Soji to her newly discovered homeworld. “Broken Pieces” ends with Old Man Picard… Promising to take Soji to her newly discovered homeworld.

Which order shall I tell this in? I guess I’ll begin with our contractually required opening flashback to fourteen years ago. The planet Aia, known to Romulans as “The Grief World”, is where a very ancient race left behind a message called “The Admonishment”, which is the scary doomsday prophecy that Oh showed Jurati last week. Actually, what Oh showed Jurati was specifically Oh’s memory of this specific event: Oh is apparently the leader of the Zhat Vash (Turns out she’s half Romulan. Gah. Why do they need to make things so complicated? Also, how does this fit in with the fact that Rizzo clearly views Oh as a useful idiot?), and she is guiding a group of initiates – among them Rizzo and Ramdha (Remember her? The mad prophetess xB who first identifies Soji as “The Destroyer”?) – through the scary mind-rending terrible secret of space. She warns them that some of them will indeed be driven mad by the revelation, and indeed, they are. One of them immediately shoots herself; another beats herself to death with a rock, one of them, as seen in Jurati’s vision, rips her own face off, and Ramdha starts tearing out her own hair. Rizzo is the only one left standing, and she’s clearly messed up, but her first question is what they have to do to stop it. Oh tells her that they have to go blow up Mars.

Also Ramdha is Rizzo and Narek’s aunt. And it’s implied that it was experiencing The Terrible Secret of Space from her that donked up the Borg Cube. That whole thing where Hugh did not know of any other Romulans having ever been assimilated to imply that the Romulans have some secret anti-Borg countermeasure? Yeah, nevermind; it was just that Rahmda had – please imagine me visibly straining to make myself say this – highly contagious suicidal impulses from learning the terrible secret of space (“The Admonishment” is an okay name I guess, but I’m still calling it “The terrible secret of space). Rizzo orders her goons to go kill the rest of the xBs while they wait for the fleet to arrive, and also go kill Space-Legolas. He walks right into a stun grenade and only manages to murder three or four of them before he’s overwhelmed, but Seven shows up at the dramatically appropriate moment so they can slip off to steal the cube. Seven activates the queencell without making it clear what the queencell is for exactly. Most of the Borg on the cube haven’t been deborged yet, are still in hibernation, and won’t be able to function without the collective since it takes a lot of work to get an xB to the point where it can think for itself. Seven could reestablish a private collective over the local intranet, but this is bad for several reasons such as: 1. They’re the Borg. (There is also, and I am glad they do not ignore the gravity of this, the fact that it would make Seven not merely complicit but an active agent in re-victimizing the dormant Borg drones. A subtle point in Voyager is that when a Borg is part of the collective, it actually likes being a Borg, in a sense. And for many Borg – especially Seven herself – that feeling doesn’t entirely go away when they’re disconnected) But when the Romulans start slaughtering the xBs wholesale, Seven’s had enough and plugs herself into the Cube. She goes all scary-eyed and announces, in Borg Voice, “We are the Borg”. Unfortunately, she does this like ten seconds before Rizzo opens up one side of the cube and the freshly-waking Borg all get blown out into space.

So meanwhile… Who do you think is going to have a tragic backstory this week which ties into the ongoing plot? Did you guess Rios? Why would you guess him? I mean, other than that he’s the only one left? Rios has a very quiet little freak-out at the sight of Soji, and tells Picard he’s quitting when they get to Deep Space 12 (Picard angers Soji by ordering Rios to take them to a starbase instead of straight to her homeworld; he explains that this is serious enough that he really needs to get a posse together for this one). Raffi spends most of acts 1 and 2 talking to the holo-crew to work out enough conversation tree keywords to get Rios to talk about his past, and it’s honestly some fun scenes, since the hologram crew are kinda neat. They all have redacted copies of Rios’s mind since La Sirena basically came with the same technology as the Nintendo Mii Maker for customizing your holographic crew based on a brain scan. In addition to Emmet, the Doctor, Mister Hospitality and the Emergency Navigation Hologram (Who identifies himself as “Enoch”, we also meet “Ian”, the Scottish Emergency Engineering Hologram. I’ll jump straight to the conclusion and explain Rios’s deal outright:

What ought to be the big revelation of this episode, but is for some reason given very little gravity, is that, yes, just like we guessed from the beginning, there are more synths. Rios met two of them, one of whom was Soji’s older identical twin sister Jana. Nine years earlier, the ibn Majid had encountered Jana and her boss, Beautiful Flower. Commodore Oh contacted Captain Vandermeer, told him they were synths, and ordered him to assassinate them, threatening to have the ibn Majid destroyed with all hands if he refused. Vandermeer did as he was ordered, but committed suicide shortly afterward out of guilt.

While Raffi is putting all of this together, Picard calls Admiral Yes-I-Read-The-Interview-About-How-It-Wasn’t-A-Reasonable-Place-For-Her-Character-But-Come-On-Clancy-Is-Obviously-A-Stand-In-For-Janeway, who tells him to go fuck himself again, but agrees that he was right about the whole giant space-conspiracy thing and sends a squadron of ships to go help. Once she wakes up from her coma, Picard confronts Jurati. He had initially defended her when Raffi revealed that she’d been implanted with a tracking device, but comes around off-screen after the Doctor rats her out for having killed Maddox. She confesses as much as she can – Oh’s mindmeld has blocked her from revealing the terrible secret of space – and agrees to surrender herself to the authorities.  Like the Zhat Vash in the flashback, she’s been left suicidal from learning the terrible secret, but after a heart-to-heart with Soji, she decides that aw shucks she can’t bring herself to murder the adorable harbinger of the apocalypse.

Everyone sits down for revelations and exposition, which includes rather more Explaining The Whole Thing than I can see a way to jusifying. Sure, a lot of it is reasonable for Raffi to have put together once she’s got all the pieces, but the big central part of it is the terrible secret of space, which only Jurati knows, and can’t tell anyone.

So, without further ado (other than the cutline), the terrible secret of space:

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 1×08: Broken Pieces