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)
