A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

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?”