Halfway into the final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks, I find myself underwhelmed by this season, except it’s not a bad season at all. The episodes themselves are great and as they should be, standalone dilemma-of-the-week outings for our lieutenant junior-grades and the rest of the crew of the ‘Ritos. The underwhelming part of me I think stems from the fact that this is the final season, and I guess modern television has programmed me to expect flashy, big-box endings to shows. This, despite getting that final season of Symphogear and being disappointed it was just Agatha the database all along.
The two-episode premiere was fairly solid in that it establishes what looks to be this season’s thing, parallel universes, but the kind like we saw from Worf’s similarly-titled TNG episode “Parallels”. It would not surprise me at all if either the penultimate episode or finale ends up with that ragged homeless Riker and Enterprise from the reality where the Borg overran the Federation to come out and be the final boss of the series. If only just because every Trek has to end with Jonathan Frakes’ involvement, somehow. I do enjoy parallel dimension Trek though, because it’s always fun to find out where the divergences occur in characters. I’m curious how Mariner ended up sending her mother to Starbase 80 and taking command of the Cerritos instead.
Tendi’s Orion space-pirate adventure, predictably, only lasted two episodes, and since they leaked images of her in uniform on the trailers for the season, you knew she was coming back, but I kind of hoped they’d B-side story her for a few more episodes just because that presents more opportunity to showcase T’Lyn or even Rutherford, since they get less character time as Mariner and Boimler. The blue male Orions was a cheeky deep-cut from TAS that I didn’t immediately get because I haven’t seen all of TAS myself.
Probably the best episode of the first half so far was last week’s “Farewell to Farms” featuring the return of last season’s Klingon Ma’ah tending to his family farm when Mariner and Boimler roll up and turn the episode into a Klingon ritual, pain sticks and all. The B-side was unfortunately a Migleemo arc, and with apologies to the amazing Paul F. Tompkins at least making him passable, he is easily the least interesting character on the show despite the show’s good premise at a new Federation alien species, the Klowahkans, even if their whole motivation for space-travel is fine dining. The only time Migleemo was ever useful was being Tuvixed with Captain Freeman to become Frigleeman.
Standard Orbit of Observations and Trekkie Shit
- The Intrepid-class vessel seen in “The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel” is the USS Endeavour, albeit a parallel universe version. Previous prime universe iterations of the Endeavour are the Nebula-class NCC-71805 noted in several TNG episodes and the movie First Contact, as well as the Constitution II-class NCC-1895 seen in The Undiscovered Country. Curious, its captain is wearing a TNG-style uniform and TNG-style commbadge. This would have probably been possible since the class launched in 2370, during the uniform style transition, and the new commbadge style followed in 2371-72.
- As McMahen often does in this show, he enjoys making references back to least-notable alien species in previous Trek shows. The Gallamites shown at the resort are a depiction of those mentioned back in DS9 “The Maquis Part I” when Dax frequently mentioned having dinner dates with Captain Boday to make Bashir jealous.
- Similarly, “Experience bIj” is from the tabletop/VHS game “Star Trek: The Next Generation – A Klingon Challenge”, a game made by Decipher, who also at the time produced “Star Trek: The Collectable Card Game”. While the game is not produced anymore, there is still very active fan community and underground scene that goes by “The Continuing Committee” and continues to produce virtual expansion sets for both the first and second editions of the game. Sadly, Lower Decks has not been added to the game yet, but perhaps some day.
- While this season’s character focus has been mostly on Tendi, Boimler and Mariner haven’t lost their main character status just yet, with him trying to do his own version of Lefler’s Laws and growing a mustache after seeing his bearded counterpart, and her still trying to sort herself out after four seasons of self-reflection which arguably started with seeing herself as the kind of captain she never wanted to be.
- Another shout out to Cetacean Ops for showing up before the show ends forever.
- And speaking of this show ending forever, are we going to address that koala shit?
