“Caves,” Season 4 Episode 8 of Star Trek: Lower Decks, is a bottle episode, and I’ll be honest, I was kind of upset we couldn’t continue the storyline with the ship. So no more theories on that for today. For today.
What they gave us instead is a lot more newness. It’s funny, because all season I feel like we’ve been seeing a bunch of callbacks and half-realized subplots and storylines. Then last week we got an episode that was really all about the lower deckers and their history, meaning they started calling back to their own stuff, which is really cool. This episode was no different. It kept that same trend going, and it did it as a bottle episode.
A Bottle Episode in a Cartoon
My co-host had never seen a bottle episode. Those of you familiar with Star Trek are very familiar with these. She watches Golden Girls with her mom, so she’s seen callback episodes, the ones with the unseen clips, but never one like this. I’d explained it to her before we sat down, and she gave it right back to me: a bottle episode is basically a way to save money for the final episode, so they use one set and do callbacks. Exactly. I was about to say it myself, and she did a great job.
I don’t believe there’s that much in terms of savings when it comes to animation. But for those of us watching Star Trek, the bottle episode is just as time-honored as half of the nostalgia stuff they keep calling back to, and that made it even more special for me.
Everybody Has a Cave Story
Our team gets stuck in a cave on an away mission. Mariner is hilarious about it. She whines so funny this episode, and I loved her so much. She hates that they’re there, and once they’re in, it turns out everybody has a cave story.
While they’re stuck, they notice the moss is actually very aggressive. “Not a hug. It’s eating my boot.” It’s carnivorous moss. Are you kidding me? It starts trying to attack them, so the whole time they’re trying to come up with ways to save themselves by telling their stories of having been in caves.
It’s also a callback to Paramount having the really bad cave set. You saw the same cave set in The Next Generation and in Voyager, the exact same one, because they only had so much money to put a cave together. My co-host had already said it while we were watching: all these caves do look alike. Then the show says it for her. “Feel like I’ve been in this cave a hundred times.” “Huh, caves do all kind of look the same, don’t they?” That’s 100 percent what they’re talking about.
Boimler, Levy and the Vendorians
As they’re telling stories, you find out Boimler has apparently been all buddy-buddy with somebody else, Steve Levy. Levy’s a conspiracy theorist who believes in the Vendorians, this one race of aliens, and Boimler’s all, “Oh no, that’s not real,” this and that. And then poof, the Vendorians show up.
Tendi, meanwhile, keeps trying to tell a story about this turbolift thing, and everybody keeps telling her no, nothing about the turbolift story is going to help us here. It’s not a cave story. That keeps going as a through-line, and it does come to fruition later.
Rutherford Had a Space Baby
Rutherford tells a story about that time he had a kid with the doctor, and you’re sitting there like, what are you even talking about? Apparently he had a space baby. They were being taken through a cave system with this one cloned scientist, one of those aliens that touch you when they’re about to die and pass on their genetic stuff. So Rutherford had to give birth to a baby, and it was a Star Trek C-section. It was awesome.
They’re also being chased by an alien monster, and Rutherford, being the genius he is, figures out how to use the tricorder to translate based on the growls and starts communicating with it. “We mean you no harm. We just want to get out of this cave.” “Did you just talk to me?” You find out it was just protecting its own baby as well.
That was a fun storyline. My co-host loved that Dr. T’Ana hated babies at first, and by the end she’s saying no, this one’s nice, this one’s super smart, super cool. She also liked the translation, and so did I. That was super sciency Star Trek stuff, and I’m like, right on, man.
Mariner and Delta Shift
Then you finally hear Mariner’s story, and it’s that she literally worked with Delta Shift. If you know anything about Lower Decks, there’s nothing Beta Shift hates worse than Delta Shift. They have this whole thing with an aging rock, and it’s a whole experience. At the end of the day she respects Delta Shift now, and everybody’s heartbroken and upset by it.
This one was my favorite. Being a Next Generation fan, I totally felt that walking near a thing makes you older, so you have to try to push through it. It was my co-host’s favorite too, even though she didn’t really watch Star Trek.
What got her was the leg. Mariner crashes the shuttle. “We lost power. Shuttles are shaped like bricks. What was I supposed to do?” One of the guys breaks his leg, and they have to fix it. Then they’re walking near the thing and they need someone younger so they don’t hurt themselves, and the guy who broke his leg is the youngest one. So the leg starts growing wrong, and eventually it falls off. She can usually do animation gore, but it looked so weird that she was covering her eyes. It’s very unsettling. And the guy just cries, can we get my leg in case Dr. T’Ana can’t grow it back? Right on, man. Me too, bro.
The Green One’s Story
By now the moss has really cornered them, and finally, boom, it lashes up and it talks. It basically says they can’t leave until it hears the green one’s story. Everyone’s like, what?
It’s a really interesting callback to the first episode. If you remember the very first episode of Lower Decks, they dealt with a rage virus, everybody spewing black goo and stuff. This is right after that. Apparently they all went into a turbolift, got stuck in it and just spent the day together, hours on end. For Tendi it was the greatest day of her life. It was really sweet.
At the end you figure out it’s just the Vendorians doing another test. The moss was the Vendorians the whole time. It was so funny. Apparently they like to do these morality tests, and they decide the four of them have earned their friendship.
Oh, and by the way, the voice cast recycling is super obvious. My co-host didn’t think it was that obvious. The only one she could point out was the captain, who played the head Vendorian. It’s funny, and it happens all the time. Let’s be real.
The Verdict
Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 Episode 8, “Caves,” is an 8.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
Both of us discussed it, and it’s an 8.5 for us. My co-host thought it was cute, and she thought every story had an interesting thing happen. She liked that the Vendorians had to eat crickets, because that’s what they eat. Huge crickets. We really enjoyed it.
Let me know what you thought of the episode. Did you enjoy all the new in-canon stuff, and all the new planets, which apparently all have the same cave system? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
