The two species Starfleet has to keep from killing each other this week are a race of glowing circles and a race of glowing cubes, and by the end of the hour they’ve gone to what the show calls a shape war.
I’m back with my favorite baby know-it-all, who’s enjoying being up this early. I film these at like 3:00 in the morning every time, so the sacrifice is real. And what an interesting and fun episode. It’s a very traditional Star Trek setup: the ambassadors of two groups come together and Starfleet helps mediate. It’s just that this time the two groups are spheres and cubes.
Zeus’s Granddaughter Is on Her Sixth Ship
Then we’re introduced to a brand new crewman from a brand new species. Remember Zeus from that episode of the original series? You know the one I’m talking about. She’s his granddaughter. She’s got a little laurel and little sparkly hands, but when she does her powers, it comes out as a floppy lightning bolt. She’s not very good at Zeus-ing.
In fact, she’s been kicked off most every ship she’s been on. This is literally the sixth ship she’s been on. My co-host says that kind of sounds like it’s her problem, and I assume this was her last chance at Starfleet.
So when Mariner sees her, she’s like, I’ve been like her, she’s just misunderstood, I’ll give her a hand. She goes to help her out and it’s rough. It was pretty rough, I’m not going to lie.
The Sharks and the Jets, With Shapes
There’s a crime scene, and it’s between the spheres and the cubes. Mariner calls them the Sharks and the Jets, and my co-host asked if that’s a football team. It’s a West Side Story joke. She didn’t watch that. It’s all good.
They walk into the crime scene, everybody’s freaking out, and my co-host noticed the new girl’s facial expression, literally pointed at the screen and said, “That’s her. She’s the one who killed them.” Obviously she didn’t kill anyone, but we knew there was more to her.
My co-host thought the Romeo and Juliet story was kind of a little played out. She should’ve seen that one coming, and unfortunately she didn’t. And then there’s the fact that they made a weird eraser top kid. Neither of us could remember what they called it. It’s square on top and then the bottom is a circle. She says it’s like a fake dreidel, and that’s the greatest analogy.
Mariner thinks maybe the new girl did the thing. She’s asking her, did you accidentally kill these kids, and she’s freaking out about the potential. They find out Zeus’s granddaughter stole the computer that was there. She hid evidence, and she didn’t have to. She just assumed they’d think it was her fault, because it got burned out and she gets all the electrical problems.
At the very end she does get in trouble for all that. She goes to the brig, and she has the exact same reaction Mariner did in season one. But Mariner actually kept her guard up through all of it, which was pretty cool. I see where they’re going with this. Mariner’s growing into a person who takes things a little more seriously. So we’ll see.
Boimler Wants a Nickname
The B plot is Rutherford, Tendi and Boimler. Boimler now essentially has a full-on mustache with a tiny soul patch going on, and he’s still trying to bring in the sides.
Tendi and Rutherford know he’s been looking at the interdimensional iPad. In the other dimension, this very event, the peace treaty between these two species, is when he did something that made the cat doctor like him and give him a nickname. That started him on the path to being given temporary command of the ship and this and that. So he’s thinking, I’ve got to be like that, and he’s stressing out, man.
By the way, his nickname in the other dimension was Flip. Keep that in mind. So he walks into sickbay with “Don’t you think I can flip the script?” Then it’s “I just flipped on down here to see if I could shadow you. I’ve always wanted to learn medical stuff.” Then he’s going to flip through this book. It was really bad. And then he does a backflip, ends up breaking all of her stuff and gets gassed or whatever. She tells him to get out.
So he tries to work out how to connect with her, and he decides in his own head to speak her own language. Cuss words. He thought that was a bright idea.
“Hey, Dr. T’Ana.”
“What do you want?”
“Nothing. What’s crappening with you?”
“What did you just call me?”
He just starts casually talking in cuss words, and she goes all cat crazy on him. My co-host has a cat, and she says that’s basically what she saw up there. She crazy. I feel like it was a good ten seconds where you just heard beep. It was long. It was rough.
The Shape War
The two plots come together when the spheres and the cubes go to war. They called it a shape war.
Zeus’s granddaughter didn’t want to do it. Mariner made her. Mariner’s telling her to use her Zeusy powers, she’s saying she doesn’t want people to know, and Mariner says, but you can do it. So she does it, and she low-key fails, and one of her lightning bolts sticks up Boimler’s butt.
That’s along with hundreds of other weirdly floppy, wobbly, very uncomfortable ones. They’re almost like gummy. Except for the one in Boimler’s butt, which apparently was made of rock candy or something. What the heck? The rules are very odd when it comes to this girl’s powers. I don’t know, whatever.
But she manages to do the thing, which was absorb the power away from those guys. She fights her way into the shuttle bay and says she can engineer her way through it, because that’s basically what she is. She does, and she saves the day. That’s when we get to see the fake dreidel kid.
Then Boimler gets surgery. Very intense surgery. And the cat lady ends up giving him a nickname. I’m not going to say it. It’s one of her bad words with an O in it, and no, Flippy didn’t make the cut.
The Verdict
Star Trek: Lower Decks “Of Gods and Angles” gets a 9 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
The nine is my co-host’s. She really liked it, and I’m with her.
I’m liking where they’re going with the interdimensional hijinks, one way or another. I’m also liking that you can see the characters on a trajectory. Their arcs are coming to fruition, and it’s interesting to watch that transformation happen. My co-host pointed out they’re not going to be lower deckers by then, and that’s real. It’s funny that the show’s going to have to deal with that, because then you can justify it: they aren’t lower deckers anymore. They’re something else.
Let me know what you thought of the episode, and tell me if you’re enjoying the interdimensional hijinks. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
