Bold Boimler is on the rise, and “Reflections” is the episode that typifies why. I really do believe that’s the case.

Star Trek is my fandom and my jam, and doing these reviews with you is one of my favorite things. Baby Know-It-All did last week’s with me and enjoyed it, but she’s been really busy with work and school, so she can’t join me for this one. We also missed last week’s episode over technical issues. We’d actually recorded it, and then the microphone and everything else went wrong. So you’re getting two reviews today: episode 304, “Room for Growth,” and episode 305, “Reflections.”

A Lottery for Deck One

I actually really like “Room for Growth.” There’s a lottery on the ship for the lower decks people, and the prize is quarters up on deck one. That’s where the big palatial rooms are, the rooms we’ve seen in every Star Trek series since the beginning. Although those quarters in Strange New Worlds, I’m telling you, those things are palatial.

So our crew tries to find a way to work together and get their names into that lottery. While she’s doing some work in one of the vents, Tendi overhears that Delta shift, who they don’t like and who apparently don’t like them, is planning on rigging the entire thing. There’s one particular computer terminal where it can be done, because on a giant networked ship, why wouldn’t there be only one place where this can happen? They map out a route through the ship to get there and put in their own names, and it becomes an adventure. It’s almost Galaxy Quest in its absurdity.

Mariner, Boimler and all of them go through the inner workings of the ship. They find the sewage plant and the water reclamation, and at one point they’re literally going through sewers. They finally get where they’re going and have to wait for a door that only opens for 10 seconds, once an hour.

Then Delta shift shows up. Everybody says they can totally work this out, they have a little bonding moment, and then you find out one of the Delta shifters was just trying to get the door to open. It opens, Delta shift rushes in, and our crew is left saying, “Oh my god, you suck.” They find another way around, and when they get to the terminal, it turns out the lottery is for one quarters. One.

So they decide they aren’t going to split up over it. Let Delta shift get split apart, not us. Totally commendable. I’m down, man.

Then you find out what Delta shift did with it. Moving out of the lower decks, where there’s no privacy, was worth it to them, so they split the room four ways.

The Engineers Can’t Relax

The episode actually starts with the captain possessed by the spirit of Masaka, an alien god spirit thing, and apparently this happens all the time. She’s flying through the ship, transforming it into what looks like Aztec type stuff. It’s the third or fourth time it’s happened, so the engineers have to work super duper overtime to recover from it, and they’ve got another job coming right behind it. All of them are overworked. They’ve got bags under their eyes.

Speaking as a former chief engineer, I feel your pain very much.

The captain believes that if the engineers don’t relax they’re going to lose their minds, so she takes them to a relaxation station. They’re each given a bracelet that turns green when you’re relaxed, and they get run through their paces, and the bracelets stay yellow. Nobody can figure out why they can’t relax.

Then the captain finds out the engineers worked out an engineering workaround to make the bracelets go green. It makes her so mad it sends her over the edge, and her own bracelet turns black. Now everybody has to save her. So the engineers come up with another workaround. They build a machine that actually relaxes the captain and gets her out of that black state, and the lady who runs the place says, “Destroy this machine right now.”

Rutherford gets back, finds out his friends had a shot at the room, and can’t believe they didn’t take it. Why didn’t they? It’s hilarious. But they stuck together.

Mariner Works the Booth

“Reflections” has Mariner and Boimler working the Starfleet recruitment booth at an alien job fair while Rutherford challenges himself. I loved this episode.

It starts with Mariner genuinely upset that she has to work the booth. We saw this scene briefly in the trailers, where she’s going, “Yeah, join Starfleet. Discover the undiscovered country.” Ransom hears her complaining and tells her she’d better be at that booth, and if she isn’t, so help him, he’s sending her to Starbase 80.

For those of you playing at home, Starbase 1 is the Starfleet headquarters base, the one that floats around Earth. Starbase 80 is about as far out as they go at this point. Nobody wants to work the tail end of space. Don’t nobody want to go there, because you can’t get anything imported, and if your replicator breaks, you’re stuck.

So they’re very much trapped in the booth. Mariner’s trying very hard, and even Boimler’s shocked that she’s really giving it the effort.

There’s an archaeologist at the next booth over, and every time Mariner is about to sign somebody up, she cuts in. Oh, you want to join Starfleet? Do you like being turned into a Borg? Because that’s going to happen. It’s that kind of thing the whole time. I kind of dug the archaeologist chick. I thought she was fun, and she’s a character I’d like to see come back.

At one point Mariner makes a really funny joke. She tells her that archaeologists are basically just thieves, that she’s probably only here to steal from the museum, that it’s right there and nobody’s looking, so she may as well go break in.

Spoilers, that’s what she’s there for. So, legit.

Boimler Loses It

At some point the people coming by the booth start giving them crap. We heard you guys can’t leave the booth. Starfleet, don’t want to get in trouble. And one dude has the nerve to grab Boimler’s rank pip and throw it.

Boimler loses it. Loses it. Rage quits. He’s flipping tables. He’s going around telling them all of you are here because of Starfleet, that Starfleet defends you from the Klingons, the Borg, the Cardassians. He’s going off. It’s exquisite.

And everybody watching says, if joining Starfleet made that guy confident like that, oh man, I want to join. Next thing you know Mariner has turned it into a recruitment technique, and she’s getting everyone to sign up.

Ransom shows up at the Starfleet table expecting the worst. He sees Mariner recruiting everybody and Boimler acting a fool. We also get a glimpse of the archaeologist running in to steal from the museum. You find out later that, I guess, the Grand Nagus’s scepter was in there, and she stole it back to sell it to him or whatever. There’s a story that’s going to happen there, and I’m in for it.

Two Rutherfords, One Head

Rutherford has an issue with his implant. He’s having nightmares and can’t figure out why. Tendi finds a backup that’s overloading his memory cache and clears it out. He gets a weird kind of shock, and the eye segment goes from its normal light blue to red. He’s talking a little differently. He walks out and it’s a totally different character.

They end up tipping off the wrong person, so Tendi calls a medical emergency. Security and medical go looking for him. I don’t want to spoil every single thing, but when they catch him, he’s rendered unconscious. I believe stunned is the official word for it.

What you’re left with is a character trying to discover what’s happening in his own head. He’s in a white mindscape, which I think is their animated version of what we used to see Sisko dealing with when he talked to the Prophets. And in there with him is a younger him. No patch. He’s real aggressive. He’s very emo.

The Rutherford we know doesn’t remember him. He gets a brief glimpse of a memory, and it turns out a bunch of his memory was dumped to get the implant in, and whoever installed it said, we’re going to make him think this was elective. The younger Rutherford explains it to him: didn’t you ever wonder why this thing kept breaking? It’s because your mind knew, and it backed me up.

Younger Rutherford used to build racing ships. He would do the Devron run, which I guess is kind of like the Kessel Run in Star Wars, a fast way through the Neutral Zone.

Only one of them is going to be able to leave, because the mind can’t handle two copies of the same personality. This is one of the most interesting things going on in the episode. Rutherford is doing his absolute best not to give in, and young Rutherford is making very compelling arguments. Finally they agree to settle it with a good old-fashioned race. Anything you can make real in your mind will happen.

Young Rutherford builds a really cool-looking ship. Our Rutherford builds a Delta Flyer, outfits and everything, the same one Tom Paris built back in Voyager. Very cool. Love it.

They’re racing, they’re doing really well, and a giant Romulan warbird shows up. Then Rutherford starts calling out orders to Tendi, and you see the others are there with him. Young him says, “What are you doing? Who said they could show up?” And Rutherford says you can make anything happen. “You think I’m going to fly a race without my crew?”

Right there you get the defining difference between our Rutherford and young Rutherford. Young Rutherford is angry and he’s got something to prove.

When the race is over, young Rutherford says, “I remember how we got the implant,” and shows him. He was building and experimenting with stuff he shouldn’t have messed with. There was a small breach and an explosion, he was scarred up, and they had to do it. But you do hear the line where the guy says, “That’s okay. We’ll make sure he thinks it’s elective.”

So there’s a deeper story going on there, and I can’t wait to see what happens. Young Rutherford’s last word on it is that he’s really happy to see him with those friends, and to keep them. I’m pretty sure he’s going to.

Where the Show Is Going

They’re giving us our first dip of a toe into a deeper storyline for one of the characters, which I’m all about. I feel like the show can only exist in its two-dimensional form for so long. It’s like Rick and Morty. Rick and Morty could only be classic Rick and Morty adventures for so long before it eventually had to get to the current season, where you’re actually getting some story.

I feel like that’s where Lower Decks is shifting. I believe you’re going to see development in Boimler. I believe you’re going to see development in Tendi. I believe you’re going to see development in Rutherford.

The only character I think is going to have an issue is Mariner. I think she’s going to have to learn how to exist in a world where she can’t be mediocre, because even her close friends are excelling. She’s finally met people she can bond with, and this is going to have to evolve past lower decks at some point. I don’t know what they’ll do, and I don’t know what that next iteration looks like, but I’m here for it.

The Verdict

Star Trek: Lower Decks gets two numbers on the Know-It-All Index this week: a 7 out of 10 for “Room for Growth” and an 8 out of 10 for “Reflections.”

The seven is not bad. I enjoyed it. I’m enjoying all these episodes, and none of them are blowing my socks off. I’m probably just waiting to throw that big huge number 10 on our crossover episode with Strange New Worlds. We’ll see. I believe it’s going to happen, and when it does, I’ll wear my Strange New Worlds uniform.

“Reflections” really did impress me. I liked the juggling, I liked the storylines, and I liked getting a little more depth to Rutherford. For me it was a solid, right up the middle eight. I liked it a lot. Hopefully we get a lot more of this and a lot less of everything else.

Hopefully you’ll see Baby Know-It-All again in the near future. Our She-Hulk review has dropped, and we’re reviewing Andor for Star Wars, so we’re covering all the bases. Star Trek is my fandom. Mrs. Know-It-All loves Star Wars. Baby Know-It-All loves Lower Decks. And of course we’re all comic fans.

Let me know what you thought of both episodes. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.