Beckett Mariner is the only person on the Cerritos who says anything good about the ship to a reporter in “Trusted Sources,” and she’s the one who gets sent to Starbase 80 for it.

It’s Thursday morning, and that means Star Trek: Lower Decks. The captain of the USS Know-It-All is flying solo this morning, because Baby Know-It-All, frankly, had a late night. Everybody here thought the captain of the Cerritos had it difficult. Trust me.

This episode’s not that bad. I actually really enjoyed it, and it starts to set the tone and the stage for some new and very interesting things.

Project Swing By

The Cerritos gets called off to the planet Ornara. Starfleet is implementing a brand new system called Project Swing By, and the idea is that they’re going to revisit planets that have been visited before and maybe haven’t been visited in a while.

They picked Ornara specifically, and that’s from The Next Generation. We’re going way back in the crate: season one, episode 22, “Symbiosis.” The point of that episode is that two species coexist, and one of them is essentially selling drugs to keep the other planet happy. Picard comes, and they have this whole thing.

So the admiral has agreed to allow this to happen, a sort of second contact, Operation Swing By. But they’ve insisted that the news people come along, specifically Victoria Nuzé. A clever name, guys.

The Captain Hides Everything

Victoria Nuzé is going around asking questions, and of course the captain wants to hide everything and everyone, to make sure nothing bad gets said or done.

They show up, and it turns out the Ornarans have had to do their best to recover on their own. They never had the opportunity to meet anybody else who could really help them through any of it. It was like 15 years that they had no contact with Starfleet or anyone else. So the Ornarans are like, meh, we’re good, we don’t need your help.

That makes the captain look really bad. So, okay, they’re going to go to Brekka, the other planet, the one that was selling them the drugs the entire time.

Mariner is not happy. Mariner’s like, this is fake, why are we doing this, we’re not being ourselves. We need to just be our own people. We’re the crew of the Cerritos, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of that. She finally gets the opportunity to kind of hijack an interview, and as you might expect, Ransom, who’s right there on her back all the time, sees it.

Everybody Jumps to Conclusions

When it’s time for the captain’s interview, the reporter comes in and proceeds to lambast the captain, straight up. What’s going on with this, what’s happening about that, and she starts naming off all these things they’ve had to deal with throughout the season.

Immediately they’re like, only one person could have said anything. It had to have been Beckett Mariner. Bad choice.

So the captain has to deal with the fact that her daughter could possibly have done the equivalent of betraying her. Everybody jumps to conclusions, and she finally does it. She sends Mariner to Starbase 80.

It’s rough, bro. The shuttlecraft that comes to pick her up is an old, worn out, season one Next Generation shuttlecraft. It’s bad. And they’re like, wow, this ship doesn’t smell like sweat or anything. It’s so rough.

The Breen and the Texas Class

Beckett’s gone, they finally arrive, and they have to face the Breen. The Breen are overpowering them, the ships and everything else, and that’s when Starfleet introduces the brand new Texas class, which is a fully automated starship.

It’s sort of intimidating and scary, because everyone’s like, oh my god, this is an automated ship, we’re going to lose our jobs. You know, because that’s a major concern in the 24th century, and the 22nd and the 23rd and whatever.

It’s a straightforward episode.

The Story Drops

Then the news story drops, the actual thing, and it was everybody else. That’s right. Officer after officer is telling different stuff. It’s all the stuff the journalist knew, the stuff they assumed Mariner was the one telling.

Then you get the Mariner segment of the interview, and she’s the only one saying good things. She’s the only person trying to tell everybody the positive things about the Cerritos.

When her mom goes to look for her, it turns out she resigned from Starbase 80. So where has Beckett gone? Great question. She has joined a certain smuggler and antiquities dealer, if you will, the same one we saw in the recruitment episode a few back.

I enjoyed this a lot. I’m pretty sure Baby Know-It-All’s going to enjoy it too, and she’ll give you her thoughts on some of that later. I’ll probably put it in a post or a short or something.

The Verdict

Star Trek: Lower Decks Episode 309, “Trusted Sources,” is an 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

It’s an eight. I liked it. I thought the episode went along very well, and clearly it’s leaving us on some form of a cliffhanger leading into next week’s episode. I’m looking forward to it.

I’d love to hear what your thoughts are, and if you can, shout out Baby Know-It-All so she knows everybody misses her. Hopefully she’ll stay up late less. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.