The penultimate episode of Lower Decks has a Boimler stand on a Section 31 bridge and say the multiverse sucks, and that’s every one of us on comic book movies right now.
We missed last week because of Thanksgiving. And no, I know Thanksgiving was the week before. We were so exhausted afterward that I just couldn’t do it. So my co-host and I watched two in a row, and they’re both good. “Upper Decks” first, then the first half of the finale.
A Day With the Senior Staff
“Upper Decks” follows the bridge crew through one day, and it reminded me of that Next Generation hour where you watch a whole day on the ship and all the mundane things that fill it, like the captain having to sit through a performance. The number of Easter eggs in this one is unreal.
The real highlight, honestly, is that Boimler has more of a beard now. Almost there.
Shaxs has inner demons left over from the battle, and I thought the cool part was that he doesn’t fight the ghostly monster in his head. He meditates, he finds some peace, and that’s how he gets past it. That’s very Shaxs, and it’s very Lower Decks.
Dr. T’Ana gets a complaint that she doesn’t seem to believe in painkillers, so she quietly starts, and I think this is the best way to explain it, torturing herself. Let’s leave it at that. Billups is helping an ensign, gets a message that something needs fixing, and then everything’s on fire. Ransom thinks he’s giving a guy a tour, and the guy turns out to be one of those aliens whose name nobody can remember, which is in fact the whole joke. They’re after the little curling armadillo creatures, because those things can turn invisible or something.
Captain Freeman gets the best ending. She grinds through that overbooked day, and it turns out Mr. Stevens contacted her husband, the admiral, a month ago and put a romantic anniversary dinner on her schedule so he could surprise her.
The Technobabble Gag
What I liked most is how the engineering plot starts with fake technobabble. If you love Star Trek, you know exactly what I mean. It’s nonsense about leptons and isolinear paths in the main deflector, and then it turns into something very real: the thing is full of energetic plasma, and if they don’t shut down the power source, the overload could spread to the warp core. By the time Billups and the ensign are talking it through, they sound like a pair of Next Generation officers.
I know my Nerd Fights partner hates the technobabble from The Next Generation, and I get why. There wasn’t any in the original Star Trek. Scotty just said, “I need to fix this thing,” went and did it, and that was it. The captain’s worried, Scotty says they’ve got it under control, done. The Next Generation brought in the idea that you had to explain it, that the warp core needed rerouting through this and that. It was fake science made to sound very scientific. I like it.
They Keep Walking Past Discovery
Somebody back me up in the comments on this one. Those curling creatures look a lot like the creature from Discovery that helped the ship use the spore drive. I couldn’t remember what it’s called. Google it.
Part of me honestly thought it was a setup for a Discovery reference, or at least that there was room for a cool one. I’ve noticed Lower Decks always stays away from Discovery, and that’s okay. Probably it’s because the show is more of an homage to The Next Generation and the original series, so they stick to the canon this audience loves and leave alone the stuff it doesn’t. I respect that.
The other running bit is the lower deckers insisting they’re the stars of the show. It’s about as close to breaking the fourth wall as you can get without Mariner just saying it. Right at the very end they show up with no idea what’s been going on, wondering if they really are the stars of their own show.
The Other Boimler Has a Ship
Oh my god, the penultimate episode. All these cameos.
I had to explain William Boimler to my co-host, because it goes back to before we were doing these together. In an earlier season Boimler got duplicated in a transporter accident. The double is good at everything, and he’s confident. They thought he died sacrificing himself, and then later, I think it was last season, it turned out Section 31 had him. Now he works for them in complete secrecy and commands his own ship, one like the Defiant from Deep Space Nine. That’s why he’s so gloomy. He wears a black communicator badge, which looks ominous, and with that purple stubble he really does look like an evil Boimler.
Our Boimler, meanwhile, has the full beard now and has started saying wise things about the randomness of death and the unexpected joys of life. Then William sends him a message at the very end, and all the wisdom goes out the window. “We’re all going to die.”
William’s job is to investigate the rifts, and the crew he does it with is the cameo list. T’Pol is there, played by the actress who played her on Enterprise. Back then she was credited as Jolene Blalock, and here she’s listed as just Jolene, which I thought was interesting. The guy who played Garak is there, and so is Alexander Siddig, who played Bashir.
And they added Curzon Dax. If you don’t know anything about Deep Space Nine, there was a character named Dax, a woman, and the host before her was Curzon. We never really saw him, except for one flashback scene where he’s dying as they’re about to transfer the symbiote to her. So seeing him in all his glory, the guy who loves Klingons and wants a fight, was such a fun turn. Then there’s the relationship between him and T’Pol, and the way she honors him at the end. That’s deep Star Trek for the people who watch it.
There’s a Mariner who’s an engineer, too, and I adore her. They hinted at this earlier in the season, when our Mariner said she guessed she could go into engineering or something. And don’t let me forget the evil axolotl things. They were supposed to be super cute, and they turned out to be something else completely.
All the Harry Kims
Then there are the Harry Kims, a whole ship of them, and one of them finally got promoted. My co-host knows nothing about Harry Kim, and even she said, “Oh my god, it’s evil Harry Kim.”
He hijacks the quantum ship and tries to kidnap all the other Harry Kims. The good Harrys try to stop him, and he tells them that’s why they haven’t been promoted yet. William and his team get the good Harry back.
The people causing the rifts turn out to be a different Starfleet. In our universe, and in every universe we know, Cochrane invents the warp drive. In theirs, they invented a quantum engine that crosses universes, and they’ve been out exploring the multiverse. Their captain is Lily, the same Lily from First Contact, played by the same actress, Alfre Woodard. I adore her. My co-host thought she was Mariner’s mother, and I had to explain that one too.
They couldn’t find the source at first because rifts kept opening in separate places, so they were flying to the wrong holes and had to use some Star Trek magic to lure the ship out. Then evil Harry Kim falls into one, blows up, and starts a collapse. Lily says they can focus it all in one place, and William says he knows where to send it: his own universe, because he trusts the people there. That’s right, bro.
What I Want From the Finale
That’s the first part, and I’ve been thinking about how they finish. I wonder if they’re going to close out the animated universe on the way out.
There’s a Next Generation episode where a whole lot of Enterprises show up on screen and you see alternate versions of everybody. We’ve now seen animated alternates. I’d like to see the reality where they’re live people, the way Strange New Worlds did its crossover, except with everybody we usually see on the Cerritos bridge standing on a real Cerritos bridge. My co-host says I’m writing a better episode. I know.
The Verdict
Star Trek: Lower Decks gets two numbers on the Know-It-All Index this week: an 8.75 out of 10 for “Upper Decks” and a 9 out of 10 for the penultimate episode, “Fissure Quest.”
The 8.75 is my co-host’s, and it’s very specific, so don’t laugh. It’s short of a nine, and it’s better than the usual 8.5. I agree with her. The nine for the penultimate episode is mine, and she said the same thing.
One housekeeping note. I’m traveling over the holidays, so worst case I’ll see you in January when I’m back on a full schedule, and Nerd Fights is coming back very soon. I’m also handing Kraven the Hunter to my co-host, because she did a great job on the Madame Web video and I think she’s perfect for it.
Let me know what you think about both episodes, and tell me whether those curling creatures made you think of Discovery too. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
