Star Trek: Lower Decks: Season 4

The Betazoid Gift Box? The Wadi Game? This show's weekly reminder that Star Trek had some super weird concepts.

I love that the gift box is profane because T'Ana was in the room.

I also like the idea that there exists a God computer out there that is benevolent. You kind of figure there'd have to be some of those, right?

Boimler did a lousy job as a commander on his first mission.

Didn't recognize the reference to where he wound up after he died.

It being hazing after all was a bit of a disappointment to me.

It was pretty good. 3 1/2 stars.

The stuff between Boimler and Rutherford was unexpectedly horrid and badly written.

But the stuff with Tendi, T'Lyn, and Mariner on Orion was really cool.

Orions have literally been around since the Original Series pilot "The Cage". And yet very few Star Trek series have bothered to explore them further (the most infamous one being Enterprise in that series' most sexist [and worst] fourth season episode). Lower Decks sort of had the mythology playing field to itself there, and whatever else Lower Decks is, I hope future Star Trek series keep whatever facets they give Orions consistent with this. It was very well-thought-out, and sort of made the society feel like a cross between organized crime and the corrupt ruling houses on Game Of Thrones.

I was disappointed the teaser didn't really have anything to do with anything. I was hoping for a little clarity on this season's on-going mystery but no such luck there.

T'Lyn is turning out to be really unexpectedly cool. Ever since Enterprise, recent Star Trek has gone out of its way to make Vulcans unlikable. Spock on Strange New Worlds is an outlier there, but it's suggested his nice demeanor is from his human side. Star Trek since Enterprise has sort of retconned Vulcans from wise peacemakers into judgmental prigs. So having a character as likable and understanding as T'Lyn really helps the antipathy that's been building for me against that species. Really, if you ask me, it's a mistake Star Trek went down that path, but I can't even blame Kurtzman for it. It started with Berman and Braga and he just kept it going. It's to Kurtzman's credit he at least didn't make it worse than it already was. I would think that type of Flanderization would have been most showrunners' first instinct.

I cannot overstate how terrible the stuff with Boimler and Rutherford and the Banzai tree and Mark Twain costumes were. It was just SO freaking stupid. Worse, it was freaking sitcom. And the show usually has value because despite being a comedy, it does not usually feel like sitcom. And that's the kind of dumb stuff you'd see on a show with a laugh track. It was awful.

But I like T'Lyn, and I liked learning what we did about the Orions. More good than bad this week, although the bad was REALLY bad. 3 1/2 stars.

Eh. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Bendi Syndrome a FATAL Vulcan illness? Sarek died of it. Saying T'Lyn has it and not acting like it's a devastating diagnosis that means she's gonna die young is wrong.

But Mariner's right. She looks great for 62. Vulcans age well.

I did not like the portrayals of the Betazoids. I dislike the idea that Lwaxana Troi's horrible behavior is common for that species. It was never portrayed as such in the few times we met other Betazoids. Lwaxana was NOT the worst Star Trek character of all time. Wesley Crusher was the worst, followed by Malcolm Reed. But she was probably third, and ahead of Geordi Freaking La Forge of all annoying characters. I don't like seeing her poor behavior normalized.

The idea that Caitians used to hunt and eat Betazoids? That ain't right. That's not a joke the show should be doing.

I like the notion that Shaxs believes the security of the ship also involves the emotional well-being of the officers. But it's not consistent with the rest of Trek set in this era, especially because of those damn counselors. Maybe this is the first step of the franchise trying to get rid of that horrid concept, but I think the only thing that will do it correctly is time and distance. This isn't a good substitute.

Not into this week. 2 1/2 stars.

I thought it was good. I liked it a lot.

I love that they got back Max Grodenchik and Chase Masterson for Rom and Leeta. It's cool Rom is still Grand Nagus. And it's also good that while the show remembers he doesn't exactly have great business sense, he isn't stupid. He appreciates Freeman swindling him and considers it respectful to Ferengi culture.

I believe Q'on'os DOES join the Federation somewhere down in the line according to the Star Trek timeline. It's not the impossible ask Freeman is making it sound like.

I love that Leeta has sort of come into her own as the person who helps Rom with the finances. It's a very similar dynanic to Moogie and Zek. Except I kind of feel like Rom is on it. His baseball obsession is partly a performance. They work well together.

Speaking of which I love Mariner's insightful and wonderful Ferengi friend. Ferengi should be portrayed as multifaceted as any other group of people, but I think Deep Space Nine sometimes failed that a bit. Ferenginar joining the Federation a few years later makes sense. Rom being made Nagus was obviously the first step there.

I wonder where Bajor currently stands as far as Federation membership goes.

Solid as hell week. 4 stars.

I like the show. I do. But dumb stuff like Badgey is why it's sometimes difficult to accept as canon.

The stuff with Agimus and Peanut Hamper was good. I was super annoyed Peanut Hamper's redemption in the last episode was a fake-out. Having her genuinely repent here, and in fact that being the impetus for Agimus to change his ways feels more in line with the actual message of the franchise. Yeah, Peanut's heel-turn last episode WAS a surprise. Because it shouldn't have happened on a Star Trek show. That's not a storytelling brag. It's a storytelling failing.

I think the climax of Badgey becoming a God was, well, a yeah, a literal Deus Ex Machina. And you know, it IS a Star Trek moral that infinite knowledge and possibilities gains wisdom and insight, and melts away hatred and violence. But it was too quick a turnaround, you know? Maybe in a 45 minute episode, I'd accept it. But it felt like it happened because the writers couldn't write a different way out of the crisis in 22 minutes.

I am going to compliment this show on the fact that Jeffrey Combs gets a Special Guest Star Credit and Jack McBrayer does not. Jack McBrayer actually sort of took pop-culture by storm a few years ago from 30 Rock, and IS an actual celebrity name. But the Special Guest Star? It's freaking Jeffrey Combs, the most multifaceted actor in Star Trek history, and it always was. And that's right. The show reserves that credit for returning Star Trek vets, rather than celebrity stunt casting. And regardless of whether I think the show fits comfortably into canon or not, that DOES make it a Star Trek show.

It was decent for what it was, but it ended too quickly and cleanly, and I wish the entire episode had been about Agimus and Peanut. But it was all right. 3 stars.

Not great but I liked how every single opening shot of the cave in each story looked identical. That is a sly slam on the fact that every damn cave on The Next Generation used the same damn set every single time. It's not really noticeable from episode to episode, but if you ever LOOKED for it, it is. What's great about the slam is I bet most people didn't even understand it. It probably didn't register, even for hardcore Trekkies. Kind of a deep cut there. 3 1/2 stars.

Oh my. That was a big week.

I thought everything about the episode was top-notch with one exception. I didn't find it particularly funny. Not because it was super serious (although there was more drama than normal). Just the jokes weren't landing. Everything else was great; The Star Trek moral, the continuity nerd stuff, the character drama. Let's talk about it all.

I think Season 7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation is, by and large, lousy. People totally forget that because "All Good Things..." remains one of the single best series finales in television history, and both "Parallels" and "The Pegasus" were great too (although Berman and Braga overestimated how much the fans loved the latter for the last episode of Enterprise). But even if the overall quality was not usually as terrible as the first two seasons, the final season of the defining science fiction show of the era and the defining sci-fi hero at the time (Jean-Luc Picard) delivered underwhelming episode after underwhelming episode, wasting potentially interesting premises (can you believe Berman thought I'd be okay with the idea that we'd meet Picard's long-lost son in one of the very last episodes, and it turns out to have been a fake-out?). It also contained the single worst cliffhanger Season Premiere resolution of the entire series, and arguably the entire franchise in "Descent, Part II". The maddening thing about that sucking so much is that the first part was easily the second best cliffhanger the show ever did besides "The Best Of Both Worlds." Lore teaming up with the Borg to corrupt Data was instead embarrassingly about Beverly Crusher giving pep talks to bickering newbie bridge officers we never saw before or since in as sappy and poorly written a manner as possible. It was frankly, obscene. Season 7 spent valuable Star Trek canon resources and real estate on nonsense and utter wastes of time. Little was as big of a time waste as the episode now-ironically titled "Lower Decks."

And this episode for the first time ever made something of its premise. Sito's death and sacrifice in that episode felt entirely unearned because it was just assumed and we never saw it happen. If there was a way to keep the audience unhappy and unsatisfied, "Lower Decks" always found a way to do it. It was insufferable.

You know Sito was one of the cadets who was busted with Wesley Crusher and Nick Lacarno, right? So the episode is using that tie to give Mariner this Lower Decks / "Lower Decks" connection. It doesn't fit entirely perfectly. Because it doesn't explain why Mariner has been acting nuts lately. But it fits better than it should.

I wonder why nobody has pointed out Nick looks exactly like Tom Paris from Star Trek: Voyager (both played and voiced by Robert Duncan McNeill). I hope that fact comes up next week. I suspect it might.

Mariner's conversation with the Klingon on the planet was just great. I love that she gives him a hug and he's outraged because they're supposed to fight and she's like, "Nope, we allies." And she's the boss, the end, and he knows it. And I love when she transports away he instantly knows it's something that's happened to her, and not a bad action on her part because she's honorable. Honestly, besides Worf, and I guess Martok, when it came to Klingons, even good Klingons we were supposed to root for like Kor, or even Gowron at one time, they always failed their ideals of honor when it mattered. Ezri Dax told Worf in one of DS9's final episodes that the Klingon Empire was dying and deserved to die because Worf is an anomaly in a rare honorable person shoved into a a completely corrupt organization that twists the meaning of the word to cover its members' crimes, betrayals, and atrocities. The fact that Worf had to accept discommendation at one point to protect freaking DURAS of all jags says that when it comes to honor, Klingons are all talk. And it was nice to meet one who actually takes that crap seriously. And he's heard of the Enterprise (no doubt because of Worf's time there) and thinks good things about it. I dunno, just wish that in order to built Worf up, the Berman era producers didn't always feel the need to tear the rest of the Klingon Empire down to do it. As seen here bad Klingons DO exist. But so do good Klingons. We deserved to meet more of them.

The episode claims Tom Riker is alive and apparently no longer in a Cardassian Prison. That's a season five episode right there. I had totally assumed he had been slaughtered with the rest of the Maquis upon the Cardassian / Dominion Alliance. He must have been able to sneak away from the prison camp before the poo hit the fan. There is an interesting story there, I'm sure, and I want this show to be the one to tell it.

How am I with Nick Locarno as the Big Bad of the season? First of all, we don't know for sure he's the guy on top. But is it any more of a ridiculous idea than Wesley Crusher being Future-Guy on Enterprise during the Temporal Cold War, which was not only a popular theory, but a solution the producers were seriously considering before doing the ultimate Berman and Braga move of letting us all down and never explaining it? On-brand for them and that crappy show. Also, why I refuse to entertain the notion that ANY of the Kurtzman era shows are as bad as Voyager or Enterprise were. Discovery at its worst never had either of those show's many glaring, obvious failings that an otherwise rankly incompetent showrunner from any other difference franchise would have done differently because the idea would seem even too stupid for the average untalented hack. The average untalented hack could not have CONCEIVED hackiness on the level Berman and Braga were operating with on a weekly basis. But yeah, it's a dumb idea. But even the dumb ideas you HAVE are better than not being smart enough to have had an answer in the first place when setting up your entire damn series. Seriously, how did Berman and Braga not know that?

I feel like this review got very bitter towards Voyager and Enterprise by the end. Which is good, because this episode is sort of redeeming a shady Next Generation episode, so that isn't the current old-school Star Trek series to aim my fire at. Sito's fate SUCKED on The Next Generation, but at least this show is trying to do something with it, and give it a little legit weight, instead of never mentioning her again. Can you blame me for, like, being a LITTLE bit impressed with that, whether Nick Lacarno has always been lame or not? 4 1/2 stars.

It's not just impressive they got back Wil Wheaton for Wesley Crusher. They got back Shannon Fill as Sito Jaxa and billed her as a Special Guest Star! I love how nerdy the show is.

I laughed that the Ferengi had a paywall on the bomb. Serves Nick right. It's using the Ferengi's foibles to proper comic effect. Star Trek isn't always able to do it, much less well. DS9 was pretty good about it, but not perfect. But the paywall for deactivating the bomb shows how misguided the Ferengi's capitalism is in a way few other things do. It's brilliant, really.

I also love the use of the word "paywall". The Roddenberry / Berman era of the show had an annoying aversion to people actually referring to things like that in a way modern audiences could understand. They were trying to have the characters speak in a more general fashion so as not to date the dialogue, which is both good for the long-term health of a series set in the far future, and something that makes the characters very hard to understand and relate to in the present. Paywalls are an annoying thing now and Lower Decks is cool because it doesn't have to pretend society will be so advanced in the future nobody will know what that is. And yes, making it a FERENGI paywall is the franchise having its cake and eating it too.

Rutherford points out Locarno looks exactly like Tom Paris but Boimler doesn't see it. Knew that wouldn't go unremarked.

On The Next Generation, the fact that Nick Locarno essentially fell on his sword for the rest of Nova Squad sort of suggested he was all right deep down. This episode's moral, that no, he's not, is far more believable to me. He was such a jackass in that episode, it was a bit hard to believe he did that for selfless reasons.

Also the idea of the stunt was stupid to begin with. If it was illegal (and it was) did they expect not to get in trouble if they performed it successfully? Another thing about "The First Duty" that sticks in my craw (and there is a LOT in that episode to dislike).

I love that Mariner is not letting him use Sito's name for his own cause. She died for Starfleet. He doesn't get to pretend she didn't.

I also loved Mariner totally dunking on him on-camera and instantly wrecking whatever rep he had just built up for himself. What amazes me is he's so dumb he didn't see it coming. It was the most likely outcome, really. Chaos is her entire bit.

Good finale. Despite Tendi's placement back on Orion making things feel a bit up in the air, I'm glad there was no tag cliffhanger. 4 stars.