One of the common complaints about Lower Decks is that it sometimes overdoes the references to other Trek stories. Most of the references are either to the original series or TNG, which is understandable given that they’re the two most popular iterations of the franchise, as well as the animated series, which is the spiritual ancestor to this show. Still, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, and Picard have been referred to as well, though not nearly as often. Those references sometimes work, often don’t, and can be a source of tremendous frustration.
“I, Excretus,” however, takes that proclivity for references and takes it to a hilarious extreme that actually works quite well.
SPOILERS AHOY!
This is LD‘s Boxing Day episode. The day after Christmas Day, the custom on the 26th of December in upper-class British homes was that the gentry and the servants would switch places for a day. In the military, that was adapted to the officers and enlisted trading places.
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In the Watchful City
In “I, Excretus,” a Pandronian drill instructor comes on board who is trying to make the Cerritos more efficient. This is another reference, in this case to the animated episode “Bem.” The drill instructor—who calls herself a “drill administrator”—is named Yem, and she acts exactly like one of those efficiency experts that businesses hire to give seminars and Myers-Briggs tests and all that other nonsense. While most of the 21st-century office tropes that have been used on LD have annoyed me, this one I’m okay with.
Yem’s method of increasing the Cerritos‘s efficiency is to pull a Boxing Day: The bridge crew has to be the ensigns on the lower decks, and our four main characters (among others) get to be in charge.
The first half of the episode is dedicated to showing how bad almost everyone is at the other side’s jobs. Freeman, Ransom, Shaxs, and T’Ana are assigned to a ship under attack by a Klingon boarding party. Their job: Stack the crates in the cargo bay that have fallen over during the attack. The crates are hexagonal, too, so they’re very hard to stack and they very easily fall down. At no point are they ever told the specifics of what’s going on—including one point where they find out, in passing, that Q is on board. (Their CO is now dressed like Robin Hood, a reference to TNG‘s “Qpid.”)
Meanwhile, Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford each are put in command situations, all similar to ones we’ve seen onscreen before. Mariner goes to the Mirror Universe (“Mirror, Mirror” on the original series and numerous episodes of DS9, Enterprise, and Discovery), and then to a Western re-creation (the original series’ “Spectre of the Gun“). In the former, she’s discovered quickly as an imposter, and in the latter, she’s thrown from her horse. (This is particularly embarrassing because Mariner had two years of horse-riding lessons as a kid.) Tendi has to treat a Klingon who wants to die after a crippling back injury (TNG‘s “Ethics“), sustained while picking up a peanut (sure, why not). Her indecision over what to do leads to her failure. Rutherford is chief engineer during a warp core breach, and must fix it the same way Spock fixed things in The Wrath of Khan, but he struggles to get the door open without burning his hands (why doesn’t he have gloves?), which he fails to do, and the ship (which is a Constitution-class ship like Pike’s and Kirk’s Enterprise) blows up.
Then they’re all put on the Cerritos bridge, with Mariner and the ensigns in charge and Freeman and the senior officers subordinate. Their mission is to steal the Cerritos out of Spacedock (The Search for Spock), and they never even make it to the doors because Freeman and Mariner start bickering.
What’s fun is that the script cleverly turns the “lesson” on its ear. The effect of all these failures is to make the crew appreciate each other more, and Freeman and Mariner go to Yem to thank her—but it turns out that she doesn’t care about that. The point for Yem was to make everyone fail—the scenarios were rigged. Yem is apparently being phased out because her drills are unnecessary, so she asked for an assignment to a crappy ship and set it up so they’d all fail and so she’d still prove useful to Starfleet. Freeman wants to do the tests again, but Yem says it’s too late, once all the tests are done, there’s no going back.
Except there’s one person I haven’t mentioned yet: Boimler. Continuing this season’s theme of Boimler’s self-improvement, he’s the only one who succeeds. He’s sent onto a Borg Cube that he has to escape from (TNG‘s “The Best of Both Worlds,” numerous Voyager episodes), and gets a 79% rating. But Boimler is also a perfectionist, and won’t be satisfied until he reaches 100%. So he keeps retaking it, doing better and better each time.
This saves everyone’s asses, because as long as Boimler’s still in his simulation, Yem can’t submit the results. So Freeman orders him to stall—right when he was about to get 100%. Disappointed, Boimler nonetheless drags out the scenario, to the point where he’s assimilated, becoming Excretus of Borg. (Yes, he’s given the name Poop of Borg. Sigh.)
Freeman correctly pegs Yem as a bureaucrat with no real practical experience, so she has the Cerritos head for some nasty stuff: first a crystalline entity (TNG‘s “Datalore” and “Silicon Avatar“), then a black hole (the original series’ “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” Enterprise‘s “Singularity,” the 2009 Star Trek, etc.). It’s more than Yem can handle, and she promises to give them passing grades if they just stop dive-bombing into dangerous situations.
There are many things I love about this episode. Putting the crew into various familiar situations (and having them fail so hilariously) is enjoyable, at least in part because we’ve seen other Trek characters succeed in those scenarios. It really does help the bridge crew, and the lower decks denizens appreciate the other side more. (Freeman forgot how frustrating it is to be out of the loop, Mariner is not at all on board with all the responsibilities.) It shows how incredibly dopey those “team-building” exercises really are, which—having suffered through such inanities when I was an office worker back in the mists of prehistory known as the 1990s—I’m always happy to see.
And we continue the badassification of Boimler. The obsessive reading over of past Starfleet missions that we saw in season one has combined with his experiences on Titan at the top of this season to make him into a really talented officer, and it’s tremendous fun to see. (By the time he scores 100%, he’s captured several Borg drones, including a trio of babies, and has beaten the Borg Queen at chess and taught her empathy.)
Mariner does help save the day this time, but it’s in collaboration with Freeman, and it works here, especially since we get to watch her fail epically prior to that.
Having said that, one of the ways the bridge crew reaches out to the lower-decksers after it’s all over is to give them a shiny new food replicator that has the full menu options, and I just want to bang my head on the wall. The food replicators have never in any other Trek production had this kind of tiered system. Hell, prisoners have had full access to whatever food they want. I mean, it’s nice that the ensigns can have pesto now, but it doesn’t even remotely track that they couldn’t have pesto before.
I also did love the opening when the Cerritos answers a distress call, leaving Mariner, Boimler, Rutherford, and Tendi behind on a subspace antenna they’re repairing, not coming to their rescue for six hours. While this is pretty horrible, I find myself reminded of the original series episode “And the Children Shall Lead,” when Kirk realizes that he beamed two of his security guards into space rather than down to the planet to relieve the two guards that were already there. Leaving aside that he barely even acknowledges that two of his crew are dead, at no point in the episode does the subject of the two guys left behind on Triacus ever come up! Those two redshirts were left on the surface, probably shouting into their communicators, wondering where everyone was. When Kirk gets control of the ship back, he sets course for Starbase 4, not Triacus.
Just in general, Trek has had a real problem with secondary characters dying with no fanfare or interest. For every episode that gets it right (TNG‘s “The Bonding,” Discovery‘s “The Red Angel“) there are dozens that don’t (the original series’ “The Omega Glory,” TNG‘s “Lonely Among Us,” DS9‘s “The Adversary,” Voyager‘s “Faces,” to name but a fractional few) This episode’s teaser is humorous, but it also works really well as a commentary and satire on that rather despicable tendency.
Random thoughts
- One of the best Boxing Day TV episodes was M*A*S*H‘s “‘Twas the Day After Christmas,” in which Corporal Klinger is put in charge, while Colonel Potter is the company clerk (among other switcheroos). In the end, Klinger proves unable to handle a genuine crisis involving making actual decisions, while Potter is utterly lost in a sea of paperwork that he doesn’t remotely comprehend. This episode is also notable for being M*A*S*H‘s fourth Christmas episode, which is a neat trick considering that the Korean War that the show chronicles only had three Decembers.
- When the Borg Queen showed up in Boimler’s scenario, I was wondering if they’d get either Alice Krige (who originated the role in First Contact, and reprised it in Voyager‘s “Endgame”) or Susanna Thompson (who played the part in Voyager‘s “Dark Frontier” and “Unimatrix Zero“) to do the voice. It turned out to be Krige, who did a lovely riff on her First Contact seduction of Data on Boimler.
- Yem is able to separate her body into three discrete parts—head, torso, legs—just like Bem in his eponymous animated episode (which was written by David Gerrold of “The Trouble with Tribbles” fame). Nothing significant is done with this, and indeed there’s no real need for Yem to be a Pandronian beyond the gratuitous animated series reference. However, I’m totally on board with gratuitous animated series references, so good job, Lower Decks! Keep it up! Still waiting for a Skorr, please and thank you…
- When Mariner is (justifiably) complaining about how cavalierly the lives of the lower-decks crew are treated, Shaxs protests: “We’re all equals on this ship!” Ransom has to take him aside and point out: “They sleep in a hallway.” Shaxs, surprised, says, “Oh.”
- Once again, we see Kayshon, but he gets no dialogue. Shaka when the walls fell, y’all.
- When Yem admits that the scenarios were rigged, Mariner is relieved, because she would never be thrown by a horse—she’s too good a rider. However, Yem says that she didn’t have time to rig that one in any way, so her being thrown was all on her.
Keith R.A. DeCandido hates pesto and does not understand why that would be restricted to senior officers. I mean, really…
Keith, we did see a couple of Skorr in the avian habitat in the Doopler habitat.
I didn’t much care for this one. It felt like an inferior attempt to recapture the glory of last season’s holodeck “movie” episode, and it was mainly just throwing a bunch of gratuitous continuity references at us with a cliched role-reversal plot as the excuse. Throw in the even more gratuitous scatological title and it’s everything I like least about this show’s approach to humor.
A lot of the scenarios were too farcical to be plausible, but I can mostly chalk that up to Yem deliberately designing them to be insoluble. But Mariner’s discomfort with seeing the crew naked in her Psi 2000 simulation seems hard to reconcile with the casual group showering in “Kayshon.” I guess maybe it’s a matter of context, like how most people would be more uncomfortable seeing someone in swim trunks in the office than on the beach.
It is nice that they’re continuing to develop Boimler, though. Here he got in trouble for being too competent instead of not competent enough. Although if Yem designed all the scenarios to fail, how did he succeed so well?
Oops, I meant “in the Doopler episode.” Since comments are moderated, I can’t easily edit that.
Yem probably just assumed that nobody on the Cerritos would be able to handle the Borg in any scenario, not factoring Boimler’s newfound awesomeness into it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The Romans had a tradition of trading places with their slaves on Saturnalia. The British Boxing Day tradition does include gifts to one’s servants, as well as donations to the poor. However, I have been researching this and am unable to find any evidence of a British tradition of trading places with the servants on Boxing Day, apart from that well-known M*A*S*H episode.
I suspect the writers of M*A*S*H just made it up for their own convenience. It is a very good episode, and if it’s based on an invented tradition, I’m okay with that. But as far as I have been able to determine, it is not a real thing, although that episode sure convinced a lot of people (mostly Americans, I suppose) that it is.
If I am wrong about this, I hope someone can point me toward a reference that shows otherwise. (Sitcoms don’t count.)
MY THOUGHTS ON THE EPISODE:
* I actually like Freeman abandoning the Ensigns here is what finally gets Starfleet to think she’s a horrible captain if the latter part of the episode is to be believed. Her other decisions may show she has a terrible personality but this is just NEGLIGENCE.
* The fact This One is more a corporate team builder than drill sergeant is both very Starfleet and a sign she’s evil.
* Mariner going off mission is actually a sign she’s terrible at following orders. However, would have been rewarded in most Starfleet crews.
* Of course Boimler is better at these simulations than everyone else. I actually assume that either the drill instructor didn’t rig his test or all her assumptions about how to deal with the Borg are not things that Boimler would do.
* I’m 99% sure that Starfleet actually wouldn’t allow euthanasia, let alone demand it. Picard may have encouraged Riker to do it but he’s not medical staff who may have their own cultural issues with it.
* Rutherford not having gloves or is Rutherford FORGETTING his gloves? I’m thinking the latter but maybe it was the former.
* Mariner is hyper aggressive and makes sudden movements all the time. Of course horses hate her.
* OF COURSE the tests are rigged. That explains Tendi’s and Rutherford’s.
* I think the episode would have been better if Freeman had revealed that they hadn’t endangered the ship but put the Drill Instructor on the holodeck–showing she can’t tell the real thing from a fake.
*. I’m inclined to think that Boimler has reason to sue Starfleet for including assimilation in their simulation. But props that saving the Borg babies is part of his score. Captain Picard and Data missed that one.
* I think that like many RL cultures, Mariner is from one that disassociates nudity from sexuality. So seeing her crew members in the shower versus having sex is very different.
* Jennifer’s last name has a Litverse reference! Four sexes is canon!
Quoth C.T.: “Mariner is hyper aggressive and makes sudden movements all the time. Of course horses hate her.”
This made me snarf my coffee. Well done….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Oh and Keith, we both agree that “Replicators being restricted to Lower Deckers” is a ridiculous incentive thing but I think it’s exactly the sort of thing that Captain Freeman would have instituted as a policy on her ship prior to this event. She’s exactly the sort of person who makes weird efficiency decisions as we see in the crystal planet episode (exaggerated as I found that episode even by Lower Decks standards).
I’m British and have never heard the supposed Boxing Day custom of switching places with servants. (Mind you, I’ve never had servants.) I think I missed the MASH episode too, or forgotten it in the mists of time. It wouldn’t be the first time that an American show depended on the totally alien nature of Britain to make something up. (I think my favourite was from ‘Home Improvement’ when the soccer playing son, Brad, was courted by a rich Brit to play for the “Birmingham Chubbs” football team. Way more hilarious in GB than elsewhere, I imagine.
The custom of giving christmas gifts (or ‘Boxes’) to servants/service givers was a thing, although more honoured generically as a Christmas gift now rather than a Boxing Day thing.
Liked the episode, loved Alice Krieg.
One more problem I noticed: In the first act, while the rescued ensigns were still shivering in sickbay, Freeman said the evaluations were “later today,” but in the final act, Yem said she’d chosen Freeman for the evaluations because she’d abandoned her ensigns on the beacon, which implies the events were more like weeks apart.
I personally didn’t much care for this one as it brought together all of the things that I like least about Lower Decks: scatalogical humour; an overreliance on references; weird class divisions for which there are no possible material basis; and 21st century office plots. But I was glad to see someone finally hang a lampshade on how ridiculous the Mirror Universe is
I really liked this one. Again, everybody had a chance to shine and get parts. I feel the show is at its best when done as an ensemble. The thing that struck me right off the bat was how the tests were clearly (at least to me) rigged. While I felt the tests were fair and should have been hard to pull off, these went too far. Mariner loses 20% for trying to walk through a random door. And why was the handle too hot to touch and no gloves provided? And Tendi lost most of her score just asking random questions. If I was in those, I would have called foul on the instructor. Though the horse thing was all on Mariner.
But Boimler was wonderful. So of course he aced it, being the master of tests and all. And each of his attempts to get a perfect score really cracked me up. Loved that whole section.
And I agree wholeheartedly about the replicator thing. When it was first mentioned, I thought Boimler was imagining it, but it turns out it’s true. I put that firmly on Freeman. Of, and I don’t think they ever put the ship in any actual danger. They were just giving the Pandronian a ride. That’s why everyone was so nonchalant. “Eh, it’s just a Crystalline Entity.”
I probably laughed at this one more than most episodes, even at some of the stupider jokes. This One flopping around in three parts at the climax, Shax’s complaint about the barrel shape, everything to do with Boimler… all of it made me laugh out loud.
I’m also irritated about the replicator issue, but I can completely believe that Freeman ordered lower decks to use crummier replicators at some point earlier. In my head-canon, this is something unique to the Cerritos. I’d like to think this episode is the writers’ way of admitting they never should have had this tiered system in Starfleet and finding a way to correct it in-universe.
I’d also like to think that Yem’s tampering removed the gloves entirely from Rutherford’s scenario, but he seemed to completely forget to even look for them.
I feel I should point out that in Pandronian grammar, “this one” is the equivalent of the first-person pronoun, so for viewers to refer to Yem as “This One” is like referring to her as “I.” Commander Bem did use more conventional pronouns to refer to other people (and oddly also used “it” and “his” to refer to himself), so it follows that we should use she/her to refer to Yem. (Although I’d think Pandronian gender would be rather more complex than human. Bem looked male and Yem female, but what if someone mixed and matched body parts of the two different types?)
I guess David Gerrold’s thinking was that they don’t have a concept of the first person because a Pandronian is a “unity” of three separate entities rather than a singular being, so the speaker saying “this one” is referring to the unity they are part of. Or something like that.
Aside from the “this one,” though, Yem’s English grammar was a lot more fluent than Bem’s, and she did use first-person pronouns a couple of times, suggesting that she uses “this one” as an affectation, maybe as a performative assertion of Pandronian identity among offworlders. I’ve read about similar practices — I think I read once that Southerners use “y’all” more often among non-Southerners than within their own communities.
So Klingons have a sciatic nerve? It’s a fact one can mess this up and promptly end up in crippling agony for ridiculously little reason. My Dad messed his back up once just stepping off a curb, and I am myself just recovering from two miserable weeks after leaning over the bathroom sink to look closely at the mirror. Bending over to pick anything off the floor could definitely do it, although it’s when you begin to straighten back up that the damage occurs if you just use your back muscles to do so.
According to my questionable Russian friend who may have been taking me for a ride, he said that there was once a debate in the “early” Soviet Union military that the concept of ranks themselves were inherently anti-communist. That everyone should just have a job and there should be no hierarchy whatever. This got smacked down hard but I think that some fans have shades of this with the idea of being upset at Lower Decks having so much class division between the senior officers and youngest officers (we still haven’t met the Ceritos enlisted that Wesley used to order the equivalent around with–imagine him ordering around O’Brian).
I for one have no real problem with it because Starfleet is a place that divisions are enforced and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was privileges separated from them as a reward system even if that doesn’t fit the Federation as a whole. You stay on your diet until you earn it!
But i admit it is far more likely Captain Freeman instituted this reward/punishment system because she is the worst captain in Starfleet. The “what do you call the lowest ranking member of his class that graduates med school?” rule still applies as she’s STILL a Starfleet Captain but I think this episode confirms that outside of the Cerritos, she has a reputation. Apparently the only worse place in Starfleet to serve is Starbase 80 (“STARBASE 80!”).
At #1: I think a lot of Mariner’s discomfort at the “Naked Now” scenario is the context. She showers with her friends all the time, but she doesn’t sleep with them. Plus seeing them being so out of character is probably disturbing too.
There is a tradition in the British Army (and presumably the other services?) of the officers serving the enlisted, but that’s on Christmas day, not Boxing Day. (See Spike Milligan’s autobiography, Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall).
Really the main British tradition around boxing day these days is that it’s just an excuse for us to have a second day off.
On the “Naked Time” simulation, come to think of it, the fact that Yem programmed a holodeck simulation showing the members of the crew having explicit sex and showed it to other members of the same crew, without the consent of either the simulated individuals or the spectator, is horribly unethical and probably illegal even aside from everything else she did.
I gotta say that for some reason the bit that was funniest to me was that the guy from the previous episode who’s a prince that is adamant about remaining a virgin was shown with an Abe Lincoln beard in the Mirror Universe because he has a mustache in the normal universe, and he was talking about how having a lot of sex gets him pumped up for torturing prisoners and torturing prisoners makes him horny and he sometimes he gets caught in a cycle and loses the whole day.
@ChristopherLBennett
I suspect she might have some legal gray area as “orgy and murder inducing virus” is an actual legitimate medical threat you have to be prepared to deal with. The fact Mariner wasn’t able to put aside her visceral reaction to seeing her crew members debased that way actually would be a potential issue in a crisis but part of her problem was that she absolutely treated the drills like a holodeck game rather than the actual situation they were supposed to be.
Which was, “Ugh, gross” and not, “Oh my God, I have to help my fellow crew.”
@20/C.T. Phipps: “I suspect she might have some legal gray area as “orgy and murder inducing virus” is an actual legitimate medical threat you have to be prepared to deal with.”
But there are more tactful ways to show that. I mean, even in “The Naked Now,” the people who had sex did so in their quarters, not in a mass orgy in the mess hall. And the “Naked” part was meant figuratively, in reference to one’s inner drives and emotions, not literally — as evidenced by the fact that both episodes called out the anomaly of someone taking a shower while not naked. So you could present someone with that same situation without taking things to such a graphic extreme. Thus, the reality of the threat is no excuse for the way it was presented.
This is the first Lower Decks episode that I did not like at all. I understand it’s a comedy, but in this instance the story was so implausible that it knocked me out of the of the story.
I was intrigued when I heard about the premise. We saw a training exercise in TNG “Peak Performance” so I expected this episode to be similar. I liked the idea of the officers switching places. I think they should’ve mined that for comedy and then at the end they’d have an appreciation of each other. Instead we get these rapid-fire simulations that barely make sense and are immediately failed. Of course, now we know it’s because the tests weren’t set up fairly–everyone was meant to fail. Unfortunately, I find that ridiculous. Yen is so worried about her job being obsolete so she sets up the ship to fail. How was this going to work in the long-term? It might’ve worked on the Cerritos, but it’s not going to work for most of the ships in Starfleet. Eventually, she’d be found out. Like I said, I know the show is played for laughs, but you still need a strong premise and this was, IMO, weak.
I wasn’t too fond of them accidentally leaving the ensigns behind. I understand the writers’ premise that lower deck types are over-looked but I don’t think you have to make the senior officers look incompetent to make that point. (though in their defense, they were responding to a distress call, so I can give them a small pass)
The replicator scene didn’t bug me. Yes, it’s odd but no odder than ensigns sleeping in barracks. Again, it’s the writers’ going a little too far to make a point (or a joke)
Someone here in the comments suggested Freeman was manufacturing these situations rather than actually taking her ship into dangerous situations. I hadn’t thought of that. That does make a lot more sense. (because 1) she can’t be that cavalier about danger and more importantly 2) how many dangerous anomalies can be in one sector of space?
A British naval tradition of officers preparing and serving food to lower ranks on Christmas exists, and the lowest ranking person on the ship is ceremonially in charge for the day (operational realities permitting). A search of the Royal Navy website will turn up annual news article published about a week in advance of Christmas which mention the tradition. This tradition is also practiced in the Canadian Navy (again search the official website for press releases), and I assume other Commonwealth countries.
I’d post weblinks for concrete references, but it wouldn’t make it past the moderators.
I mean they make that joke with Freeman and Mariner assuming that was what was planned all along. They’re just wrong because this isn’t a typical member of LDS Starfleet (which is idealistic despite its many-many flaws) but a neurotic bureaucrat like the kind Kirk constantly had to deal with.
Well, she’s not interested in going against the entirety of Starfleet. She only wants the Cerritos to fail because she wants to prove her tests aren’t too easy. I presume her problem is that they’re just replicas of famous Starfleet events so most officers just do what Kirk, Picard, or others did to pass them. She rigged them for the Cerritos because by having the “worst ship in Starfleet” fail, it would illustrate that her tests DID weed out the worst and her job was secure.
It’s a bad plan but not an unbelievable one. Especially since her tweaks didn’t appear to be that severe (the fact Rutherford didn’t have gloves, Tendi being stuck with an ethically dubious task, and Mariner being confined to strict parameters–oh and horsies).
I mean the classicism is a fundamental theme of Lower Decks and is not going away. It’s everywhere in the series up to and including the fact that California-class ships aren’t invited to Starfleet parties. Snobbery is all over this version of Starfleet.
@24/CT Phillips
About the Cerritos being the worst ship in Starfleet–I don’t think that’s the show’s premise. I’ve had the impression that the Cerritos is a low profile ship. That class of ship is just assigned the low level missions. But I don’t think the Cerritos has the worst crew in Starfleet. They’re not the best, obviously, but I don’t think the show’s premise is that they’re incompetent.
As for Yen’s plan “weeding out the worst”, okay, if that was the nature of the drills, it makes sense. I was thinking of it more as the training exercises we saw in “Peak Performance.” Now that I think about it, Freeman did say it was an “evaluation”. I guess I just didn’t see it as a way for Starfleet to weed out crew.
I enjoyed the episode, particulary Boimler’s Bundle of Borg Babies sequence. I don’t mind all the references (nor the recurring replicator joke). Also, NAKED TIME!
BTW, krad, the CO in the simulation has a Robin Hood cap, a jester’s collar, and a WWI soldier uniform all on at the same time. Hijinks!
ÌMHO, Boimler is not given the name Excretus, he comes up with it, after 24 hours or so inside the simulator, completely out of sorts of exhaustion and simulated assimilation.
@5 – CT: Rutherford thinks of using his boots as gloves, but can’t handle the door… handle with them on. I think the idea is to show that while Rutherford is a very technically-savvy engineer, he is still young and inexperienced, and not used to dealing with life-threatening stakes like a more experienced officer (such as Billups) is.
@9 – Chris: The evaluations might have been already scheduled, like many others for other ships in the coming weeks, but Yem chooses the Cerritos for the rigged ones, after learning of the incident. She already had the rigged holoprograms ready, since she’d been planning this for a while. She just needed the right mark.
@22 – Mary: This story was implausible? There are worse premises from previous shows…
I think it’s not that she chose the Cerritos because of the abandoning incident that happened that day but she was pointing out it’s because of incidents LIKE THAT which is why she chose the Cerritos.
@26/MaGnUs
I”m not saying it’s the most implausible thing I’ve seen in Trek. It just didn’t work for me.
FWIW, this is the first LD episode that made me actually laugh out loud. And the scheming visitor testing the crew with a nefarious agenda is a very Star Trek TOS kind of plot.
When the Pandronian drill instructor is introduced one of the male crew members makes a comment about being a triple threat himself. I didn’t recognize him – was he a notable guest star who sings, dances, and acts?
It’s a bit of a gimmick, but I enjoyed how many of the tests were just the names of previous episodes. Good luck to whoever got the Threshold simulation!
@31/No2: This proves it. All previous Star Trek is just holodeck simulations for training purposes. Lower Decks is the only real canon. I have spoken. ;)
Yeah. nothing in this or any other Star Trek episode was more improbable than the idea that in Britain we have a Boxing Day tradition as described…
This episode was just loads of fun. I’ve settled nicely into the headspace where I take the canon of Lower Decks seriously but not literally, so I just enjoy the ride. This was a fine ride!
Oh, and I’m no expert in Latin, but I think “Excretus” means to sift one thing from another, or to raise one thing from another. I didn’t think it was a scatological reference, but a “wheat from the chaff” play on words. I suppose it could be both but I didn’t read it that way.
@34/jmwhite: Wiktionary agrees — excretus is the perfect passive participle of excernō and means “separated.” So in-story, that may be how Boimler meant it.
Still, given this show’s style of humor, I think it’s a given that the writers metatextually meant it exactly the way it sounds. Remember Tendi and the slug a few episodes back? If they went there once, they’d go there again.
Yeah, you might be right. I’ll be sad though if what I thought was a clever joke reference to the crew’s experience in the episode as a whole, and Boimlers desperation to rise above the rest, was instead a crude joke that gets made in every school ground in the world.
@36/jmwhite: As you said, it might have been both. It would be kind of impressive if they managed to make a single joke that was both intellectual and infantile at the same time.
I just watched the episode again and it worked better on a second viewing (which isn’t unusual for me)
The drill I had the most problem with the first time was Tendi’s because it didn’t make any sense. I recognized the scenario but when the techs started pounding on the Klingon’s chest, it seemed like they were trying to use chest compressions to save him. So, I totally missed the point the first time. I understand it now, though there should be easier ways to kill a Klingon. Besides, the drill was for for Tendi, not for holodeck characters to jump in and interfere. However, the whole drill was rigged so that explains the oddities in this and all the other drills.
I’m not still keen on the whole premise of Yem doctoring the drills to keep up the evaluations. After some comments here, I understand the point, it’s just that I never saw Starfleet as conducting these types of evaluations on entire ships in order to weed out poor performers. It’s the senior officers’ jobs to weed out their poor performers and the Admiralty would quickly figure out which captains are performing badly. I just don’t see Starfleet needing an outside evaluation program like this. Of course, now that I’m typing this that may be the point. Some Admiral probably instituted this program thinking it was a good idea but it quickly became irrelevant.
Watching again, I think people here were correct that Freeman was running the starship simulation at the end. We did see Yem activate it. She either left it running and Freeman & Beckett took advantage of that fact or they simply reinitialized it. But the main problem is when wuould they have come up with that plan? They didn’t Yem’s plan until after they were in her office and from what I can tell they went straight to the bridge with her. But somehow they must’ve done it without her knowing.
@Mary
I think Freeman actually was piloting the ship to the black hole and Crystalline Entity but knows that there’s no actual danger from the former if they don’t go beyond their ability to escape it and the latter if your shields are up. As such, she’s just banking on Yen’s inexperience and the fact her “tests” are just recreations of better Starfleet personnel’s adventures. Which is also probably why everyone passes them with flying colors as it’s not hard to do what Kirk or Picard did, assuming that they are as famous in-universe as it appears to be here.
As for the evaluations, I think it was a parody of corporate culture’s idea that you’re supposed to find the weakest performers. Yen certainly seems to think that the Cerritos is going to be marked as SUCH a terrible ship that the crew will be broken up and reassigned across the Federation. I think she’s given the evaluation scores too much credit as she knows/we know that Starfleet DOESN’T take them that seriously but she wants to establish a baseline with the Cerritos as “These are the guys you need to get rid of! My tests find them!”
I do think that the Tendi simulation is rigged in a much more insidious way than “don’t give them gloves” in Rutherford’s simulation or “you’re not your base hand in the Mirrorverse.” I think it was rigged to make it so most medical students would horrifically balk at being asked to euthanize a patient for being disabled. Tendi reacted as how most doctors in the Federation would (and perhaps better than most in understanding she was supposed to kill them).
@38/Mary: “Besides, the drill was for for Tendi, not for holodeck characters to jump in and interfere.”
But that was the point. The fact that other “doctors” had to interfere meant that Tendi had failed the simulation. It was showing her the consequences of her “bad” decisions.
“it’s just that I never saw Starfleet as conducting these types of evaluations on entire ships in order to weed out poor performers.”
Since Yem was apparently a civilian consultant (in Pandronian attire rather than a Starfleet uniform), I imagine she co-opted the evaluations to work differently than Starfleet intended.
It occurred to me, by the way, that her behavior has parallels to Trek’s first Pandronian, the title character of “Bem.” Ari bn Bem was also a trickster, engaging in deceptions and getting Kirk and Spock into trouble to evaluate how they dealt with them. He considered himself superior and felt entitled to test Starfleet officers to assess their worth.
(Oh, and from Ari bn Bem to Shari yn Yem? That’s just lazy character naming.)
“I think people here were correct that Freeman was running the starship simulation at the end.”
That can’t be, though, because we saw exterior shots of the Cerritos in space. It was real, but it was as C.T. said above — she knew they were manageable situations.
@39/CT @40/Christopher
This is why I like to have people to talk about Star Trek with. You guys help me to understand the episodes better.
Of course that still seems like a lot of spatial anomalies close together. But maybe Mariner was exaggerating for effect. You only need to go through a few to get the point across.
The simulation capsules were for one person, they couldn’t have taken Yem with all of them into one of those.
While I wasn’t fond of the episode overall, those one-person holo-pods were a clever extrapolation of the holodeck concept.
But they did put the entire Command crew in one capsule for their Klingon attack simulation, so there wouldn’t be any reason they couldn’t have brought Yem in with them.
@44/costumer: But that’s missing the point. The whole idea was to show Yem that her simulations didn’t reflect the crew’s real ability to come together in the face of genuine challenges, that their real-world experience gave them insights that a chair-bound paper-pusher like her couldn’t understand, and so she underestimated them. They were real situations, but they were situations the crew knew how to handle.
Plus, again, we saw exteriors of the ship. Those wouldn’t have existed in a holodeck illusion. That alone proves it was real. As a rule, Trek doesn’t cheat by showing ship exteriors in holographic or illusory sequences. That’s often been a clue to their unreality (e.g. in TNG: “Future Imperfect,” as I recall).
Christopher,
No, I understood all that. The only thing I was commenting on was Magnus statement that the capsules were for one person and they couldn’t take Yem into one. The episode specifically shows us that multiple people can use one capsule.
I agree with you that the run through anomalies and chrystalline entities was real and not a holodeck simulation.
@46/costumer: Did we see the command crew using the pods? I would’ve assumed they used the regular holodeck for their group simulation.
They also didn’t do any exterior shots of the Enterprise in “Ship in a Bottle” for the entire time that Picard, Data, and Barclay were in the simulated Enterprise, even before the reveal that it was simulated. We didn’t get an exterior until after the reveal when Moriarty confronted the real Riker.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad: I suspect that Yem was made a Pandronian because (a) doing so added a flair of panache to a character whose villainy is otherwise fairly mundane, in a way that might be done in Live Action but looks so much better in animation & (b) The fact this is a being whose physiology consists of discrete elements combining to function as something more than the sum of its parts is the sort of symbology that would almost certainly appeal even in-universe; I wonder if Yem was picked for a job for which she seems ill-suited because that symbolism was so delightful certain initially-minor weaknesses in her profile were overlooked?
On a less serious note, I’m absolutely delighted to see another episode that exposes Cap’n Freeman’s inner trickster – really, that little trick with the various celestial phenomena struck me as about one carrot removed from a Bugs Bunny moment – and especially delighted when it’s another episode that showcases the ensemble to its fullest, rather than play Favourites.
1. ChristopherLBennett & @3. krad: My own guess would be that the rather arrogantly reductionist thinking of Yen accounted for the rule, but not for the exceptional in her scenarios – she assumed that the imaginative would shoot themselves in the foot by breaking the (deliberately unfair) rules of the scenario, that the sticklers would all be conventionally-minded enough to employ only the ‘Historic’ solutions to these scenarios (which she presumably stacked in such a way as to deny them anything more than a bare passing grade at best) and that absolutely nobody would take these team-building exercises Very Seriously indeed.
As it turned out, she nearly won her bet, so her notion was a Bad Plan in the sense of being inherently unethical & selfish rather than unworkable; unfortunately for her, Boimler was just imaginative enough and just enough of a stickler, as well as more than ambitious enough to smash through that grading curve like Hulk ignoring the front door (then KEEP SMASHING).
@5. C.T. Phipps: I’m quite astonished your point-by-point doesn’t include a squee! of raw delight at seeing the Doc bunk up with her favourite Bajoran (which was, in fact, one of my favourite sight gags of the episode, though one would like to see some hints seeded into the show that – while Caitians do have strong feline traits – Doc T’Ana is somewhat unusual in channeling a Terran housecat and would absolutely LOVE to see an episode suggesting that the Doc took one look at what Humans let their cats get away with and thought “Oh yeah, I can work with this”).
– I’m not going to lie, one actually quite liked Yen’s style before she was revealed as Our Villain; I still rather like the character as a villain, but am a little sorry the Team-Building Exercise was vilified along with her.
– I tend to agree that the Federation would be open minded enough to avoid blanket condemnation of euthanasia (IDIC still applies even where you don’t like the combination to hand), but that Starfleet Medical would be extremely careful to balance that tradition of tolerance with a mindset that stresses ‘First do no harm’ above all (On the understanding that the Federation DOES NOT PLAY GOD and that there’s nothing more inherently dangerous than using something other than simple triage to choose who lives & who dies).
– Given the tests were all rigged, my assumption is that the lack of gloves was a deliberate choice by Yen, intended to make the test much, much less easy than it might appear (without doing something blatantly sadistic, like cranking up the pain factor for those who make it into the reactor), a decision presumably sold as encouraging ‘flexible thinking’.
– I’ll bet dogs LOVE Ensign Mariner’s rampant energy, casual generosity and infinite willingness to play though!
– That’s an excellent point about making Captain Freeman’s gambit an illusion, rather than an actuality; it would definitely have been a useful refinement on a fairly strong original.
– I do tend to agree with the notion that while Beckett Mariner has no hangups when it comes to nudity, this doesn’t automatically translate into a casual reaction to watching people actually do something with all that nudity, at least when that activity comes as the result of a scenario where meaningful consent is inherently impossible (Remember, this isn’t a pre-planned orgy; all these officers have been ‘slipped a Mickey’ by some cosmic joke).
– I definitely hope that Andorian sex/gender/married life gets some play in this series; it’s one of the few places where the inherently alien weirdness and presumably numerous complication of having four sexes (and therefore of each child having four birth-parents) could be played with the right mixture of laughs & thought-provoking seriousness without seeming out of place (also, it has to be said that animation allows a freedom from the limits of human physiology AND the uncanny valley that also suit the subject in a way that Live Action cannot match).
@7. C.T. Phipps: I’ve thought for some time now that Lower Deckers having less tasty replicators than Upper Decks sounds more like some the product of some weird, incentive-based managerial strategy implemented on a discretionary basis rather than a genuine Starfleet-wide policy (“Work well and get the goodies” makes much more sense than “Upper Decks = Good, Lower Decks can SUCK IT”).
Still glad to see Captain Freeman punt that particular gambit out the window, though, especially in rather touching circumstances.
@13. ChristopherLBennett: You’re quite right, the notion of using Pandronian physiology for a little mix-and-match exploration of body modification (and, one might argue, of organ transplants to boot), as well as the complexities of attitudes towards same would be an excellent hook for a STAR TREK episode (It’s interesting to wonder which era would suit this story Best; it strikes me that going with a relatively early period of Federation history might allow a certain degree of “This is what people have thought; this isn’t necessarily what WE think” wiggle room – in all honesty ENTERPRISE might allow the right balance of “These attitudes are a little old-fashioned, but the show means well” with “OK, this is a series in which the subject could actually have been brought up on Prime Time”*).
@14. Lisa Conner: These being Klingons, they probably have at least two …
@15. C.T. Phipps: Well now I want to see Starbase 80 (We need at least one really juicy parody/affectionate pastiche of DEEP SPACE NINE before we can call this show complete, after all!).
@21. ChristopherLBennett: If you buy into Dahar Master brad’s pet theory, a holodeck scenario being just a bit unethically raunchy might be more of a bug than a feature in many quarters of Starfleet and the wider Federation …
@32. ChristopherLBennett: You madman! You daredevil! You squamous lunatic of Lovecraftian proportions! You, a published author, having evoked STAR WARS in relation to STAR TREK have now summoned up the most pitiless, unholy & unrelenting of all entities known to Human Thought – COPYRIGHT LAWYERS!
BEWARE, I tell ya, BEWARE!
@42. MaGnUs: On the other hand they could have gulled this latest headache onto their own holodeck and made her think it was actually their bridge – after all, someone with as little genuine field experience as the arrogant Yen has almost certainly never bothered to memorise the internal layout of any starship, much less a ‘mere’ California-class (and we know for a fact that the Starfleet holodecks can fake up illusions of the bridge convincing enough to gull actual Starfleet officers).
Having said that, I tend to agree with Mr Bennett (especially his points @45) that the Cerritos crew was quite maverick enough to have done that crazy **** for real.
Also, the impression I took away from various mentions of STAR TREK’s less than proud history of dealing with Redshirts is that we need at least one episode showing various generations of Lower Decks personnel getting together for an epic bitch & moan session about their various eras of Starfleet history.
I quite like the idea of an episode that shows a series of such meetings, with the oldest person at a NEXT GENERATION/PICARD meeting flashing back to an UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY/NEXT GENERATION meet-up segueing into an ORIGINAL SERIES/WRATH OF KHAN mixer hopping back for an ENTERPRISE/DISCOVERY/STRANGE NEW WORLDS meet-and-greet, complete with identical complaints about officers who know exactly what they’re doing and ever-changing grumbles about the twists & turns of history in a minor key (preferably climaxing with an Epic Montage set to the ‘Generations Overture’ giving a surprisingly optimistic answer to the acid question “Was it all worth it?”).
…
I’m not saying ‘Series Finale’ but I am thinking it very loudly.
Also, should the Daedalus-class be THE ORIGINAL SERIES-era equivalent of the California-class? (Something dinky-looking enough to be a slightly-embarassing assignment, but also retro-chic enough to be rather endearing; also a ship class that would have been unquestionably rather dated by the 23rd century, but more than useful enough to keep on the job for a while yet).
I could be misremembering. However, as I recall, they were all pushed into a capsule and not taken to a holodeck. They were all in a group with the rest of the crew. I’ll have to try and check.
I just rewatched the episode. At 12:28 the bridge crew is shown going into one of the holopods (or capsules) for the Klingon attack simulations, not a holodeck.
Not as strong as the previous one, but still a lot of fun. Dawnn Lewis really brings a feisty energy to Freeman. Reminds me of her role on Futurama.
I felt exactly like Boimler during the Borg simulation – there’s always room to improve your score. I can sympathize with that kind of anal behavior.
Meta-humor is definitely an acquired taste, but it seems to fit Lower Decks well. Not only it makes sense for the likes of Mariner and Boimler to idolize past Starfleet heroes with this amount of name-dropping and event references, but it also fits McMahan’s own sensibiities. All that time on Rick & Morty had an effect, no doubt.
How does The Search For Spock scenario make sense as a training exercise (it’s not just Yem, I think Freeman described it as “an oldy but goody”)? Kirk was (rightfully) condemned for stealing a ship from the Federation, it shouldn’t be presented as heroic behaviour to be emulated!
I don’t recall the dialogue, but we we saw was not “Search for Spock,” it was “Wrath of Khan.” And it was Spock Rutherford was emulating, and I don’t think you can claim that sort of heroism shouldn’t be emulated.
costumer: wrong scene. Rutherford’s scenario was Wrath of Khan, but the group-on-the-bridge scenario with Mariner in charge and the bridge crew subordinate was Search for Spock, where you had to steal the Cerritos from Spacedock.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@27: That’s the way I read the line too.
57. krad
Oops, your right. I had forgotten that scene.
I honestly don’t see the similarities, beyond very small things, with Rick and Morty.
On the name Excretus, Boimler was separating the drones from the collective, so the name fits his function within the simulation.
Much as Locutus describes the function of the drone bearing the name. He speaks for the Borg.
Late to the party- but I loved that Boimler had the infant Borg wrapped up around his chest. It’s a Baby Bjorn Borg! (just like in Bojack Horseman!)