Star Trek has rarely done a full-on crossover between shows. There’ve been lots of cross-show guest appearances: McCoy, Spock, Scotty, Bashir, and Quark on TNG; Picard, Riker (sort of), and Tuvok on DS9; and Riker, Troi, and Barclay on Voyager. Star Trek Generations came close to being a crossover, as did Enterprise’s “These are the Voyages…” and one could argue that all three seasons of Picard are TNG/Voyager crossovers. Plus there’s DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations” and Voyager’s “Flashback,” but the former was accomplished via footage, and the latter didn’t entirely work as a crossover with The Undiscovered Country.
And now we have the long-anticipated SNW/Lower Decks crossover, “Those Old Scientists”—which was previewed at San Diego Comic-Con and then went live on Paramount+ over the weekend, so if you haven’t watched it yet, you can and should!
It’s kind of amazing that Trek has mostly avoided a crossover like this until now. TNG and DS9 played at it with occasional guest appearances, plus both shows helped set the Maquis up for Voyager, but they never really mixed it up. DS9’s “You Are Cordially Invited” should have been a TNG crossover episode, given the importance of Worf to both shows, but they couldn’t make it work.
Buy the Book
Emergent Properties
The best crossovers are ones that work well as both parts of the mix, as it were. To give an example from the 1990s, the “Golden Hind” storyline on Hercules ended with Xena and Gabrielle showing up for the final part of it, and that episode worked just as well as a Xena episode as it did a Hercules episode. The various crossovers between Law & Order and Homicide: Life on the Street in the 1990s and between The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman in the 1970s were also pretty good examples of the breed.
I’m pleased to say that “Those Old Scientists” is one of those best crossovers. It works perfectly as an episode of SNW and also as an episode of LD. And it’s just a great episode of Star Trek.
My favorite part, truly, was the opening credits, which were re-done in animated form, complete with a few little nods to LD’s opening credits. And the twenty-fourth-century segments are all animated (as is one twenty-third-century scene at the end), though the majority of the tale is live-action, thus giving Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome a chance to play Boimler and Mariner in body as well as voice. (In addition, Noël Wells, Eugene Cordero, and Jerry O’Connell all make brief vocal appearances as Tendi, Rutherford, and Ransom, respectively. Ransom in particular makes a semi-lewd comment about Number One, which is an amusing in-joke, since O’Connell is married to Rebecca Romijn…)
The episode opens in the twenty-fourth century with the Cerritos in orbit of a planet that has a portal on it that hasn’t been active for a hundred and twenty years. Tendi makes a comment that Orion scientists discovered it, and Boimler is skeptical that there even were Orion scientists back then, which prompts yet another rant from Tendi on the subject of Orion profiling (which has been a running theme on LD), and also that an ancestor of hers served on the ship in question.
Rutherford taking a picture of Boimler standing in the portal apparently emits some kind of radiation that activates the portal, sending Boimler into the past, where he lands at the feet of an Enterprise landing party.
Boimler has a rough time of things in the past. His obsessive need to follow regulations to the letter and try very hard not to pollute the timelines by giving hints about the future is swimming upstream against his hero-worship. He keeps a Starfleet recruiting poster that features Number One in his bunk. He hugely admires Pike and Spock. On top of that, when an Orion ship shows up, he finds himself speaking up when he really shouldn’t, trying to get the Enterprise to at least consider the possibility that the Orions are scientists rather than pirates.
Which is a problem, as the Orions take the portal from under Enterprise’s nose.
When they finally do get the portal back, there’s just enough technobabble left to activate it one more time—but instead of allowing Boimler to go back to the future, Mariner comes through it to the past, ostensibly to rescue Boimler.
Mariner’s bull-in-a-china-shop act is at least as disruptive as Boimler’s nerdity—although, weirdly, it’s less annoying in live-action than in animation. It’s possible that LD’s stylized animation, which is a bit more static than the more fluid movements of live-action humans, softens Mariner’s edges some. (She also talks way faster in animated form…)
In her case, Mariner’s eager to talk to Uhura, and makes no bones about it, going so far as to claim a nonexistent background in linguistics so she can work with her on translating the glyphs on the portal.
Both Boimler and Mariner see weirdness in people they think they know from history. Spock—after the events of “Charades” and the tentative steps he and Chapel are taking toward a relationship as seen there and in “Lost in Translation”—is experimenting with his human side, and occasionally laughing and smiling. This freaks Boimler the heck out, and at first he thinks that his time-travel has done this, though he’s reassured by Chapel that this experimentation started before Boimler’s arrival. But Chapel is disheartened to know that Spock’s current behavior—which is wrapped up in her own relationship with him—is temporary, which means their relationship is also likely to be temporary. Jess Bush magnificently plays Chapel’s heartbreak as the realization dawns on her when she’s talking with Boimler in the turbolift.
Mariner’s surprise is less invasive and depressing, as she thinks of Uhura as the one we met on the original series and the movies, the one who sang filk songs making fun of Spock in the rec hall. The unsure-of-herself workaholic ensign is not what Mariner was expecting, and she winds up forcing Uhura to take a break in the bar. (Ortegas is both amused and frustrated that Mariner is able to accomplish what she herself hadn’t managed in getting the ensign to lighten the hell up.)
And it works, as Uhura has a breakthrough while relaxing and chatting and drinking with Mariner and Ortegas that she wouldn’t have had sitting alone in her quarters.
Mariner also prepares an Orion drink for them that provides an amusing joke at the end. Ortegas and Uhura share the drink with the whole gang at Pike’s birthday shindig, and it has a hallucinatory effect on them so they all think they’re animated with really big eyes, as that bit is done in the LD animation style…
Speaking of Pike, that’s another great moment. La’an catches Boimler and Mariner trying to steal a shuttle and get the portal back from the Orions. First of all, while this specifically isn’t the great moment, it’s nice to see someone steal a shuttle on a Star Trek show and actually get caught for once. Also, apropos of nothing, at one point Boimler and La’an are walking down the hall side by side, and Quaid must be, like, a foot taller than Christina Chong…
Anyhow, they’re brought to Pike’s quarters. Prior to this, Boimler and Mariner let slip that Pike’s birthday was coming up (Boimler further lets slip that Pike’s birthday is a holiday in their time, which is kind of fabulous, especially since he already has a medal of honor named after him…), and a plan is hatched to throw him a surprise party. Pike, of course, cottoned to that and tells Boimler and Mariner that he’s not interested in a party, and was planning to be alone on his birthday. We get some interesting insight into Pike’s tempestuous relationship with his father (previously established in Discovery’s “New Eden” as a science teacher who also taught comparative religion), and this year is the first that Pike will be older than his father was when he died. Boimler and Mariner, meanwhile, try very hard to say “live your best life while you can with the people you love” without saying the “because you’ll have a terrible accident in a few short years,” and then Pike goes ahead and reveals that he already knows that fate, to the abject shock of the ensigns from the future.
But Pike also takes their words to heart, and decides to let the crew go ahead and throw him a surprise party (though Number One chastises him for not acting nearly surprised enough). It’s a very sweet and insightful moment in an episode full of them.
What makes this great as an LD episode is the realization on Boimler and Mariner’s part that their hero-worship is—not misplaced, exactly, but it can easily obfuscate the fact that their heroes are also people.
Tying this all magnificently together is the solution to the portal problem, which relates to the first starship called Enterprise, the NX-01. At first, it’s just Pike mentioning that he’d probably be just as much of a fangoober as Boimler and Mariner are if he went back in time and met Archer, but then the solution turns out to relate to Archer’s ship (another technobabble thing the details of which are irrelevant). As they’re implementing that solution, Ortegas and Uhura start fangoobering over, respectively, Mayweather and Sato. First of all, it’s very nice to see Mayweather in particular get some love, which is more the writers of Enterprise were able to manage most of the time, plus Sato was obviously an attempt to do a communications officer better than they did with Uhura (who was written as a glorified telephone operator in the 1960s). Secondly, Ortegas and Uhura belatedly realize that they’re acting just like Boimler and Mariner when discussing century-old heroes…
In a final nice touch, Pike agrees to give the Orion scientists all the credit for discovering the portal in exchange for letting them use it to get Boimler and Mariner home to the twenty-fourth century. The Orion captain (played by Canadian character actor Greg Bryk) very quietly and happily says, “That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” nicely sowing the seeds for the marginally better treatment of Orions we see on LD.
We won’t know until the fall when LD season four debuts how this will affect Boimler and Mariner, but we’ve already seen that the events of this episode have some effect on Spock, Chapel, and Pike in particular. Oh, and a bit on Number One, too, as she learns that she’s the literal poster-girl for Starfleet recruitment. After what she went through earlier this season, Number One is obviously deeply touched to find out that Starfleet will use her as a recruiting tool, even using the phrase “Ad Astra per Aspera” as part of the poster. Boimler admits that it was that poster that got him to apply to the Academy. And Number One’s response to is chastise them for giving away the future like that and then, like the Orion captain, giving them a quiet, heartfelt thank-you…
As those of you who’ve been reading my LD reviews know, it took me a bit to warm to the adventures of the U.S.S. Cerritos, but I’ve come to really love the show, and this crossover between it and my favorite of the new Paramount+ shows is perfect in every way. Just a wonderful hour of television
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be in the exhibit hall at GalaxyCon Raleigh this coming weekend in North Carolina, where he’ll be selling and signing his books and comics, as well as some hand-made stuffies created by his wife Wrenn Simms. Come by and say hi!
