One of the joys of producing a science fiction TV show about a ship that goes to planet to planet is that you have to create those planets on a TV-show budget. The original Star Trek would often do this with location shooting in remote locales (like Vasquez Rocks) or on existing sets on the Paramount backlot, or—especially in the third season—with soundstages and matte paintings.
The spinoffs from 1987-2005 mostly went the soundstage route with occasional forays into location shooting. One soundstage was dubbed “Planet Hell” by the cast and crew, as it was a barren area that didn’t look like much of anything. (Voyager even used the name onscreen in “Parturition”).
And they went to caves. Lots and lots of caves. So of course, Lower Decks must make fun of that…
The current crop of Trek shows we’ve gotten since 2017 have generally been able to create more elaborate alien worlds thanks to either being animated (LD, Prodigy) or using virtual sets (Discovery, SNW, and, to a way way way lesser degree, as they spent most of their money on actor salaries, Picard). The difference is marked, as a comparison between, for example, DS9’s rendition of the Trill symbiote caves in “Equilibrium” and Discovery’s rendition of same in “Forget Me Not.”
Animation, of course, can really go crazy with the new worlds, thus completely obviating the need for boring cave sets.
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The Jinn Bot of Shantiport
Unless, of course, you want to make fun of them!
Once again, we have an episode that LD is tailor-made to do, as that budget-necessary reliance on cave sets that we especially saw on TNG (“Final Mission”), DS9 (“Rocks and Shoals”), Voyager (“Phage”), and Enterprise (“Terra Nova”—and these are all just random examples I picked off the top of my head, I could’ve several for each show) led to a lot of clichés. Blocked communications. Cave-ins. Being trapped with unknown life forms. And so on.
“Caves” beautifully plays on all these notions, mostly through Mariner. The line I used for the headline of this article particularly had me laughing my ass off. Mariner is dreading a cave mission, complaining that they all look alike, there’s always things that go wrong, and that it seems like a third of their missions are in caves. That last is particularly amusing because it sometimes felt that way in the 1990s, and it also hasn’t actually been the case with the Cerritos missions we’ve seen, because, being animated, they don’t need to fall back on cave sets to amortize costs…
Of course, just making fun of Trek clichés that have accreted over the decades isn’t actually a story. The story being told here is very much about our four main characters and their relationship, and it does a lovely job with that.
Since being promoted to junior-grade lieutenant, Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford haven’t been able to spend as much time together, as they’ve been on other assignments both on and off the ship. This mission to investigate moss in a cave is their first time together on duty in ages.
When the inevitable happens and tectonic activity on the planet (that the Cerritos doesn’t detect until it’s too late) causes a cave-in that traps the away team, the four try to talk about past missions in caves to help them out.
In the process, they find out things about each other they did not expect. Rutherford had a baby (sort of), which he then raised with T’Ana on one such cave mission. Boimler wound up bonding with Levy when they were trapped in a cave. Mariner similarly bonded with the members of Delta Shift. Each of these stories prove to be revelations, making the other three angry that the fourth didn’t tell them about this major thing in their lives.
Poor Tendi, meanwhile, keeps trying to tell the story of when the four of them were trapped in a turbolift shortly after she signed on, but Mariner repeatedly cuts her off because that’s a trapped-in-a-turbolift story, not a trapped-in-a-cave story, and therefore not relevant.
As they’re telling these stories, they’re being menaced, because of course they are. In this case, it’s green moss. At first they think it’s a kind of bioluminescent moss—and it is, but it’s also growing. Eventually it’s going to completely consume the enclosed area they’re stuck in and smother the away team.
Just as they’re about to be completely smothered, just as they’ve finished yelling at each other for keeping secrets from their closest friends—the moss speaks!
It wants to hear the turbolift story.
And so Tendi gets to tell her story also, and it’s not even really relevant to how to get out, it’s just a fond memory she has. It was right after she reported on board in the premiere episode, “Second Contact.” The episode ended with the four of them sharing a celebratory drink, and we pick up after that. The ship is still in bad shape after the rage virus that infected the crew in that episode, and the quartet wind up stuck in a turbolift for hours before Billups and Shaxs can get them out.
In the present, the foursome realize that they are allowed to have other things going on in their lives and can make other friends. It won’t change the fact that they’re all best friends. The green moss is touched by their friendship, and asks for some more stories.
The theme of forming friendship bonds runs through all the stories. Mariner and the folks on Delta Shift are able to put aside their differences. Boimler actually becomes sorta-kinda friends with Levy. And Rutherford helps raise a kid and almost bonds with T’Ana, plus they make first contact.
Okay, it’s not really a kid Rutherford and T’Ana raise. They’re being shown the caves by an alien who is killed by a cave creature, but when they die, they place themselves in a host body that gives birth to a newborn in whom the alien lives on. However, the cave creature turned out to be a mother protecting her young, and when she sees Rutherford and T’Ana caring for the reborn alien, she’s willing to show them a way out and not kill them. It’s very sweet. Plus pairing the eternally optimistic Rutherford with the eternally cynical T’Ana is comedy gold.
Mariner’s story has a bit that I actually liked despite the cruelty. The youngest member of the away team breaks his leg in the crash. The stuff they need to fix the shuttle is in a weird force field that ages you. He’s the only one who’s young enough to be able to make it before he gets too infirm—but then his leg shatters completely and falls off. Once they save themselves (another member of the team goes the long way around, is made younger, and gets the stuff), they all go back to the shuttle, but leave the leg behind. Mariner fobs it off, saying that sickbay will grow him a new one.
Which makes sense. Twenty-fourth-century medical technology is capable of growing biosynthetic body parts (see Nog’s leg and Picard’s heart), so it really shouldn’t be that big a deal to lose a leg like that when you know you’re on your way back to a starship’s sickbay. Having said that, the rest of the away team is remarkably unconcerned with the fact that one of their own is hurt, though that is sadly on-brand for Mariner.
The only one of the stories I have a significant issue with is Boimler’s, Levy’s conspiracy shtick was cute as a bit of parody when it was first introduced in “No Small Parts.” But what made it funny is that it made fun of conspiracy theorists we see in the world now. The problem is, such theorists are doing things like storming the capital and trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power in a democracy. I mean, it’s fine when Levy is saying, “The Dominion War didn’t happen!” when you know he’s full of it and nobody takes him seriously, and it shows the nut jobs he’s parodying out to be the ridiculous people they are (since we know full well that the Dominion War did happen, what with it taking up two full seasons of a TV show…).
But in Boimler’s tale of him and Levy in a cave, the latter is going on at great length about how they’re being studied by Vendorians who are testing them to make sure they’re moral enough, and a whole lot of other nonsense that Boimler rightly decries as absurd—
—except it all turns out to be true! The Vendorians really are secretly testing them! Which is funny from a writing perspective, but it left a really bad taste in my mouth, because it softens the satire and lets the thing being satirized off the hook.
In general, though, the message of this episode is that everything will be fine if you just talk to each other and be nice to each other. Which, let’s face it, has always been the primary message of Star Trek. So bravo!
Random thoughts
- Each of the stories has a riff on something that Trek has done at least once before beyond just being stuck in a cave.
- Boimler’s story includes Vendorians (introduced in the animated episode “The Survivor”) and Starfleet personnel being tested in bizarre ways (the original series’ “Arena,” “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” “Spectre of the Gun,” and “The Savage Curtain,” TNG’s “Encounter at Farpoint,” “Hide and Q,” “Q Who,” “Where Silence Has Lease,” “Allegiance,” “All Good Things…” and turned on its ear a bit in DS9’s “Move Along Home”).
- Mariner’s story has a shuttle that needs to be repaired to escape (the original series’ “The Galileo Seven,” Voyager’s “Muse”) with the thing they need to get at surrounded by a weird technobabble field (TNG’s “Final Mission”) that causes people to rapidly age (the original series’ “The Deadly Years,” TNG’s “Unnatural Selection”) and de-age (the animated series’ “The Counter-Clock Incident,” TNG’s “Rascals”).
- Rutherford’s story includes a man getting pregnant (Enterprise’s “Unexpected”), a monster that turns out to be just a mother protecting her young (the original series’ “The Devil in the Dark”), and an unlikely pair thrust unexpectedly into the role of caring for a newborn while trapped on a planet (Voyager’s “Parturition”).
- Tendi’s story has people trapped in a turbolift for far longer than expected, and coming to bond after some initial hardships (TNG’s “Disaster,” Short Treks’ “Q & A”).
- And, of course, the whole cave thing has been done so many times (besides the ones I listed earlier, there’s the original series’ “The Cage” and “Friday’s Child,” TNG’s “Silicon Avatar” and “The Enemy,” DS9’s “The Circle,” “Improbable Cause,” “The Maquis, Part II,” and “Heart of Stone,” Voyager’s “Caretaker” and “Blood Fever,” Enterprise‘s “Dawn,” the movie Insurrection, etc., etc., ad nauseum).
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be a guest at Anime Banzai at the Davis Conference Center in Layton, Utah this weekend, alongside Star Trek: Prodigy voice actor Bonnie Gordon, as well as a bunch of voice actors and artists and writers and cosplayers and performers. He’ll have a table where he’ll be signing and selling books, and also will be doing some programming. His full schedule is here.
I could have lived without the gross-out body horror in Mariner’s story, but I liked this one. Levy reminds me of a few people I met in academia: brilliant in one particular domain, but prone to believing the absolute weirdest and stupidest things, and expositing about them at length at the drop of a hat. I agree that, under the present circumstances, it sends the wrong message to show that his bullshit theory was mostly right, but I’ve long expressed my frustration with the fact that, in fiction, conspiracy theories usually turn out to be real (Off topic, but I think that Raffi discovering that the Romulans were actually responsible for sabotaging their own rescue efforts back in Picard, s1, was probably one of the worst versions of this in Star Trek, given how closely it aligned with anti-refugee narratives). And I liked that we saw some weird/unusual pairings, like Rutherford and T’Ana or Mariner with the Delta Shift.
You left out two other things this episode was parodying — a bottle show and a clip show. Even though there’s no reason for an animated show to do the former (unless it’s a CG-animated show, since they have the same budget limits on building new sets that live-action shows do, which is why Green Lantern: The Animated Series gave its Lanterns a spaceship as a standing set), and the flashback “clips” are all new.
This was a mixed bag. I felt it went too far with the wink-wink parody of Trek tropes. I hate it when characters age due to time acceleration yet still have time pass for them normally while they move and speak, let alone not die of thirst or starvation while being time-accelerated without access to food or drink. And I didn’t like the conspiracy-theorist character, because I don’t buy that someone that irrational and unstable would ever get past Starfleet’s psych evaluations. Boimler’s line handwaving that it was tolerated because he’s a math genius didn’t work for me, because it’s just too much to tolerate. It’s dangerous for someone to be so out of touch with reality, so incapable of making rational decisions based on evidence, when his crewmates might depend on him for their survival.
It was nice, though, to finally get another story about the Vendorians. I’ve always wanted to see them revisited. It’s long annoyed me that productions like TNG and TUC have invented new shapeshifter species instead of further exploring the ones already established like Antosians and Vendorians. That’s the one respect in which revisiting past continuity doesn’t annoy me — it’s not just a “remember when” wink for the audience, it’s maintaining consistency of worldbuilding by not forgetting that entire species exist.
Though I’m still disappointed that we’ve never seen a Vendorian in live action. Well… that we know of.
“location shooting in remote locales (like Vasquez Rocks)”
Despite what Picard implied with regards to Raffi Musiker’s homestead, Vasquez Rocks is hardly remote. It’s about a 45-minute drive from Paramount Studios, just a few miles northeast of Santa Clarita along Escondido Canyon Road. It’s so popular as a filming site because it looks remote but is actually quite convenient.
“or—especially in the third season—with soundstages and matte paintings.”
There were no original matte paintings done for TOS after season 1, though “Wink of an Eye” recycled the Eminiar VII matte painting as a set backdrop and “Requiem for Methuselah” reused the “Cage” Rigel fortress as an establishing shot of Flint’s mansion.
Yes, I have to say that conspiracy theories aren’t fun in RL and thus aren’t very funny in Lower Decks. Part of the reason I feel this way is because I used to be a huge X-Files fan and am an anarchist in RL. There’s numerous RL conspiracies of shady inside things like the fact that the NRA was funded by Russia to subvert democracy and a certain electorate vote scheme on January 6th. Things that certainly are straight out of Tom Clancy or John Le Carre. However, these aren’t the conspiracies that people focus on. Instead, the conspiracy theories of the internet are usually Far Right barely disguised anti-Semitic blood libel and often used as propaganda for the Far Right.
*sigh*
Which is to say it just didn’t work for me at this day and this time.
I wasn’t even fond of Rutherford giving birth to a baby plot because not only does that remind me of one of the worst episodes of ENT with Trip’s pregnancy but it also reminds me of “the Child” where I maintained that it really is a form of sexual assault that is just sort of glossed over. It happened to Carol Danvers in the Avengers and it wasn’t funny there either, lack of sexual contact or not.
Best story was Tendi’s by far.
I admit, though, I can totally buy someone in the Trek universe refusing to believe Q is real. And Levy’s paranoia about Vendorian infiltrators isn’t that implausible when you consider that the Federation was victim to a conspiracy of shapeshifters less than a decade before. Maybe I’m being too hard on him, and his paranoia is an expression of some lingering Dominion War trauma.
The Dominion War was faked according to him. :)
@5/C.T. Phipps: “The Dominion War was faked according to him.”
Okay, that’s hard to believe, given that it ended only about 5-6 years ago in-universe. Even if he’s freshly graduated and came from some remote colony, he would’ve attended the Academy alongside countless people to whom the war was immediate history, he would’ve been taught by instructors who were veterans of the war, he would’ve studied it exhaustively in his training, etc. So that puts me back to my original conclusion — anyone delusional enough to ignore such overwhelming evidence of historical reality would never have gotten past the Academy entrance exam, let alone made it onto a starship.
Christopher: Hard to believe you didn’t know about Levy’s Dominion War denial, given that I wrote about it in the very review you’re commenting on……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I have been doing a Star Trek Animated Rewatch on the 50th Anniversary of the original broadcast. I wonder if the meant to show this episode last week since October 13, 1973 was the first broadcast of “The Survivor”.
@2 – “don’t buy that someone that irrational and unstable would ever get past Starfleet’s psych evaluations.”
what about Barclay and Tilly? Tilly was barely functional at first. She couldn’t even manage to hold onto a roommate. And Barclay was somewhat competent, much like Levy, he also had essentially zero in the way of interpersonal skills
I know that parodying bottle episodes was part of the point of this one, but I got the feeling that last week’s story and this week’s were kinda perfunctory. “Toss all the evil AI’s together and write them all out” followed by an actual clip show. I know Lower Decks is lightweight by design, but in a 10-episode season, I don’t expect filler.
Vasquez Rocks is used so frequently specifically because it’s not location shooting under the union contracts. It’s toward the edge of the “30 Mile Zone” that’s defined as local, and so doesn’t require the studio to pay for meals and transportation.
I’m sure you could come up with one of your continuity patches on it, @Christopher, the way you’ve done so much else in novels (i.e. “He was propelled forth in time from Season 1 of TNG to post Deep Space Nine and embraced conspiracy theory to deal with the fact that the Federation was barely recognizable”) but sometimes a joke is a joke.
I guess Levy’s Vendorian conspiracy theory is the “every dog has his day” factor. I really don’t like the character though, I’m surprised he doesn’t catch hell from the people who have lived through those events. The Vendorians also pissed me off thinking it’s mean to call him out on that crap.
I do appreciate Boimler instantly pivoting to making him de facto Vendorian ambassador. Once Levy was proven right Boimler immediately shifted to letting those conspiracy theories work for them, which shows again that Bradward has the goods.
Tendi’s story goes back to what I was saying about her personality compared to being the Mistress of the Winter Constellations. She wants people to like her for her.
Mariner’s story…ouch. I mean, no osteogenic regenerator in the shuttle? Thinking about it wouldn’t the time field have also matured any infection he was suffering? Maybe that’s why his leg fell off. Nobody thought to set the bone though?
Not in any way surprised Rutherford immediately became a good Dad. But T’Ana’s lock in is amazing, she didn’t even flinch at the pregnancy just jumped on the C-section. I guess she’s a great obstetrician, not a daycare specialist.
@10/kkozoriz: “what about Barclay and Tilly?”
Hey — don’t equate neurodivergence and social anxiety with mental instability. Just do not do that. The fact that they had trouble asserting themselves and relating to people doesn’t mean they were delusional or paranoid. They were able to engage with reality and solve problems when they needed to. If Levy can’t even agree with objective facts, then he can’t function in a crisis and could get people killed. Someone like that should not be in Starfleet.
@13/C.T. Phipps: “sometimes a joke is a joke.”
That’s reductionistic. Humor is not just one undifferentiated thing. There are as many different subsets of comedy as there are of drama or music or any other art form. So it’s important to choose the right style of comedy for what you’re doing.
I’ll say again what I’ve said before: If this show is meant to be part of Trek canon, rather than purely a parody of it, then the jokes should make sense within the logic of the universe, rather than just being random absurdity and chaos. There’s a difference between a naturalistic comedy and a complete fantasy, and a comedy that coexists in the same universe as dramatic series should be naturalistic. What Gene Roddenberry stressed above all else was that the characters in Trek should be written believably and realistically. No matter how fanciful the sci-fi situations got, he wanted them grounded in characters and reactions that the audience could believe in. And I cannot believe that a conspiracy nut would have the tiniest chance of surviving the rigorous psychological screening that Starfleet cadets receive.
Also, as Keith pointed out, conspiracy theorists aren’t funny anymore after a mob of them tried to overthrow the government. The essence of comedy is timing, and this is not the time.
@115 – Go back and look at Barclay. He was shirking his duty in engineering. If he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to, things go go very bad, very quickly.
And Tilly doesn’t seem the sort that would function well in an emergency. Unsure of herself, unable to realize that she has to work with other people.
It’s not about being neurodivergent or delusional. It’s about their ability to do their duty. And all three characters show that but for different reasons.
Whatever happened to the psych test that Starfleet has? Surely it’s not just one scenario and you get a “Yeah, all good in that department”. Although, apparently it is.
In addition to all the other, mostly Trek-specific, influences you point out, I think this episode owes a creative debt to the utterly brilliant second episode of “Clerks.” As far as I’m aware, that was the first time an *animated* show specifically parodied the concept of clip shows and bottle shows. The two leads become trapped, naturally, and start to flash back onto events from their past, but are stymied by the fact that they can seemingly ONLY recall events from the series’ pilot, aka “last week.” Then, naturally, they start to “remember” completely original events as done in this episode.
The fact that the final flashback goes all the way back to the pilot even feels like an intentional shout-out.
anguirus: I can’t agree with you at all on that, and not just because I thought that episode of Clerks was dumb. (Indeed, I was completely unimpressed with the Clerks animated series, and I say that as a huge fan of the original film.) The similarities are very vague, and the episode shares much more specific characteristics with Trek‘s clip shows and flashback episodes and bottle shows and such.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Lower Decks is just getting better constantly :)
@17 anguirus
The Simpsons, Episode 10 of season 7 titled: The Simpson’s 138th Show Spectacular. Comes to mind for cartoon bottle show parodies. The episode first aired in late 1995.
Back to Lower Decks I think this episode might be my least favorite this season and I still thought it was very good. Man do I love this show. After a rough start in the first half of season 1, every episode I thoroughly enjoy. This is seasons 3-7 TNG levels of consistency for me. Nothing else in the Trek canon comes close (well maybe season 1 and 2 of TOS but so many TOS episodes I have only seen once, so it is hard to say).
Lower Decks for me is the only Trek show (Prodigy might get there) that actually makes the Trek canon feel whole. Every season more so and more so. I get a real sense that TOS/TNG/DS9/Films, etc actually are all part of the same continuity/universe instead of strangely disconnected “Trek boxes” with differing ideas/visual style/tone and so on that always made me look at each show as it own thing that was not or at least in a very limited way connected to other “Trek” boxes. The majority of the Trek canon I don’t watch anymore, but this show makes me happy I did.
-Kefka
@krad: “Rocks and Shoals” wasn’t really a budget-saving cave episode. It was a Jem’Hadar faceoff that took place in the same desert location as DS9’s “The Ship” (and like all DS9 location filming, it was unbearably hot, according to the DS9 Companion).
One thing that I love about the Tendi flashback to episode 1 is how much the animaton has improved over these four seasons. The characters move around a lot more than they did back then.
It’s impressive that Lower Decks took this long to do an episode making fun of the classic Planet Hell soundstage (if this show attempted more of a fourth wall break, those rocks would turn out to be made of styrofoam or some other similar substance). It’s such an obvious story idea, but still executed remarkably well. It makes perfect sense to use Mariner as the one officer who’s sick and tired of cave missions. It’s a nice, clean break from the usual Lower Decks worshipping of past Trek shows.
Individually, I definitely prefer the Rutherford tale over the others. Partly because it has the more heartfelt story with the baby, but mainly because of T’Ana’s usual cranky attitude.
I’m not so sure of the above criticism that the show is somehow endorsing Levy’s QAnon-esque conspiracy theory BS. I just think that he’s shooting half-baked theories around, hoping that one will stick – and he just happened to get surprisingly lucky with the Vendorian guess. As pointed out, the Dominion War was still recent, and the Changeling paranoia certainly enabled hacks like Levy to get away with these mostly asinine assumptions.
Eduardo: I never said “Rocks and Shoals” was a budget-saving episode. I just said it took place in a cave. It’s the constant return to that particular set piece that is being parodied here, regardless of whether or not it was there to save the budget….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Trek terminology references: Dunsel (Ultimate Computer), pergium (Devil in the Dark).
@18–I surely didn’t mean to suggest that this particular episode of LD is any *less* Trek-referential than usual.
What I doubt, though, is that in the production of an animated sitcom that’s playing with the concepts of clip shows and bottle shows, that Clerks ep 2 wasn’t part of the conversation.
@20–betting on “Simpsons did it first” is generally pretty safe, but S7E10 is an *actual* budget-saving clip show–written and directed under pseudonyms as a protest–and doesn’t seem to have anything in particular to do with the concept of bottle episodes.
Qujoth anguirus: “What I doubt, though, is that in the production of an animated sitcom that’s playing with the concepts of clip shows and bottle shows, that Clerks ep 2 wasn’t part of the conversation.”
And I doubt that a 23-year-old animated series that was cancelled after two episodes ever was part of the conversation.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@23/Andy: They mentioned pergium, but they mispronounced it, I think — they said “PURR-ghee-um” when it should be “per-GEE-um.” (Unless I’m misremembering. For years I thought “Argelius” had a soft G when it’s actually a hard G.)
I dunno, funny how those cult shows resonate when they come to reruns and home video…
@26: Yeah, I noticed the mispronunciation. I was happy about these references because they weren’t slavish references to TOS, but rather off-handed references to an implied consistent culture (no one said “the equipment is dunsel, like they called Kirk after M-5 run the Enterprise” – they just used a term that is supposedly common Starfleet parlance in an appropriate way.
@24 Sorry mistyped I meant clip show.
Kefka
I just figure, in-universe, “Pergium” is probably one of those “Aluminum/Aluminium” things/
The universal translator clearly allows for variant spellings and pronunciations within a language — I guess it has to be smart enough to group them with instances where another language is spoken intentionally (like peppering Klingon words into a conversation) or we’d never know how Picard says the word “schedule”…
@ChristopherLBennett: I maintain that LOWER DECKS is best understood as anecdote, not sober history – so much of the show makes more sense if you receive it as 87-94% what actually happened and the rest of it what one Beckett Mariner SAYS happened (retelling her adventures for the umpteenth time, not necessarily in a condition of perfect sobriety) rather than just the facts.
Should anyone write a LOWER DECKS tie-in novel, one hopes they would evoke this sense of anecdote, tall tale and worm’s-eye view of history (Perhaps a collection of short stories written as a series of interviews? One can imagine the interviewer taking Mariner to task for – say – claiming that Levy was an unhinged conspiracy nut in general, rather than specifically worrying about the Vendorians and theorising about how it might have been THEM, rather than various other shapeshifting species, behind various crises in Federation history).