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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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.
