The last two weeks have shown Lower Decks’ tendency to dig up obscure corners of the Star Trek universe, so it’s fun this week to see the show going for some pretty standard Trek tropes and revisiting some concepts from some of their better episodes (as opposed to, y’know, TNG’s “The Vengeance Factor” like they did in “Starbase 80?!”).
This week, we’ve got: a planet where time passes more quickly (Voyager’s “Blink of an Eye”), Mariner wanting to learn the flute while trapped on a primitive planet (TNG’s “The Inner Light”), Data’s disembodied head still fully functioning (TNG’s “Disaster”), surgically altering the crew to blend in with a pre-warp planet’s population (numerous times, from Enterprise’s “Civilization” to SNW’s “Strange New Worlds”), cobbling together equipment to create something approaching Starfleet tech using primitive tools (the original series’ “The City on the Edge of Forever”), struggling to make a living on a planet more primitive than what they’re used to (Enterprise’s “Carbon Creek”), plus the recurring theme this season of a portal opening to another timeline (TNG’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise” among others).
On top of that, we’ve got some genuine character work with Tendi and T’Lyn. There’s a bridge science officer position open, and Freeman is having difficulty choosing between those two for the position. Tendi is incredibly eager to get it, but she feels inadequate n the face of T’Lyn’s fabulousness.
The mission involves the Cerritos being sent to close yet another of the interdimensional fissures (first seen in “Dos Cerritos”), through which came an alternate version of the Enterprise NCC-1701-D. The main feature of this alt-Enterprise is that it’s purple rather than silver-gray.
Unfortunately, they can’t close the rift just yet because sensors are picking up tech from the purple Enterprise on a nearby planet with a tachyon core. Freeman sends Mariner, T’Lyn, and Tendi down in disguise as natives to find and dispose of the tech. Mariner is disappointed because it’s taquito night. In fact, Boimler and Rutherford are drinking their funky margaritas while beaming the away team down. Unfortunately, right after beam-out, Boimler spills his margarita all over the console. So instead of beaming them back up right away—which would still be a few days down on the planet—it takes several minutes to clean up the console, by which time a year has passed.
In that time, our intrepid heroes have to make the most of things, trying very hard not to break the Prime Directive. They have, at least, destroyed all the purple Enterprise tech, with one exception: Data’s head, which is also purple. Tendi takes care of Data’s head, while T’Lyn is able to make a living growing mutant fruit and marketing a skin-care product. Mariner, meanwhile, spends a lot of her year on the planet in jail. She makes a flute out of soap, hoping to replicate the experience Picard had in “The Inner Light.” Of course, the flute doesn’t work very well, and Mariner is awful at playing it…
The episode is just fun. Gabrielle Ruiz’s deadpan continues to absolutely nail it for T’Lyn, as always, and it’s such a perfect contrast to Noël Wells’ obsessive need to be the best at science that devolves into obsession. We’ve seen so much of Tendi the badass lately that it’s refreshing to be back to nerdy Tendi. (Though the badass shows up periodically, like when she says she’s wanted to be chief science officer ever since she could pick up a dagger.) And Mariner really is trying to do better, even though it’s swimming upstream against her general Mariner-ness. One of the times she goes to jail is when she puts out the sacred eternal flame, mistaking it for a fire that needed to be put out.
Plus Brent Spiner provides the voice of purple Data! It’s always a pleasure to see Spiner, who has played a ridiculous number of roles in Trek over the years, but who particularly shined as the curious android. While Spiner no longer convincingly play Data in live action (hence the gestalt being created in Picard’s third season that was a mix of Data, Lore, B4, and Altan Soong, thus allowing the character to look as old as Spiner is), his voice is still spot-on perfect, and his friendly calm tones are a delightful contrast to Tendi’s ever-growing anxiety over getting the science officer position. For her part, T’Lyn doesn’t feel she deserves the science officer spot because she doesn’t fit in. She was kicked off a Vulcan ship and is still trying to figure out who she is. This is in direct contrast to Tendi, who has been back home but is self-aware enough to know she doesn’t belong there and has found her place in Starfleet. T’Lyn doesn’t feel she has finished that journey the way Tendi has. Tendi herself pooh-poohs it, especially given how effortlessly she owns living on a pre-warp world…
And it’s Data who talks Freeman into the perfect solution: make them both bridge science officers, because they complement each other so perfectly.
In the end, Data’s head is shot through the fissure in a torpedo so he can go back to his purple ship and the Cerritos closes yet another fissure.
Random thoughts
- Rutherford has decided to follow Boimler’s lead and grow a beard. It’s growing faster and more smoothly, and he’s getting lots of compliments on it. Meanwhile, Boimler’s beard is proceeding very very very slowly, and he hasn’t gotten a single compliment…
- When queried by Data as to the color of her universe’s Enterprise, Freeman says it isn’t any color, which fails her saving throw versus color identification as it is, as I said above, silver-gray. That’s, like, really a color! Honest! Though I agree with Data that there’s no reason why it couldn’t be purple…
- Data’s head was established as being able to operate independently without the rest of his body in the aforementioned “Disaster.” His head was also separated from his body in TNG’s “Time’s Arrow” two-parter, though the head was inactive in that instance.
- Back when I was doing the TNG Rewatch, there was a comment exchange in the entry for “The Inner Light” where one person was firmly of the belief that Picard never told anyone about his experiences in the episode (at least until he shared some of it with Nella Daren in “Lessons”). However, Mariner is aware of it, which proves the contrary theory held by me and most everyone else in the comment thread, that of course Picard reported it in full, especially since that was the whole reason why the Kataan people sent the probe in the first place…
- With his appearance here, Brent Spiner joins an exclusive group: people who have played the same role on four different Trek TV shows. (Once, the list of who appeared in three shows was exclusive, but Picard, LD, and Prodigy have made that list rather long now.) The current list of four-timers:
- Jonathan Frakes as the person born as William T. Riker: TNG (series regular), DS9 (“Defiant”), Voyager (“Death Wish”), Enterprise (“These are the Voyages…”), Picard (recurring regular), LD (recurring guest star).
- Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi: TNG (series regular), Voyager (recurring guest star), Enterprise (“These are the Voyages…”), Picard (recurring regular), LD (“No Small Parts”).
- John deLancie as Q: TNG (recurring guest star), DS9 (“Q-Less”), Voyager (recurring guest star), Picard (recurring guest star), LD (“Veritas”).
- Armin Shimerman as Quark: TNG (“Firstborn”), DS9 (series regular), Voyager (“Caretaker”), LD (“Hear All, Trust Nothing”).
- Brent Spiner as Data: TNG (series regular), Enterprise (“These are the Voyages…”), Picard (recurring guest star), LD (“Fully Dilated”).
- Robert Picardo will apparently be joining this club, as the EMH is supposed to be a regular on Starfleet Academy, which Picardo will add to DS9 (“Dr. Bashir, I Presume?”), Voyager (series regular), and Prodigy (series regular).
I enjoyed all the stuff on the planet, however, I didn’t like the way the show made Boimler & Rutherford look incompetent. There should’ve been a better way to have them on the planet for a year other than the premise of a spilt drink on the transporter console. That was just ridiculous.
BTW, Mariner realizing she was going to miss taquito night was pretty funny.
Yes, this is like Doctor T’ana’s assault on Boimler last episode or Mariner stabbing Bomler with her bat’leth. All three of them are genuine court martial offenses, IMHO.
Perhaps it should be noted that Mariner didn’t actually miss taquito night, although she had to wait a subjective year for it…
An okay episode, but it had issues. The spilled drinks on the console were ridiculous. The parallel timelines having nonsensical differences like size and color rather than just being branched timelines with different events continues to annoy me. The episode failed to address why the purple Enterprise sent Data down to the planet in a shuttle and then just left him there when it crashed, something that I can’t imagine them doing if it still had the same command crew. Nor did it address why it’s still the E-D instead of the E, which is a pretty massive timeline change given that everything else purple Data said about his timeline corresponded exactly to the TNG timeline.
It also disappointed me that there was no twist with Snell, that he really was just the creepy lurker and antagonist he appeared to be, instead of turning out to be more benevolent despite appearances, which feels like it would’ve been more of a Lower Decks-style resolution. In general, the planet was just too ordinary, with no interesting worldbuilding.
Keith, the Enterprise-D was not actually silver-gray, but azure, an homage by designer Andrew Probert to the way color-filter issues in TOS’s composite shots sometimes made the Enterprise appear green or bluish. It just tended to look gray in FX shots because of the dim outer-space lighting, or because the FX shots got color-corrected to look grayish, an ironic inversion of the TOS color errors.
To be fair, I don’t think the dimension was purple but the Enterprise-D was purple and Data just shared the same color. Perhaps because he liked the look of it.
As for Snell, I feel Lower Decks has been a little too nice for people. I mentioned how much I disapproved of trying to retcon Starbase 80 as a bunch of scrappy underdogs versus genuine underperformers. The Federation may be optimistic but life in the 24th century is still full of jerks.
It’s not about whether people are jerks, it’s about whether a story is interesting. A character introduced as a nosy creep and turning out to be a nosy creep has no arc, no surprises. He’s just a walking cliche and a plot device.
Color blind person here (protanopia): I’ve also heard the Enterprise-D described as Robin’s egg blue, can anyone confirm?
The filming model of the D was painted Duck Egg Blue w/a sky blue aztec pattern for the hull plates with the intent for it to appear more grayish on screen to look like the TOS 1701.
I just re-read an article from Starlog‘s TNG magazine at the time, a detailed look at the design and construction of the E-D 6-footer, and designer Andrew Probert was quoted as saying, “We’ve even gone back to the original blue-green color of the old TV starship.” So evidently Probert either spoke inaccurately or mistook the occasional color-correction errors in TOS’s VFX shots for the actual color of the ship, but it seems he, at least, intended the ship to appear blue-green onscreen.
Hmm, yeah, I’d say that’s a valid term for it, a light, slightly greenish blue.
Fine, whatever, but that’s still a color!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
If this episode did nothing else it recognises and exalts the inherent majesty of Purple, reminding us that we must never forget the Good Luck that permits us to luxuriate in it’s voluptuous luxuriance.
As you can see, I quite like the colour – we’re not exclusive, but we’ve been going steady for a while now.
The episode as a whole I found good, though one felt that Mr Data’s role was (rather like the episode) sound but unexceptional: it might have been fun to let Mr Spinner perform some of the other voices, just to keep us guessing.
Also, it was hilariously disconcerting to see Mr Rutherford get in on the facial hair game and rather charming to see Mr Boimler finally acquire a passable goatee: it will be interesting to see where his grooming goes from here.
One small note: The spilled drink was a michelada, not a margarita. A michelada is a mixture of beer, tomato/clamato juice, citrus, and/or spices, a savory drink rather than a sweet one.
My apologies. My libation preferences are more toward straight-up drinks, not mixed ones.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, Scotch, bourbon, beer, and wine man
Ah, a fellow man of culture, I see.
You and George Thorogood.
I cannot for a nanosecond imagine George Thorogood drinking wine…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
What I don’t understand is: if T’Lyn knew she wasn’t as resolved in life as Tendi was, then why did she apply for the science officer position? Did she somehow sense Tendi’s eagerness/fears over getting the job and decided to do it out of a need to teach her a lesson? I don’t get her motivations here. Sure, it makes for a nice counterpoint explanation to Tendi’s insecurity, but if T’Lyn is that self aware, then there is no reason for her to do it, especially if she felt to be unqualified for the job.
I like the callback to VOY’s “Blink of an Eye”, and did find Boimler and Rutherford’s transporter mishap quite funny – made all the better when the others reinforce that that’s why drinks are forbidden in the transporter room. Very Stooges-esque physical comedy that by this point is vintage Lower Decks.
The planetside story? A nice collection of small bits. Mariner had the better story for me this week, getting arrested for doing what she believed to be the right thing rather than acting out. Putting out that fire was a fun bit, and I liked that she was so obsessed over doing something meaningful that she didn’t realize that she made lifelong friends on that jail.
And while the Tendi story felt a bit staged and contrived, it’s hard to go wrong when you get Spiner’s mellow, supportive Data with that unmistakable voice of his. It was his best mode during most of TNG, whether he was giving moral support to Wesley or the guest star of the week. He made anyone feel welcome. I particularly loved Mariner’s low-key understated fan worship of him when they finally meet in person. That’s like a Beatles fan going back in time pre-1980 and meeting John Lennon in person. Easily my favorite moment of the episode.
As we see with Rutherford, T’lyn is actually trying to bond with everyone in the crew but screwing it up.
Mariner wanted The Inner Light, but ended up getting Hard Time instead. Still, she managed to turn it into a positive experience, which does feel very Mariner.
It’s very interesting that hyper competent Mariner ended up being so befuddled at just making friends. I also find it curious that “horned me” was stated instead of attacked or assaulted. I guess it goes to show that like Boimler, trying too hard is self defeating. Also, she fundamentally misunderstood the events of Tapestry. Picard ended up living someone else’s life, not living as himself in another environment.
Joining the people who didn’t like how incompetent Boimler and Rutherford came across in this one. Granted, it was only about a minute delay in proper time, but they’re damned lucky that none of the women died or held a grudge. Also I don’t like that they’re going ahead with Rutherford trying to be like alt-Boimler because there’s no reason for him to be insecure about himself. I really hope that there’s a payoff to the beard gag relatively soon.
I did like the stuff on the ground, though I was expecting Snell to be one of the purple-Enterprise crew in disguise.
Come to think of it, why isn’t Rutherford trying to be like his own alt-self? I mean, I know he disapproved of removing emotions and memories Tendi, but he seemed to think that a lot of his other upgrades were cool.
I can’t remember. Has live action Star Trek ever addressed time dilation?
Not really. Indeed, the episode title here is a misnomer, since dilation means slowing down time, not speeding it up as here or in VGR: “Gravity” or “Blink of an Eye.” That’s time contraction or compression.
One thing I always wanted to do in a Trek story was to have a ship flung back in time return to its present by accelerating to relativistic speed and using extreme time dilation to decrease the shipboard elapsed time. As it happens, The Orville did exactly that in “Twice in a Lifetime,” which I was totally thrilled to see.
@krad – You left Wil Wheaton off that list of actors playing the same character on 4 different Trek shows. He’s played Wesley on TNG, Lower Decks, Prodigy and Picard
The planetside shenanigans were mostly enjoyable, though I thought Spiner’s voice sounded a bit off compared to his recent live action appearances as Data. I’m not sure why. He’s not exactly new to voice work. However, I was pretty disappointed with the reason why they were stranded. I wasn’t keen where Boimler and eventually Rutherford were headed as characters in the last episode, and this did nothing to reassure me that it’s going to end up being somewhere interesting.
Data sounded off to me, too, and I chalked it up to Spiner’s age. It was just a bit more fuzzy and phlegmy, reminding me of Leonard Nimoy in his later years, ironically enough for Alanis Morissette, and of what a friend said back when we noticed that on a Fringe episode the younger William Bell’s voice on an old tape sounded too much like present-day Nimoy: “They should’ve had Zachary Quinto do it.”
As it happens, Anna Torv’s performance in the Fringe episode where she was possessed with Bell’s consciousness is just about the only good Leonard Nimoy impression I’ve ever heard. She captured his rhythms uncannily well. The second-best Leonard Nimoy impression I’ve ever heard is Tim Russ’s Tuvok. (Neither Quinto nor Peck really imitates Nimoy; they create their own versions of Spock that capture the essence if not the exact rhythms.)
Anna Torv’s performances in Fringe were uniformly great.
She’s underappreciated. Everyone praised Tatiana Maslany’s chameleonic acting playing multiple clones in Orphan Black, but there was a point where Torv was playing four versions of Olivia at once (Olivia, Fauxlivia, Fauxlivia pretending to be Olivia, and Olivia brainwashed into thinking she was Fauxlivia) and making them all clearly distinct from one another.
I nearly made that exact point earlier and was going to link to a friend’s blogpost expounding on the same.
100%. The Zachary Quinto remark was a joke. “Bellivia” was a dangerous gambit and could have so easily been laughable but it totally worked.
His advancing age, maybe?
I think this is it. When he first spoke, I thought it was a little jarring, but by the end I thought he sounded much better. It might have been the use of some more “Data” phrases.
It actually sounds much more convincing to me if I close my eyes, so maybe it’s just how he’s animated that’s slightly throwing me off. But like CLB says, he’s not supposed to be the same character.
I thought Data sounded okay, but any discrepancy can be accounted for by him being from an alternate timeline.
“I’m a doctor, not whatever the fffff*** this is” just about killed me.
An implication of this plot that just occurred to me is that Tendi and T’Lyn are no longer lower deckers. Presumably, they’re both going to need promotions to full lieutenant.
That was the first thing I thought of when they mentioned senior science officer, but I guess there’s precedent for a lieutenant J.G. to be in senior roles, since we have seen them be in chief roles before (Bashir, Worf in TNG S1). Still, this does seem like something that would merit further promotion.
Was the purple Enterprise-D a purposeful reference to the Playmates figure of Q in his Starfleet Uniform that for some reason came with a small Enterprise accessory that was inexplicably purple?
I loved this episode very much. It had multiple laugh out loud lines, notably T’Lyn’s “You do not know how to play that” about Mariner’s soap flute at the end. I also keep repeating Purple Data’s “That feels like a missed opportunity when purple is an option” line to my wife with absolutely zero context.
On the subject of the Enterprise-D’s usual color, the original model was intended to appear the same color as the Enterprise from TOS did on the screen. The official colors were “Robin Egg Blue” and “Pale Green”. Andrew Probert helpfully used mostly off-the-shelf colors instead of mixing custom shades so that fans would have no problems making screen-accurate models. Ironically, when ILM filmed the model the lighting they used was so strong that the Enterprise appeared to be exactly as Freeman described it: “neutral gray”, like the TOS model on display in the Smithsonian. Thankfully, the HD restoration of TNG has made some of the details more visible again. And of course, for Generations they completely repainted it with a more complex “Aztec” scheme in a few shades of blue and gray, which looked fantastic on the big screen. The model is still painted that way, if you’re lucky enough to see it in person.
What’s funny is that the original Enterprise only looked bluish-green on TOS because of ambient light from the studio; the model action *was* neutral grey. Unfortunately, they “corrected” that in the remastered versions.