One of the more challenging storytelling needles to thread is that of the thing that is spoken of dramatically but never seen. It can be risky to actually show the thing, because after all the buildup, you don’t want to risk disappointing the viewer by not living up to what their imagination already came up with about it.
Sometimes the best solution is to never see it, which is why, for example, the producers of Frasier never once actually put Niles Crane’s wife Maris on camera. And, to be fair, sometimes seeing it does work. Indeed, Star Trek has two excellent examples: Boothby, the Starfleet Academy groundskeeper first mentioned in TNG’s “Final Mission” and referenced a couple more times before being seen in “The First Duty,” where he was absolutely perfectly rendered by actor Ray Walston and writer Ronald D. Moore; and Quark’s cousin Gaila, first mentioned in DS9’s “Civil Defense,” and also referenced several times again before showing up, beautifully played by Josh Pais and written by Bradley Thompson & David Weddle, in “Business as Usual.”
Alas, Lower Decks has rolled craps with their equivalent. We’d been hearing about Starbase 80 a few times before Mariner was assigned there as a punishment in “Trusted Sources,” and it so totally didn’t work. And then, with only one season left, the producers of LD decided that they’d waste an entire episode showing us Starbase 80.
Look, I get it. This is a comedy. They want to do funny things. And I’m sure several people thought, “What would a backwater starbase really look like?” As we see here, it’s mostly just an excuse to show twenty-second- and twenty-third-century tech. They still use wall intercoms like they did on the original series! They have to cover themselves in decon gel before using the transporter just like they did on Enterprise! And the personnel still wear Enterprise-era uniforms even though those uniforms are from a completely different service for a government that doesn’t exist anymore! (The Starfleet of Enterprise was the space exploration arm of United Earth. The Starfleet of LD—and all the other Trek shows—is the military/space exploration arm of the United Federation of Planets. Starfleet personnel wearing those blue uniforms is like contemporary U.S. Army personnel wearing the uniforms of the Texas Rangers from 1846 while on duty. There is no circumstance under which it would happen.)
Plus, we’re talking about a post-scarcity society with replicators. And we know that the producers of this show are aware of that because they built an entire damn episode around that fact just a couple of weeks ago in “Shades of Green.” Targalus IX just became a Federation member world five minutes ago, and they’re already okay with Boimler confiscating a vehicle because they can always just replicate another one. And yet, somehow, Starbase 80 is unable to be upgraded to modern specifications, which, again, makes absolutely no sense.
It’s really hard for me to judge this episode, because I just find the entire premise impossible to swallow. Which is too bad, because there’s some fun stuff here. Mariner is finally starting to act like a Starfleet officer, proudly declaring at the top of the episode that she genuinely enjoyed the scientific mission to an ocean planet that they just finished. (Tendi jokingly checks to see if Mariner’s suffering an illness.) We get to see Cetacean Ops performing their actual function, as the problem of the week is catalyzed by something going wrong with navigation. And it’s always good to see Kimolu and Matt! When Boimler announces that Starbase 80 is the nearest port of call, Mariner nearly has a breakdown, as she’s suffering PTSD from being assigned there previously. Her mother isn’t much better off, as her alternate-universe counterpart in “Dos Cerritos” was assigned there, and Freeman is determined not to let even the possibility of that happen in the mainline universe.
Plus we’ve got some fabulous guest casting! The great Stephen Root voices the starbase’s chief engineer, Gene Jakobowski, who manipulates Freeman and Ransom into making repairs for him that Starfleet hasn’t gotten around to fulfilling his requests for (yet another thing I don’t buy for a nanosecond), while Nailed It! host Nicole Byer plays an el-Aurian diplomatic liaison named Kassia Nox, who serves as a chirpy tour guide whose personality is, basically, that of Nicole Byer, host of Nailed It!
There’s some technobabble stuff with a being of pure energy who got into the nav system and started possessing people by way of trying to make contact, but losing control of it, turning everyone on the Cerritos crew who uses their combadges into zombies with glowy eyes who lick the bulkheads. Eventually, our heroes figure out the problem and are able to come to an understanding with the energy being, which is, to be fair, a very Star Trek resolution to the storyline. (And the being turns out to be a young person trying very hard to impress his superiors, whom he describes as being a bunch of dicks, which is a very Lower Decks twist on that resolution.)
Nox tries to convince everyone that the joy of Starbase 80 is not that it’s a shitty assignment, but that it’s a place for people to get second chances, and I’m sorry, I don’t buy it. I don’t buy any of it. LD is at its best when it looks at the Trek universe through a humorous lens. It’s at its worst when it contorts and distorts the Trek universe for a giggle, and that’s what this entire episode is, alas.
Random thoughts
- Ransom really really loves the decon gel, because of course he does. Jerry O’Connell’s contented sigh as he runs the gel through his hair and says, “Oh yeah—that’s the stuff” is epic.
- This is not Root’s first appearance on Trek. He previously played a Klingon, Captain K’Vada, on TNG’s “Unification” two-parter.
- Starbase 80 has food vendors in lieu of food replicators. At one point Chad, the corn dog vendor, gets to save the day.
- Trek has twice had a title with an exclamation point—the original series’ “Operation—Annihilate!” and Voyager’s “Bride of Chaotica!”—and twice had a title with a question mark—the original series’ “Who Mourns for Adonais?” and DS9’s “Who Mourns for Morn?”—but this is the first title to have both an exclamation point and a question mark. Isn’t that amazing?!
- Boimler now has a full mustache, though the beard is still very much a work in progress, as he gets closer and closer to looking like his alternate-universe counterpart from “Dos Cerritos.”
I had a feeling you weren’t going to like this one, Keith.
Me, I’m so glad we got to see it! It was EXACTLY how I pictured it! I had this theory that modern tech there is unreliable due to its location near a pulsar cluster. I didn’t see any pulsars today, but maybe something else out there in space is disruptive. BTW, I wrote a fic about Starbase 80 this year where I mention that the replicators hardly ever work correctly. So, seeing that this station has food vendors for that same reason was so cool! (Note—there’s no logical reason why they’d be wearing uniforms from 200 years earlier, but they look nice so I’ll go with it)
The story itself, with the anaphasic energy being was kind of weird. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me. (neither did Dr. Horseberry’s 1/2 altered DNA appearance) But I did enjoy Carol and Jack’s story.
Despite the wobbly premise, I found it to be a fun episode.
I don’t think there’s any indication you get a second chance in Starbase 80 but that you get your hands washed of you in a society that is very good at giving second, third, and fiftieth chances. I kept expecting the “twist” to be that there was a radiation leak causing everyone to be stupid in Starbase 80 which would go a long way to explain why there’s so many problems to the place. It would also allow it to be “fixed.” Also, it doesn’t explain why Mariner thinks everyone at Starbase 80 is an idiot and why she didn’t see any of these otherwise Cerritos-level competent people.
I was also hoping that the blue ENTERPRISE uniforms was because she was a time traveler.
Basically, I feel like attempting to make Starbase 80 nice ruined all the potential comedy.
Edit:
Weirdly, one of my “Trek nerd” moments is, “Billupus shouldn’t be able to activate the self-destruct! Only the Captain and 1st Officer should be able to do that!”
Do really think a Chief Engineer can’t techno-whiz his way around those Starfleet safety protocols if he really, really feels a need to?
I dunno, while he’s a zombie?
On the Starfleet flagship, probably not: on the USS Cerritos? Who knows!
Also, in a post-scarcity society, where people presumably join Starfleet for the fun/thrill of exploration, why would anyone go to a backwater Starbase instead of, you know, just resigning? Sometimes I think Star Trek writers lose sight of the fact that Starfleet is not the military and is completely voluntary.
Mariner did resign shortly after her transfer to Starbase 80. The next time we saw her she was with the archaeologists recovering artifacts.
I assume that there’s a minimum term of service that recruits are legally obligated to fulfill. Otherwise you might see people jumping ship before going into battle with the Borg or the Dominion.
Starfleet is a military. It’s got ranks and uniforms and courts-martial — hell yes, it’s a military. That word does not only mean an organization that fights wars. The US Coast Guard is a military organization. The Japan Self-Defense Force, which is forbidden by law from waging war or using weapons except in self-defense, is a military organization. Like those organizations, Starfleet has a hierarchy and a system of regulations, and once people join, they’re obliged to obey orders and fulfill their responsibilities. Heck, even in a civilian job, you usually can’t just disobey orders or quit without incurring some penalties for the breach of your agreed obligations. Starfleet may have relaxed discipline compared to present-day militaries, but it’s not a hippie commune.
Not to mention that a lot of people have career ambitions that make them willing to tolerate unpleasant work assignments in hopes of gaining experience that will help them rise through the ranks later in life. So they wouldn’t just casually abandon their long-term life goals because they were annoyed by a near-term inconvenience.
I think there are something like 14 uniformed services in the US. I have a friend who’s a Lt Cdr in the Public Health Service, and I once worked at NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations which is headed up by an admiral. All the officers on their research vessels are military officers.
Well, not completely voluntary. If it were, thery would need a reserve activatin clause.
“ Just a moment, Captain, sir. I’ll explain what happened. Your revered Admiral Nogura invoked a little-known, seldom-used “reserve activation clause.” In simpler language, Captain, they DRAFTED me!”
It should be noted that Commissioned Officers like Mariner can in fact quit, Resigning Commission. But in the modern day, that’s only after the obligated service, typically eight years. Though further education or anything where the service has invested in you can increase the obligated service. In the modern day that typically takes up to nine months to process too. Things presumably go much faster in Starfleet. I presume they don’t want to keep anyone who really doesn’t want to serve on the duty roster.
I’m no fan of the idea of Starbase 80, but this episode did a decent, typically LD thing of showing something that initially seems cynical and mean-spirited and turning it around into something positive and heartfelt. It’s implausible that the station would be so neglected, but it’s nice to see the Cerritos crew that’s spent multiple seasons condemning Starbase 80 as basically a leper colony turning around and learning it’s just a place that needs a little TLC from their experts.
I might have preferred it if it turned out there was something wrong with the SB80 people causing them to act the way they did; when Mariner said they gave up decon gel for a reason, I was expecting it to turn out that it was dumbing people down. But I somewhat appreciate that they went against that expectation and had it be the Cerritos that had something wrong with it. And it was deft the way they set it up, mentioning the mission to the water planet and showing the whales getting zapped by a malfunction, which we didn’t realize until later were clues to the problem.
Also, maybe it’s just me, but Kassia Nox was really pretty hot for a cartoon character. Never heard of her voice actress, though.
I think it was the great hair and the vivacious personality.
Nicole Byer is just as bubbly and charming in live action.
I’ve learnt to rationalize the sillier aspects of Lower Decks by assuming that, while the other series are based on the captain’s mission logs, LWD is based on stories the junior officers tell at the bar. This episode fits nicely into that idiom
That said, I still don’t think it was a terribly good episode, for all the reasons you mention. I also don’t really buy that Starfleet would bother with a posting whose only purposes is punishing bad officers. I did, however, like the doctor with the Tarchannen parasite and the Acamarian knife gangs.
This episode was the point at which I cried “Jerry O’Connell, you are a Treasure!” (krad himself mentions the scene that provoked this particular exclamation).
Also, once again, I say that LOWER DECKS is Mariner’s personal collection of anecdotes, some more historically accurate than others, and this tall tale pulls our legs a little harder than most others (I’m not going to lie, one could only wonder if this was some sort of historical reenactment day when I saw those NX-class uniforms).
On the other hand seeing the day saved by a Spaceman Doctor with a British accent gave me a warm feeling of patriotic pride (and should hopefully help tide me over until the DOCTOR WHO Christmas special).
Finally, we’ve all had some fun with this week’s episode of STAR TREK, but aI think that we can all appreciate the Serious Message underpinning this particular episode: over a century after the death of that gallant gentleman Mr Quincey P. Morris of Texas, the War on Bats goes on AND WILL NEVER END.
I wonder if the supply problems on Starbase 80 are due to the mixed jurisdiction? (Perhaps if the Acamarian government deliberately makes it as awkward as possible to change anything so that Starfleet influence over the base is extremely attenuated?).
That’s a good theory. There’s obviously a supply problem on the station.
It was dumb stupid not smart stupid — like watching g a newer Simpsons episode or one of those mid-80s Roger Moore Bond films, when everyone was just going through the motions and things were increasingly implausible.
It just occurred to me that this one really reminds me of the Devidian missions from Star Trek: Online; run-down TOS-era space station, mysterious goings-on… I wonder if it was a direct inspiration or if this is a sort of convergent evolution.
Welcome to Drozana.
Maybe things aren’t “scarce,” but that doesn’t mean that nothing is limited. Platinum cannot be replicated, other wise it would have no value in societies that have replicators. Likewise, there are numerous Star Trek plots about starships delivering upgrades to planets and stations, and needing to go into Spacedock for retrofitting. Star Base 80 being way way way out of date is honestly likely. Too far away to get upgrades easily, or always forgotten about due to clerical errors, etc.
You mean latinum, which is imaginary, rather than platinum, which is real. And in principle, no pure element should be able to be created in a replicator, since replicators only convert an existing supply of matter into new forms, rather than performing nucleosynthesis; however, writers for the shows often forget this.
Still, as long as a replicator has a sufficient supply of raw materials, anything can be created. And SF stories built around the scarcity of rare made-up elements are rather artificial; if anything, the wonder material that most future technology will probably be made of is good old ubiquitous carbon, what with graphene and nanotubes and advanced polymers and composites and such. Not to mention that any precious metals or rare earth elements that are, well, rare on Earth are thousands of times more abundant in the asteroids and far easier to mine there without having to dig through a huge amount of planetary crust. A spacefaring, warp-capable society should not have materials shortages, because space travelers would have access to an abundance of resources beyond the dreams of avarice.
Huh? Aren’t the replicators supposed to work via energy-matter conversion, just like the transporters?
That’s a myth, or rather, a TOS-era assumption that was rejected by TNG’s technical consultants because it’s totally nonsensical. By E = mc^2, replicating a single sandwich from pure energy would require roughly twice the United States’ annual power output. And converting a 70-kilogram person to energy and beaming it at a planet would tantamount to firing a weapon of mass destruction at it, since a single gram converted to pure energy would be on a par with the Hiroshima bomb.
The paradigm developed in the TNG era by Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda (and remember, replicators weren’t introduced until TNG) is that transporters merely disassemble the subject’s particles, transmit them through subspace, and reassemble them at the destination, whereas a replicator draws on a stock of raw matter formulated to contain the necessary elements in the ratios most likely to be needed.
Yes, but that would be one helluva sandwich.
There were fabricators in TOS. Otherwise how could the computer get McCoy’s boots wrong?
“ Stupid computer made a mistake in the measurements. The right boot’s too tight.” – Platterns of Force.
It was never mentioned in the show how the replicators worked. That explanation came from the tech manual which, while interesting and useful, was not the last word in tech. That came from the writers.
And if we’re going to ignore things that were nonsensical, there’s also warp drive, phasers, everything subspace, human alien hybrids and much, much more.
It’s a format for telling little morality plays in a paper thin sci-fi wrapper. What would work best is not trying to make Star Trek work in the real world, but to be internally consistent.
23rd-century fabricators and food synthesizers were not replicators. They weren’t based on transporter technology, but synthesized items from raw materials using mechanical methods. By analogy, they were like electronic music, a synthesized approximation of an instrument’s sound constructed from pure tones, while a replicator is more like a digital recording of a real musical instrument.
Again, never explained as such on screen.
Both fabricators and replicators make things. How they do it is unknown but the TNG versions, replicators, is more advanced.
That’s about all we know, other than there’s some things that replicators can’t make.
Background information is cool and all but unless it’s on the screen, it’s not canon. And even if it is, it can always be changed later on. Transporters, for example. In ST09, the transporter loses Amanda when she slips out of the field. And yet, there’s numerous instances of people in similar situations, differences in velocity and so forth, where they work perfectly.
Later in the same movie, Kirk and Scotty beam aboard the ship while it’s travelling at warp, even though TNG established that you needed to match velocities exactly. Yet not only did oldSpock among to work around that and greatly extend the range, he did it in 5 minutes using an old shuttlecraft transporter.
Why the difference? Story reasons.
I don’t think using Star Trek 09 is the best example as the tech in that film was scattershot and cared nothing about the previous established rules in the setting.
A young El-Aurian is a just a regular person!
I forgot all about the Acamarians while writing this review. Sigh.
To be fair, I also forgot all about the Acamarians within ten minutes of finishing watching TNG‘s “The Vengeance Factor,” too……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Lower Decks is never happier than when it’s referencing forgettable episodes of TNG.
Which, honestly, is one of the things I like about it………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I admit to being especially delighted when ENTERPRISE gets a nod – and the decontamination gel is exactly the sort of thing that deserves to be spoofed by LOWER DECKS to boot!
Look, I agree that Starbase 80 is one of the most nonsensical elements of this show, and it might not have been the best idea to devote the entirety of one of its ten final episodes to showcasing it. However, I can at least respect that the show has refused to simply pretend it never existed, instead attempting to recontextualize the nonsense, provide (sometimes dubious) explanations for the place’s…erm…quirks, and put a positive(ish) spin on it. And Nicole Byer is always a delight.
Yeah, hard disagree this time @krad. I thought the episode was a subversive smart take on the whole thing. For ages, they’ve been setting up Starbase 80 as an undesirable can of worms. And when we finally get it, it’s totally not that. They’ve been abandoned and forgotten. And yes, that can be tricky to explain in-universe, but that shouldn’t get in the way of telling a good story, because that’s the case here, at least to me.
The point is: Starbase 80 is not a haunted house space station carrying the worst dregs of the galaxy. The officers within can be a little too interesting at times (to partly quote one of my favorite Indiana Jones lines from their worst movie), but hardly threatening. As pointed out by Kassia, it’s about people in less than ideal situations trying to make the best of what they’ve been given in life. That speaks directly to the very notion of being one of the Lower Deckers, having to scrub the floors for the higher-ups. And Kassia proves that Mariner’s fears were unfounded and that the place has a lot to offer to the galaxy. I can’t think of many more uplifting Trekkian endings to a story.
I always get a laugh out of these episodes where some virus or other phenomena just throws the Cerritos crew into chaos. It seems the show gives us one of these stories at least once every season. And I almost lost it during the gel decontamination homage. Of course Ransom would be the one to really dig the rubbing. And we finally get a glimpse of T’Ana this season. She’s been too absent.
I didn’t think it was all that bad. I do think there should’ve been something wrong, and I wouldn’t have minded if Kassia was newly transferred there in order to get things back on track. Perhaps a Badmiral was previously in command was just DONE with the whole thing letting the station fall into disorder. But the resolution was very very Star Trek and I appreciate that.
If the comedy of this episode was supposed to be the number of ways that Starbase 80 was run-down and outdated, it sure didn’t work on me. Least of all the corndog vendor. The only part that gave me a laugh / smile was the revelation of the giant bat at the end.