In its final season, Star Trek: The Next Generation did a unique episode that examined what life was like for the lower ranks on the Starship Enterprise. The whole episode was from the POV of the “lower decks” crew, including a nurse, a security guard, an engineer, and a pilot. It was a nice change-of-pace, seeing how a typical Star Trek episode would look like from the people working under the senior officers.
The episode, of course, was “Lower Decks,” and besides being one of the best Trek tales, it also inspired the Lower Decks animated series.
By way of bringing everything full circle, LD in its final season is doing a unique episode that examines what life is like for the senior staff of the Starship Cerritos. Unlike the senior staff of the Enterprise in the TNG episode from thirty years ago, the main stars of LD only appear at the very beginning and the very end of the show. Instead, we focus on Freeman, Ransom, Shaxs, Billups, and T’Ana, each of whom has their own storyline to play out, some of which cross over with each other. Each opens with the characters providing a log. (Naturally, T’Ana’s starts with, “Chief medical officer’s fucking log…”)
Freeman is followed around by Stevens dealing with all the silly minutiae of being a captain, starting with a staff meeting and continuing to a bunch of very dull-but-important duties.
Ransom is supervising four other lower-decks personnel, who are bringing a Bughoon on board—basically a space armadillo—for study. A Grazerite, who works for Starfleet as an ecologist, comes on board to study the Bughoons. Unfortunately, things go wrong when they discover too late that the Bughoons have a natural cloaking ability. Well, in truth, things go wrong sooner than that, as two of the ensigns working on the project are with Beta Shift and the other two are Delta Shift, and they do not get along.
Throughout this part of the plot, Ransom is regularly giving dull speeches and telling stupid stories and also finding excuses to work out—then he takes a nap. Eventually, it comes out that he’s doing that on purpose to unite the squabbling ensigns by giving them a common enemy in Ransom. (One of the ensigns discovers his secret, but promises the commander that she won’t tell anyone. No one would believe that he was that smart anyhow…) I’m enjoying the way they’ve developed Ransom as something a bit more than the jock dudebro we were first introduced to, and this episode puts that all together nicely, showing how much of the jock dudebro is a front for an actual talented officer.
Billups and one of his engineers spend the entire episode dealing with a cascading crisis in engineering as various juryrigged repairs that Billups has done. This is pretty much every technobabble crisis and solution in Trek history in a single plot thread, and it’s hilarious just to see it all in one place like this, and Billups handling all with his usual nerdy calm. My only disappointment with this end of the plot is that it’s not particular to Billups. Aside from a brief mention of a broken-down repair having possibly happened while his mother was visiting, so he messed it up, there’s no real reference to Billups’ backstory as part of the royal family on the RenFaire planet. My disappointment is mostly borne of my unreserved love for Hysperia, which is my single favorite thing that LD has given the Trek universe, and I really really really want to see more of it. What we got was fun, though, and also, hilariously, completely disconnected from every other plot.
T’Ana has been told to work on her bedside manner, specifically with regards to pain management. T’Ana herself has an absurdly high pain tolerance, and she obviously has been having trouble remembering that her patients don’t feel the same way. Her completely insane solution is to cause herself lots and lots of pain. In contrast to Billups’ plot, T’Ana’s is 100% about this particular character, in all her foul-mouthed glory.
Shaxs comes closest to having a serious plotline, as he periodically suffers from PTSD regarding his past as part of the Bajoran Resistance. He sees a hallucination of himself as a resistance fighter as well as tons of Cardassians he’s killed. The solution is for him to meditate and to have his astral form beat the shit out of the hallucination, because of course it is.
Some of the plotlines start to collide when it’s revealed that the ecologist isn’t a Grazerite after all, but a Clicket in disguise. They plan to take over the ship so they can finally get some respect, as apparently they are never remembered. Indeed, Freeman doesn’t remember who they are, at first. She didn’t when the Clickets were brought up in the security briefing earlier…
The Clickets go after the senior staff, which doesn’t go as well as hoped, as T’Ana is in a pain-induced frenzy and Shaxs is in full beat-the-shit-out-of-people mode, plus one of the ways the ensigns serving under Ransom bond is to take out the Clickets attacking the first officer.
Freeman then remembers an important detail about the Clickets from the briefing: they hate being complimented. So she drives them off by saying nice things about them. Unable to stand it, the Clickets retreat.
In the end, Freeman is concerned that she’ll have to put off her planned comm conversation with her husband—today’s their anniversary—but then Admiral Freeman himself shows up. Turns out that he and Stevens worked out a surprise visit and a romantic anniversary dinner on the holodeck.
And in the end, Boimler, Mariner, Tendi, Rutherford, and T’Lyn—who were off-duty—enter the bar having totally missed all of this. It’s hilarious.
One of the things I’ve loved about the way Trek has developed is the shift away from the Enterprise’s uniqueness. Up until Deep Space Nine debuted in 1993, Trek was all about “these are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise,” and there was a feeling that all the cool stuff happened to the crew of the Big E. Lots of tie-in fiction magnified this issue by establishing that the Enterprise crew were the absolute best at everything and the top authorities in their respective fields and that they single-handedly saved everything.
With DS9 coming along, that changed, and soon it became clear that dealing with all kinds of crazy-ass shit isn’t just something that happens to ships called Enterprise, but happens all over the damn place.
LD is at its best when it’s having fun with existing Trek tropes and taking them to their absurdist extreme, and this is one of their best examples of that. It’s summed up perfectly in the end when Freeman tells her husband what her day has been like—engineering crises, alien invaders, Shaxs fighting his personal demons, and so on—and the admiral expresses relief that it was just a normal day…
Random thoughts
- Freeman is saved from the Clickets initially by Ensign Barnes, who is established in the morning briefing as having suffered from a virus that both evolved and devolved her, which is a delightful riff on the Trek series’ rather idiotic understanding of how evolution works in so many episodes (e.g., TNG’s “Genesis,” Voyager’s “Distant Origin” and “Threshold,” and Enterprise’s “Dear Doctor”). According to T’Ana, Barnes could read minds but also was afraid of fire. (T’Ana sedated her by thinking about a candle.) Barnes is in the process of recovering from the virus, so she still has a Cro-Magnon unibrow, but she apparently can still play the Sousaphone, as she does a concert for the captain. Later, she uses her cavewoman strength—and her Sousaphone—to subdue the Clickets.
- The absolute funniest thing in this episode is when Billups reports that the Cordry rocks have been replenished. Finally we have an explanation for those pebbles that get thrown all over the place when the ship takes damage even though one doesn’t usually see, um, rocks on a starship. According to Billups, the non-centrosymmetry of the Cordry rocks disrupt the charge leptons in the isolinear pathways of the main deflector. So glad to have that cleared up…
- Nothing for Kayshon beyond a single moment where he speaks in Tamarian metaphor. I was hoping he’d get one of the plotlines, but no. This was a way to expand on his character in a manner that several people speculated about in the comments a couple weeks ago, but which the show itself can’t really be arsed to do.
- Boimler’s almost starting to have an actual beard. Almost.
