SpaceOpera.com

Star Trek: Lower Decks reviews — season 1

Star Trek: Lower Decks — 1x09 — Crisis Point

Synopsis

Mariner repurposes Boimler's holodeck program to cast herself as the villain in a Lower Decks style movie.

Remarkable scenes

  • Mariner: "It's the 80s, dude, we don't have psychiatric problems!"
  • Boimler: "They'll respond exactly the way they would in real life." Rutherford to Shaxs: "Ah... Hey buddy, how's it going?" Holodeck Shaxs: "Don't talk to me, I'm pissed off!" Rutherford: "Whoa, amazing! We had that exact same conversation an hour ago!"
  • The prolonged, emotional, overwrought Cerritos flyby, complete with overdone Kelvinverse-style lens flare.
  • Tendi objecting to being stereotyped as a pirate.
  • Tendi's reaction to Mariner's rampage: "You're way too into this! This is messed up!"
  • Mariner crashing the ship.
  • The computer: "Warning: The ship has crashed."
  • Rutherford: "I initiated a rapid-repeating emergency transport sequence and beamed the entire crew before we crashed." Andy: "What? That's not possbile." Rutherford: "No, it's a movie, you can beam whatever you want; you can do all sorts of beaming stuff in a movie!"
  • Mariner: "Therapy works!"
  • Mariner: "Hey T... I owe you an apology. The whole Orions, pirate thing. I—I feel really bad. I'm sorry if I put you in a weird spot." Tendi: "Thanks, I appreciate it. And the truth is a lot of Orions are capitalist hyper-libertarian gangster pirates, just not this one. That's why I'm here."
  • Boimler discovering Mariner is Freeman's daughter.
  • Boimler freaking out during his interview.

Review

This is best episode of Star Trek since Ent: In A Mirror, Darkly aired more than fifteen years ago. Mariner's holodeck adventure was an ambitious idea that could've easily devolved into a collection of banal canon references or mean-spirited jokes like some previous parodies have been, but instead what we got here was a classy pastiche of some of Star Trek's most celebrated episodes and films. Some highlights include the emotional flyby of the Cerritos similar to Star Trek I: The Motion Picture, Mariner quoting Shakespeare like General Chang from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and the Cerritos crash landing fusing elements from Star Trek VII: Generations, Star Trek Beyond, and Voy: Timeless.

Mariner's character in the holodeck adventure "Vindicta, vengeance personified" reflects the vengeance theme common to many of Star Trek's big episodes and films, such as Khan vs. Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Picard vs. The Borg in Star Trek VIII: First Contact, and Nero in Star Trek XI. In fact, even Admiral Marcus' ship in Star Trek Into Darkness is named the USS Vengeance. Rurtherford's remark that "you can do all sorts of beaming stuff in a movie!" is also great meta commentary about how Star Trek's transporter technology is too often abused by being given unfortunately unrestrained superpowers in big episodes and films.

A ton of smaller aesthetic details worked well as smart commentary too. For instance, the excessive lens flare and camera blurring plus the Cerritos getting a new and more intense warp engine effect reflected a common complaint about the Kelvinverse films, Discovery, and the Picard show: Not all the recent aesthetic "upgrades" have actually been improvements over previous aesthetics on Star Trek. In fact, the attention to detail on aesthetics was so good that the animators even inserted little dots and lines into the picture to imitate the flaws in film projected onto a movie theater screen, all in the name of making everything feel more film-like at the expense of it actually looking good, which was a nice touch. The fact that making it "feel more cinematic" requires degrading the aesthetics in numerous ways is itself one of the funniest and most profound meta commentaries of this brilliantly-conceived episode.

The story is also an excellent character study for Mariner, Tendi, and Boimler too. Mariner finally does therapy in her own bizarre way and processes a lot of her feelings as a result. We also finally get a chance to explore Tendi's identity as an Orion in a deeper way. She is sensitive to stereotyping about Orions, but also regards much of her people as "capitalist hyper-libertarians" which is a sentiment not dissimilar to how Nog must have felt about his people on DS9. It also echoes Worf's discomfort with some aspects of Klingon culture. And of course we get a bit more character development for Boimler here too as he finds a new way to obsess over trying to find ways to impress the captain, only to bumble into her family secret instead. Hopefully he gets in trouble for violating their privacy in the next episode.

Last but not least, this is a holodeck adventure episode where the plot isn't driven by a holodeck malfunction, instead focusing on using the holodeck as a way to allow our characters to express a side of themselves we hadn't seen before, which is a perfect symbol of how this episode could've taken the easy way out and delivered cheap thrills or cheap laughs numerous times but instead shot for something richer, deeper, and more profound. And in that they succeeded. The result is something truly wonderful, one of the best episodes of Star Trek ever made.