Star Trek: Lower Decks

izzat about dolphin rape?
because I hear that's far more likely than the tentacle type

ohh.. MU Freeman! I like that rabbit hole (not in a dolphiny way!)

And infanticide.

I can't lie, I'm more stoked for whatever is happening with Rutherford than the obvious conclusion to this story, which will be Freeman being cleared and returned to Cerritos. Some people speculate that will be connected to the Pakled story and that coverup but I hope not. It deserves its own room to breathe and they can handle a second story alongside that.

I mean, obviously she was framed. I don't think that was ever supposed to be in doubt.

Even her promotion to a better ship seemed suspect, since she got a bad review (micromanager) at the beginning of the season and that performance reviewer believed she was one bad report away from losing her command entirely and the crew being disbanded. The timelines are kind of unclear so far, but Freeman must have been serving with/been BFFs with Riker before he came aboard the Enterprise, so she's been serving in Starfleet longer than Gomez who seemed like she was fresh out of the academy during the second season of TNG. But Gomez is the one with the more prestigious command.

The timing of it makes me think someone from Starfleet might be in on it as well.

Tendi and Rutherford have both been assigned to covert black ops style missions in the past as well, and there were a couple episodes in the first season showing how his implant basically made him a super-soldier if he chooses the correct setting. For such a tech guy, he barely knows what that implant is capable of.

The question is who has it out for Freeman that much? Everything in canon suggests she's considered a joke.

An MU counterpart is the only thing that makes sense.

I was thinking she's just the most convenient person to frame, for exactly that reason. Riker's fought the Pakleds, but no one would believe it if he was accused of something like that.

Looking back, it's weird that Freeman was chosen to visit Pakled planet in the first place. That was a high stakes diplomatic assignment far above anything the Cerritos would normally be assigned. She thought it was because she'd faced them before, but they didn't even know her name when she arrived. Every other time she's encountered the Pakleds it's been completely unintentional. We saw in the season premiere that the Titan was dealing with them, Starfleet was treating them as a b-level threat serious enough to merit sending in Riker but not Picard.

I know it’s early and it’s not likely, at least for now, but I want to see a new big bad like a Kahn or the Borg that shows up in an episode or two, but we don’t see them later on until a movie comes along. I could see Paramount wanting to do a Paramount Plus exclusive movie later on. I don’t want to see this new big bad over done, which is why a Kahn like character would work. Introduce them about half way in the fourth season and let them be a huge threat, then we forget about them until a couple of years later they reappear in a movie. I know Trek has been trying to do this for decades, but I feel this show could actually pull it off.

Love the horny dolphins.

Am I forgetting things that happened before, or did Rutherford's crush on Tendi get a lot more transparent in this episode?

It'll be interesting to see where they go with the presumably false accusation against Freeman. Some kind of corruption within Starfleet seems plausible -- this is just four years before the attack on Mars, and the cracks have been starting to show for a while. Is she just a fall guy to distract for somebody else? Is she the target -- maybe somebody has reason to believe that Freeman, in her new position, would uncover something they didn't want uncovered?

Was it weird seeing Mariner and Boimler on the bridge at Conn and Ops? In the past anytime we saw one of the lower deckers in a position like that, they were out of place, and having both of them there changed that dynamic.

Haven't you been paying attention?

Yeah, but I was thinking about something new. What I like about Kahn is Space Seed. Kirk underestimated him, he damn near took the ship and was banished to Ceti Alpha V. Nobody had Kahn on their radar in 1982. I especially like the scene where Kirk is stalling so Savik can put in the prefix codes. That was something we’d never seen before. I want LD to introduce something new to the franchise like that. I know they’ve done little things here and there, but I want to see something huge. I think they can do it and do it well.

Speaking of out Lower Decks wishlists, I'm so hoping we'll get a time travel episode. Maybe Daniels from ENT appears and needs one of the four to fix the timeline or they uncover the mystery of Discovery or find out the truth about Trip and T'Pol. Hell, T'Lyn being a descendant of theirs would be pretty based too.

I love this. I know a lot of people have no love for Enterprise, but I love Enterprise and what it brought to the lore. The theme song sucks though. If they did this, I’d be happy. Also, I agree with @Diacanu , Archer needs to make a cameo so they can fix TATV.

I don't know how much Rutherford remembers of his life before he received his implant, but Tendi is surely the biggest and most important part of his personal life, and she's talked up the depth and importance of their previous relationship that Rutherford doesn't remember a lot. I can completely understand him prioritizing memories of her in light of that, especially after she kept electrocuting him that one time.

Oh, and I really appreciate them bringing back Gomez without basing her entire characterization on that one previous appearance. That one brief reference to spilling hot chocolate on Picard was so subtle that someone who never say Q Who could easily assume she was just using self-deprecating humour to put one of her lower deckers at ease.

I loved Pike on Discovery, but I hate how his entire arc was directly tied to the events of The Cage/Menagerie. Most peoples lives are about more than just how they end, or one memorable afternoon.

Not to mention the Vulcan ship that WITNESSED the Klingon/Pakled attack.

Starfleet Security has tended to be portrayed as incompetent, overzealous or corrupt at their jobs, whether it's completely missing actual threats, making threats up, overreacting to them, or collaborating with them.

The only question is which category or categories these security officers fall into.

Agreed. The latter half of this season has been amazing but the "cliffhanger" didn't really hang my cliff.

I guess when you think about it, I do expect to see Freeman exonerated. I'm more curious as to the details of how she framed and how they plan to plausibly pull off this conspiracy. How were the Klingons/Pakleds able to fool Starfleet security. I was much more enthralled by the action sequences and how the Cerritos saved the Archimedes and the science-y was they did it.

Maybe a Klingon got carved up into a human like Tyler in Discovery, and infiltrated Starfleet.
It would have to be a Klingon, a Pakled couldn't pull it off.

https://gizmodo.com/star-trek-lower-decks-mike-mcmahan-breaks-down-season-1847858312

Interview with the showrunner. The biggest revelation: Mariner and Jennifer the Andorian didn't just bury the hatchet in the finale, now they're dating.

Cerritos sans plating. Mwroaw!

surprising anybody?

probably not...

I'm not opposed to it (Lauren Lapkus ) but I thought the point of that relationship was to show Mariner finally accepting someone in her personal space that she truly regards as her equal. The trouble with imagining yourself as a Kirk is that Kirk didn't have any equals among his contemporaries, even Spock deferred to Kirk when it came down to it, even when they were both captains.

She almost made that leap with Jett, but Boimler came back just in time for her to push him out of the group.

When it came to rank, yes. But I think Kirk thought of basically everyone as equals and friends up to Chekov.

Kirk certainly wasn't disrespectful to any of them, but at the same time there was that unspoken separation between himself and everyone he considered under him. He always had to be the guy saving the day, taking the risks, facing the enemy himself, personally piloting the Constellation into the mouth of the planet killer. I feel like Kirk (or at least Mariners idea of Kirk) would have failed that engineering test that Troi passed because he'd keep sacrificing himself to save the ship instead of delegating it to someone more expendable. That's exactly the kind of choice Mariner tried to make in the finale, convincing herself she was the only one capable of carrying out the big heroic act to save the day when Boimler did it just as easily. (It's even what holoMariner did in the movie episode last year, fighting/distracting the villain personally while everyone else escaped.)

That's part of why she avoids getting promoted, because that's the sort of pressure she puts on herself even as an ensign.

(I know Spock did the big heroic sacrifice in TWOK, but at that point everyone in in engineering was incapacitated and McCoy didn't have the expertise/Vulcan resilience to do it properly.)

Hot take: In the beginning of Generations it seems like Kirk is doing the responsible thing by refusing to accept the captains chair, but Harriman was younger, fitter, and knew the ship a lot better than Kirk did. The scene is written as though Kirk is being humble and making a sacrifice by going to engineering himself, but in reality Kirk was acting selfishly by stealing the Big Damn Hero moment from Harriman, who was in a much better position to save the day without getting himself trapped in the Nexus.


I know no one is paying to watch a movie where Picard teams up with Alan Ruck, but I'd love to see a What If story where Harriman ends up in the Nexus, Picard recognizes him as a legendary Starfleet footnote long presumed dead, and the two of them stop Soran without either of them dying. Harriman is given command of the Excelsior D or something, and Picard promises him that whenever he's ready to move on, he'll be first in line to replace him as captain of the next Enterprise.

Violin lady does the LD theme.
It took two seasons, cuz someone animated the shit out of that Cerritos background!



Her previous medley of TOS-PIC.