Star Trek: Lower Decks

Dukat had a weird obsession with making sure Sisko respected him, he probably wanted to keep his word regarding Tom Riker.

Different franchises have different sensibilities about what sorts of characters they want front and center. In the history of Star Trek, there are very few lead or recurring characters that I can think of that come with the kind of character baggage Locarno did (being a smug bully who thought he was a god, and who caused a death and a coverup). Quark and Garak from DS9, the Empress and Lorca from Discovery is all that comes to mind. Two of them aren't human and so don't have to abide by human senses of morality. Even Quark is shown to have his heart generally in the right place, and Garak's gray-ness that is shown in the series is mostly white or in the past. We see him torture Odo, and it's implied that he tortured a lot of people in his spy past.

https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcmahan.bsky.social/post/3kd7vwk5icd2e

Holy fuck that was awful.

Derivative and fan wank-ish, and not in a good way.

I thought it was awesome.

Exactly.

"He looks like Tom Paris"
"I don't see it"

"They have like the same face. They're identical."
"No, I just don't see it"

Also, getting Shannon Fill to play Sito Jaxa again was awesome. Really great that LD didn't get a random voice actress to play her.

F in chat to the entire Nova Squad, I guess ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

But also seeing young Mariner act as neardy and excited as Season 1 Boimler in the cold open warmed the cockles of my cold, dead heart, as did the Cerritos breaking rules to save her. It's a nice turnaround from last season when they were all ready to turn on her.

And hey, the Cerritos made it outta this season intact for once!

That was the best part of the episode.

Thanks for all the feedback, kids. :repwhine:

I guess all it takes to satisfy Trek nerds these days is to recycle a bunch of music and scenes from TWOK.

EDIT: what happened to the rep whine smiley?

I will say that the parts with Mariner and Locarno seemed to cover maybe half an hour, while the parts with Freeman and Tendi had to have taken considerably longer. Just the Clemmons thing alone probably took longer. Surprisingly sloppy writing in that regard.

It’s the difference between this show and The Force Awakens, the story telling and character development was better in Lower Decks.

OK, so I finally started catching up on this now that I have a service that gets it. I am through season one and am catching up on the thread.

However, did anyone notice they got the guy who was the VA for Discord in My Little Pony to play that Q guy in that one episode? That was awesome, but dude is going to get typecast as some snarky god type character if he keeps on playing roles like this.

Anyway I am glad to see some of the cast of TNG getting some VA work. It is too bad they can only play their old roles. I would love to see them step out and play something different like an evil human magical corporate exec, or some crazed female monster. Maybe a gummi bear or something.

Oh, and am I the only one who wants to have Mariner's babies? Best Trek character ever.

I know, nice to finally catch up, but I didn't want to pirate the shit so I had to wait a bit to watch it.

As far as old actors playing other roles, you'll be glad to know James Doohan was the Maurice Lamarche of Star Trek The Animated Series (AKA TAS).

am I the only one wondering where and how Nick got all the tech? The ship, the shield, etc.

What's that got to do with anything?

Lower Decks is a great show. It's just that this episode was full of egregious plot holes and dripping with unnecessary TWOK fan-wank.

And the fact that I'm getting disagree reps from the likes of yourself and morons like Jenee just proves my point.

In combination with their promotions, the episode in which they all talked about previous missions, and this one, I’d say this is the best Trek finale I’ve seen.

The Starfleet ship was a Steamrunner class, they appeared in Voyager, DS9, and the last season of Picard. Probably an abandoned ship from the Dominion War, or stolen from a salvage yard.

The trynar shield was Bynar tech, seemingly named so because three of them were working in it together.

Everything else could have been salvaged or stolen, or maybe even purchased. Rios and Dr. Crusher somehow had enough money to have his own ships after leaving Starfleet, it's not implausible that a less ethical character like Locarno could have made even more money.

I thought that was a fun one. No problem with the nostalgia cheese.

That's exactly what you sound like.

You hadn't figured that out after all the nerdgasms over Picard season 3?

Plus it's kinda baked in the premise that we're gonna get stuff like this, especially for the episode that inspired the whole series. I can't blame people for wanting more original stories cuz I do think the show is at its best when world building but screaming about references in this show is like complaining about the sky being blue, to an extent.

That was purged literally ten years ago lol

We put Tamar's ghost in the bottle, and put it on a barge headed to international waters.
It was the only way.

For those timeline nerds, I think this episode pretty conclusively puts S4 Mariner at about 31. We see a flashback to 13 years ago, and L'il Mariner tries to fangirl up to Sito. She's a 1st year in the Academy, so that would presumably put her at 18. (And I think she could possibly even be younger...she was adorbs!) 18+13=31.

Apparently according to the stardate this show doesn’t follow the old formula of each season being a year in universe.

Oh, shut up Cleetus.

Well, the old formula was used by shows that had 24 episode seasons, and much longer episodes.

But even then I don't think it was a hard and fast rule. Samantha Wildman didn't inform Janeway she was pregnant until season 2, episode 4, and she wasn't really showing when she broke the news. Then she gives birth in episode 21 of the same season.

For reasons pertaining to other fandom politics (not specific to Trek but it's real TLDR stupid shit no one in WF will care about), I was antsy about TPTB pinning a specific age to Mariner but it tracks that between her many demotions that she'd be a bit older than the rest of the crew. Definitely not late thirties like some were suggesting.