Mariner tries to help her Klingon friend Ma'ah regain the captaincy he lost, using Boimler's extensive knowledge of obscure Klingon traditions. Meanwhile, the Cerritos hosts two esteemed scholar/food critics from the planet Klowahka, who focus their ire on Doctor Migleemo.
This has been a great season of Lower Decks already -- but this episode was my favorite of them so far. I have always tolerated Klingon episodes of Star Trek, finding them inherently a bit silly... and often bad when that silliness overwhelms the story. Lower Decks is a completely different context for a Klingon story, a place where being silly is the point. And so the show dives headfirst into Klingon tropes and invents a barrel load (of bloodwine, of course) of new ones.
Making sweet, soft Boimler the most enthusiastic fan of Klingon tradition was an inspired comedic choice. And having him team up with Mariner to game a system is a pairing that has worked time and again for the series. I could go on and on (tediously) about the moments that made me laugh out loud, but I have to give a few limited shout-outs: to the hilarious animation of our heroes getting painsticked, to the deep cut VCR game reference to "experience bIj," and to actually calling the most prominent feature of female Klingon armor a "boob window." This storyline of the episode went all out with the jokes.
But honestly, even if all that didn't have me laughing regularly, I'd have found the Migleemo "B plot" hilariously funny too. Just as Klingon society has for decades been built out in borderline cartoonish ways, so this episode built out Klowahkan society in... well, literally cartoonish ways. From viewing everything through the lens of food, to the amusing physical displays that accompany emotion, everything about these aliens was built for laughs. And all the details were perfect, from the idea of an amuse bouche as a last meal before prison, to the beak-like silverware a Klowahkan uses to eat.
No, there wasn't much of a story here. We got another tease about this season's "rift" Macguffin, and some sort of tacked-on morality about hiding your struggles when you could ask for help. (Lessons never go down as effectively when it's a guest character learning them.) I suppose an absolutely "best of the best" Lower Decks episode would have nailed those elements too.
And yet, I laughed a lot. That's not all Lower Decks can do, but I really couldn't ask for anything more from this episode. I give "A Farewell to Farms" an A.
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