Captain Freeman is determined to get Mariner off her ship after an embarrassing moment in front of the senior staff, and begins assigning her the worst grunt work to drive her away. Meanwhile, Tendi's enthusiasm to witness an accession ceremony ends up ruining the event, and she's determined to make the officer she disrupted like her. But personal problems are pushed to the side when an alien generation ship begins to transform the Cerritos using its strange biological technology.
There's a common way of constructing a sitcom episode: from a narrative standpoint, a character has to be a deliberate idiot, unusually obtuse, or obsessive, to foment conflict and cause a problem -- to cause the plot. But because they're a main character, the audience is primed to forgive them; they'll realize the error of their ways in the end, apologize to their friends, and reset things for next week (where, hopefully, a different character will don the Idiot Hat so as not to damage one character in particular too irreparably.)
I have liked plenty of sitcoms that operate in this way. But it's a new thing to have a Star Trek series do it. And as much as I've really tried to keep an open mind on Lower Decks, as much as I actually want a new Trek series to do something legitimately different from the others, I'm really starting to chafe against this aspect of the series.
I'm interested in the strife between Freeman and Mariner, and I'm actually curious to learn if there's any particular incident(s) in their past that fractured their relationship, or if it's just a generic "they don't get along because they're so alike" conflict. Almost no main character in Star Trek gets along with their parents, it seems, so I'm convinced there's good material in here somewhere. And yet, this is the second episode in a row where Freeman has to wear the Idiot Hat to move the plot forward, and it's starting to be a permanent accessory for her character that's making it hard to like her.
Over in the secondary plot, Tendi had a Hat of her own. It felt to me like it would have been enough for her to have messed up, needing to make an apology she felt had been sincerely accepted. That she went a step farther into a pathological need to be liked felt like it was taking things too far. Sure, Tendi should have flaws -- but does she need to be this flawed when we're just getting to know her?
You may have noticed that all of the above is a pretty serious analysis of an episode of a comedy show. You might be thinking to yourself: he should really lighten up, this is a comedy. Well... it's supposed to be a comedy, sure, though I found the jokes pretty weak overall in this installment. There were definitely moments that worked for me, from yet another solid joke about what a holodeck would be used for to quibbling over the pronunciation of "sens-ORS." But a lot of the humor fell flat for me this time, and a fair amount of it lacked that sense of "loving Star Trek as much as fans do" that past episodes have had. (Mariner being so down on the stuff that's the backbone of your average Next Generation episode wore a little thin for me.)
Speaking of The Next Generation, the "main plot" of this episode was pretty much lifted straight from "Masks," and saw the Cerritos being transformed all around the crew. Here, the episode made fantastic use of its animation medium, altering the ship in radical ways that a live production would struggle to do. (Indeed, "Masks" brought out a few statues and plants and that was all the budget would allow.) We got caves, floods, and more -- and it looked really great.
But overall, this was the weakest episode of Lower Decks for me so far. I'd say it just slipped down to a C+. I hope this is just one minor stumble, and that things get back on track next week. Or perhaps I need to figure out a way to realign my expectations before the next episode.
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