Mariner and Jet clash over who is going to become the "leader" of the Lower Deckers, right as they're assigned a mission with new Tamarian security chief Kayshon. When they try to pack up a collection of antiquities amassed by a deceased alien, the collection fights back and tries to destroy them. Meanwhile, aboard the Titan, Boimler must get used to a faster, more action-oriented (and more "serialized") kind of life in Starfleet.
(Spoilers follow...)
Season one's Cerritos security chief was going to be a tough act the follow, comedically. Shaxs was a reliable source of laughs just by transposing stereotypically Klingon aggression into a Bajoran character (plus, he got a push from Fred Tatasciore's over-the-top voice performance). But this new character of Kayshon is here to play. "Darmok" is one of the all-time great episodes of The Next Generation, even if it does ask for extreme suspension of disbelief over whether a culture that speaks only in metaphor could practically exist. (We're trying to prove it's possible with online GIF-driven discourse!) Bringing on a Tamarian character to play with that conceit, repeat some fan-famous lines for comedy, and add some ridiculous new ones ("Kayshon, when he became a puppet.") is inspired.
That would have been all the fan service I needed to be happy as a clam. But the collector's museum was a Where's Waldo of "how many episodes can you recognize?" that included every "vintage" Star Trek series (including the animated series), and which will surely reward later freeze-framing. Throw in the countless shout-outs to TNG made by Boimler and Riker, and this episode was a nostalgic walk down memory lane -- albeit handled more craftily than a simple parade of "hey, remember when that happened? Wasn't that cool?" moments.
It's debatable -- maybe even on a week-to-week basis -- whether Lower Decks is here to tell a story, or to tell jokes, but this episode did well on both counts. Boimler was never going to stay cut off from the rest of the characters for long, but the writers found an especially clever answer to "how does Boimler end up leaving the Titan and returning to the Cerritos?" That answer was that he both won't leave the Titan and he'll return the Cerritos. I suppose any time Jonathan Frakes wants to drop by a recording booth, we could see the Williams -- Riker and Boimler -- on another adventure, but Bradward's back where he needs to be for Lower Decks to have all its characters back in one place.
All that, plus some surprisingly insightful commentary on leadership, which basically amounted to understanding that you don't always have all the answers, there's more than one way to do things, and that a good idea can come from anywhere. Lower Decks framed this as a learning moment for Mariner, but I also felt like it was a low-key subtweet at Star Trek: Enterprise and the depiction of Captain Archer, who (in my memory, at least) always made a snap decision and then stuck to it no matter what. (Because in the early 2000s, that was apparently the brand of "leadership" our culture celebrated.) Part of me chooses to think that the relative lack of any Enterprise memorabilia inside the collector's museum says that the Lower Decks writers agree with me on the relative merits of that series.
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