Lower Decks: We'll Always Have Tom Paris

The latest episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks was the 800th episode of Star Trek in the franchise's history. While there may not have been anything special about it to mark the occasion, it did show that Lower Decks specifically is hitting its creative stride and could itself have many more episodes ahead.

(As usual with my Star Trek posts: SPOILERS!)

Mariner and Tendi, realizing that they've never gone on a mission as a pair, team up to retrieve something for Dr. T'Ana. Boimler, determined to best a ship that doesn't acknowledge his presence, crawls through the guts of Cerritos to reach the bridge with his Tom Paris collectible plate. And Rutherford, stunned to find security chief Shaxs returned from the dead, is determined to learn how that happened.

All along, Lower Decks has poked loving fun at earlier Star Trek series, playing with their episode formulas, mining their plot points, pointing out continuity errors, and effectively using it all for comedy. In this episode, Lower Decks turned its gaze toward a mirror, having good-natured fun at its own expense. The Mariner/Tendi story line repeatedly pointed out how Mariner and Tendi don't ever have story lines together. Each character was shocked to learn things about the other that we the audience already know. And there were fun jokes about recurring Star Trek aliens from Nausicaans to Orions to Klingons to Caitians.

Bringing Tom Paris on for a brief cameo (voiced by the man himself, Robert Duncan McNeill) was something of a magic trick. Though he had perhaps just two minutes of screen time -- and that time mentioned some of the worst elements of Voyager, from Kazon to the episode "Threshold" -- it didn't feel at all like they were being mean to either the series or the character. (Not even when the captain cautioned Paris against getting them lost in the Delta Quadrant as he took the helm.) If anyone seemed to be the target of a maybe-not-just-playful ribbing, it was "Boimler as Star Trek fan," dragging around his cherished collectible in search of an autograph. (But then, they have actually now made that Tom Paris plate in the real world, and plenty of Trekkers who can take a joke are apparently buying it.)

In perhaps a failure of my own imagination, I never considered the possibility that after dying in the season one finale, Shaxs would be resurrected to continue on the show. But in an especially Lower Decks take on that idea, we aren't told exactly how it happened. (Though we were told nearly a dozen other ways such resurrections have happened on previous Star Trek episodes.) And it was actually meaningful -- about as serious as Lower Decks ever gets -- that this return aroused feelings of guilt in Rutherford, who felt responsible for Shaxs' death.

It was another really great episode of Lower Decks, which so far seems to have stepped up to a consistently higher level this season. I give "We'll Always Have Tom Paris" an A-.