Captain Freeman beams down to the Pakled homeworld for negotiations, and a Pakled spy posing as a defector boards the Cerritos to gather intelligence. Boimler befriends a career-driven group of ensigns who want to help him get on the command track -- by encouraging to ditch his friends. And Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford are put on "anomaly consolidation duty," cleaning up the dangerous space devices the senior officers have accumulated on recent missions.
The Pakleds themselves are dumb as bag of rocks, of course, but the choice of the Lower Decks writers to develop them as a recurring villain is incredibly smart. Given the desired tone of this show, the Cerritos simply can't mix it up with the Romulans, the Borg, the Cardassians, or anyone else Star Trek has cultivated as a serious bad guy... precisely because they were cultivated as serious bad guys. Any interactions with them could only diminish those villains, or threaten to sap the comedy out of Lower Decks. But the Pakleds are perfectly suited for the show's needs.
Sure, getting the best of Star Trek's dumbest aliens isn't a major accomplish, but I still appreciate that Captain Freeman gets a win this week. She's been screwing up a fair amount this season (no doubt to show that all the characters on this show are flawed in similar ways; it's not just the Lower Deckers who aren't ready for a front-line ship). That the Pakleds kept calling her "Janeway" was not only amusing, but perhaps a bit of commentary if you tilt your head and squint: is it sexism that they can only retain the name of one female starship captain?
The Boimler plot line was definitely commentary, a bit of insight on the sort of people who aspire to middle management. The group Boimler falls in with (the "Redshirts" -- ha!) seem to have convinced themselves that the entire job is telling people what to do. They don't actually want to make decisions, and they certainly don't want to do anything; they think an effective captain merely basks in the reflected glow of a competent crew. Unlike Boimler, they've clearly never "watched all those Star Trek episodes" (read the log entries?). This sub plot may not have generated loads of laughs, but it was fun to watch and was a nice little Star Trek-style morality play for the show.
For the big jokes, there was the "anomaly consolidation" plot line. The show took what I think was a wise rest from franchise in-jokes here. Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford could have just encountered one past episode reference after another as they worked their way around the ship (like when they were escaping from the museum a few episodes back), but the random jeopardies were instead just that, calibrated for maximum weirdness and comedy. The one big shout-out (to Armus, at the end of the episode) was fairly low-hanging fruit that even most casual Trekkers would get.
"The Spy Humongous" was definitely not as funny as most Lower Decks episodes this season have been. But there was a trade-off: it was a more credible Star Trek episode than many Lower Decks episodes get to be. Overall, I'd give it a B+.
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