Lower Decks: I, Excretus

Last week, Star Trek: Lower Decks kept doing what it's been doing all season, delivering another hilarious episode. And what I hope is a very small (though obviously very vocal) contingent of gatekeeping Trekkers kept doing what they've been doing: complaining about it. The difference is that their complaints broke through on my social media a bit, as those who can take a joke responded to their concern trolling. But we'll get to that.

In "I, Excretus," consultant Shari yn Yem arrives on the Cerritos to run a series of holographic drills on the entire crew. Bridge crew and "lower deckers" are made to trade jobs, and everyone faces challenges beyond their expectations... save for Boimler, who expects to complete his Borg scenario with 100% success, and is determined to repeat the scenario until he gets there.

The premise of this episode allowed the writers to cram in little bite-sized send-ups of dozens of past Star Trek episodes. I thought they were generally handled with the series' trademark balance: respecting most ideals of the Star Trek universe while pointing out moments where it had soup stains on its figurative tie. For example: "Ethics" is a really good episode... even if Worf's injury looks utterly ridiculous in the moment. "Spectre of the Gun" is a creative classic... even though its surrealistic set design had everything to do with budget restrictions and nothing to do with plot. "The Naked Time" was a just-this-side-of-campy romp that The Next Generation cranked up the volume on (before Lower Decks yanked off the knob).

Basically, "I, Excretus" was a Snack Pack of mini-episodes like season one's fantastic "Crisis Point," bound together loosely with a "learning to work together" moral that I thought gave it just the right touch. I laughed a lot, from still more jokes about Dr. T'Ana as a cat, to bringing back Alice Krige to comedically reprise her role as the Borg Queen, to daring to mine one of Star Trek's most powerful dramatic moments -- the end of Star Trek II -- for humor. (And shout-out to composer Chris Westlake, who very meticulously mimicked the original scores for many of these classic Star Trek moments.)

Needless to say, there are others out there who were rubbed the wrong way by all of this. Why they're still watching Lower Decks at this point, I couldn't say. Hate watching? Some sort of Clockwork Orange scenario? (Most likely: they're not actually watching it, but whining about what they hear online.) And once primed to see this episode as a tasteless puncturing of their favorite Star Trek moments, they focused their real ire on the nudity. Never mind that Star Trek had shown brief nudity before. Never mind that Star Trek has featured plenty of horny characters, none more so than Captain James T. Kirk. Never mind that, judging by some of the original series costumes, Gene Roddenberry clearly would have shown naked people if the network had let him.

You know what? Actually, just never mind any of that. Never mind the people who've been "not my Star Trek"ing the "CBS All Access / Paramount Plus" era of Star Trek from the very beginning. It's fine to say, "you know, that one part of that episode wasn't great." That's basically what "I, Excretus" was doing to past Star Trek. But to let that sour the rest of a fun episode? What a shame.

Because, yeah: this was a super fun episode. I give it an A-.