Lower Decks: Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus

A week after Star Trek: Lower Decks brought back one of its least appealing characters for an episode that left me cold, it now gets back on track with a sequel of sorts to the best episode of its first season.

Boimler, Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford are enjoying another holodeck movie when Boimler gets news that shakes him to his core. As he veers "off script" in search of personal meaning, Tendi is left as captain of the story, finding she has a taste for it.

As much as I personally disliked last week's strange "return of Peanut Hamper," I commented at the time that it was clearly enough of a one-off story that it wouldn't interfere with the show getting back on a track that appealed to me more. Quite fitting that it did so by again revisiting something from a past episode -- this time, the brilliant and hilarious conceit of knowingly making a "Starfleet movie."

Once again, we got plenty of great goofs on what Star Trek movies look like and how they're put together. Some of the jokes really called attention to themselves, like gags about how sequels are usually bad, and Mariner dissing the plausibility of the Kelvin timeline (young versions of established characters). But my favorite jokes were more subtle, like stepping over the black letterbox bar to leave the holodeck, the winking references in the planet names shown on screen, and the way Romulan triplets with ample cleavage were a clear one-upping of Lursa and B'Etor.

But where the first "Crisis Point" really was a big joke factory (at least, that's how I remember it), this sequel was actually more serious overall, with two big dramatic story arcs for the characters. Tendi's thread, worrying about being taken seriously as a captain, nicely played into the character's well-established insecurities. Still, I feel like it won't be believable for much longer when such insecurities involve Rutherford. Every time Tendi needs an enthusiastic cheerleader, Rutherford is right there to be that. I love that about him and their relationship, though she really ought to know by now that he's always in her corner. (And I don't even mean this in a "ship them" sort of way.)

Boimler's arc was akin to Jean-Luc Picard's in the movie Generations (appropos of this being a "movie"). Still, it's interesting to see the upbeat character shaken in this way -- and felt like a novel use for the doppelganger trope in Star Trek. And of course, this story line culminated in one of the most fun cameo appearances in the series so far, with George Takei returning as Sulu. It was a fun inclusion -- and equally fun that Boimler was as happy to "meet" Sulu as he probably would have been for Captain Kirk. Still, part of me wonders... was this always the writers' plan? Did they go out to Shatner first and get turned down, or did the "Lower Decks" mission statement mean they were never going to aim for the top like that?

For pure laughs, I would say that this sequel wasn't quite as good as the original -- as mentioned cheekily in the episode itself. Still, "Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus" was a good episode with surprisingly strong stories for the characters. I give it a B+.