When another Starfleet ship is diverted from a rendezvous with the Cerritos, it falls to Captain Freeman to take on their mission: a diplomatic negotiation at Deep Space Nine. Boimler quickly settles in at Quark's dabo table, Tendi and Rutherford pair up with an Orion who annoys Tendi with his cliche attitudes, and Shaxs constantly trades Resistance stories with Colonel Kira. Soon, another one of Quark's schemes escalates into a crisis. Meanwhile, back aboard the Cerritos, Mariner tries to be on her best behavior as she meets Jennifer's friends.
Lower Decks is clearly written by a team who know Star Trek well and love it... and an episode like this actually shows how much restraint they exercise on a regular basis by not throwing into each episode every reference they could. You can imagine how far "full fan service" in a scenario like this would go, and this wasn't that. We don't run in to Julian and Ezri, we don't see Jake Sisko still wandering the Promenade, and so on. The scope of the crossover here is wisely limited to a number of elements that can be incorporated well into a tight sub-30-minutes episode of television.
It's interesting that Kira is used more as the comic relief than Quark in this story construction. It's perhaps even more interesting that her most dramatic and soulful moment in the episode comes when she gazes out the window at the wormhole -- a moment that doesn't rely on Nana Visitor's acting chops at all, but rather is carried entirely by the animators. In any case, the Deep Space Nine fan in me was desperate for more, more, more... and the Lower Decks fan in me knows that they made the right choice not to do that.
As fun as it was to have Visitor and Armin Shimerman back voicing their iconic characters, the guest star having the most fun this episode might just have been Adam Pally as the Orion Mesk. His purposefully over-the-top performance put the screws to Tendi in an interesting way. And while it made for good humor along the way, I was also impressed at the more serious elements of the story line. We already knew about Tendi's misgivings about her Orion heritage, but Star Trek rarely circles back to hit a character over the same vulnerability more than once. Often, the end of an episode brings a full resolution to whatever personal problem might be plaguing a character... but real-life insecurities don't work that way of course. All the more remarkable, then, that a Star Trek cartoon is dealing with insecurities in a more realistic way.
The other subplots of the episode certainly kept things from getting too serious. Mariner out of her comfort zone has been good for the character all season long, and "trying to tone it down for the Significant Other" is just an obligatory rom-com premise you have to check off eventually. Putting Boimler in his element is equally unusual, and was good for a simple joke-centered runner.
For deftly juggling all these balls so well, I give "Hear All, Trust Nothing" an A-.
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