Lower Decks: A Mathematically Perfect Redemption

With five (!) new first-run series in the modern age of Star Trek, one "lesson" lurking in the background has been that "not every Star Trek show has to be tailor-made for YOU." In its latest episode, Lower Decks delivered that message at the micro level with an episode that quickly polarized the audience: "A Mathematically Perfect Redemption."

When the Exocomp crewmember Peanut Hamper leaves the Cerritos, she winds up on a technologically primitive world populated by an avian species. There, she is shown a new perspective on life, ends up in a relationship with the heir to the village leadership, and must ultimately defend the village from an alien attack.

I have seen a handful of tweets claiming to like this episode (even better than the previous week's adventure on Deep Space Nine!). I have to take these people at their word, because this episode was emphatically not "For Me." I found it to be not only the worst episode of Lower Decks by a wide margin, but the worst episode of Star Trek since Discovery brought the franchise back to television.

Peanut Hamper was introduced back in the season one finale, "No Small Parts," and for me was the worst element of that episode. I didn't even mention her in the write-up I did at the time. She was abrasive and strange, clashed with the Star Trek aesthetic, and wasn't especially funny. But at least in her previous appearance, we got only small doses of the character. Here, she takes center stage for an entire episode that barely even includes the regular characters, and the results are predictably annoying from beginning to end.

As exhausting as this episode was up until the much-needed arrival of the Cerritos, it might at least have been tolerable if the episode was going to convoluted lengths to give us what the title promised: a redemption for Peanut Hamper. Instead, what a twist!, she remains just as reprehensible at the end of the story as she was in the beginning -- a self-centered, psychopathic character who in any other episode of Star Trek would be the villain, not the star.

Because there is no character arc here, no change of any kind, the entire episode feels like a waste of time. Why tell a story if nothing meaningfully changes between the beginning and the end? Even among the crowd saying they liked this episode, I can't believe that anyone was actually thinking "I wonder whatever happened to Peanut Hamper?" before this came along; it's not like this was a loose end that truly needed tying up.

I can think of literally only one thing I enjoyed about the episode: it gave us the brief return of Jeffrey Combs as the Evil AI Agimus. Combs, of course, is one of the best things in all of Star Trek... though this episode really tested just what I'm willing to put up with to "see" more of him.

Obviously, this episode was a one-off experiment by the writers; it hasn't permanently changed anything in a way that would keep next week's Lower Decks from rebounding. Yet at the same time, we only get 10 episodes of Lower Decks in a season, and to me it felt like this deprived us of that precious, limited resource. I give "A Mathematically Perfect Redemption" a D-. This is one episode of Star Trek I'll never watch again.