The Cerritos is the first ship to test a new initiative to revisit planets that Starfleet has long left alone, and a Federation news reporter is on the scene to cover it. The stakes are high for Captain Freeman, so she's suspicious when it seems Mariner has undermined her authority by spreading gossip to the reporter -- gossip so damning, in fact, that Freeman reassigns Mariner to the dreaded Starbase 80 to be rid of her.
All season long, the writers have been teasing out that Mariner might be reaching her usual "expiration date" for any one Starfleet posting. In one episode, she was pointedly tempted with a life outside of Starfleet. Now that all pays off with this episode that pushes her over the edge. It's a plot development that easily could have been a season finale, and it's rather interesting that it isn't. Is a bigger cliffhanger yet to come, or is Lower Decks looking to wrap up this particular season neatly by resolving the situation next week?
I do like that Lower Decks has been slowly laying ground on a big story like this. (And in particular, that it's been in sync with stories for Boimler, Rutherford, and Tendi -- all showing them looking for big changes in their lives as well.) But packing this much story in does mean there's less room for jokes, and indeed this episode of the show isn't as laugh-out-loud funny as many are. I've said before that I prefer for the balance to favor jokes more than story, but I respect that that balance is going to be different from one episode to the next -- and one of the strengths of Lower Decks is that it does tell legitimate stories amid the comedy.
But there is another reservation I have about this episode that I feel more keenly -- the way Freeman behaves throughout. She is certainly well-established as being the opposite of self-confident, and the very premise of the show requires that she be far from the best captain in Starfleet. Still, I thought the relationship between her and Mariner had progressed farther than this. This episode marks a real backslide for Freeman that feels quite artificial and sitcomy, and her reaction feels quite extreme and cartoonish. Yeah, it's gotta be this way, and half-hour shows must be brisk. But as slowly as Mariner's discontent was hinted at all season, I would have wished for a somewhat more deft hand here.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, I smiled at the revisiting of one of The Next Generation's oldest episodes. Pointedly, it was not a very good episode, with a rather unsatisfying ending... which made it perfect fodder for the premise of this episode: "can you believe we just left them that way?" You'd think the whole debacle with Khan might have put Starfleet in more of a mind to check up on planets that Enterprise captains just abandon after an hour... but I guess Starfleet can be stretched pretty thin. It was fun of Lower Decks to address this, and the Away mission to Ornara generated the best laughs of the episode.
I give "Trusted Sources" a B. I'm eager to see where they'll take Mariner's story in the coming season finale.
No comments:
Post a Comment