Lower Decks: Upper Decks

The very concept of Star Trek: Lower Decks came from a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that took a look at life aboard the Enterprise outside the view of the main characters. Now the series loops back upon itself to do the same thing, but kind of in reverse, for "Upper Decks."

It's a hectic (but perhaps quite typical) day aboard the Cerritos, as members of the senior staff become entangled in a variety of problems. Alien invaders try to seize the ship, and Freeman must stop them. Alien creatures are lose in one of the cargo bays, and Ransom must rally a group of ensigns to contain them. Shaxs is at war with his own psyche. Dr T'Ana is cranky about being asked to review her Sickbay's pain management protocols. Billups works on an especially dangerous repair in engineering. Meanwhile, Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford, and T'Lyn carve pumpkins.

This is by far the most stuffed episode of Lower Decks we've ever seen. It features twice as many story lines as we usually get -- and I haven't even mentioned the evolving/de-evolving crewmember hosting a sousaphone recital. Sitcoms do this sort of deft writing all the time, and it very often flies under the audience radar. Telling compact stories with a true beginning, middle, and end is a real art that the best sitcom writers quietly excel at, and the Lower Decks writers show they are among the best here as they keep all these balls juggling, coherent, and funny.

Admittedly, you have to squint pretty hard to find the "Star Trek morality tale" in the episode. Perhaps it's Shaxs' story line, showing how a dark past will always remain with you and be something you must constantly overcome to be a good person. Perhaps it's the Ransom story line, which reveals the character as willing to subsume his own ego in the name of being good at his job. But really, this is one of those episodes that's just going for the funny, and I don't mind that at all.

To that end, this episode perhaps isn't peak funny, as it has to work hard to keep all the plots straight. But there are a lot of laughs. I was most entertained by the 3x dose of technobabble we got in the Billups story line, but you might just as well go for Freeman saving the day with compliments, or T'Ana cursing up a (censored) storm as she tests her own pain threshold. Regardless, I must give props to the incredibly clever joke about how to stop a mind-reading cave person: think of fire.

Now here's where I'll be a little unfair. If I knew we had another season of Lower Decks coming, I might call this an A- episode. But in the context of this being almost the end, I'm a bit disappointed that we haven't spent much time with Rutherford this season, and barely more with Tendi. Sure, Freeman and Ransom are technically main cast too, and the whole episode did center on long-established characters. Still, I couldn't help but feel a little like one of the precious few episodes we have left wasn't being used for the core Lower Deckers. And that makes me feel like this was perhaps more of a B+. Like I said, maybe a little unfair.