Lower Decks goes on an away mission. Spoilers.
Bit of a miss overall. It’s a fairly flat episode, with a pair of pretty predictable plots that run down set rails and don’t really do anything very interesting. There was some interesting potential in introducing us to a different perspective on Klingons, but it’s a one note joke the show bores of quickly. Then there’s a quick slide show of different famous Star Trek races, but none of them are played for anything much more than laughs.
The episode I wanted to see would have had the same broad plot (Boimler loses confidence, Mariner helps him out secretly), but might have tried to broaden the Lower Decks theme by showing us what the lower decks equivalent is for the Klingons, or some of these other races.
The slightly more successful part was Rutherford trying out different departments, which had some nice moments. But it’s undermined by Rutherford being such a boring character. He has exactly one character trait, ‘likes engineering stuff’. It’d be nice to have something a little more than that.
Hopefully this is just the early days of finding what works and what doesn’t in this format, but this is one of the weakest single pieces of Trek in a very long time.
790 down.