Spoilers for Lower Decks, “Fissure Quest.”
It turns out you can have your cake and eat it.
The penultimate episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks is an exercise in box ticking for the show’s creative team. It does the grunt work of laying the table and raising the stakes for next week’s series finale. But it’s also the show’s last — for now — chance to wring a gag or two out of all those deep-cut, Extremely Online Trek in-jokes. It’s fortunate that while the episode is a little on the thin side, the stuff that’s thrown at the wall is charming enough for it not to matter.
For the second week in a row, we’re pulling focus from the lead quintet to catch up on William Boimler. (That, if your memory isn’t too sharp, is Bomiler’s transporter clone, last seen faking his death to join Section 31.) He’s now captain of the USS Anaximander on a secret mission to close up the interdimensional fissures the show has been encountering all season.
Boimler, the show’s avatar of a Star Trek fan, has been picking up stray figures from the canon during dimension hops. His crew includes T’Pol, Garak and an EMH version of Dr. Bashir, all played by their original actors.. And yes, Garak and Dr. Bashir are a married couple in this universe, because of course the show has to embrace that piece of fan lore that launched a thousand pieces of slash fiction.
The ship picks up an escape pod with Lt. Harry Kim inside, who learns most of the rest of the crew is Harries Kim as well. He’s the only one who’s ever been promoted above the rank of ensign, nodding to the rumor that longtime series head Rick Berman said someone had to be the lowest-ranked member of the crew. And / or as punishment for clashing with the production team, .
They soon encounter an alternate universe Mariner who, unlike our version, is a timid engineer. She, however, has worked out a way to track the vessel that’s punching holes in the fabric of the universe. So the Anaximander lays a trap, only to reveal that it’s an old Enterprise-class ship called the Beagle. It’s an exploration vessel with a human and Vulcan crew, led by Lily Sloane.
Sloane isn’t trying to tear the universe to shreds, their universe just discovered to discover interdimensional travel ahead of warp. They’ve been leaping between universes exploring strange similar worlds, the same life and civilizations boldly… examining the differences. It’s a mission statement that outrages Boimler, who’s gorged himself on fanservice and is now looking for something, anything new to cleanse his palate.
Naturally, this is Lower Decks winking toward its own major flaw, given its reverence for ‘90s era Trek. I’ve always found it quite successful in bobbing and weaving around simply milking the audience’s ‘memberberries. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t at least complicit in the concept of serving up the same old crap, again and again.
Sloane disagrees, saying her crew looks to explore the ways in which people grow and evolve in different environments. She says she’s met several different Boimlers, all of whom have their own Mariner, as their connection endures across the universes. And that exploration isn’t just about exploring what’s beyond us but finding what’s true inside us. That’s a journey that can be just as perilous, and rewarding, as traveling to the furthest edges of the universe.
Kim, outraged at his namesakes’ stalled careers, steals the Beagle with plans to return to his own dimension. The Anaximander pursues, and while the other Kims mutiny and beam back, the Beagle successfully makes a jump but explodes in the process. That sends a huge wave of energy that will wipe out every universe in existence unless it’s dumped in a single place. Thankfully, Boimler knows where to send it — to his transporter twin and the crew of the Cerritos.
See you next week for the finale.
