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A little bummed season 2 isn’t just a fresh set of cadets, would be cool to have new lower decks denizens each season. Still, definitely looking forward to it, S1 got good the further it got in.
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was inspired in the middle of an episode to make some art:
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they do not kiss in null space what the fuck
they kiss like 3 min after though lol
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Lower Decks is still pretty solid in the new season. I still wish the characters looked different and I wish that the Star Trek fandom was more in the metatext than their mouths but it’s fun enough that I can accept it on it’s own terms.
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Pretty weak first ep of LD season 2, went real hard into crazy crazy crazy all the time and I just got bored with it. Also wild how they spent what little story there was on undoing what they set up in the season 1 finale.
Please don’t have the characters say “I know we’re not supposed to have inter-personal conflicts but I hate that Andorian bitch!”
Anyways, on to the reason I came here, from the Mem Alpha page for Unnamed Romulan Commander 001 from Balance of Terror:
In William Shatner’s novel The Return , the commander’s House, one of the oldest and most esteemed on Romulus, fell into disgrace after this failure, and his granddaughter Salatrel ( β ) was responsible for resurrecting Kirk, which she did with the intention of killing him and restoring the family’s standing.
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this weeks lower decks is interesting because it is a very explicit defense of the goofiness and nerdy charm of star trek and TNG style morality plays. like they basically say out loud we’re lighter and less serialized although honestly they are MORE action packed and violent than even the darker treks. they handled the idea of the tamarian crew member better than i thought. also the elote as wrong number of pips joke was pretty funny. also perhaps the skeleton of spock two?
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Pretty good Lower Decks ep. It like, wasn’t funny at any point, but I enjoyed it all the way through. I liked Mariner in this one.
Nice seeing a rebuff of the Picard/Discovery/movie grimviolent actionblaster deluxe style of Trek we’ve been plagued with. Like Sleazy said, though, while it’s great to defend the goofy and nerdy Trek, you gotta actually walk the walk, and not just have every episode be an action shlockfest like, you know, Picard/Discovery/the movies. I’ve seen this show do a pretty good original sci-fi story that takes advantage of the medium - that one with the terraforming plant comes to mind - so I know they have it in them to do some real good Trek. Whenever they do these reference-heavy action winkfests it’s just like, ugh. The Tamarian crew member was pretty solid and all but do you gotta have him constantly saying the same stuff we heard in the TNG ep? Make up some new metaphors! I’m hoping they just do something like, the shared adventures they have become the metaphors he uses all the time.
Little disappointed Boimler came back this ep, but the show does feel like it’s missing something without him. Tendi and especially Rutherford don’t really seem to get episodes about just them, they’re always sorta side characters for the B or C plots. With Boimler back you’ll have some A plot variation, which is good.
Wouldn’t have minded Manhaven being the new Boimler, but, they would need to give him more to work with character-wise than “I’m by the books”.
Loved seeing the Collectors constantly shitting on how weird the Federation is. Like with Quark, I love whenever you get the perspective of another species in this universe on the big powerful utopian goody-two-shoes brigade that has the run of the place.
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funny how the cartoons have much more “star trek” style intros than the live action stuff which is just weird prestige tv tone poems
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LD “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris” was good. I think they could’ve done without the entire Boimler C story and just put that time into Mariner/Tendi stuff. Rutherford actually got a good B plot in this one, I like that he finally has some kind of character building going on with him and Shaxs. It annoys me that they’ve now fully undone everything they did at the end of S1, but whatever I guess, I am glad to have Shaxs back.
Probably my favorite thing in this series so far is the Orion stuff. I love that Tendi puts up this enlightened front while the Orion civilization is still like FRESH out of the fucked-up slavery/piracy Bad Guy Alien mold they’ve been in since TOS. Mariner and Tendi visiting her cousin and it being a complete shithole was really good, Tendi is just mortified that her lazily-conceived alien civilization plays into every Orion stereotype out there.
The Mariner-doing-greenface bit was good, which I took as a send-up of the go-to TNG strat of slapping on rom ears or klingon headloaf and expecting that to work on a stealth mission. Mariner having just assumed prejudice about the Orion sex pheromone thing takes one of the most cringe-inducingly sexist things from TOS and has fun with how embarrassing it would be to have this be a foundational aspect of your culture. That Tendi is trying to distance herself from her ridiculous Star Trek Bad Guy species and force herself into a Federation mold has some meat for character-driven comedy. Like, none of the humans so far know how to handle this with any level of tact, and I like that. Hope they stick with this subplot going forward, because this show is the perfect place to send up Trek’s lowlights for character comedy while also staying committed to the high-falutin’ vision of humanity’s future the show’s founded on. It’s one thing to talk the Federation talk, but actually truly accepting someone from a species this galling without expecting them to fully renounce their culture is where they’re going to have to walk the walk.
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i only know about Orions from watching Discovery but i thought it was a little clever how in that their thing was just that they were like, very white. like they all (both?) had beaky noses and big chins and thin lips and loved slavery and capitalism
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orions are very weird because in the original show they were literally just the sexy green space slave babes of the week but ENTERPRISE retconned it so that the women were actually in charge the whole time because they have magic pheromone powers and just pretended to be slaves so they could ensnare men with their feminine wiles to do space crimes on them so now they seem to just openly show the matriachal BDSM crimelord stuff
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It did really feel like Mariner and Tendi were all but saying let’s try to pass the Bechdel test out loud, lol.
I liked the visions of all the possible Shaxs although the Moriarty one was probably one step too goofy. Very funny that Memory Alpha style guide has to label them individually on the wiki
Wonder if Vic Fontaine is THE Vic Fontaine, considering you could just make another one
But yeah this show is at it’s best when it’s doing interesting explorations of the concept of Star Trek itself. I guess there will always be goofy meta stuff like them saying “VOY” out loud in addition to all the actually interesting fleshing out of half remembered concepts. There is fundamentally Rick and Morty in the show’s DNA so Dan Harmon-y genre stuff comes with the territory.
i thought it was kind of half neat that Mariner was just pansexual compared to how buttoned up pre-Discovery Trek was but since she’s a wacky impulsive Adult Cartoon Party Animal it’s kinda just flavor unless it’s actually shown on screen
The entire episode being a build up for that cat joke was pretty funny though
I sound more down on this episode than I actually feel. Honestly I do think this is probably one of my favorite Trek shows tbh. Like as far as being excited on a week to week basis to see what they are going to do next this is up there with any of them.
Also Mike McMahan did confirm that it was canonically dead Spock Two in the previous ep!
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That ep with the Collectors felt like a veer into referencefest territory that wasn’t really what I was hoping for. Same with the swift reset of everything that changed in S1.
I’m like a man in the desert here with new Trek, hoping that Lower Decks can actually do some decent character work where Disco/Picard couldn’t, but, I dunno, deep down, I know this show could do that, but the crazy crazy crazy Rick & Morty aspect has not gone away or diminished much and that ain’t a great sign. Their focus is on throwing out as many jokes as possible and wrapping it up, and like, Rick & Morty will have jokes but they’re also progressing a plot with a sci-fi concept driving it, so, would like to see more of that without the cynicism.
LD my favorite of the new Trek, mainly because it seems to at least kind of like dorky and awkward things that are quintessentially Trek, but man that bar’s pretty low, at least for me. I’m hopeful, but I feel like it’s gonna take LD another season or so to get there.
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this weeks ep is basically kinda flat just all hijinks but Diplomath is truly a 100% a perfect TNG era nerd game and wesley and geordi would be playing that shit all the time
This one was reasonably entertaining, goes to show how far you can get on the cast alone. Like there was no actual storyline I don’t think. Anyways, Shaxs rules.
Man they really are just going ahead with “the doctor is a cat and the joke is that she acts like a cat” as a centerpiece gag in two episodes in a row huh
i love the dumb cat jokes because me and my family have been making them since m’ress on the animated series kept fucking meowing and purring after every sentence
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