Star Trek has rarely done a full-on crossover between shows. There’ve been lots of cross-show guest appearances: McCoy, Spock, Scotty, Bashir, and Quark on TNG; Picard, Riker (sort of), and Tuvok on DS9; and Riker, Troi, and Barclay on Voyager. Star Trek Generations came close to being a crossover, as did Enterprise’s “These are the Voyages…” and one could argue that all three seasons of Picard are TNG/Voyager crossovers. Plus there’s DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations” and Voyager’s “Flashback,” but the former was accomplished via footage, and the latter didn’t entirely work as a crossover with The Undiscovered Country.
And now we have the long-anticipated SNW/Lower Decks crossover, “Those Old Scientists”—which was previewed at San Diego Comic-Con and then went live on Paramount+ over the weekend, so if you haven’t watched it yet, you can and should!
It’s kind of amazing that Trek has mostly avoided a crossover like this until now. TNG and DS9 played at it with occasional guest appearances, plus both shows helped set the Maquis up for Voyager, but they never really mixed it up. DS9’s “You Are Cordially Invited” should have been a TNG crossover episode, given the importance of Worf to both shows, but they couldn’t make it work.
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The best crossovers are ones that work well as both parts of the mix, as it were. To give an example from the 1990s, the “Golden Hind” storyline on Hercules ended with Xena and Gabrielle showing up for the final part of it, and that episode worked just as well as a Xena episode as it did a Hercules episode. The various crossovers between Law & Order and Homicide: Life on the Street in the 1990s and between The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman in the 1970s were also pretty good examples of the breed.
I’m pleased to say that “Those Old Scientists” is one of those best crossovers. It works perfectly as an episode of SNW and also as an episode of LD. And it’s just a great episode of Star Trek.
My favorite part, truly, was the opening credits, which were re-done in animated form, complete with a few little nods to LD’s opening credits. And the twenty-fourth-century segments are all animated (as is one twenty-third-century scene at the end), though the majority of the tale is live-action, thus giving Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome a chance to play Boimler and Mariner in body as well as voice. (In addition, Noël Wells, Eugene Cordero, and Jerry O’Connell all make brief vocal appearances as Tendi, Rutherford, and Ransom, respectively. Ransom in particular makes a semi-lewd comment about Number One, which is an amusing in-joke, since O’Connell is married to Rebecca Romijn…)
The episode opens in the twenty-fourth century with the Cerritos in orbit of a planet that has a portal on it that hasn’t been active for a hundred and twenty years. Tendi makes a comment that Orion scientists discovered it, and Boimler is skeptical that there even were Orion scientists back then, which prompts yet another rant from Tendi on the subject of Orion profiling (which has been a running theme on LD), and also that an ancestor of hers served on the ship in question.
Rutherford taking a picture of Boimler standing in the portal apparently emits some kind of radiation that activates the portal, sending Boimler into the past, where he lands at the feet of an Enterprise landing party.
Boimler has a rough time of things in the past. His obsessive need to follow regulations to the letter and try very hard not to pollute the timelines by giving hints about the future is swimming upstream against his hero-worship. He keeps a Starfleet recruiting poster that features Number One in his bunk. He hugely admires Pike and Spock. On top of that, when an Orion ship shows up, he finds himself speaking up when he really shouldn’t, trying to get the Enterprise to at least consider the possibility that the Orions are scientists rather than pirates.
Which is a problem, as the Orions take the portal from under Enterprise’s nose.
When they finally do get the portal back, there’s just enough technobabble left to activate it one more time—but instead of allowing Boimler to go back to the future, Mariner comes through it to the past, ostensibly to rescue Boimler.
Mariner’s bull-in-a-china-shop act is at least as disruptive as Boimler’s nerdity—although, weirdly, it’s less annoying in live-action than in animation. It’s possible that LD’s stylized animation, which is a bit more static than the more fluid movements of live-action humans, softens Mariner’s edges some. (She also talks way faster in animated form…)
In her case, Mariner’s eager to talk to Uhura, and makes no bones about it, going so far as to claim a nonexistent background in linguistics so she can work with her on translating the glyphs on the portal.
Both Boimler and Mariner see weirdness in people they think they know from history. Spock—after the events of “Charades” and the tentative steps he and Chapel are taking toward a relationship as seen there and in “Lost in Translation”—is experimenting with his human side, and occasionally laughing and smiling. This freaks Boimler the heck out, and at first he thinks that his time-travel has done this, though he’s reassured by Chapel that this experimentation started before Boimler’s arrival. But Chapel is disheartened to know that Spock’s current behavior—which is wrapped up in her own relationship with him—is temporary, which means their relationship is also likely to be temporary. Jess Bush magnificently plays Chapel’s heartbreak as the realization dawns on her when she’s talking with Boimler in the turbolift.
Mariner’s surprise is less invasive and depressing, as she thinks of Uhura as the one we met on the original series and the movies, the one who sang filk songs making fun of Spock in the rec hall. The unsure-of-herself workaholic ensign is not what Mariner was expecting, and she winds up forcing Uhura to take a break in the bar. (Ortegas is both amused and frustrated that Mariner is able to accomplish what she herself hadn’t managed in getting the ensign to lighten the hell up.)
And it works, as Uhura has a breakthrough while relaxing and chatting and drinking with Mariner and Ortegas that she wouldn’t have had sitting alone in her quarters.
Mariner also prepares an Orion drink for them that provides an amusing joke at the end. Ortegas and Uhura share the drink with the whole gang at Pike’s birthday shindig, and it has a hallucinatory effect on them so they all think they’re animated with really big eyes, as that bit is done in the LD animation style…
Speaking of Pike, that’s another great moment. La’an catches Boimler and Mariner trying to steal a shuttle and get the portal back from the Orions. First of all, while this specifically isn’t the great moment, it’s nice to see someone steal a shuttle on a Star Trek show and actually get caught for once. Also, apropos of nothing, at one point Boimler and La’an are walking down the hall side by side, and Quaid must be, like, a foot taller than Christina Chong…
Anyhow, they’re brought to Pike’s quarters. Prior to this, Boimler and Mariner let slip that Pike’s birthday was coming up (Boimler further lets slip that Pike’s birthday is a holiday in their time, which is kind of fabulous, especially since he already has a medal of honor named after him…), and a plan is hatched to throw him a surprise party. Pike, of course, cottoned to that and tells Boimler and Mariner that he’s not interested in a party, and was planning to be alone on his birthday. We get some interesting insight into Pike’s tempestuous relationship with his father (previously established in Discovery’s “New Eden” as a science teacher who also taught comparative religion), and this year is the first that Pike will be older than his father was when he died. Boimler and Mariner, meanwhile, try very hard to say “live your best life while you can with the people you love” without saying the “because you’ll have a terrible accident in a few short years,” and then Pike goes ahead and reveals that he already knows that fate, to the abject shock of the ensigns from the future.
But Pike also takes their words to heart, and decides to let the crew go ahead and throw him a surprise party (though Number One chastises him for not acting nearly surprised enough). It’s a very sweet and insightful moment in an episode full of them.
What makes this great as an LD episode is the realization on Boimler and Mariner’s part that their hero-worship is—not misplaced, exactly, but it can easily obfuscate the fact that their heroes are also people.
Tying this all magnificently together is the solution to the portal problem, which relates to the first starship called Enterprise, the NX-01. At first, it’s just Pike mentioning that he’d probably be just as much of a fangoober as Boimler and Mariner are if he went back in time and met Archer, but then the solution turns out to relate to Archer’s ship (another technobabble thing the details of which are irrelevant). As they’re implementing that solution, Ortegas and Uhura start fangoobering over, respectively, Mayweather and Sato. First of all, it’s very nice to see Mayweather in particular get some love, which is more the writers of Enterprise were able to manage most of the time, plus Sato was obviously an attempt to do a communications officer better than they did with Uhura (who was written as a glorified telephone operator in the 1960s). Secondly, Ortegas and Uhura belatedly realize that they’re acting just like Boimler and Mariner when discussing century-old heroes…
In a final nice touch, Pike agrees to give the Orion scientists all the credit for discovering the portal in exchange for letting them use it to get Boimler and Mariner home to the twenty-fourth century. The Orion captain (played by Canadian character actor Greg Bryk) very quietly and happily says, “That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” nicely sowing the seeds for the marginally better treatment of Orions we see on LD.
We won’t know until the fall when LD season four debuts how this will affect Boimler and Mariner, but we’ve already seen that the events of this episode have some effect on Spock, Chapel, and Pike in particular. Oh, and a bit on Number One, too, as she learns that she’s the literal poster-girl for Starfleet recruitment. After what she went through earlier this season, Number One is obviously deeply touched to find out that Starfleet will use her as a recruiting tool, even using the phrase “Ad Astra per Aspera” as part of the poster. Boimler admits that it was that poster that got him to apply to the Academy. And Number One’s response to is chastise them for giving away the future like that and then, like the Orion captain, giving them a quiet, heartfelt thank-you…
As those of you who’ve been reading my LD reviews know, it took me a bit to warm to the adventures of the U.S.S. Cerritos, but I’ve come to really love the show, and this crossover between it and my favorite of the new Paramount+ shows is perfect in every way. Just a wonderful hour of television
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be in the exhibit hall at GalaxyCon Raleigh this coming weekend in North Carolina, where he’ll be selling and signing his books and comics, as well as some hand-made stuffies created by his wife Wrenn Simms. Come by and say hi!
This whole episode was a pure delight from beginning to end. I had to rewind and rewatch the part where Boimler jumps on the saddle and says “Rrriker” about five times, because I was laughing so hard.
I loved this episode.
It was so cool that we saw all four lower deckers in the beginning! I knew the first part would be animated but I figured it’d be Boimler and Mariner alone in a shuttle or something. I was so psyched that we saw Rutherford and Tendi as well!
I loved Pike in this episode so much. He’s normally much more diplomatic and accepting of people. But he has no clue how to deal with this kid from the future! LOL
And the fangirling/fanboying was so awesome! Of course, I expected it from Boimler but I was totally surprised about how much Mariner hero-worshiped Uhura. My favorite part was when Ortegas and Uhura fangirling about Mayweather and Hoshi–and also when Pike said he’d love to go and visit Archar’s Enterprise. It’s like every generation has their own heroes!
I’m still dubious about Orion “scientists”. I wrote backstory for Tendi last year about her deciding to join Starfleet. She tells her parents she wants to learn what’s out there and her parents are “What for? What do you plan on doing with the knowledge?” So, I wonder if these Orion scientists are just out for profit (especially since they did take off with the portal)
I agree with Boimler–emotive Spock is just freaky. I wonder what will happen to make Spock decide that experimenting with his human emotions is not a good idea. It’d be interesting if it involves Sybok.
The ending with the SNW crew animated–was hilarious!
A wonderful episode of both shows! I’m amazed at how well they managed to touch on character threads from both and I especially liked the meta digs (everyone talking slow, oddly specific references) and musical stings when Spock smiled or laughed.
My absolute only complaint about this episode is that animated!Pike’s hair needed to be at least…three times taller.
I haven’t seen SNW – I’m changing that right now, obviously – so I came in as a Lower Decks-er, and I think the best part from this position was absolutely the Spock/Chapel/Boimler thing, because I walked right into the same buzzsaw that Boims did. When Spock laughed at “dumb luck”, I was like “what the hell, that was weird”, and got increasingly confused by the smiles just like Boimler (the music and horror close-ups helped). I figured it out about a half-scene before Boimler did, and I thought it was really well-done, especially since the emotional stakes were made super clear even though I hadn’t seen the rest of the show.
Also, “I love grapplers.” Just hilarious the whole way through.
@Mary – I’m pretty sure the whole bit was that they were, in fact, pirates, but Pike agreeing to claim they were scientists helped pave the way for them to actually, ya know, do science. Or maybe I interpreted it completely wrong, who knows.
As Enlightenment Europe (and other eras) prove, scientists can also be pirates (Especially when archaeology is involved).
Alright, confession time: Although I’m up to date on Lower Decks, this was my first episode of Strange New Worlds entirely because I just had to see if Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome could pull it off.
And for some reason, I think this show gave even further armor against those attacks on Lower Decks for being too wacky and out there to be Star Trek. (Given that Spock’s gonna be walking around without a brain in approximately 9 years’ canon time, I really don’t think they need it, but still.) I was watching this and I felt like Boimler and Mariner were ever so subtly more subdued on the Enterprise than they were on the Cerritos — but still definitely the same people. They fit fairly well into the more dramatic moments, and it’s like their personality made everyone around them feel… lighter. I feel like Ortegas instantly took a shine to Mariner, for example. (Possibly also Boimler, come to think about it, depending on the nature of the teasing from her and Chapel?) Basically I think that it’s possible that every ship in the fleet has a comedy, a drama, and a tragedy that can be told about it, which you could argue “Trusted Sources” made the case for as well last season, and Lower Decks shows that the Cerritos just has more “Trouble with Tribbles” tales and less “City on the Edge of Forever”‘s.
And I did love how Chapel and Ortegas had no surprise whatsoever at Pike’s birthday being a holiday. I do think that what eventually happens to him (I busted a gut in the middle of that otherwise rather dramatic scene when Mariner mimes the wheelchair) has a lot to do with it, and that would probably horrify them to some degree, but this is in canon their second five year mission, right? He’s probably already low-key legendary at that point anyway.
As Frakes, Newsome and Quaid said on The Ready Room, this really DOES make it look like Ransom’s 8 feet 6 or something, considering how tall the both of them are, but that brings me back to my first point: I think that since Lower Decks is from the perspective of the Ensigns, it’s also from the perception of the Ensigns. Everything feels crazier on screen because everything feels crazier to them as people at the bottom of the ship. And of course Ransom feels a foot taller than Boimler to HIM. (I really would love a reversed crossover with Number One and Ransom meeting in 2381, by the way. When the strike is over they better get on that!) And as long as we accept that all four of the main characters are crazy history geeks with an odd personality quirk of “Really Specific References”, I can accept that they really do exist in the same world that’s going to get super dark in 4 years time. Or I can just say it’s a show, I really should relax. #MST3K
I’m an outlier in that I didn’t care for this episode at all and quit watching. I’ve not seen LD at all, so this episode had zero context for me and after the umpteenth scene of Jack Quaid (Hughie from The Boys, as I see him) going all fanboi on people I got bored and turned it off.
The story never got past the clichéd “fish out of water” part for me.
I’ve found that SNW is doing too many fun/silly episodes for my taste. 3 out of 10 episodes last season and this one too. I unsubbed to Paramount+ after the 1st season (the only reason getting it was to watch SNW) but changed my mind and decided to give the 2nd season a chance.
I’m not sure I’m going to keep watching at this point.
This worked pretty well, given what a weird pairing of shows it was. I guess it’s an appropriate pairing in a way, since both shows ride so hard on Trek nostalgia, but SNW tends to do so in a much better way than LD, actually fleshing out underdeveloped ideas rather than just tossing in a bunch of obligatory recognition-inducing in-jokes that often get in the way of LD’s stories. (I did like Number One saying “Don’t you find their references oddly specific?”)
I get tired of LD’s characters’ excessive fannishness toward Trek’s own past — especially when it’s limited mainly to references to the episodes and movies we know, instead of the vast amount of other important people and events that must exist in Starfleet history — but it worked well to send a couple of Starfleet history buffs into the very history they revere and contrast their expectations with the reality. It kind of works as a meta reference to how SNW (like ENT & DSC before it, really) develops past continuity in a way that challenges fan expectations without actually conflicting with the letter of continuity (at least, not much worse than TOS conflicted with itself).
Quaid and Newsome worked well as their characters in live action; I think I prefer them that way, since I’ve never been a fan of LD’s Simpsons-esque art style. I feel a show that’s meant to be a canonical part of the Trek universe should have a more realistic character design style. Although it’s a bit hard to explain why Boimler is so much taller in live action than animation.
I did like it that they redid the main titles in animation. Since the whole thing is CGI, I figure they just re-rendered it in cel-shading, though it was probably more involved than that, especially with the little jokes they slipped in like the nacelle-feeder and the koala.
This must have been very strange and jarring for people who haven’t watched LD before, opening with this highly cartoony comedy thing before one of the cartoon characters suddenly becomes live-action and it turns out to be an episode of SNW after all.
I do think the show is too fond of giving characters glimpses into their futures. Pike knowing his fate was one thing, but now Spock, Una, and Uhura all know they’re going to be famous in the future, which is a lot of pressure, especially for Uhura. I think I’d prefer it if Uhura hadn’t known that. Still, the way Mariner & Boimler’s future knowledge resonated with the SNW characters’ personal arcs was deftly done.
It also bugs me that the characters treat time travel so casually. I mean, the writers will bend over backward to avoid conflicting with the line about Kirk meeting Pike when he became fleet captain, but they don’t bother to reconcile with “The Naked Time” treating time travel as an unprecedented discovery. Even the Orions were totally blase about finding a time portal, when it should be a revolutionary discovery in that era. And if Starfleet was already familiar with circular artifacts you could step through to travel into the past, why were they so surprised by the Guardian of Forever?
Also, how does an ancient time portal have Nausicaan writing on it? The Nausicaans have always come across as a rather backward civilization, yet now we learn they were traveling the spaceways millennia ago and building time portals, or at least finding one and labeling it? They’ve really gone downhill since then. Why the hell did the writers choose to make the language Nausicaan instead of something else? Were they that determined to make a domjot reference?
@Keith: “It’s kind of amazing that Trek has mostly avoided a crossover like this until now.”
I can kind of see why. The crossovers you mention generally only happened between shows that were on the same network or in the same syndication package. The bionic shows stopped doing crossovers when one of them moved to a new network, and the same happened with Buffy/Angel decades later. The makers of Supergirl and The Flash had to move mountains to arrange a cross-network crossover in SG’s debut season on CBS, but when it moved to The CW, the crossovers became more frequent. Given that pattern, it is odd they didn’t do more TNG/DS9 crossovers, since those were both syndicated, but VGR was network, so its lack of crossovers with DS9 is understandable (storyline reasons aside).
@2/Mary: It makes no sense on the face of it for an entire civilization to have nothing but pirates in it. Naturally there must be a full range of different professions within Orion civilization, because that’s what a civilization is. Even pirates need support from existing institutions. TOS/TAS established that the Orion government tacitly supported the efforts of Orion pirates so that it could maintain its facade of neutrality, which means there must have been a sufficient distinction between the pirates and the rest of Orion society to allow the facade to work. Sure, it means the government was corrupt and basically in league with the pirates, like the Russian government and the mob, say; but the pirates, like the mob, are just one faction out of the entire civilization. There are no doubt plenty of honest Orion civilians who hate the bad reputation the pirates have given their people, and who are probably just as victimized by the corruption of the government as the Russian people are.
@6/wizardofwoz77: “Basically I think that it’s possible that every ship in the fleet has a comedy, a drama, and a tragedy that can be told about it”
I would be very happy to see the occasional Lower Decks episode that was a straight-up drama or tragedy. Honestly, I think the comedy is the weakest part of LD, but it’s really good at doing Trek-style episodic adventure stories. So let them go dark from time to time.
This was great. (Keith, you forgot to note that it was directed by Jonathan Frakes) Spock’s attempts at “smiling” were creepy as heck. I hope when the blu-ray for season 2 comes out (assuming one will be released) they include laugh reels from this episode. The entire cast looked like they had a blast filming it.
One thing I liked about this episode is the way it engaged with Strange New Worlds’ status as a prequel and had something to say about it. Boimler and Mariner are playing the role of fans here, watching the show and saying “this Spock and Uhura are behaving differently from the Spock and Uhura I remember”, and the show is telling us it’s okay, there’s room for lots of different stories to be told about these characters, let them live their lives.
@1 /elcinco:
According to The Ready Room, the “Riker!” (which, incidentally, had me howling with laughter too) was ab-libbed by Jack Quaid.
He couldn’t resist doing it in front of Riker himself (i.e. Jonathan Frakes, who unsurprisingly loved it).
One of the many things that worked for me was the referencing of Pike as being ‘Space Dad’. Yes, its often said in jest, but in real world one of the Captain and First Officer’s primary duties are to the overall wellbeing of the people under their command, and honestly this is something that Trek has not done traditionally as well as it could. I think one of the best aspects of his character is that he sees his crew more as family than responsibility.
But overall, this was one of the best Trek episodes in a long time. Yes, it was a gimmick, but the gimmick was used in support of character development and did it well. Fanservice done well is a good thing, too. (As I understand it, Quaid’s ‘Riker Maneuver’ was ad-libbed while looking right at Frakes and Frakes almost lost it).
I do love LD but hope they can take away from this that it’s ok for their mains to occasionally be serious and insightful more often.
I loved this episode enough to rewatch it three times (so far).
I’m curious how folks who have not watched Lower Decks will respond to the episode. I love that show but I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But I think this episode did a good job of highlighting some of the strengths of LD. The Cerritos crew might not be the ideal examples of Starfleet officers but they genuinely love the job and believe wholeheartedly in the principles the Federation represents. Especially Mariner, though she tries hard to present herself otherwise. But digging into that would not have been a good use of screen time here—having Boimler be the focus and bringing her in mid-episode was a smart choice.
It’s a minor detail but I think the animated Enterprise in the credits looked fantastic and fixed one of my quibbles about the show’s effects. It was both brightly lit and far cleaner than the regular version of the Enterprise. The simplification of detail really worked for me and came across as very TOS while still modernizing the look.
I got a good laugh at the “Remember Me” joke.
@6 you brought up a great point about perception and how the characters probably seem so much smaller than the senior officers. It goes along with why every seems to fanboy themselves- The crew of NX-1 is legendary and probably been the subject of not only countless historical texts but holovideos, dramas etc. Same thing with the legendary figures of NCC-1701 (no bloody A B C or D). For young officers these are what they’ve been told they have to follow. I’m sure young tank officers are told they’re following in the footsteps of George Patton, Pilots in the footsteps of Chuck Yeager or Ira Bong or Robin Olds, Naval Officers in the footsteps of Chester Nimitz. I think if they did anything other than gush they’d be out of character.
The perception piece also applies to Spock Was Spock really leering as Boimlet sees, or was he just so expecting the completely straight faced Spock (say circa “Reunification”) that any facial movement he perceived as massive? Also how good was the chemistry between Ethan Peck and Jack Quaid?
I loved how Pike and company treated the time travel portion- realizing it’s usefulness in the “everyone don’t look” scene. I think that’s one of the shows strength- it is a nice balance between the sometimes over serious Discovery and the totally irreverent Lower Decks.
This was a bit of a gamble for the SNW producers that really hit From the frame to frame recreation of the opening sequence (plus one nacelle sucking Alien) through the meta humor and the great character work it was really really worth the hyp
I actually really liked that the writing was in ancient Nausicaan, precisely because of the fact that, until this point, they’ve been pretty consistently depicted as a race of dumb, violent thugs, even if it does take a bit of legwork to explain (maybe they were once a powerful civilization until some calamity reduced them to a few scattered bands of pirates and mercenaries? maybe they will invent it at some point in the future and are neatly labelling it for their ancestors? or maybe it was built by someone else entirely and then stumbled upon by a Nausicaan crew, who labelled it for later reference?); I also loved that Lower Decks continues to develop the Orions, even in a crossover episode; and I loved that Boimler and Mariner, even if they’re not the best Starfleet officers, are still completely willing to put the good of a Federation colony over their own ability to return home.
My only real criticism is that I think that the episode could have used a bit more narrative tension; imposing some kind of a time limit, maybe.
@14 It may be that LD is a great show but since I’ve never seen it I was lost and the episode lost me as a result. I understand the need of the owners of the IP to milk it for every penny they can, but the crossover didn’t make me want to start watching LD, but rather quit watching SNW.
@00 / KRAD:
It’s kind of amazing that Trek has mostly avoided a crossover like this until now. TNG and DS9 played at it with occasional guest appearances, plus both shows helped set the Maquis up for Voyager, but they never really mixed it up. DS9’s “You Are Cordially Invited” should have been a TNG crossover episode, given the importance of Worf to both shows, but they couldn’t make it work.
I vaguely remember this topic being brought up back during the DS9 and VOY Rewatches.
(And I still stand by my opinion that DS9 missed an opportunity to acknowledge VOY’s disappearance and try to search for the missing vessel…and with the dramatic irony of only the audience knowing what had really happened.)
Anyway, if I remember right, Christopher Bennett pointed out that the 1990s-era TV market meant that different regions had different episodes at different times vs. simultaneous availability now in the digital era. It was less feasible to do those kinds of episodes (especially with the added complication of TNG and DS9 being first-run syndication while VOY was exclusively UPN’s).
I do think it’s gotten easier now in the digital era and the increased ascendancy of shared universes and doing full-on crossovers thanks to the MCU.
@9 I’m not sure there needs to be an honest majority of Orions more than there need to be a majority of non-logic-focused Vulcans or non-martial Klingons. Trek has always been about some species having particular characters, plus rare outliers who are frequently the first (or among the first) to tread a different path. Some of whom actively flout their species’ normal path (Sybok, to some extent Nog), but many of whom do pursue it, albeit in an unconventional way (the Klingon whose battlefield is a courtroom, the female Ferengi who assert the right to pursue profit in ways historically restricted to males).
(And yes, a society can’t plausibly function with all intellectuals or all warriors or whatever. But we can be reasonably sure that Vulcan trash collectors have a very logical approach to waste disposal, Klingon vehicle mechanics attack a bad timing belt as a personal enemy, and Ferengi clergy measure their spiritual attainment in latinum. And we’ll only see any of it when it’s funny, or when the contrast with our expectations advances the story.)
The portrayal of Orions other than Tendi in Lower Decks (and to a large extent elsewhere) suggests that she’s to Orion culture what Nog was to Ferengi culture. She doesn’t really like the baggage that comes with it and justly wants to be judged as an individual– an individual moreover who hasn’t been a pirate “for over five years”! And maybe that she’s looking hard at Orion history for signs that she’s not alone in that inclination.
(That the Orion captain in this episode wanted to be known as a scientist suggests she’s not the only one who ever felt that way. But, well, stealing things *is* the family business. And per Discovery will likely remain so for another eight centuries.)
Having a human subgroup lean into a stereotype like that would be justly offensive. But it’s historically kind of been what (some) Trek species are for. That doesn’t mean that they’re all alike anymore than Sarek is the same as Tuvok or Martok is identical to Gowron. And Trek generally comes down on the side of much of it being nurture and culture rather than primarily nature. (Worf has more natural aggression than most humans, but his more Klingon than thou bearing is a matter of conscious adoption. Spock has Vulcan drives, but has to make a positive choice with respect to whether to use a more Vulcan or human approach to dealing with them.)
But species character is a longstanding Trek shorthand, allowing for individual characters to play variations on them, or more rarely play against. At least so far, a lot of Lower Decks’ Orion humor has relied squarely on the distance Tendi genuinely wants to put between herself and piracy, and the fact that nearly every encounter she has with other Orions messes that up.
And if she’d been part of the group that time traveled, she might well have commiserated with M’Benga about how people keep calling on the skills that they really wish they didn’t have.
I am mostly ambivalent about Lower Decks. I’ll watch it in fits and starts but don’t really keep up with it like the other Trek shows. That said, this episode was pretty phenomenal. It had humor, pathos, adventure and did some interesting setup for things we will likely be seeing in the next few episodes.
My favorite scene in the episode was the one between Boimler and Chapel in the turbolift because it shows the real sense that Chapel hadn’t really thought through what a relationship with Spock would really be like. The moment when she says that she didn’t think it would be permanent and didn’t want it to be was just heartbreaking. And it was a great callback to her tendency to end things when they’re going well in “Spock Amok.”
A missed opportunity though, was that Pike didn’t ask Boimler what he was doing carrying a Section 31 communicator. After all, Ash Tyler has a very similar combadge in an episode of Discovery
I seem to recall that one of the misfits in Voyager‘s “Good Shepherd” talked about being offered a position at some extremely prestigious cosmology institute on the Orion homeworld; I don’t think that Tendi is as much of a black sheep as people seem to think.
I always enjoyed the crossovers among the Law & Order series, plus there were occasional crossovers between the original Law & Order and Homicide, both of which aired on NBC, and Munch from Homicide later joined Law & Order: SVU. The one crossover I remember being a really big deal at the time was between Boston Public (which aired on Fox) and The Practice (which aired on ABC), but both of which were produced by David Kelly.
Anyway, I loved this episode. I thought it was very clever and charming. I liked Mariner saying she was afraid Boimler had wound up in a San Francisco riot instead (a reference to one of my favorite DS9 episodes, “Past Tense”), which prompted Number One to make a comment about “oddly specific references.”
I also did not realize until I saw Jack Quaid in person that he had played one of the tributes in the first Hunger Games movie. He’s the one who killed Rue, and then Jennifer Lawrence put an arrow through his chest.
@16 ” I’m sure young tank officers are told they’re following in the footsteps of George Patton, Pilots in the footsteps of Chuck Yeager or Ira Bong or Robin Olds, Naval Officers in the footsteps of Chester Nimitz.”
And young astronauts are told they’re following in the footsteps of John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, and it’s probably hard to picture them as people and not legends. I’d geek out like nobody’s business meeting Ken Mattingly or Jim Lovell and have trouble realizing that yes, they put their pants on one leg at a time every morning, and I’m just a space program enthusiast, not an actual astronaut.
@9 The one thing is that I wonder if we could see a dark episode on Lower Decks the same way we’d see it in Strange New Worlds or Picard. I don’t even know if you could have Strange New Worlds do dark the same way Picard does, even as I keep insisting that I see the hope in that series that a lot of people missed. I feel like these characters… exist independently of their actual shows, and we see them through the frame of the show that they’re in at present. That was the basic pitch of SNW in the first place, right? “What if we just did Star Trek? But as if Gene and Gene were just starting in the here and now?” I can’t picture animated Mariner and Boimler in that scene with Pike talking about his birthday in that way; I keep running into difficulties with how they’d manage the subtle looks in that art style … but they have tackled death and thoughts of mortality like that in the series, just not in ways that tend to stick. Still, I wonder… and I’d love to see Noel Wells and Eugene Cordero play their characters in live-action as well.
(As an aside, you know where I really first started to formulate the idea in my own head that characters have their own definition of selfhood outside their shows, books, movies, and even portrayers? Not that that idea is original or anything. But it’s Kermit the Frog. Kermit to me is a character and actor that has been primarily played by three different puppeteers not counting stand-in performers, and the essence of Kermit has always been the same. He does subtly change when he’s playing a character that’s not named Kermit (that’s the other nuance people miss about the Muppets, the accepted fiction about them is that they are real, they play characters often named after them, but it’s just a story within the overall story — and don’t pay attention to that guy’s lips even if you can see him) but I feel like Jim Henson created a character, Steve Whitmire inhabited that character, and now Matt Vogel does the same.)
Love Lower Decks, but I felt like Boimler reminded me more of the season 1 version of himself in this episode, more awkward, less confident and less able. I was taken out of it over and over again by him revealing the future to those around him. I feel like the current version of Boimler would have not acted so foolishly given the situation. I did get more into in the 2nd half (partly just by accepting they aren’t going to take timeline contamination seriously, they never do).
It was fascinating to see the actors trying to mimic some of their cartoon mannerisms. Like Mariner’s bent wrist fist bump or Boimler’s way of running. Also fun to see SNW in LD style.
-Kefka
I liked this one, but didn’t love it.
Jack Quad and Tawny Newsome ABSOLUTELY crushed it as the live action versions of their characters. They were hilarious and meshed well with the rest of the SNW cast. And we got plenty of little character moments. La’an makes a comment about the relationship with the alternate reality version of Kirk. We see how the Spock/Chapel romance is going. Uhura hangs out with Mariner. We find out that Ortegas is a war hero and Number One is a literal poster child for Starfleet.
Where is was a miss for me is that the stakes were virtually non-existant. I love the fact that SNW (and LD) are low stakes shows, compared to Discovery or Picard where there is a galaxy ending threat every season. However, this one was a bit too low stakes for me.
Boimler and Mariner show up on the Enterprise, they mildly inconvenience everyone and they have to deal with some non-threatening Orions to get back home. So there wasn’t really much of a story and there wasn’t much of a theme either. Something about the Enterprise characters geeking out over the NX-01 makes them the same as the LD characters geeking out over the Enterprise? And something about have confidence in yourself because in the future you are all legends?
I never got the impression that Boimler and Mariner being in the past was much of a problem nor would there be any consequences if they didn’t return, other than the general idea that they shouldn’t be there because they could mess with the timeline.
Fun episode with great characters and great character moments, but probably the thinnest plot of any (episodic) Star Trek episode I can recall.
@17/jaimebabb: “My only real criticism is that I think that the episode could have used a bit more narrative tension; imposing some kind of a time limit, maybe.”
Boimler & Mariner would’ve been stranded permanently in the past, forced to isolate themselves to avoid altering the timeline, if they hadn’t gotten the portal to work. I’d say that was sufficient tension.
@20/mschiffe: “I’m not sure there needs to be an honest majority of Orions more than there need to be a majority of non-logic-focused Vulcans or non-martial Klingons.”
But that kind of stereotyping is racist as hell, and it’s a terrible, ugly habit of Trek and other sci-fi that needs to stop, period. We’re talking about a whole species, a whole civilization of billions of people. Even a small minority of a billion people is still going to be a sizeable community, so it’s irrationally simplistic to assume it’s nonexistent except for one or two people.
As I said, TOS/TAS and ENT’s portrayal of the Orions implies a corrupt government in bed with the Orion Syndicate, like Russia and the mob. So maybe the state is intrinsically criminal. But it’s a mistake to equate the character of the state with the character of the people. Maybe the rank-and-file Orions hate their corrupt leadership but are too afraid to defy it.
Also, watching the animated intro of SNW makes it obvious how underlit the live action version is. They should redo the SNW intro where the Enterprise is properly lit.
Unlike krad, i love Lower Decks from the beginning. I don’t take it too seriously as it does not take itself too seriously, but at the time of Discovery and then Picard, it was awesome to have a show that has 1) primarily single, SHORT stories, 2) is finally not about saving the bloody universe in every single episode – it gets really tiring and 3) there are great characters in the show.
This crossover was really fun and entertaining and really well executed. The SNW characters a bit more like LD characters and the LD characters were very cool to see in real life and acting a bit more human. :)
The story was simple, but not annoying or dumb, good dialogues, good dynamics for the story (ok, i think Frakes is one of the best directors in Star Trek, so no surprise), so i was very happy with this episode overall.
On the subject of a darker Lower Decks episode, I would say that “Trusted Sources” basically became a drama about halfway through its run-time, and that the situation with the Texas-class ships in the next episode was treated about as seriously as anything has been on that series. Also I suspect that it’s inevitable that they will, sooner or later, take on the “redshirt” issue.
@24/wizardofwoz77 – For what it’s worth, I completely agree with your assessment that Picard was a great deal more optimistic than most fans seem to think (or, at least, that it’s first two seasons were; I thought its third was dystopian in a way that the script never bothered to acknowledge).
LD is generally mediocre to me so it’s not surprising that I found most of this episode mediocre. The exceptions were Chapel’s revelation in the turbolift and Una’s reaction when she heard about the poster. Those two parts made watching it worthwhile. I’m a bit on the side of the person upstream who is tired of the lighter episodes. I’m really not looking forward to the musical. That’s something you typically see in the 10th season of a show when they’re out of every other idea. I don’t think SNW needs it. I certainly don’t want it.
I had a smile on my face for this entire episode. Its one of my favorite episodes of New Trek to date. I particularly loved some of the smaller, almost toss away jokes. Like every time Pike is chastising Boimler/Mariner, he’s slightly flattered by their admiration at the same time. His smirk when he learns that Boimler dressed as him for Halloween was just precious.
And I think my favorite line of the night is towards the end when they are removing the floor panel to get to the piece of the original Enterprise, when Pelia decries them removing her floor because, in her words, “I use that!” Spock’s reply, “It is illogical to assume that you are the only one.” absolutely sent me.
But even from the first scene I was giggling. “Help!, the portal’s trying to portal me!” “Stop lurching towards it!”
Side note, Tendi is my favorite LD character, and I want more focus on her next season.
I really liked this episode, and enjoyed the fact everyone seemed to be having a blast, and the multiple layers of references and basically giving the reason for it in universe be that they are all just huge Star Trek fans was wonderful.
I did have a small nitpick that stuck out for me though, and that was “Una is the literal poster girl for Starfleet recruitment”. It’s a lovely sentiment and pays off “Ad Astra per Aspera”, but I can’t see how it would work. A recruitment posters purpose is basically to say “You can be like me, and do what I do” – except if you are like Una, you explicitly can’t be in Starfleet. Augments are banned from service, and still are 120 years later. She’s only still an officer on a extreme technicality (and having a TV contract). We’ve even been told that she only got in to begin with because she “passes” as human.
It just struck me as a bit off the mark when they’ve been really good at being open that it’s a commentary on gay and trans rights, as well as prejudice in general, it came off as “don’t worry, she’s one of the good ones!” – and Ransoms comment at the end just doubles down by basically saying “it’s also because she’s gorgeous”. Just felt off to me in an otherwise great episode.
I feel like this will either be a 10 or 9 for Fans of Lower Decks and a 2 to 4 for people who don’t like Lower Decks style humor. A lot of people really don’t like the fast paced hilarious, “These guys are terrible at their jobs” fiction being canonized as part of the “main” Trek timeline. Hell, there’s plenty of people that absolutely hate Strange New Worlds and wish it was the Kelvin timeline (even though Pike would be crippled or dead). However, for someone who DOES love Lower Decks, I loved it.
* Boimler being terrible at not breaking the rules despite being a stuck up rules boy being lampshaded by Pike? Awesome.
* I like La’an lampshading that you shouldn’t get attached.
* Ransom complimenting No. 1 makes perfect sense since he married her in RL.
* I hate that Tendi and Rutherford didn’t get to be in the past.
* I already want a sequel to this stunt. Send Christopher Pike to the Cerritos!
* I HATED Nurse Chapel being devastated that Spock and she don’t go the distance. BAD BOIMLER.
* Boimler telling Pike that he might erase Tendi and cause a paradox was actually a good moment to share information.
* Simultaneously, I wanted Boimler to be Una’s grandson or something? I’m a sick man.
* This episode does thread the needle of Spock’s more emotional portrayal in THE CAGE versus the later TOS era.
I mean, we all agree that it may be a recruitment poster, but Boimler is using it for other purposes–right? By which, of course, I mean he’s a collector of vintage art! The equivalent of a Rosie the Riveter or snub nose art from WW2 for us in the modern day. What did you think I meant?
Lower Decks generally embraces the diversity of the individual experience so Tendi is an Orion who is not a sex-slave/pirate and we have a Kzin officer. While we can say they’re “one of the good ones” (like Una!), that’s actually something they try to avoid. Tendi gives a perfectly valid point that, “of course Orion scientists exists [like Klingons] because who would make the ships?” It’s also why I liked the Nausicaans had a time portal in their distant past at some point. Because why not?
It reminded me a bit of an Alien Nation (remember that show?) line where the protagonist finds out his neighbor is a different religion than his partner. He goes, “You have different religions? *beat* Of course you do, why wouldn’t you?”
9.5/10 for me
@C.T. Phipps: It’s equally possible that time travel portal is also in their distant future, Time Travel being a ***** on tenses and generally a pain in the brain when it comes to linear thinking to boot.
Still, I do like the suggestion that there’s much more to Nausicaans than “Makes life in any pool hall more interesting, in the same way a resident population of crocodiles lends interest to any swimming hole”.
Quoth Christopher: “Also, how does an ancient time portal have Nausicaan writing on it? The Nausicaans have always come across as a rather backward civilization, yet now we learn they were traveling the spaceways millennia ago and building time portals, or at least finding one and labeling it? They’ve really gone downhill since then. Why the hell did the writers choose to make the language Nausicaan instead of something else? Were they that determined to make a domjot reference?”
Quoth Christopher a bit later: “But that kind of stereotyping is racist as hell, and it’s a terrible, ugly habit of Trek and other sci-fi that needs to stop, period. We’re talking about a whole species, a whole civilization of billions of people. Even a small minority of a billion people is still going to be a sizeable community, so it’s irrationally simplistic to assume it’s nonexistent except for one or two people.”
The second comment quoted above nicely answers the first one, methinks.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I actually kind of hate that Boimler is being racist in that opening scene with Tendi. I thought he’d be better than that.
And the joke is that the Orions DID steal that portal.
Probably to STUDY it.
Quoth C.T. Phipps: “A lot of people really don’t like the fast paced hilarious, ‘These guys are terrible at their jobs’ fiction being canonized as part of the ‘main’ Trek timeline.”
I must remind you of DeCandido’s First Rule: Don’t mistake a few fans bitching on the Internet for any kind of trend. So unless you have actual numbers to back up your statement, I challenge your “a lot.”
And in any case, that ship sailed on LD itself with the appearances of Riker, Troi, Kira, Quark, etc.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
That made it hit home for me. It reminded me a bit about how Lawrence of Arabia is one of the greatest of British soldiers and you wouldn’t have his personal life acknowledged even a century later by many.
I take Lower Decks to be a direct sequel to Star Trek: The Animated Series and that there’s a bit more hyper-stylized goings on than in the main continuity but in this case, Riker, Troi, Kira, Quark, and so on appearing on Lower Decks is one thing. The Lower Deckers being acknowledge on the live action show is another. If the California Class starts showing up in other shows, that is a lot more acknowledgement.
Before, we only had the acknowledgement that Replicators really love making hot bananas.
I found myself smiling through most of this episode. This is exactly how I imagined Boimler and Mariner would behave if thrust backward in time to bask in the presence of their heroes. An above comment said that the humor reminded them of first season Lower Decks rather than its more recent, less reference-heavy episodes, but I think that was inevitable, seeing as Boimler and Mariner were literally surrounded by the history they used to constantly reference.
I think Quaid and Newsome did an admirable job of bringing their animation characters into live action, ever so slightly subdued, while the entire SNW cast did a great job of playing slightly sillier versions of themselves (except Melissa Navia as Ortegas, who didn’t need to change a thing). Of course all of them will really get the chance to let their hair down in the upcomming musical episode.
As for whether or not the Orions actually were pirates, I like to think they really were the Orion version of scientists who were genuinely curious about the nature of the portal but, being Orions, were still not above trying to profit by its discovery, first by stealing it, then by trading it for the grain. In the end you can tell that the captain really is touched by the opportunity to be taken seriously as a scientist.
@11:
the show is telling us it’s okay, there’s room for lots of different stories to be told about these characters, let them live their lives.
Given that it’s the same show that is telling the different stories about these characters, I’m inevitably reminded of Mandy Rice-Davies: “Well, they would, wouldn’t they?”
@35/krad: “The second comment quoted above nicely answers the first one, methinks.”
They’re not the same thing at all, because one is about individual variations in the present, and the other is about the progress of the civilization over thousands of years. If the Nausicaans were starfaring thousands of years ago, conceivably even building time machines, then they were once hugely more advanced than they are now. That’s a really big revelation to drop without following up on it.
@39/David Pirtle: I disagree with the assertion that the Orions “stole” the portal. It didn’t belong to anyone; it was a relic of a lost civilization (apparently). Nobody had a claim to it, so arguably they weren’t doing anything legally or ethically wrong by taking it — although that action was certainly archaeologically wrong, because removing an artifact from its context before you’ve fully studied it in situ is really bad science.
And there’s certainly nothing criminal about asking for a fair trade for something somebody wants from you.
Some of the things I loved about this episode is how Pike is just done with Boimler and Mariner’s antics. Its like he appreciates the enthusiasm but at the same time he wants these two off asap as they are just a lot. Both Quaid and Newsome clearly had a fun time getting to do this, and that just makes me smile. I also do appreciate the low energy. There isn’t a real crisis or end the universe threat, its just antics with these characters meeting each other with some very good character moments for the crew of SNW. I showed this episode to a friend who isn’t really a fan of Star Trek at all and he was enjoying it, he even said he would like to see more of Lower Decks. So, yeah, this is just a fun episode.
Excellent episode. Also, pretty much everything in pretty much every British history museum shows that you can be both a scientist and a pirate
SLANDER! The Elgin Marbles were purchased outright … admittedly from an occupying power that had allowed the Parthenon to be blown up in the first place, but money absolutely changed hands!
…
Also, we have some fairly nice watercolours!
I’m not a fan of LD but this was a very entertaining episode so I guess that’s saying something. I never really laughed out loud but there was certainly a lot of cuteness. Newsome and Quaid acquitted themselves and came across as believable characters and toned down from their roles on LD. I believe that made them bearable. I also like how the aspect ratio changed from filling the whole screen for the animated parts to the narrower, cinematic aspect ratio of the live-action parts. While that’s just how each of these series is regularly shot and broadcast, that aspect ratio change helped sell the transfer of Boimler from the animated universe to the live-action universe (a huge coincidence that the Enterprise away team happens to be standing right at the portal when Boimler drops in). I also was surprised that the episode started off in animated format because I just assumed the show would be in live-action the whole way through. So having the animated opening and coda (particularly with the Enterprise crew getting rendered 2-D) was a delight. I’m not sure if this episode was really about anything (maybe being careful about meeting your heroes or don’t stereotype whole races of people) but who cares when it’s this much fun.
Too bad Pelia wasn’t rendered in animated form at the end too.
A nit would be how casually the Enterprise crew treats time travel. It just seemed to be a big deal on TOS and then how I grew up with as portrayed in the TNG-era, but chronologically in an even earlier era here it’s treated like no big whoop.
I guess season 2 of SNW will be known as the season of gimmicks what with this crossover episode and the upcoming musical episode. I definitely applaud this taking risks approach of the showrunners in keeping things fresh because fresh ideas at this point in the franchise are hard to come by.
Krad, Quark also makes a crossover appearance on Voyager, in the pilot no less.
On a related Trek tangent, Michelle Hurd and Armin Shimmerman are among the guests on Garrett Wang and Robert Duncan McNeill’s most recent episode of their Voyager podcast. However, instead of the usual recapping of an episode, this latest entry is used for Hurd and Shimmerman to talk about the ongoing actors strike as they are former or current heads of SAG-AFTRA. What they relay to the audience about how unfairly and poorly compensated the majority of actors are, and the contrasting greed of the studios and streamers (like, ahem, Paramount+) will surely infuriate any listener. So I hope the strike lasts as long as necessary for the actors (and likewise, the writers, in their concurrent strike) to get the concessions they are demanding. New Star Trek content can surely wait until these matters are resolved.
@44 Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the crew of the Enterprise is so nonchalant about time travel is because they have encountered it before because of what happened in Discovery, and several other time travel antics that have happened to them. After all, Pike, Una, Spock and L’ana would have witnessed time travel or at lest bizarre time visions at this point
@44/garreth: “(a huge coincidence that the Enterprise away team happens to be standing right at the portal when Boimler drops in)”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all. I mean, Boimler was talking about wishing he could be in the 23rd century and meet the Starfleet heroes of that era. I presume the time portal was voice-activated or thought-activated and sent him to the time he had in mind when it powered up.
I liked this a lot. I am deeply ambivalent about Lower Decks–I really quite like the characters and some of the stories, but I don’t particularly like the style of humor or the animation or a lot of the writing. So oddly enough live-action Lower Decks was for me kind of everything I like about Lower Decks without the things I disliked. The humor was subtler, more character-based, less gross, and as everyone has said the actors did an incredible job bringing their characters to life. And as Keith said above, even the rough edges of the characters (esp Mariner, who does sometimes get on my nerves a bit) seemed sanded off just in seeing as actual people in physical space.
A lot of that, of course, came from being meshed with Strange New Worlds more grounded, character-based humor. Which was very well done, especially in the stuff with Spock and Chapel and La’an. The scene with Chapel in particular was weirdly devastating. It made the meta point about Spock/Chapel that every fan with knowledge of TOS would make, but is nonetheless played completely straight as a character moment. Very well done.
I like the discussion above about Star Trek’s penchant for simplifying cultures, but imo the random Nausicaan reference is kind of exactly how to complicate things. As a historian it seems obvious to me that in Star Trek the Starfleet characters are mostly interacting with the elite power centers and dominant classes or professional cadres of alien species. One could make a very similar point about the Starfleet characters themselves, who are clearly much more similar to each other and mono-cultured than one would expect from a vast civilization like the UFP. This is sort of the whole point of a professional/military organization, though: to socialize and indoctrinate people into a particular set of cultural values and ways of life and hierarchies and ideologies and beliefs that fit their (usually privileged) role and function. Similarly, of Klingons the dominant noble/warrior class and their retainers are most of what we see of the society–and so on and so forth. And I mean, my favorite Star Trek race is the Cardassians for a reason: for me they very much are the gold standard for a Star Trek species portrayal, precisely because we’re actually explicitly shown and told that a very particular and extreme elite group and ideology is politically and socially dominant and also *how* and *why* that group manages to dominate so thoroughly a more diverse society with a complicated history and the inevitable strains of that system and how it all falls apart.
It’s actually not at all implausible to have a culture that is focused around something like piracy. though. In history, these cultures are often called “marginal,” and there are generally always a decent number of them existing around the edges of major Empires like Rome or China. They define themselves largely by opposition to or with reference to this dominant Imperial system, and their societies are built around the resources and prestige to be gotten from trade with and/or military alliance with and/or actual piracy and raiding of that dominant culture. Hence you had Germanic tribes whose whole way of life was based alliances and conflicts and pillaging and trading with Rome and whose social hierarchies were defined by possession of Roman goods.
Now of course how that works with a whole species like the Nausicaans or the Orions is more complicated. But if I had to speculate the Orions seem like a fairly straightforward trading/merchant society like the Phoenicians with actual power centers but somewhat in decline and dominated by the mercantile class and the wealth that comes in from trade and piracy around larger civilizations. In particular, they seem to have their own strong sense of cultural pride and their own power centers, even if we mostly see them around other more, powerful groups. Still, we rarely see Orions working for others, for instance. The fact that they sell their own people into slavery is not that crazy.
The Nausicaans seem more truly marginal, as we almost always see them doing more petty piracy or serving other, more powerful civilizations–and one could speculate that perhaps they did have a more centralized civilization but it was destroyed in some cataclysm or fell apart internally. Historical groups that tend to give lots of mercenaries and bodyguards and enforcers to other cultures are often ones in the middle of some horrific internal process of dissolution. Hence the German mercenaries that filled Europe during and after the Thirty Years War, or Irish mercenaries after the occupation of Ireland.
Anyway, those are random thoughts, but as I said, I think it’s fine for Star Trek given its generic nature to focus in on elite power centers and dominant groups in its civilizations (even Starfleet and the Federation!), so long as it puts in enough references to show that non-elite and subaltern groups exist and/or that there is a more complicated history of development behind it. For that purpose, “random” factoids and appearances and references where members of the species past or present don’t perfectly match their contemporary elite cultural values is actually a very effective and value-added way to do that imo. A little goes a very long way.
It was my understanding that they were not actually stealing the shuttle but were trying to use it’s communications array for McGuffin related reasons?
I think detailed sociological worldbuilding is a fine way to write a story. I think that broad strokes and Planets of Hats is also a fine way to write a story. (Vulcans and Klingons clearly both strike a chord with fans in a way that’s much harder for a more multidimensional alien polyculture.) It depends on the particular story the writer is trying to tell.
The repeated close juxtaposition of Tendi’s defensiveness and immediate evidence of either general Orion or her own past larceny is funny, which is a fine thing in a comedy like Lower Decks, or a largely comic episode like this one. (And I don’t think it’s remotely analogous to real world bigotry, since there are no Orions to be harmed by it.)
If someone wanted to apply the full John M. Ford Klingon treatment to the Orions, I imagine that would be a good story in a different way. But I don’t think it’s something that’s owed to the nonexistent Orions, or that it’s a problem that speculative fiction includes fictional species who don’t reflect the complexity of real-world humanity.
There’s a place for logical Vulcans, obstreperous Tellarites, noble elves, maleficent vampires, and avaricious dragons without requiring an asterisk that “they’re not all like that”. At least until and unless it becomes important to the story someone is telling that that’s the case, as with Tendi herself.
@48 I believe that is correct. Why two of the other shuttles were launching is left as an exercise for the viewer.
I thought the OTHER meta aspect about Una’s poster was her outrage about being considered a pinup girl. Amused me greatly.
I also would have liked to have seen Rutherford and Tendi in live-action form. And Ransom too. The writers could have found a way to have all of those characters transported to the past and then we could have had a buffed up Jerry O’Connell heavily flirting with his wife.
And I’m all for more crossovers across the other Trek series moving forward. I’d love to see the Prodigy kids all grown up and serving in Starfleet as adults on a Star Trek: Legacy if that comes to fruition.
@49/mschiffe: “(And I don’t think it’s remotely analogous to real world bigotry, since there are no Orions to be harmed by it.)”
The problem is that it requires the Starfleet heroes to think about alien cultures in a way that makes them come off as racist and simpleminded. They should be better than that.
“There’s a place for logical Vulcans, obstreperous Tellarites, noble elves, maleficent vampires, and avaricious dragons without requiring an asterisk that “they’re not all like that”.”
I think it’s lazy writing to reduce a fictional society to a monoculture. It makes them feel caricatured and unrealistic. People today forget that what defined Star Trek to begin with, what set it apart from everything else in SFTV in both the TOS and TNG eras, was that it made an effort to be plausible and grounded. It took liberties with physics, astronomy, and biology sometimes for the sake of the story, but it strove for naturalism and believable complexity in the portrayal of the characters. And surely the portrayal of a character’s culture should be equally believable and nuanced. Granted, TOS was itself prone to racial essentialism, but that kind of thinking was commonplace in the ’60s. These days, we should know better.
It was only in this episode as Peck’s grinning face filled the screen that I realized this whole Spock experimenting with expressing his emotions storyline is to justify the expressive Spock of The Cage. Continuity nerds, unite!
@54/Cc: But the events of “The Cage” happened several years in the past chronological to this episode. If the writers wanted, they could have already transitioned Spock to being more emotionless but it’s obviously something they want to play with until they get him to the more logical Vulcan of TOS.
@55 / Garreth:
Right, it’s one the ways for the Writers Room to do something new with Spock after 57 years — and because the character’s fate and arc being locked in by TOS canon.
We know these experiments are doomed to failure. We know Spock’s going to become emotionless come TOS, that he’ll pursue the Kholinar in TMP, and then ultimately have an epiphany thanks to melding with V’Ger.
This is all actually a clever reconciliation of the early TOS Spock and Classic Spock — but one that still fills in an uncharted era of the character’s life.
Hell, developing T’Pring has also yielded dramatic dividends and filled in major gaps in Spock’s backstory.
I really liked Mariner’s comment about everyone in Strange New Worlds talking slower. It took me a while to enjoy Lower Decks because the characters spoke too quickly and too loudly. So it almost seems like an acknowledgement of a valid criticism.
@55/garreth: “But the events of “The Cage” happened several years in the past chronological to this episode.”
Sure, but Spock’s been relatively more open and expressive throughout SNW and perhaps DSC too. Here we see a Spock who’s approachable and interested in being friends with his crewmates, unlike the more icy, aloof Spock of TOS. (And it’s interesting that the one person he shows a willingness to open up with in season 1 — even giving a borderline smile at one point — is Uhura, his longtime crewmate from the period when he was more open to friendships.)
@58 / CLB:
Here we see a Spock who’s approachable and interested in being friends with his crewmates, unlike the more icy, aloof Spock of TOS. (And it’s interesting that the one person he shows a willingness to open up with in season 1 — even giving a borderline smile at one point — is Uhura, his longtime crewmate from the period when he was more open to friendships.)
Right. Again, because Spock’s character arc’s locked in for TOS and the Movies, it sets up a nice mini-mystery here: How does Spock go from what we’re seeing here in SNW (and how it’s reconciling his depiction in “The Cage”) to what we’ll see a decade hence?
What happens that would make Spock cut off those relationships and socialization before Kirk and McCoy come aboard and get him to slowly start thawing out again?
@59/Mr. Magic: My guess is the paradox Boimler created by informing Chapel that Spock reverts to his emotionless demeanor causes Chapel to preemptively “break up” with Spock even though he’s already in love with her. The shock of that turns his Vulcan heart steely cold. Time loop closed.
This was truly one of the best hours of television I’ve seen is years. Funny and touching, the mention of the NX-01, the animated parts, just wonderful stuff.
@60 / Garreth:
Works for me.
And the fallout of Chapel’s breakup could also add to the tensions between him and T’Pring that will bring us to “Amok Time”.
*YANKED INTO A PORTAL*
”REMEMBER ME!”
@55 – He was still Smiley Spock in Where No Man Has Gone Before.
KIRK: Have I ever mentioned you play a very irritating game of chess, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: Irritating? Ah, yes. One of your Earth emotions.
I admit I like the retcon of Chapel and Spock. It’s significantly less pathetic to not-so-subtly try to awaken a past relationship versus pining for someone who was never interested.
@20
”Klingon vehicle mechanics attack a bad timing belt as a personal enemy”
There’s a list of “Things you may have heard from Klingon Programmers “ that’s been floating around since Ye Olde Days of Usenet. It evolves as technology evolves and as new versions of Klingons are unleashed (Klingon software is not “released”, it escapes, leaving a bloody trail of QA testers behind) on Star Trek.
Based on the closing gag, somebody on Tumblr suggested that the only reason Lower Decks looks so cartoony is because everyone’s constantly buzzed on Orion liquor.
@60 said: My guess is the paradox Boimler created by informing Chapel that Spock reverts to his emotionless demeanor causes Chapel to preemptively “break up” with Spock even though he’s already in love with her. The shock of that turns his Vulcan heart steely cold. Time loop closed.
That’s my thought as well. It occurs to me that we likely will also see Spock have to deal with Chapel having a whirlwind romance with Roger Korby. I forget – does “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” specify how long Korby was missing?
@67 / lisriba:
Heh, which would explain a lot about the insanity of the Cerritos and their perspective of the Trek-verse, wouldn’t it?
One of the best things in this episode was how much it functionally just was a LWD episode. SNW typically has pretty big stakes, like Gorn attacks or aliens hypnotizing everyone on the ship or a diplomatic treaty getting a huge wrench thrown in it because one of the diplomats accidentally became his fiancee, and it must have been tempting to have Mariner and Boimler slide into those quadrant-sized adventures and solve them in their own sideways fashion. And, to be clear, I would have enjoyed that. But this whole episode is just a character exercise where the major conflict is simply getting the dang time portal to work, and I enjoy that more.
The episode also has the biggest endorsement I know of: my wife, who isn’t a big fan of Star Trek in general, looked at me afterwards and said, “I kind of want to watch some Lower Decks now.”
@68/twels: “I forget – does “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” specify how long Korby was missing?”
Five years prior to the episode, or the year after the current SNW season.
@70/CWatson: “One of the best things in this episode was how much it functionally just was a LWD episode.”
I got that sense too, particularly with the way the resolved things with the Orions just by talking it out, and the “That’s all we ever wanted” line. It felt very LD.
But then, I believe this was written by LD writers, so it makes sense.
I love Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, so I was prepared…or so I thought. I’m having to pause and rewind cause I’m laughing and I wanna hear the jokes again. I also loved the brighter animated Enterprise, it was actually the correct color for once. Nothing irks me about the Secret Hideout era more than the fact that everything is so visually dark. Picard s3 was barely visible til I turned up the brightness in my settings.
I can’t believe they put the Nacelle Feeder and the Koala in the intro.
It’s rather par for the course that Boimler freaked out and that Mariner adapted relatively quickly. Even with character development Boimler’s flaw is he tries so hard that he screws himself up. But he was also awe struck. Normally Boimler has a problem of being a kiss up and wanting to be seen, but here it’s different. Boimler wants to not screw up, but he’s surrounded by heroes and is internally desperate to tell them how awesome and influential they are and how important and inspiring they have and will be for him, but he knows that not only is it breaking the rules, it’s also entirely possible that saying anything could actively disrupt them being said legends.
Mariner on the other hand is more experienced and generally sidestepped the whole thing by focusing on the personal rather than the legend. Yes she glazed Uhura quite nicely, but when Uhura wouldn’t chill out she switched into the same problem solving mode that she uses to help Boimler improve. Mariner and Ortegas clicking immediately was fantastic, especially since if you think about it, they’re both pilots.
Also, the way that Mariner was sitting in Uhura’s quarters when the scene opened, it was like she was waiting for Mom to tell her a story, quite adorable.
Tawny and Jack absolutely KILLED it. I had always had problems translating what Mariner would be like in real life as she seems almost way too ludicrous, and I always thought that their voices had to be a little altered from their normal speaking, but they really inhabited the roles. And seeing them in live action really made then click. Though Mariner’s hair looked more like in the DS9 flashback than the LD present. Now I really wanna see Freeman’s hair in live action.
And yes, Pike’s animated hair was SO low I didn’t recognize him, hard fail animation team…though it DOES track with Mariner’s live action hair actually being more voluminous than live action, so that’s actually consistent.
Pike’s reactions were very good. He was obviously THROUGH with everything, but he also didn’t want to crush the hero worship either, not from his own ego, but because it meant that everything he had been through and would go through would continue to inspire and have positive impact more than a century later, and Pike is wise enough to appreciate how remarkable that is. Mariner and Boimler actually giving Una the whole story about the poster is a similar gift. Her tribulations even if they haven’t advanced the cause of augments and Ilyrians, did in fact inspire others as Una was herself inspired. She isn’t a footnote, or a cautionary tale, she’s a legend. A hero to generations of Starfleet Officers. And Starfleet itself values her excellence so much, that they put her forth as the best of Starfleet a century later, so that others might follow in her footsteps. A misdemeanor violation of the Temporal Prime Directive, but one that means so much. Honestly the episode hit me because it is a time travel wish fulfillment dream of mine. To go back in time to people who really moved history forward to something better and let them know, that their struggles, their battles, their sorrows, their triumphs….they mattered, or to take it from Kirk, that “you (made) a difference.” To, give them the flowers they’d never get to receive otherwise, not from the people who knew them, but from the people who heard about them, and were in awe.
On the subject of the Orions, I like how it dovetailed with all the beta canon on the Orions. If you go to Memory Beta’s article on Orions it points out that Orions have great reverence for Starship Captains and ESPECIALLY Pioneers. It’s a position that can inspire great loyalty, requires lots of guts, and quick thinking. I think Harr Caras was especially validated that the Captain of a Federation Exploration ship gave him that validation.
As for the Nausicaans, it can go either way. It could be that it’s Nausicaan graffiti, or it could be a notation from an ancient Nausicaan team that found it, had their own time travel adventure and wanted to leave a warning. At the other end, we could have a legitimate foundation for a Nausicaan legend arc, where the Nausicaans were a great advanced civilization that suffered an even more catastrophic collapse than Orion civilizations have. Imagine if the Nausicaans were involved in a Temporal War that ended up with their civilization either being bombed back to the stone age, or temporal edited to be little more than taller more successful Kazons. That portal may be one of the last vestiges of high Nausicaan technology. OR neither the Orions or Starfleet, but instead the Nausicaans found it first.
@34, C.T. Phipps: “A lot of people really don’t like the fast paced hilarious, ‘These guys are terrible at their jobs’ fiction being canonized as part of the ‘main’ Trek timeline.”
I would offer a rebuttal to anyone who would say that. They’re really not terrible at their jobs. They’re rebellious (Mariner), still growing confidence and finding themself (Boimler and Tendi), and markedly excellent and happy where they are (Rutherford). But Mariner is actually hyper competent when motivated, to the point that she’s gotten baseless Mary Sue accusations, Boimler has proven he has chops on multiple occasions, Tendi is consistently recognized for being excellent and being pushed into training to accelerate her career, and Rutherford is a superlative young engineer who is also pretty good at security, terrible at command, and has saved the day more than once.
@33 It’s barely possible that Starfleet reversed or modified its policy on Augments between DS9 and Lower Decks. (Unless I missed something that rules that out, which is possible.) In which case putting Una on a poster could have been a deliberate recognition of past mistakes.
(I really wish they’d just deep six the whole question. DS9 is one of the best Trek series ever, but that and Section 31 are not the enduring legacy I’d have preferred.)
@72 Agreed. A recurring theme of Lower Decks is that the Cali class crew, for all its foibles, is very much Starfleet when it comes down to it. (Mariner most of all, even if it takes her three seasons to cop to it.)
Even their screwups are frequently playing off things done in other Trek series, just looking at them from a comedic angle. If anything they’re more careful about some things, because of their encyclopedic knowledge of what previously happened with malicious AIs and space anomalies.
I was sold on the episode at the phrase…
“One hero told me:
I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.“
The hero was Cary Grant
I was sold on the episode at the phrase…
“One hero told me:
I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.“
The hero was Cary Grant
@38 C.T. Phipps: Laurence is a good example, though oddly enough from what I’ve read that at the time the great scandal fear among his contemporaries wasn’t so much his possible homosexually, as he’d made some references to it in his writing, but rather the fact he was the legitimate son of a minor aristocrat – that and his parents “living in sin” was what they found shocking.
About 30 years ago I was briefly slightly obsessed with him when I found out he was also the T.E. Shaw who had translated the first copy of The Odyssey I’d read, which caused a lifelong love of Homer, (though now I go back and forth between him and Lombardo for my least favourite translation), but is so long ago I’m potentially miss-remembering it, or I read bad sources then.
The fact that I don’t think a real life example of a famous, openly gay, American/Allied service person from equivalent eras of time who could have been used on a recruitment poster during “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” exists is kind of why it seemed a little off to me, but I’m probably overthinking it.
@73 mschiffe: 2380, 5 years after DS9 ended, so if Boimler was a year or two out of the academy there would potentially be just enough time for Starfleet to repeal the Augment ban and to have Una as the poster woman in time to inspire him to join – but that would make Prodigy non canon as the ban is still in place in 2383 to prevent Dal from joining.
DS9 is my favourite Trek series, despite the Augment ban and Section 31 being two of the worst things to ever happen to the franchise, but I wouldn’t want to sacrifice Prodigy even if doing so would get rid of both :(
While a reference to another episode of SNW, I’m inclined to think that Captain Batel (and her like) is why the Augment ban actually lasted until DS9, which may strike Christopher Bennett and KRAD as counter-intuitive but actually does reflect a real life phenomenon. Basically, there’s quite a few unjust laws on the books that rarely get enforced or when they are enforced then they are softpedaled with deals or people trying to make it less of an issue. This actually does a great deal to keep them from being openly repealed. Batel tried to do it so that Una just got a dishonorable discharge and while that’s horrifying and unjust, it would just make the problem disappear.
“Go, Una, enjoy your 20 years of Starfleet experience and go pilot a freighter somewhere.”
And Batel is just trying to minimize the damage and do the right thing. However, making a huge issue and stink out of things is how change happens.
Julian Bashir gets a pretty sweet deal and while that’s a “happy ending.” It’s yet another case of Starfleet making the problem quietly vanish rather than confronting it.
@76 Dracomilan: after watching that scene I had
“How Old Cary Grant?”
“Old Cary Grant Fine. How you?”
in my head (even though I know it’s meant to be apocryphal!), loved that scene – made Pelia more of a full real character to me as we’ve seen so little of her so far this season.
@78: that makes a lot of sense, as both times it’s come to the fore as something that can’t be brushed under a rug, it’s been the episodes “antagonist” who have made a big deal of it; Zimmerman in DS9, who’s portrayed as something of a creep, and Admiral Pasik in SNW, who gave off real Justice Scalia “being proved innocent of the crime doesn’t bar us from executing you if you had a trial” vibes.
@78 Of course you’re right – I’d forgotten about that plot point on Prodigy. Maybe Discovery can establish that it was dropped before the turn of the millennium at least.
Whatever I think of it, the Augment ban clearly does seem to resonate with the writers, doesn’t it?
I’m impressed just how Paramount/CBS moved up the season with such ease. The episode was already available for streaming on my home’s Amazon Prime/Paramount+ combo last Saturday (Latin America). Between that and the San Diego Comic-Con Trek event, that must have been quite a coordinated worldwide effort. If only the studio/streamer had that same willingness and put that same effort to actually pay the writers and actors what they’re actually worth. CEO greed will be the industry’s downfall.
I’ve seen crossovers before, but this time I was truly impressed by the effortless transition from animation to live-action and vice-versa. It’s one thing to do cartoons blending with live-action like Roger Rabbit and whatnot. It’s another to essentially cross over from a show based on one specific medium to another distinct one and become a version of that show we hadn’t seen before, especially on Trek. Figures it had to be Frakes directing. There’s no one better at it.
Loved the live-action version of Bradward Boimler. The way Jack Quaid managed to more or less maintain that character, including the anal OCD, insecurity, hero worship of past Starfleet legends, and still be the same one we’ve seen in animated form, and the same time different. The same can be said of Mariner, but in her case I couldn’t help but notice the little differences more. Namely how fast Newsome talks in animation compared to her live-action version. And I cheered at the animated SNW ending. Almost made me wish for an animated version of all the past episodes.
Loved the interactions with the Enterprise crew, and especially how they paid off Boimler’s worship of Una, tying the whole thing to Ad Astra. Loved the way Mariner’s attempts at getting Uhura to unwind ended up getting a good reaction out of Ortegas.
There is one other thing that caught my attention, for better and worse: Boimler’s hair. I didn’t imagine live-action Boimler’s hair would be blue/purple. I always assumed Boimler’s bluish hair in animation wasn’t actually that color, but standard dark instead. I’ve read enough comic books where I’ve seen superhero characters with dark hair that have blue highlights in the way they’re drawn. And I’ve always assumed that the artists deliberately draw colored reflections/shades/highlights on the hair to make the characters stand out, even if the character has natural dark hair. An artistic choice to be sure, but not one that would necessarily work on a live-action setting. And I’ve assumed that was always the case with animated Boimler.
@8/Christopher: The first TV crossover I’ve ever watched was an Ally McBeal/The Practice murder case across both episodes, with the characters from each show crossing over back and forth. That happened between different networks. And while Buffy/Angel mostly stopped the crossovers after the UPN move, they didn’t abandon them completely. It happened during Buffy’s final season/Angel’s 4th year when Willow crossed over to restore Angel’s soul and then brought back Faith to the main show’s final arc.
@80 / vegandanimal
“…and Admiral Pasik in SNW, who gave off real Justice Scalia ‘being proved innocent of the crime doesn’t bar us from executing you if you had a trial’ vibes.
Thank you. I kept trying to figure out who Pasalk reminded me of and that is a perfect analogy.
@82/Eduardo: It’s interesting how many franchises these days have live-action and animated productions meant to exist canonically in the same reality. Star Trek and Star Wars both do it, the MCU did it with What If…?, and Doctor Who has done it with the occasional direct-to-video special, not to mention the animated reconstructions of erased 1960s episodes. The Arrowverse did it with Vixen, and theoretically with Freedom Fighters: The Ray, although that ended up not really fitting the live-action continuity.
On Boimler’s hair, yes, it’s canonically purple, and there was an LD episode that established he dyes it that color.
Anyway, live-action productions have a tendency to take the “black with blue/purple highlights” thing literally, which is why Beast and Nightcrawler were blue-furred in the X-Men movies despite being canonically black-furred in the comics, or at least the early ones. Also why Batman had a blue cape and cowl in the ’66 series.
And yes, crossovers between different networks can happen — I mentioned the Supergirl/Flash one — but there are more obstacles to overcome in order to make one happen, so they’re less common. Buffy and Angel did several crossovers a season while they were on the same network, but only once after they were on different networks. And bringing in Faith on Angel doesn’t count because she wasn’t a current Buffy regular at the time, so the logistical hurdles of a crossover between contemporaneous series didn’t apply.
I wonder how classified the discovery of time travel would be? On one hand, it’s important to let everyone know that those round artifacts can be dangerous, but on the other hand, you want to control the information about the existence of time travel as much as possible. When Star Fleet wants you to go to a planet with a known portal, the Captain can get a classified briefing, but maybe for an unexpected portal, it will take a while for the information about what it means to get to the people on the spot. Kirk and McCoy didn’t meet Boimler, so maybe as far as they knew time travel didn’t happen (or was so rare that it’s not the first thing they thing of). Guardian of Forever is a different kind of portal, anyway – continuously active, intelligent and talkative, not currently inactive, intermittent and silent.
Just noodling around…
@84/Christopher: I’d forgotten that LD made Boimler’s hair a plot point.
Regarding Buffy/Angel, it should be noted Angel himself also appeared briefly on Buffy’s last two episodes (in fact, I recall they deliberately aired the ending of Angel S4 earlier than usual to justify his appearance on the Buffy finale – I can only imagine how challenging it must have been to coordinate/negotiate the scheduling with WB to accomplish that).
@85/AndyLove: The problem is, Spock was there when the Guardian was discovered, and he didn’t seem any more familiar with time portals than Kirk was. “For this to do what it does is impossible by any science I understand.” Seven years after he was able to study a time portal in detail and get it up and running again.
Although… well… Spock is the one who pegs the Guardian as a time portal in the first place. And he could be saying it’s impossible for what appears to be nothing but a hunk of rock to be generating or controlling temporal energy of that magnitude. So it’s not completely irreconcilable if you squint a bit. Still, I don’t like the demystification of time travel in the 23rd century, having characters react to it as if it’s as casual and routine to them as it is to us in the audience.
I guess Starfleet isn’t completely comparable to contemporary militaries in regards to Boimler’s hair. In any military, or even police or any first responder service, one is not supposed to dye one’s hair a non-natural hair color. I just went through an EMS Academy so I know that was a real rule. I was wondering as I watched this episode if any of the SNW crew would remark on Boimler’s hair color but I guess it may have been explained already in an LD episode?
it was great how the Enterprise crew got all nostalgic over the Archer-Enterprise crew, specifically citing Archer and Mayweather and Sato. But that also would have been a perfect opportunity for Spock to do the same regarding T’Pol as well as establishing if she was even alive in their era.
It occurs to me that an animated crossover between ENTERPRISE and STRANGE NEW WORLDS would be a potentially excellent way to pay off Pike’s notion of paying a visit to NX-01 …
(In all honesty, one would love to see an episode from some later STAR TREK show which paints NX-01 and Captain Archer as ‘Starfleet 1.0’ – that is as a rough draft for later greatness, but doing great deeds and setting invaluable precedents nonetheless – not to mention being recognised as such by later generations of Federation citizens*).
*I’d especially love to see a scene where Captain Archer, in all humility, pulls an “I dare you to do better” on Captain Pike himself.
“What the hell is in these things?”
I forgot to mention how much I LOVED that they gave shine and love to the Enterprise crew. Especially Mayweather and Sato, a war hero who flew against the Romulans and who never got his proper respect on the show, and a Founder of Starfleet linguistic excellence.
@88, Garreth,
Starfleet does have much more relaxed rules on hair in general however, recall the conversation around Saavik’s hair in Star Trek II, “It’s still regulation sir.” Mariner and Una’s hair would also be out of regs for a modern female in uniform, their hair going below the collar.
Also, I think there may be a question opened as to who’s natural hair color? Of course the natural answer is hair colors restricted to your species, but part of the point of that if memory serves is for the hair color to not be a distraction. That does lead to someone who is blonde being able to dye their hair bright red, but not neon green. But in a civilization of over 150+ alien species, you may get someone who has lime green, neon red, or purple as a natural hair color. Suddenly a human dying their hair that color is a lot less important.
@84 – 86 – Lower Decks Grounded (S3E1). From Boimler’s logs
“Got to be better about hiding my purple hair dye. Nobody knows my real hair color is…”
@72 “To go back in time to people who really moved history forward to something better and let them know, that their struggles, their battles, their sorrows, their triumphs….they mattered”.
Oh, to go back and tell Alan Turing that he mattered more than he could possibly have imagined. And that gay people can get married to each other now.
@88: Actually, it suddenly occurred to me that Spock is still alive in Mariner and Boimler’s time. Don’t need time travel to meet him, just need a shuttle ride to Romulus, or Vulcan, or wherever he canonically is in 2381.
I love that Federation starships are made like sourdough bread.
(Yes, I’m aware that it’s less “starter” and more hiding away a little token for luck as with the bridal tradition of “something old, something new…”; don’t ruin this for me.)
@49. mschiffe: “logical Vulcans, obstreperous Tellarites, noble elves, maleficent vampires”
That is the coolest version of Lucky Charms™ ever.
@93 cap-mjb: I thought about Spock being alive in 2381 during the episode, and how Boimler and Mariner’s reference points for his “future” behavior likely came from seeing video streams of Ambassador Spock speaking on one topic or another.
By the same token, I wonder if Pelia is still around in 2381, and available for a Lower Decks cameo…
I had thought about Pelia being alive, but forgot about Spock himself. When did McCoy and Scotty canonically die – both of them were alive in the TNG era (McCoy, very old, Scotty, quite mature, but still hale)
@96/AndyLove: “When did McCoy and Scotty canonically die”
Unknown. The only TOS main characters whose death dates have been established are Kirk (2371 after a presumed death in 2293) and Spock (2263 in the Kelvin Timeline, subjectively after a presumed death of 2387 in the Prime Timeline).
After all the excitement of the episode, when Boimler and Mariner exit the portal together Rutherford (who’s been watching from his side of the portal) remarks “They seem nice”. Which was a perfect and sweet observation.
@97: Thanks.
@96 – McCoy died on the shore leave planet but advanced technology was able to revive him. Scotty was killed by Nomad, as confirmed by McCoy but, agan, a more advanced technology revived him.
@95 Thing is, Spock has certainly found a balance by then because he might look completely unemotional, but he has a sense of humor with a perfect deadpan by then, or at least 6 years later. But it seems like humans have a sense of Vulcans that differs based on how well they know Vulcans.
@101: Yes. Mbenga, for example recognized that Spock and that other Vulcan were having a vicious argument, while the other humans in the room didn’t notice anything unusual
Another thing that greatly amused me is that a withering stare from Pike and his crew shut down Mariner in ways that her mother could only dream of.
Rewatching this episode, I have decided to adopt “Numero Una” as an affectionate nickname for Number One, also that this may be one of the Best episodes of STAR TREK, period.
Top Twenty, at the very least.
Also, years later and I still think “ENTERPRISE love in this year’s STAR TREK? Who would have thought!” (Happily thought, it must be said – I’m more defensive of STAR TREK’s least popular show than I thought).