Star Trek: Lower Decks had a difficult third season, with rare moments of grow your character cast in the shadow of a regressive feeling to draw the main characters traversing paths they had already sailed. Its finale, for better or worse, resets the show in some ways, so we can forget that most of this season actually happened.
pick up from re-hash from last week of the Captain Freeman/Mariner conflict that drove the show’s first season, “The Stars at Night” strays far from that drama to give us some stakes worthy of the finale. With Admiral Buenamigo’s Texas-class drones revealed and proven of their potential to save the Cerritos last week, it is now moving forward with its plan to replace the human crews of California-class ships with its new drones, threatening to put our heroes and all their fellow support ships out of commission.
The idea of drones is an interesting conundrum for the Federation, especially given the long history we’ve seen of how Starfleet has handled, badly or otherwise, the labor rights of inorganic beings in its service. What are the rights of the AI that controls an entire ship? Are they officers of the fleet? What does it mean when these ships are put in dry dock? Can you give a drone ground leave?
Since Lower decks is a comic adventure above all else, this idea is largely unexplored, and instead abandoned to the much funnier idea of Captain Freeman’s desperate gamble to keep the Cali ships in service: a race between the Cerritos and a Texas-class drone on a series of rudimentary Starfleet missions, to see which ship performs them fastest and to satisfactory standard. For the most part, the race is neck and neck, until a decision by Ensign Tendi – the right decision – to check whether a planet is host to sentient microbial life undetected in early investigations means that the Cerritos narrowly loses against the drone, and the fate of the Californian ships seems sealed.
But any interesting intellectual aspect of this Texas-California class conflict is almost immediately set aside to reveal that Buenamigo isn’t so buen un amigo after all: his victory assured, the admiral reveals that it had been his plan all along. the start of undermining Carol to give Texas-class ships the edge among her fellow admirals, and even worse, he’s the architect behind Rutherford’s memory loss, hiding the fact that the Texas AI is only based on none other than the psychopathic “helper” Badgey hologram code from the show’s first season. While Badgey’s return – and, thanks to the mid-credits scene, a reveal that he’s still here for more badness – comes as a nice surprise, pinning down the potential interest in the existence of the Texas class at Starfleet on the fact that it’s really just another bog standard star trek The Admiral Who Gone Wrong completely undermines him.
That at least gives “The Stars at Night” enough explosive stakes. As the Texan ships turn on Buenamigo and quickly kill him, it’s up to the Cerritos– and the timely arrival of all the other California-class ships in the fleet, courtesy of a Mariner turnaround – to stop them all and save the day, which they do, of course. Everybody is happy ! Boimler affirms his audacity! Rutherford has found meaning in his story! Mariner is back in Starfleet and in her mom’s good books! And… yes, it’s a win, but it also means so little that this season ultimately feels like it doesn’t really matter. We have largely returned to the status quo Lower decks had before the shock of Captain Freeman’s arrest in the final moments of Season 2. The fact that everyone on the Cerritos seemed to hate Mariner for betraying them in the last episode, his girlfriend included, is also cast aside, so we’re really back with Mariner and Carol getting along well, but given the quick turn of the start of this season it soured their relationship as captain and ensign, what about something like that couldn’t come out of nowhere anymore, and we’re doing this whole arc with them?
At least some growth has occurred for the characters beyond Mariner and his status as Lower decks‘ de facto protagonist. Tendi’s Journey to Senior Officer Training Means We Can Finally Seize the Promise of Season 2 excellent episode “Wej Duj”, with T’Lyn finally stepping aboard ship as a fresh counterpart to our seasoned Lower Deckers. Now that Rutherford’s backstory has been fleshed out, there’s a lot of potential in the scene for Badgey to potentially become a major villain in Season 4. And even if Boimler’s progression towards “Bold Boimler” was a little lighthearted, it pays off wonderfully when he bonds with Shax and gets everyone on deck to listen to the Bajoran’s explosive desires for once.
It’s enough for “The Stars at Night” not to resemble some of the lows of this third season of Lower decks has endured so far. There’s potential here, so the trip up and down these ten episodes is ultimately worth it. For now, it’s a good thing that Lower decks seems to be going back to where it was in season 3…if only because it makes it much easier to forget that a lot of those lows happened.
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