2x10 First First Contact

[8.3/10] Sometimes I get so caught up in the great comedy of Lower Decks, that I forget it can be a great nuts and bolts, straight Star Trek show when it wants to be.

It’s hard not to laugh at absurd, inside jokes like our first real look at cetacean ops. Watching a pair of beluga whales try to get Rutherford to swim with them, and process the world through a lens aquatic mammal (“blowhole broken!”) cracked me up. It speaks to the now proud Lower Decks tradition of taking an off-hand absurd thing from mainline Trek and spinning it into something even more delightfully ridiculous.

But the other side of the coin is that the crew of the Cerritos stripping their ship of its outer hull plating so they can manually navigate the vessel through a radioactive debris field, to rescue a damaged sister ship and prevent it from crashing into a local planet before first contact is fantastic, meat and potatoes trek. You could see the crew of the Enterprise, or Defiant, or Voyager pulling the same sort of maneuver. And despite a few gags here and there, the show plays the peril, and the heroics, impressively straight.

I’m not saying I want Lower Decks to be this serious or epic every week, but it’s a reminder that the show can go to that setting when it wants to and still soar with flying colors.

I like the emotional conflicts here too. The prospect of Captain Freeman getting a promotion, to the chagrin of her senior officers and, of course, Mariner, is a good story engine. It gives the Captain a chance to have one big epic ride, leading her people to save the day and finally getting to do a first contact rather than the second contact. It gives her fellow officers the chance to lament how their lives will change and mope about not being told.

Mainly, though, it gives Mariner a chance to deal with the fact that she doesn’t want her mom to leave. She responds about as well as you’d expect, but it’s a sweet story. Carol challenging her daughter on why Becket has to make everything a fight is a good throughline for their conflict. And the moment where Tendi tells Mariner that they’re her family, they’ve got it, and she should go make up with her mom is just as sweet. Hell, I even like Mariner being saved by none other than Jen, the Andorian officer she ostensibly loathed, only for the two of them to make up. It’s a sharp way to dramatize Mariner being combative for no reason and her growing from this experience.

Boimler has a great outing too. For one thing, the running gag about his sign for Captain Freeman day is both a great Star Trek callback and also a hilarious piece of business for him to fuss over. More than that, though, I like how competent Boimler’s become this season! Him literally “diving into the unknown” to save the day is a superb hero moment for him, and while you know he’s going to survive, his drowning scare made for some good drama.

Likewise, I like Tendi and Rutherford’s story here. Tendi fearing that Dr. Tiana hates her and so will transfer her off the ship and Rutherford having issues with his implant are good subplots for both of them. Tendi proves her medical prowess by saving Boimler from drowning, and the swerve that she’s actually being promoted to senior science training is a strong one. Likewise, Rutherford having to get over his fear of forgetting Tendi again, so that he can make new memories with her is another sweet note for the character, and the hint that he received his implant against his will is tantalizing.

Plus hey, it’s Lower Decks so there’s more fun Trek callbacks! There’s some neat tributes to The Search for Spock (the space station departure), Insurrection (the manual steering column) and, appropriately enough, First Contact (the hull plate business), as movie references go. The big “To Be Continued...” at the end is a nice meta homage to how many a 90s Trek season ended. And last but not least, we get freaking Sonya Gomez, who’s a captain now, and still drinks coffee, and comforts other clumsy officers! Her scenes are a little on the nose, but it’s a damn good pull! I even love the show poking fun at its own references when Tendi says “Like Jadzia Dax?” and Tiana says she has no idea who that is.

If that weren’t enough, the animation and design team outdo themselves here. The explosion of the unstable planetoid from the solar flair is brilliant. The de-hulled Cerritos looks really striking and impressive. And the sequences of our heroes navigating through the debris field and saving the day are a blast. Much of the excitement here is in the visuals, and they go off without a hitch.

On the whole, Lower Decks already had the best first season of any Star Trek show, and now, I’d venture to say it’s had the best second season of any Star Trek show either. (Sorry, TOS fans.) The series doubled down on all the stuff that made it great from its first batch of episodes, from deeper references, more committed character work, and big swings like views of the lower decks on alien ships. It’s such a treat to have a show like this one, which pays tribute to the Trek of old, while doing its own unique thing and finding such a great balance between comedy, excitement, and drama. It’s a great time to be a Trekkie.