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The third season premiere of Star Trek: Lower Decks is called ‘Grounded’ and it’s not nearly as expansive as I was hoping. We start things off with one of the few journalism examples in the Star Trek universe, an ‘FNN’ anchor talking about Beckett’s trial and doing the cliched ‘and in lighter news’ stuff too. Mostly this episode does a lot of those sorts of easy jokes, but maybe it was trying to get back into the swing of things.
After angrily worrying with her father, Mariner freaks out on hearing that the judge for her mother’s case is ‘Mith bin Tong’, a ‘planet’s rights’ lunatic, obviously a parallel to state’s rights types. But this entire little plot thread is set-up and completely dropped, which makes me wonder if it’s a set-up for later in this season or an intentional misdirect to fool us into thinking Mariner is right that her mother is doomed. If it’s the latter, it honestly could be a better or funnier reference because at this point it’s a meaningless aside.
We catch up with some of the people out and about while grounded, which I thought would be more of the episode — it’s the sort of thing that could really stretch a full episode but it’s barely touched on here. Mariner finds Boimler at his family’s raisin farm where he is hit on by a bunch of the women working there, including one that looks like the ‘Sun-Maid’ mascot. None of these are particularly funny and it’s a lot of that very dated ‘nerdy guy doesn’t realize the obvious come-ons’ joke — the only joke that works is the girl who literally says ‘I need help getting naked’ because sometimes the obvious ones still work.
In the meantime Tendi and Rutherford are having fun in Sisko’s Creole Kitchen (a reference from DS9 I appreciate seeing) and talking about wanting to visit all of the fun Earth tourist sites. Again this could’ve been an episode too, but here it’s just about the drop of ‘Historical Bozeman’ as a tourist site and the place we saw in Star Trek: First Contact where Zephram Cochrane (James Cromwell) broke the warp barrier.
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There’s a short little aside where the gang is unable to knock out a kindly yet capable old security dude named Denny (Bobby Moynihan), which is cute but not that funny really. When the gang heads over there to try Mariner’s terrible plan, James Cromwell actually voices the character multiple times (synthesized of course as he’d be long dead here). There were some cute background references to that movie, although again nothing particularly that funny.
They run into another little silly joke where a dude named Gavin (also Bobby Moynihan) is worried about going into space, and naturally goes crazy and takes over the ship from them later, only to be arrested at the end of the episode — actually he kinda gets a raw deal here, doesn’t he?
As for Mariner, she keeps doing destructive things while her friends try to help her as she keeps pushing them away — nothing is funny here, but there is a well-handled moment where Mariner breaks down and admits she’s simply scared that she can’t do anything to help her mother.
And then we get the ‘twist’ ending which in retrospect, is a pretty nice little thing — Beckett was vindicated as Starfleet was able to prove she was framed and the Federation justice system actually worked, just like everyone kept insisting to Mariner. And so now her future in Starfleet will be entirely in the hands of Commander Ransom, someone she has a mixed relationship with to say the least.
I have to say that it’s a bit of a weak start to the season, with the comedy iffy and the story kinda rushed. I suppose that the starts of the first two seasons weren’t perfect either and got pretty good pretty quickly — so I’m optimistic that this show goes back to those strides again.
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