Screengrab
The latest episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks is called ‘Mining The Mind’s Mines’ which is the sort of stupid wordplay I appreciate. The conceit behind that idea is that a planet of silicate lifeforms has attacked ‘psychic mines’ to protect their planet which uses holographic fantasies to trap and turn people to stone.
I liked that after the sinister cold open we immediately cut to it being resolved by a big dog while the Cerritos and another California class ship the ‘Carlsbad’ take care of handling the peace treaty. There are immediately a series of funny lines with Tendi delighting in getting senior science officer training with a shout of ‘Wish me facts’ instead of luck and Rutherford’s sigh of wanting to die by having his head explode with science if he had to go.
Her storyline is decent enough, except that it intersects with the captains of each ship childishly bickering in a way that screamed ‘we need something for these people to do’ instead of anything in character for Captain Freeman (she seemed quite immature). Dr. Migleemo (voice of Paul F. Tompkins who also does other characters on the show) as the terrible mentor was a funny idea, and it was a nice resolution that Tendi’s actually good mentor was Dr. T’Ana, who offered good advice that sometimes she needs to risk things in order to try.
Down on the planet we get a nice little subversion, where at first the Cerritos gang worries that they’re the joke of Starfleet and thus want to compete harder with the Carlsbad crew, but we find out in the end that Cerritos is the ‘cool’ ship because they’ve done all the weird stuff we’ve seen over the first two seasons. And we get a nice scene of the teams working together as you’d hope to see in a Star Trek show.
Screengrab
Because of the nature of the dream stuff, we get to see some interesting fantasies and nightmares from our crew, including Rutherford fantasizing about engineering cool things with Leah Brahms from TNG (voiced by Susan Gibney reprising her original role). It’s a cute little aside, even if it does inadvertently parallel Geordi’s creepy usage of Brahms in his episode with her.
Boimler simply gets jokes about being invited to help fight the Borg (which makes sense, he killed that simulation back in Season 2) while Mariner gets a bunch with her new paramour Jennifer the Andorian. It’s a lot of unusual vulnerability from her, which was nice to see — and hopefully a good setup for seeing how she might actually handle a real relationship going forward.
There were some funny visuals, like a giant Borg anaconda or Klingon evil clowns, classic nightmare stuff mixed with Star Trek dangers. The final twist, that the silicates and scientists were working together was a nice little idea, and I also liked how Stephens mentions seeing that weird Koala while brain dead (an old callback to the dude that transcends earlier in the show).
I can’t say I loved the final joke about Boims being thought of as a tiny comedic robot, which is just really stupid in a world where everyone has photos or videos of everyone else. And that captain vs captain stuff was too broad, but the rest of the episode was quite funny and had some moments of character growth too — a hopeful sign for the season’s quality going forward.
New episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks stream Thursdays on Paramount Plus. Use Hotchka’s affiliate link to subscribe.
Share this post
