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The latest episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks is called ‘Veritas’, which is of course just ‘truth’ translated from Latin, but Star Trek loves that Latin for episode titles. Here the episode revolves around the truth and how it can be misunderstood and misconstrued as the Lower Decks gang find themselves in what seems to be an alien dungeon for reasons unknown. Then they arrive in a room reminiscent of many trial scenes throughout Star Trek, especially the Klingon one from The Undiscovered Country.
Also from that movie is guest voice Kurtwood Smith as the alien Klaar who seems to be leading the trial — Kurtwood Smith is a classic Star Trek actor who’s also played roles in DS9 and Voyager. And he’s great here too. Each ensign in turn is called to explain what happened on a particular day, and it gets increasingly ridiculous.
Due to a mistake by Rutherford, Mariner and Boimler are late to the bridge during a red alert and thus must make it up as they go in a pretty funny scene of escalating tensions as Boimler digs himself deeper and deeper. But that lack of clarity and truth leads Mariner to misinterpret the captain asking to ‘send a message’ which sure sounds like shooting at them to me too. But ultimately Mariner admits that because of all that, she has no idea what’s going on with this mysterious map of the Neutral Zone.
But she avoids the tank of eels (with a ‘Better luck next time, eels’ delivered hilariously) as Rutherford is brought up to testify instead. Rutherford’s inability to explain what happened is due to a series of upgrades to his implant, so he keeps missing out on events to the most dramatic effects during what appears to be some sort of spy mission on a Klingon Bird of Prey.
This also leads to a bunch of very funny moments, the two with his fan dance (parodying the terrible Uhura fan dance from Star Trek V) and the unusually expressive guard — all of his lines, ‘You’ve drawn my attention’, ‘Now you’re distracting me’, and ‘I want the regular dance’ all killed. But then they finally subvert the upgrade time skip at a Gorn wedding where Rutherford only skips a second and thus is still in trouble.
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So then we get Tendi’s tale, which is another very funny spy mission — this time she can’t tell everything because it’s classified. But it’s also another series of mistakes about the truth, as she’s called the ‘Cleaner’ accidentally and keeps getting interrupted when trying to come clean. I appreciate that she legitimately kept trying until they actually got to the planet and it was too late. All that is delightful too, but then we get our ‘lesson’.
Boimler gives a speech about how the senior officers don’t always know everything — we get a few fantastic moments, including one from Q (played by the legendary John De Lancie in a great cameo) and one where the doctor thinks she’s in a parallel universe but actually just got on the wrong ship. That’s a great joke.
Of course, the final twist is that it was actually a weird local party to celebrate the senior staff, and it was going wrong because the ensigns were supposed to testify about how great they had been but because they didn’t know anything, they ended up in danger instead. So although the captain then allows for more transparency, it’s undercut immediately because of course she can’t be completely transparent.
It was a very funny episode, a standout so far, and even if the final twist of the party was a little meh, everything else worked very well — we even got something from each of our Lower Decks gang, and they all were good moments. And I loved those cameos.
The stand out moments were Boimler referencing the ‘Crazy Ivan maneuver’ (either the real life submarine trick or a Firefly reference), ‘Updating Klingon fonts’, Mariner complaining that she never gets to clean the conference room, and those references to wine about Earth and Picard. And the funniest moment of them all was with the two Romulans, and one says to the other ‘You know who I hate? Remans.’ Beautiful.
Star Trek: Lower Decks streams new episodes every Thursday on CBS All Access.
What did you think of the episodes? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
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