Screengrab
It’s well known among the Star Trek faithful that the franchise has often had great trouble with their first seasons. I have a soft spot for the TNG pilot episode, even if it’s a bit all over the place — DS9 is decent enough, and Voyager is fairly exciting. Both Picard and Enterprise were disappointing, for different reasons, with people already warning about the ‘first season curse’. The pilot episode of Lower Decks was also a bit of a mess, but it was decent — as it turns out, the season ended up working very well indeed.
The season finale of Star Trek: Lower Decks is called ‘No Small Parts’, that classic reference to ‘No small parts, only small actors’, meaning that everyone on the ship might be important if they take the initiative to do so — and it’s a pretty Starfleet attitude. The episode starts with a callback to the original series, with the planet of Beta III regressing to worshiping their computer Landru (voice of Maurice LaMarche), but what actually came from this is the Mariner reveal.
Boimler shows up to help Mariner without approval, just like her, and although Mariner mentions her problematic behavior (literally calling it ‘downright dangerous hazing’ which is accurate) it’s mainly because of her secret. This leads to Boims accidentally outing Mariner’s relationship to the captain to the whole ship, with a very funny cutoff scream as we cut to credits.
After that, the big plot of the episode gets kicked off with some surprising destruction, an entire ship called the USS Solvang (yet another California city in the continuing running gag) that gets destroyed while trying to go to warp. The enemy here are the Pakleds, a TNG reference, although here they are certainly more dangerous — although very dim. They seem to consider all Starfleet ships to be the Enterprise — and this had one of the funnier jokes in the episode when the aliens cry out ‘it’s another Enterprise!’
Tendi didn’t get as much to do, sadly as per usual, although everything she did was gold. Her role as a liaison to introduce the sentient exocomp (voiced perfectly by Kether Donohue of You’re the Worst) led to a great subversion when it seemed that Peanut Hamper the exocomp would be the ideal person to save the day. Only to have the exocomp flee in cowardice. Classic.
Rutherford’s ongoing gag was his personality mode, with various funny ones — although the first one ‘Extremely Optimistic Mode’ with his cry of ‘This is gonna be great!’ is really still the funniest. And Rutherford even gets a call back to his evil creation Badgey, who plots to save the day and attempt to kill Rutherford too — and we get a legit self-sacrifice moment as cool Bajoran Shaxs rips off the implant and gets left behind.
Now, the funeral didn’t really work in terms of being sad, although I was a bit taken aback at the sacrifice. The actual moment of triumph that worked 100% was the save the day moment by the USS Titan, with cameos of Riker and Troi (with their legit voices) and a boatload of great jokes with them, all the while the TNG theme ringing triumphantly. They fit in pretty well with the fairly silly crew of the Cerritos.
Screengrab
Mariner’s arc here is pretty good too, with her mother asking for her help for a crazy plan in the final moments of despair, and even offering her a pretty serious promotion to work by her side. It’s a level of trust that finally feels justified after the season of setbacks and growth. In terms of more changes, Tendi has to reaffirm her friendship with Rutherford, which seems like it’ll be pretty easy so it’s a pretty mild way to get back the status quo.
But the big other change is Boimler accepting a promotion to the Titan, while Mariner is rightfully angry at him taking it without saying anything to her. Especially after he admitted she was his best friend (and thankfully nothing further). Although I doubt we’ll get Riker and Troi as regular cast members, it’s a great shakeup for the next season.
In general, it’s a pretty great cast of characters, both our lower decks gang and the command crew that has expanded in depth over time. Not everything worked every time this season, and the funeral felt a little jarring in this episode, but otherwise the finale wrapped it all together and set things up brilliantly. It’s overall the strongest first season I can recall for any Star Trek show, easily over the messiness of Picard which was somehow also this year.
Finally, the last stand out moments of the season:
- Ransom calling the Kirk era the ‘TOS’ era for ‘Those Old Scientists’
- ‘That was a weird thing to say.’ ‘It sure was!’ (as Tendi pumps her fist, which is a gag that nearly always works on me)
- The Federation conspiracy theorist – Wolf 359 was an inside job and changelings aren’t real
- Riker’s cringey Jazz inspired: Warp in the factor of five six seven eight!
Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 1 is now available on CBS All Access.
What did you think of the finale? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
Share this post
