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The latest episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks is called, ‘Kayshon, His Eyes Open’, which is a reference to the classic TNG episode ‘Darmok’ in which the crew has to deal with an alien species that speaks entirely with allegory. It doesn’t entirely make sense as a concept, but the episode is a stone cold classic — here we meet the first Tamarian ever in Starfleet, the new security officer named Kayshon (voice of Carl Tart).
There are a couple of fun jokes about his troubles with translating his linguistic paradigm to something everyone else can understand, but for most of the episode, he is removed from the action after being turned into a puppet. It’s funny, but hopefully they’ll have more the rest of the season from this character — it’s already inherently a funny concept, and I did enjoy the tag of the episode where he hits on a fellow member of the crew with the classic ‘Are you tired? Because you’ve been. Arnock, at the race of Natara through my mind all night.’. Pretty easy, as is mentioned elsewhere in the episode, to pick it up by context clues.
‘Shaka, when the walls fell’ indeed. It’s amusing in specificity because that was a particularly emotional note in the original episode and here’s it’s the comedic final line of the episode. We also got just a few moments from the bird doctor Migleemo (voice of Paul F. Tompkins as a reminder), but PFT is basically an effortlessly hilarious voice actor.
The two storylines of the episode were the away team of the Cerritos trying to escape a ship of ‘collected’ dangers while in contrast Boimler was trying to help his team on the Titan escape a planet of Pakleds. The running gag about how stupid the Pakleds are still works — the idea of the team being ‘made’ because the Pakleds thought their snacks were being stolen was hilarious. Plus there’s the intriguing note from Riker (who is really very funny in this show) that maybe someone else is behind the Pakleds.
Boims is at first at odds with the away team because they deride the Enterprise as being boring, but the fanboy manages to get them to realize that Starfleet’s success is about combining cool action with incredibly nerdy technobabble. I like that it humanizes the other crew as more than just cool bad-asses and shows Boimler as pretty competent despite his fear — and it solves the problem of Boimler on the Titan easily with the classic reference to Riker accidentally getting split into two clones. Of course the fanboy Boimler would’ve known exactly how that happened.
Interestingly, the clones aren’t identical — but this actually does make sense, as the Boimler left behind escapes the Pakleds by himself — so he’s likely a more action-connected version of himself, even if only slightly. Once he returns to the Cerritos, Mariner is immediately excited to see him back shouting ‘he’s my friend!’ and pushing out new cool dude Jet.
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The Jet storyline was ultimately a pretty fun one too, with an ending that I felt made up for some of the more annoying parts of the competitive vibe. Jet and Mariner stupidly compete against themselves, showing in the very first scene (with the co-ed but sci-fi blurred showers naturally) that they will literally harm themselves to prove who is more of a bad-ass.
So it’s actually nice that the two eventually realize what we’ve already known, that Starfleet succeeds because everyone knows something useful. Tendi and Rutherford offer ideas that are immediately more useful than anything Jet or Mariner were doing, and it’s a good way to show some growth and that maybe Mariner isn’t always right.
It was a pretty decent episode, but I mainly hope that we haven’t seen the last of Titan Boimler and company. Definitely funnier than the last episode, and great to see more from the Tendi/Rutherford relationship continuing forward. Some of the highlights were Tendi’s recognizing all of the perverted stuff but explicitly offering no judgment (as she’s an Orion), the idea that Jet’s extra pip was simply delicious street corn, and Dr. Bird woefully asking why they couldn’t leave Data alone, he ‘just wanted to feel!’
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