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The latest episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks is called ‘The Spy Humongous’ and I am sure there’s some play on words I’m completely missing — obviously the direct reference is to the Pakleds sending a huge dude as an ineffective spy to the Cerritos. There were effectively four different storylines this episode, although two were nearly the same and each meant to bolster the other.
This dual storyline was about the so-called cease fire mission with the Pakleds; the Captain and Shaxs beam down to the ‘Pakled Planet’ to meet with the aggressive aliens, getting increasingly annoyed with their comments about bigger and bigger helmets and the various ‘leaders’ like a Queen, King, and Emperor. And of course, constantly being called ‘Janeway’ instead of her real name. At the same time, a Pakled named Rumdar has sneaked aboard the ship, and essentially reveals himself to be an incompetent spy.
Naturally this leads to a great exchange when Kayshon asks if it’s ‘Bazminti when he pulled back the veil’ vibes and Random immediately gets it and agrees. I like that little subtle growth of Kayshon being more integrated with the crew, but then they lose track of the alien spy. This is eventually resolved when they literally see the Pakled floating in space because he accidentally thought an airlock was a bathroom. It’s a silly joke but I laughed.
Thus it ends with the Captain easily tricking Rumdar to reveal a plan to set a bomb on Earth, but all throughout, Freeman is still so aggressively ambitious and often condescending — well, it makes it easy to see how Mariner is how she is.
On the lower decks side of things, the gang gets assigned (although we eventually find out that Tendi volunteered them) to the ‘Anomaly Consolidation Duty’ which is meant to be pretty terrible. Boimler, by virtue of his time on the Titan, gets offered a chance to hang with a bunch of up-and-comers calling themselves the ‘Redshirts’ (rim shot), and it leads to a pretty fun series of scenes, include one where Boimler manages to give quite the stirring speech when prompted.
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For the rest of the gang, they get injured repeatedly while gathering various anomalies, naturally, and eventually it comes out that Tendi volunteered them because she’s jealous of all the adventures the others often go on. Naturally this becomes self-actualized when she gets so angry that a magic cube transforms her into a giant scorpion.
The Redshirts only offer meaningless stirring speeches and Boimler, having heard the absurd ‘they work for Starfleet versus us working in Starfleet’ idiocy from the head of the Redshirts literally jumps into action. His encyclopedic knowledge of nonsense immediately gives him the knowledge to help Tendi — make a fool of himself to get her to laugh.
Although the myopic head of the Redshirts derides such behavior as unbecoming, Commander Ransom offers praise and Ensign Castro (voice of Gabrielle Ruiz) even asks Boimler out. And the gang all finally has their own little phone by a kind of prank call to the disgusting tar monster Armus from the infamous TNG episode ‘Skin of Evil’ that killed off Natasha Yar. Honestly messing with that dude works for me, he’s earned that sort of treatment.
Overall, it was a classic ‘small’ episode that actually moved a lot of characterization forward. It didn’t repeat many of the same tropes the show has sometimes fallen prey to, and even if it wasn’t quite as laugh-out-loud funny as sometimes, it was funny enough to still fit in with the rest of the season.
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