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The latest episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks is called ‘I, Excretus’ which is a direct reference to the TNG episode ‘I, Borg’ because of a very silly joke nearly at the end of the episode. The entire episode is one of those ‘holodeck’ style ones except that everyone gets involved. The ship’s crew is due to be tested by a Starfleet drill instructor, Shari Yen Yem (Lennon Parham), and that means it’s time for the ol’ switcheroo.
Meaning our lower decks get command scenarios and vice versa, and the number of references is absolutely out of control — but in a pretty well handled manner. Mariner starts in that old chestnut, the Mirror Universe drill, with goatees and ridiculous outfits — except that she gets caught by Boimler screeching like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and has to try again.
But she’s not the only one. Tendi flubs a pretty hilarious mercy killing of a Klingon that ‘broke [his] back picking up a peanut’. The disappointed face on the Klingon when the other docs called the ‘time of life’ was one of the funniest moments of the episode. Rutherford similarly fails his ‘good of the many’ self-sacrifice test that Troi had to utilize back in TNG in her command test.
Mariner fails an Old West planet test by getting kicked off a horse and freaks out during a ‘Naked Time’ (a reference to the well known terrible TNG episode ‘The Naked Now’) due to seeing all of her crewmates naked and intertwined. Of course, the only ones she seems to be attracted to are watching Barnes and Jennifer making out, which is … consistent. The command crew simply gets into an annoying situation where they stack crates while far more interesting things are going on and they aren’t told anything.
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And it gets even worse at a bridge simulation when Mariner and Freeman fight so much they nearly immediately fail the drill. At first all this failure connects the upper and lower decks, and they think it’s a classic ‘hardship towards actual improvement’ trick, but obviously an obvious twist means there’s an unobvious twist and it turns out the drill instructor intentionally found a troubled ship (in fairness, they did strand our lower deck heroes for six hours floating in space) and then rigged the drills to really make them impossible.
Except, of course, for Boimler, who is the only one who immediately passes his Borg drill, and then keeps working on it until he gets to 100% — the one where he teaches the Borg Queen chess (cameo by Alice Krige who played the character) and somehow, empathy. The ship goes into actually dangerous situations to reveal the incompetence of the instructor and blackmail her to pass them all — I mean, sure, it’s two wrongs make a right, right?
But the crew actually has gained their own empathy, and the command crew deliver a high-end replicator to the lower deckers — Tendi’s delight at getting pesto is a highlight. And we get Boimler once again doing well at command stuff, despite his own issues — which is desire to prove himself at all costs.
So it was a pretty great, funny episode — the list of drills was already funny, including things like Time Trap, Tribble Troubles, From Q to Q, Borg Encounter, Cause & Effect, Carbon Based Units, Naked Time, etc. Other highlights were that great first joke about the temporal causality loop repeating, Shaxs figuring out how to stack the crates, and of course, Boimler calling himself Excretus of Borg. Now that’s a scatological joke that works.
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