Lower Decks S4E5: Empathalogical Fallacies

T’Lyn has been a terrific addition to the cast this season, as a straightlaced foil to Tendi’s enthusiasm and Mariner’s penchant for chaos. Her straightlaced Vulcan sensibility includes a very dry sense of humor which gives Decks’ comedy a new cylinder to fire on. So it seems only natural they’d quickly put T’Lyn front and center for an episode. Can she go from being a supporting player who excels in small doses to being a lead character we’re invested in? The episode’s so much of a mess we don’t really get to find out.

We have a promising start, as the Cerritos has to host a diplomatic party — three middle-aged Betazed women who are slightly-less-overbearing riffs on Counselor Troi’s mother from Next Generation. The three are played as overgrown sorority girls who are intent on drinking and flirting their way from one diplomatic soiree to the next.

They’re a great pairing for T’Lyn, who both has no time for their frivolity, and like most of our Lower Deckers, chafes against what she sees as an unimportant mission. She’s desperate to be seen as a serious person doing serious things, so babysitting the profoundly unserious Betazeds is her personal hell. Or to put it in Vulcan terms, she, “finds their exuberance disruptive.”

There’s a lot the episode could have done with this. Lwaxana Troi was one of the most reliably irritating characters on Next Generation, but Majel Barret still managed moments of grace for the character in between chewing scenery. Lwaxana was a widow and repeat divorcee whose loud personality masked a deep insecurity about her fading attractiveness and advancing age.

We get no such depth with “Fallacies”’ trio, just a surprise reveal that doesn’t make much sense, but also takes them away from T’Lyn. And that’s emblematic of the episode as a whole. The plot lurches this way and that — the Betazeds unwittingly cause emotional outbursts among the crew, which causes them to descend into chaos faster than usual, so T’Lyn gets pushed into the background as Captain Freeman has to hold it together in front of her guests while trying to get her crew under control and fix whatever’s happening to them.

Then we come back to T’Lyn for a pretty pat resolution to her emotional arc that’s pretty rote “believe in yourself”/”power of friendship” that this show has done better and in more depth in the past.

And while it’s nice to give supporting characters like T’Lyn or Freeman a chance to shine, it doesn’t usually come at the expense of the leads to the degree it does here. Boimler gets a forgettable B story, where he’s tightly-wound as usual, so Rutherford sends him to train with the security team for reasons that no one even attempts to explain. Boims is frustrated that, instead of action, it’s an afternoon of slam poetry, charades, and tarot readings, and misses the point that Rutherford (and Shaxs) just wants him to relax once in a while. It echoes’ T’Lyn’s frustration with wasting time on nonsense, but other than that it doesn’t add much. 

And that’s basically it for Rutherford, as he and Tendi are glorified background characters this week, although they do get to participate in the escalating shenanigans with the rest of the overly-emotional crew. And Mariner gets paired with T’Lyn in the second half, and they’re a great order Muppet/chaos Muppet pairing, but it feels like T’Lyn’s friendship with Tendi has already been largely forgotten by the writers (if not by Tendi, whose only real moment in the show is a brief attempt to get her new BFF to respond in any way to her enthusiasm).

The episode had a few solid gags, and we get another brief moment with our mysterious ship that’s clearly going to feature late in the season. But this was a pretty skippable episode. The older Trek series certainly had their fair share, but with only 10 episodes a season (and the whole franchise’s future in doubt as Paramount Plus struggles financially), it feels like a waste of a week. 

Stray tachyons:
• While it’s a shame we didn’t get a better episode to build around T’Lyn, Gabrielle Ruiz does a terrific job of putting very slight cracks in her facade that give us glimpses of the emotional turmoil Vulcans bury deep beneath the placid surface.

• Mariner does at least get in a few good lines. “I wish I could roundhouse kick this situation in the face, but I can’t! It is one of those rare types of problems that can’t be kicked!”

• Mariner also gets to channel her inner Jesse Pinkman. “Fuck yeah! Logic, bitch!”