Lower Decks S5E1: Dos Cerritos

It’s the last season of Lower Decks, which is a damn shame. This might be the most consistently great show Star Trek has ever produced; the cast recently said they’d be happy to keep voicing the characters for “17 more years” (Jack Quaid), or “until we’re dust in the ground” (Tawny Newsome). While previous Treks have been more focused on stories-of-the-week than character development, Decks has given us both in spades, so it would be a joy to watch these characters continue to grow for a few more years.

We’ll have to settle for a solid season opener that builds ever-so-slightly on the character growth we got last season, as the sci-fi plot is once again an excuse to look at who our central foursome are and where they’re going.

The series has done that by splitting off one character from the group each season, and this time it’s Tendi’s turn. In last season’s finale, she made a deal with her sister — in exchange for an Orion warship that she used (and destroyed) to save her friends, she’d leave Starfleet and go back to her old life as notorious pirate Mistress of the Winter Constellations.

This means we open with a fun Orion heist, but even as a badass space pirate, she’s still our sweet-natured Tendi. She’d much rather be “nerding it up” with Starfleet, as her sister D’Erika puts it. So D’Erika makes her a proposition — replace the ship she blew up by salvaging a long-lost Orion warship left for dead on a barren planet, and she’s free to return to her old life.

Meanwhile, back on the Cerritos, Mariner’s given newfound (and unwanted) responsibility when she’s put in charge of a bunch of new ensigns. Rutherford’s throwing himself into work even more obsessively than usual so he doesn’t have to acknowledge how much he misses Tendi. And Boimler’s feeling dejected because he got bumped from Fleet Magazine’s 30 under 30 (percent of their lifespan).

So, back to the usual shenanigans; so usual, in fact, that Mariner’s loudly bored with the latest rift in the space-time continuum the Cerritos has to close up. It’s the third one this month! Except they get sucked in, and on the other side of the rift is… another Cerritos. It’s an alternate dimension version of the ship, captained by… Mariner. Except in this dimension, she goes by Becky Freeman. (Mariner is our Beckett’s middle name; she doesn’t go by Freeman to distance herself from her Captain-and-Admiral parents.)

The whole other Cerritos is crewed by alternate versions of our crew, but unlike the famous Evil Spock episode of the original series, everyone here is just slightly different. Rutherford has more cybernetic implants and less humanity. Boimler is more confident than our fumbling, overeager Boims. And Mariner sees a version of herself that isn’t a self-sabotaging screwup… and likes what she sees. 

She shadows her more straightlaced, successful counterpart, hoping that seeing a less defiant, more successful version of herself will inspire her to get her act together in her own dimension. Except her admiration doesn’t last. Becky’s an authoritarian hardass who throws her crew into the brig for the slightest infraction (“our ship is mostly brigs”), and has become basically everything Beckett despises. And a lesser show would leave it at that — the two Becks hate each other, and ours walks away happy with the choices she’s made and the kind of person she is. But Decks has gotten very good at taking an extra step, so it’s not quite that simple.

Along similar lines, we get the expected conflict with Tendi — she’s too sweet to be a pirate, and her underlings are all cutthroat and rebel against her. But that also takes an unexpected turn, which gives a bit more depth to Tendi’s crew. She opened the series chafing against stereotypes about her people (“Many Orions haven’t been pirates in over five years!”), and we get a nice payoff to end this episode.

But we don’t get Tendi back just yet, which is all for the best. The show’s confident enough at this point to not go for pat resolutions, and she and D’Erika have some more pirating to do.

Stray tachyons:

• More on this being the final season and the state of the franchise in general: Paramount Plus is losing money, and has decided the best way to deal with that is to cancel as many shows as possible. So after boasting about getting every iteration of Trek in one place and running five new streaming series concurrently, the studio has sold the rights to the films to Amazon, and once Decks’ fifth and final season wraps, we’ll be down to Strange New Worlds and the upcoming Starfleet Academy. Perhaps they’re sending out lifeboats before the whole P+ ship goes down, and making sure Trek keeps going after the streaming service folds. But it’s looking more like the golden age of Star Trek Paramount ushered in has been short-lived.

• Even when Ransom’s fighting with his doppelganger, he’s still in love with himself. “I’m supposed to press the button, you sexy bastard!”

• “Go back to whatever slime dungeon you were born in, Orion!” “I would rather die than return to my childhood dungeon!”

• We never actually get to Mariner’s new ensigns. Maybe next episode? Paramount released the first two together, so we’ll review “Shades of Green” in the next few days.