Lower Decks S5E7: Fully Dilated
Last week we declared, approvingly, that Lower Deck had fully become Beckett Mariner’s show. And yet it’s also a welcome development that the episode relegates Mariner to comic relief and puts Tendi and T’Lyn front and center. The overeager Orion and extremely under-eager Vulcan have always made for a great pairing, and we haven’t seen much of either of them this season, apart from the Tendi-focused “Shades of Green.”
T’Lyn’s desert-dry observations throw Tendi’s manic cheerfulness couldn’t be more opposite, but their friendship has always made sense, as each of them appreciates the qualities they themselves lack. Except this week, the show puts their jarringly different personalities into direct conflict — Captain Freeman needs to appoint a new head science officer, and T’Lyn and Tendi are the candidates.
Before the Captain makes her decision, the two rivals (and Mariner) have to infiltrate a pre-technological society. An alternate-universe version of the Enterprise dropped in just long enough to leave some advanced technology somewhere it shouldn’t be. So the crew have to find it, without alerting the locals to the existence of aliens and spaceships and transporters and whatnot.
Complicating things is that the planet experiences time dilation. So a few weeks planetside will pass in only a few seconds on the Cerritos. (“You mean the way time slows down any time I have to watch a play?”) Which means that when Boimler spills his drink on the transporter console, the frantic few minutes it takes him to clean up means months pass on the planet below.
It doesn’t take long for the away team to find the advanced technology — a crashed shuttle, and Data’s head. (Not our Data, a purple-hued version from this week’s alternate dimension.) With the mission completed, there’s nothing to do but wait months for Boimler to beam them up.
While the trio kill time, they have to avoid Snell, a snooping alien who knows they’re up to something, but otherwise they have a lot of time to kill. Tendi decides she needs a science project to try and impress the captain upon her return. But it’s T’Lyn who diligently completes one project after another, and Tendi gets increasingly anxious about losing the competition between them.
She powers up Data’s head, and gets advice from the android. And while our characters’ schemes usually lead to mayhem, this one mostly just leads to Tendi better understanding herself and her friendship with T’Lyn, and it’s actually a nice change of pace from the mayhem. “Fully Dilated” ends up being a low-key hangout episode, and with the series finale looming, it’s nice to get a chance to just hang out. It’s a sign of how much affection the show has earned for these characters that watching them try to integrate into small-town alien life and lay low is just as rewarding as any space battle.
Stray tachyons:
• Mariner loves an undercover mission. But not nearly as much as taquito night.
• Speaking of Mariner, she gets the B story, in which she decides she needs to use this time-dilated interlude to get a lifetime’s worth of experiences, like Picard does in “The Inner Light,” when an alien probe lets him experience a lifetime as a now-extinct alien species so their culture won’t be forgotten. Instead, Mariner’s every attempt to bond with the locals gets her thrown in jail (and in the end, the locals she bonds with are her fellow prisoners). It’s weirdly a sign of Mariner’s maturity that instead of deliberately causing trouble, every arrest is the result of her genuinely trying to help and stumbling into a cultural misunderstanding. Although it doesn’t hurt that, as much time as she’s spent in the brig, she’s unfailingly cheerful about her time spent in an alien prison.
• Data’s disembodied head is a callback to Next Generation episode “Time’s Arrow,” in which the Enterprise crew finds Data’s head in a cave on Earth, and then the android travels back in time, only to be beheaded in a cave, and also Mark Twain is there for some reason.
• This is the fourth Trek series Brent Spiner has appeared on, after playing Data on Next Generation and Picard, and various ancestors and descendents of Data’s creator on those shows and Enterprise.
• “Looks like Snell’s creepy lurking finally paid off!”
• We’ve been waiting for a Tendi episode, but we’re not as bothered about Boimler and Rutherford being sidelined. Boimler works just as well as a comic relief character as a lead, and Rutherford has always been the most one-dimensional of the foursome. Besides that, Boimler’s fixation on his cooler alternate-universe double has been this season’s slow-drip overarching plot, and it just isn’t terribly interesting.
• That being said, we haven’t forgotten about another double of Boimler’s — his transporter clone, who faked his death to join black ops division Section 31 last season. We’d bet some gold-pressed latinum we’ll see him again before the season’s out.
