Review: Star Trek Lower Decks – Mugato, Gumato s02e04

The improved balance of the characters continues this week on Star Trek Lower Decks, with less Mariner than before in episode 4 of season 2, ‘Mugato, Gumato’.  *Warning! Spoilers Ahead!’

With a cheeky nod to the way that certain words get mispronounced throughout the various series, the show goes in search of an out of place Mugato creature.  On Frylon IV, some Mugato (pronounce this how you wish!) have been detected and the Cerritos has to figure out what is going on.  It turns out that a band of Ferengi are killing them and selling their horns.

Alongside a fairly standard plot, Boimler (Jack Quaid) and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) fall for a rumour that Mariner (Tawny Newsome) is a secret agent, trained to be a killing machine.  While not the most promising of ideas, it does allow ‘Mugato, Gumato’ to address some of the poor setup of her character.  Hopefully more of this will occur and Mariner can be pushed further into the background, or at least made a less annoying character.

Elsewhere, Tendi (Noël Wells) is assigned a fairly innocuous task by Dr. T’Ana (Gillian Vigman) and manages to impress, after initially being too timid once again.  It’s a bit of a rehash of things we’ve seen before, but with any luck Tendi will be given more screen time to develop what is quite an interesting character.  Compare Troi on TNG before and after she starts wearing the blue uniform and takes the command exam, and you’ll get the flavour of what they should be doing here.

‘Mugato, Gumato’ seems less packed with references than usual, but has a much better balance of story and character, so there are advantages to how it has been approached.  Like many episodes of Star Trek, the central message is a brain wins over brawn type message, but there is much in this episode that could have been done with more depth.  There are a number of moral, or ethical quandaries that could have come into play, but instead it is dealt with relatively shallowly.

On the whole though, it feels like a more even episode, and we can only hope that they continue to focus more on the interesting characters, rather than the irritating ones. *cough* Mariner.