This week, Star Trek Lower Decks tests the boundaries of the issues that have been its Achilles heel since the start. Episode 8 of season 2, ‘I, Excretus’ mixes the lower decks with the upper decks and risks all the gains it has recently made.
The inclusion of the upper decks on a regular basis has long been my bugbear with this series and it initially looked like ‘I, Excretus’ would fall back into some bad habits. It was a pleasant surprise then to discover that it managed to just about stay on the right side of losing credibility through some neat writing.
The basic premise for this episode is that the USS Cerritos gets visited by a Starfleet consultant, who is there to test the crew’s competence and give the ship a rating. In a novel approach, the consultant, Shari Yen Yem (Lennon Parham – Playing House, Veep) decides to make the upper and lower decks swap roles for the exercises to see how each cope with the different expectations. Obviously, this goes horribly wrong for all involved, except Boimler (Jack Quaid), whose competitive and anal spirit keeps him invested in getting the perfect score.
In a nod to previous Star Trek incarnations, all of the tests are based on stories from the old shows or movies, each with a knowing nod to a plot point or a little twist. Therefore we get references to the old west, the Borg, Worf’s back injury, time loops, The Wrath of Khan, and even the execrable Qpid episode of TNG. These are all played out with suitably terrible results for each of the characters, and its nice to see the cocksure Mariner (Tawny Newsome) fail miserably. Normally they would have her win regardless, so this is a good change of tack.
Arguably they have made Boimler the main hero here and it does help things along quite a bit. It would have been nice to give Tendi (Noël Wells) a bit of a win, but her scenario understandably had to play out as it did for the humour. In the most shocking twist, Ransom (Jerry O’Connell) actually has some decent lines in all of this and isn’t just a poor caricature like he often is.
What all this means is that ‘I, Excretus’ adds up to being a much more balanced episode than some we’ve had. It also borders on being a successful story in its own right, having a pretty self-contained and complete narrative, without being too ‘bitty’. Sometimes with Star Trek Lower Decks, things get very reference heavy and almost like a bunch of sketches thrown together, rather than a standalone, complete tale. As this show continues it seems to be trying new things, and some of them are working.
