The latest “Lower Decks” episode, “Upper Decks”, reveals what the command crew gets up to when Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford, and T’Lyn aren’t hogging all that main character energy.
So, as the lead quintet gets busy “mutilating gourds” for Halloween — everyone but T’Lyn would describe it as carving pumpkins — “Upper Decks” shows that the bridge crew doesn’t just “fade into the background” when the junior officers are elsewhere. It turns out that alien invasions, potential engineering disasters, and metaphysical crises are all in an average day’s work, in an outing that’s also a clever nod to a 30-year-old episode of “The Next Generation“.
Spoiler warning! Caution is advised if you’re yet to watch this week’s episode.
If the Lower Decks is about junior officers, why is this episode about the Cerritos’ command crew?
The name of this episode, “Upper Decks”, doesn’t just reference this particular “Star Trek” show.
“Lower Decks” took its name from a classic episode of “The Next Generation”, which — for one week only — put a quartet of ensigns under the spotlight. This episode flips the dynamics of that 30-year-old “TNG” story.
“Lower Decks” is unique among the armada of “Star Trek” TV shows in that it doesn’t focus on the upper echelons of starship/space station management — this is the only TV show in the franchise where a story about bridge officers could be an anomaly.
What happened in the original “Lower Decks” episode of “The Next Generation”?
“Lower Decks” arrived in the second half of season seven, when “TNG”‘s writers’ room was willing and able to get a little more experimental.
In the cold open we met four ambitious young officers sharing a drink in the Enterprise’s Ten Forward bar. Two of them we’d met before: Alyssa Ogawa (Patti Yasutake) was a semi-regular character in Sickbay, who’d go on to appear in big-screen outings “Generations” and “First Contact”; Sito Jaxa (Shannon Fill) had, along with Wesley Crusher, been involved in the Starfleet Academy stunt that got a fellow cadet killed in “TNG” episode “The First Duty”. Completing the quartet were cocky Sam Lavelle (Dan Gauthier) and Vulcan engineer Taurik (Alexander Enberg).
Over the course of the episode, each of the ensigns worked closely with a member of the senior staff on different aspects of a mission so classified they couldn’t discuss it with…
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