From Blue Streaks To Blue Orions, The ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Easter Eggs In “Dos Cerritos”

We have already recapped and reviewed Star Trek: Lower Decks season 5, episode 1, “Dos Cerritos,” and discussed it on the All Access Star Trek podcast. As to be expected, the season 5 premiere of Lower Decks included many fun nods, connections, and Easter eggs to Trek lore. Here are the ones that jumped out to us, which includes SPOILERS. BTW, We also have analyzed the easter eggs for “Shades of Green,” the second episode which premiered the same day.

Blue streaks and more crazy credits

The new opening credits for season 5 includes a deep cut in the title treatment for the series with the addition of blue streaks below “Lower Decks.” These are an homage to the blue streaks added in season 5 of the titles for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

As has happened each season, more bits of Star Trek canon have been added to the space battle sequence. For season 5, they added Apollo’s space hand from the TOS episode “Who Mourns for Adonais,” Tholian web-spinning ships from the TOS episode “The Tholian Web.” and the V’Ger cloud from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. 

The Mostest Toys

The episode kicked off with Tendi undercover on a collector ship owned by Yorif, who is another member of Palor Toff’s species first seen in the TNG episode “The Most Toys.” In Lower Decks we learn these distinctive gold facial appendages aren’t decorative but “prescription.”

Yorif’s collection featured a few well known Trek artifacts including a Risan Horga’hn from TNG, a Bajoran tablet from DS9, what appears to be a bust of Grand Nagus Zek from DS9, and a 23rd century Starfleet Type II phaser as seen in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Yorif and his Bajoran tablet are actually easter eggs of easter eggs, as he appeared in season 3 Lower Decks episode “Reflections,” representing the Collectors Guild.

Double trouble

The plot of “Dos Cerritos” featured encountering another USS Cerritos from an alternate universe. This multiverse type of story was first done in the classic TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror,” although in that episode the duplicate ships and crews do not meet face to face. However, meetings of doubles has happened several times in Trek canon, notably in the TNG episode “Parallels” which featured similar bridge to bridge moments between alternate crews.

Playing Vulcan games

When we first see Mariner, she is with T’Lyn  and playing the Vulcan logic game Kal-toh, first introduced in Star Trek: Voyager.

Bumped by Wildman

Mariner’s game of Kal-toh was interrupted by Boimler, excited over the new issue of “Fleet” the official Starfleet magazine, expecting he was going to be included in the “30 under 30” feature, a staple of magazine profiles. Boimler was particular upset that he didn’t even make it to the list of honorable mentions, which included Voyager’s Naomi Wildman, noting “She’s like ten years old,” which tracks as she was born in 2372. The cover of the PADD-mag had some little easter eggs on it, including a feature called “Q Who?: The Continuum Awaits.” This is a meta reference to the title of the classic TNG season 2 episode “Q Who,” when Q introduced Picard to the Borg.

Riker moments

Fleet magazine also has a feature titled “Top 10 Riker Moments,” referencing Star Trek: The Next Generation’s William T. Riker, who has appeared in Lower Decks several times as the captain of the USS Titan. Later in the episode the alternate Boimler exits his station on the bridge doing a classic “Riker maneuver,” swinging his leg over the chair. His beard is almost certainly also an homage to Riker, who Bomiler idolizes. Riker grew a beard in season 2, leading to the aphorism “growing the beard” for a show getting good, something noted by Mike McMahan in our NYCC interview.

Captain crop

Mariner’s double “Captain Becky” ruled her USS Cerritos through fear and she even wielded a riding crop. This could be a nod to the pompous Captain Styles from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock who carried a swagger stick.

Orion blues

Perhaps the deepest cut for the episode was diving into Orion lore, with Tendi’s storyline. In this case she came into conflict with some “Blue Orions.” While Orions were introduced in The Original Series as green, and seen that way throughout the rest of the live-action franchise, there is an exception from Star Trek: The Animated Series. In the episode “The Pirates of Orion” they appeared with a blue-ish tint, however this was really just a production error. And that episode uses the unusual pronunciation “or-EE-ons” for Orions. Lower Decks decided to do a bit of retcon and make the Blue Orions and their unusual punctuation part of the canon. They even used the same unusual Orion costumes featured in TAS. Lower Decks hung a lantern on all of this with Tendi and her fellow Orions mocking the Blues for how they mispronounce “Orion” and one of the Blues saying if they can pull off the mission, other Orions will “fear and respect us instead of saying we look stupid in our ridiculous uniforms.”

The ship Tendi was sent to retrieve was based on the design of the Orion scout ship seen in the remastered version of the TOS episode “Journey to Babel.” A similar 23rd century Orion ship was more recently seen in the Strange New Worlds / Lower Decks crossover “Those Old Scientists.”

What did you see?

Spot any new Trek references we missed on Lower Decks? Have a favorite? Sound off in the comments below.


Keep up with all the news and reviews from the new Star Trek Universe on TV at TrekMovie.com.

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It’s fanservice but I love it, Lower Decks works on many levels and although prominently comedic it has a good “heart” and tells stories that work on many levels. I will be sad to see the end of this wonderful show.

That is not Palor Toff. His name is Yorif. He doesn’t look like Toff other than being from the same species, and he’s too young to be Toff anyway. (The previous article linked above, claiming he’s Palor Toff, is also wrong by the way.) Also, neither TAS nor this episode used the pronunciation “or-EE-ons.” Both said “OR-ee-ons.” 

“tHiS iS aLl FaN sErViCe AnD nO sUbStAnCe!”

Getting this in before the usual suspect does.

Nice. I enjoyed it.

Even though I watched all of TAS for the time a few years ago (thanks partly to Lower Decks) I completely forgot the blue Orions existed. That’s why I love this show, it has made things canon in ways I never saw coming. It’s just fun to see how much they take a deep cut and expand it.

And I think LDS has done the best job with the Orions more than any other show. They basically didn’t even exist in the other 24th century shows.

I had always thought TAS was canon – and I watched it during its original Saturday morning run as a kid. Roddenberry, Fontana, Shatner, Nimoy, Kelly, Doohan, Takai,, Nicholls… why wouldn’t it canon?

TAS has been in a grey space for a long time with Trek canon.

People seem to go back and forth with it. To this day I never understood why it wouldn’t be considered canon myself?

But eitherway LDS has basically canonized the show at thos point. And SNW added to it bringing April on that show.

In their comics from after ST IV, DC included a bunch of TAS references, like Arex and M’Ress. One issue featured the blue Orions, although they had white (actually white) skin for some reason.

Roddenberry (and more specifically, his much-disliked lawyer) got really cranky about canon at just that time, and DC was told to cut out all TAS references. For their next series (after ST V), DC changed Arex and M’Ress to barely-disguised new characters before being told they had to get rid of *all* original characters, even ones they invented.(The same had happened to characters DC had introduced earlier in the run. It also cut off all connections between Pocket and DC that had previously existed, leading to some explicit contradictions.)

No one had really thought of the idea of “canon” before then. TAS was kind of a test case.

DS9 featured the Orion Syndicate a few times, but oddly we never saw any actual Orions.

Wow thanks for the info. Very insightful. I never heard about any of this.

And sure, maybe at the time, canon wasn’t a thing when TAS came around, but Roddenberry was still around for nearly 20 years after that and could’ve just said it was canon later. No one for example doubts TNG as canon because it was made clear on day one. And even though he may have not loved all the TOS movies, that was always made clear it was canon as well.

It’s just one of these weird things people are still arguing about literally 50 years later because either Roddenberry himself kept going back and forth with it or no one that owns it today has simply said it’s canon like everything else.

And that’s also why TAS itself just seems to be on the outside of the other shows because it’s not deemed canon in the way other shows are and people like me never bothered to watch it even though I have been a fan since the 70s. I used to meet newer fans in the 90s who was watching the new shows but didn’t know it existed because it was never rerun everywhere like TOS and the spin offs were. Even when you bought TOS package DVDs of the shows and movies, TAS was rarely included.That just gave off a farther vibe it was never part of the official continuity like everything else was.

Today thanks to the internet and streaming, every Trek fan is at least aware of it, but I still doubt most have watched it if they weren’t big TOS fans.

But I think at this point, it should just be considered canon and move on. Besides the fact more Star Trek has canonized those stories and characters today, nothing in it contradicts anything anyway. And if it did, it’s Star Trek, something is always contradicted lol.

I think some people have a sneaking suspicion that while, sure, quality issues and his developing views of what Star Trek is “about” may have been motivating Roddenberry (he tried to write ST V and parts of ST VI out of canon for those two reasons respectively, and TAS isn’t quite up to the standards of much of TOS), there might have been some money issues there too. (Bear in mind how Roddenberry wrote never-used lyrics for the TOS theme song so he could take half the royalties for it.) TAS was made by a different company and they might have had some claims there. The fact that his lawyer was involved is also telling.

Basically, TAS was “out” for a very brief period, say from about 1990 until ENT began inserting elements of it in about 2004, and then the powers that be even started claiming that TAS was never officially out.

Hopefully we’ll get a third appearance of the contraband/collectable Spock Helmet

I thought Becky Freeman’s reference to “no interpersonal conflict” was a dig at Roddenberry’s rules for TNG.