“Upper Decks”
Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5, Episode 8 – Debuted Thursday, December 5, 2024
Written by Cullen Crawford
Directed by Bob Suarez
A fun celebration of the show itself gives more characters their time to shine.
SPOILERS BELOW
Yeah sure, you are Mirror Boimler, we believe you.
RECAP
“They are no Janeway, Kirk, or Sisko.”
As the Cerritos is parked in the rings of Bhungar V to study some “buhgoon” space creatures, the lower deckers take a break carving pumpkins (“mutilating gourds,” according to T’Lyn) and listening to Mariner’s tale of an off-screen adventure stuck in a painting. They agree all the cool stuff on the ship revolves around them, not the boring bridge crew. Cut to the senior officer briefing, where T’Ana says she’s found the cure for a pathogen that transformed Barnes into a “futuristic cavewoman.” However, the doctor is cautioned there have been complaints about her lax approach to pain management. After some other quick updates on engineering (new bridge rocks installed) and security (some random insectoid chatter), Shaxs has to excuse himself after seeing a haunting vision. As they break up with a rousing “Strong and brave, wise and true, that what makes us Cerritos crew” chant, Ransom heads off to handle the buhgoon. He escorts a gruff Grazerite Starfleet specialist to the shuttle bay, where a group of bickering ensigns struggle to bring in a “space cow” which freaks out, naturally cloaking and rampaging invisibly around the bay. Jack tries to get things under control by gathering the eyerolling ensigns so he can recount a tale from his past about impressing a commander by beating “Big Wave Tommy” in a surfing competition. Meanwhile, in his quarters, Shaxs is being taunted by a literal specter of his past: “You can’t fight me because I am you.” He meditates to astrally project… straight into a Shaxs-on-Shaxs ghost fight! Awesome.
Admit it, you miss killing Cardies.
“I haven’t been overwhelmed with pain yet.”
As Shaxs battles himself and the waves of the Cardassians he has killed, each of the senior officers across the Cerritos are dealing with their own crises. In engineering, the calm turns to chaos when retrofitted plasma canisters look to explode with Meredith literally roped in to help Billups prevent an overload—and if that wasn’t enough, there is a Bynar AI golem thing, too. In sickbay, T’Ana has had enough constructive criticism and tasks a reluctant Westlake to inflict increasing levels of torture onto the Caitian so she can update her pain chart… “You are going to f—k me up so I can feel some pain!” Okay. With the patience of a saint, the captain faces a morning filled with crew meetings that include a Barnes (still a bit cavewoman) sousaphone recital, a beautiful (and horrifying) fertility event, and Winger Bingston Jr’s latest (seven-act) one-man show.
Unbeknownst to them all, the Cerritos is being observed by an ominous lurking ship. The shuttle bay has only gotten more chaotic as more riled up cloaked buhgoons smash everything up. Ransom tries to rally the ensigns again, but they only back away from his attempt to inspire them by doing curls with cargo containers. In the mayhem, the Starfleet expert gets jostled by a space cow, revealing something under his face. In the corridor he runs into the captain and we find out why the buhgoons were so agitated by him: He’s actually a Clicket! Who? The Clickets want the secret to the buhgoon cloaking so they can take over the quadrant, and more Clickets are beaming in, targeting the senior officers…”You and your pathetic crew are no match for my infiltrators.” Again, who are you guys?
Do you Grazerites lift?
“What a bunch of weirdos.”
The captain is rescued by cavewoman Barnes dispatching Clickets with her sousaphone. T’Ana also leaps into action, ignoring a set-to-kill Clicket phaser blast because she is past pain. Insert cat screeches! Ransom is now sleeping off his workout, so Beta and Delta shifters work together to subdue more Clickets. And the insects sent to Shaxs’ quarters didn’t stand a chance, as he took them for just a few more Cardies to add to his corpse pile. The captain makes it to the bridge, but there are just too many Clickets and their commander calls over to gloat. Carol praisesthe insects on their invasion… and also on their handsomeness, amazing breath and more as she has remembered the briefing that Clickets can’t handle compliments, so they beam away. That was super easy, barely an inconvenience. Things calm down across the ship once Billups is freed from a tube in engineering and is ready to tech more tech. In the shuttle bay, the buhgoon are escorted out and Ransom sees his plan to unite the ensigns by acting like a doofus was successful. Carol returns to her packed schedule only to be surprised that Stevens arranged to have her husband visit for a nice holodeck Paris anniversary dinner. Other senior officers adjourn to the bar to reflect on their day as the lower deckers emerge from their pumpkin party, apparently unaware of everything that has been going on. Mariner is particularly oblivious, and it takes a joke from T’Lyn to get Beckett to question her worldview that they alone are all the “the spice and glitter around here.” Boom.
I was in “Veritas,” how dare you forget me.
REVIEW
This was another treat for longtime fans of the series. Creator Mike McMahan has come full circle by presenting us with the Lower Decks version of the TNG episode that inspired the series, so of course he named his “Upper Decks.” From top to bottom it was a celebration of the show itself, giving us an episode from the perspective of the senior officers. It got perhaps too meta given Boimler introduced the premise early on with “We’re sort of the stars of the show,” but this inward focus has been a constant theme for this fifth and final season. But it was still a bold choice to have the core four (five now with T’Lyn) only bookend the episode, leaving the rest to the supporting cast of characters, the senior officers, who showed that each of them are stars on their own. The writing, too, demonstrated that these characters have been developed enough over the years to easily carry an episode. The result is we have a lot of fun discovering more about each of these characters from Carol’s dedication to her crew to Shaxs’ tragic backstory, Billups’ wild engineering, and T’Ana’s issues with pain management, and learned there is a whole lot more to Ransom than his cultivated jock persona.
No kink shaming, Westlake.
This switch of focus also allowed more background characters to shine, including Barnes and her killer sousaphone, Nurse Westlake’s catty chemistry with Dr. T’Ana, and Stevens’ thoughtful attention from bringing an umbrella to the beautiful (but messy) fertility event to arranging a romantic moment for the captain. Digging even deeper, Hans Federov (better known as “Towel Guy”) finally got some lines, as we saw him, Castro, and Karavitas step out of the background as bickering ensigns learning to work together to wrangle space cows, fight space bugs, and unite against their shared disdain for Ransom. Speaking of the insects, going back to season 1 to bring back the Clickets as the episode baddies was just another way of showing how this series has plenty of characters and canon of its own. But don’t worry, there’s a V’Ger gag and more of the like for the egg hunters to find.
Did I ever tell you how I learned this move from Captain Riker?
As for the main plot, it was pretty thin and predictable, and the season plot was again not even mentioned. There simply wasn’t much room left after they jammed in so many character moments. That is typical of these kind of pause-before-the-storm bottle shows, and the tradeoff was worth it. The Clickets were ridiculous but that was the point, and room was left for unique moments like Billups and Meredith fighting the AI defense golem built into some used tech bought from Bynars, where the only way to disable it was to tell it a sad story from your childhood to demonstrate human emotion. But don’t worry, with lines like “We have to decouple the deuterium conduits before the thermal blankets push the valve blocks into the adjustment coils,” they didn’t skimp on having fun with over-the-top technobabble. That’s the stuff that makes the episode work, and there was plenty of it.
What? We were just…. uh… realigning our coils.
“Upper Decks” was full of great performances from the ensemble cast the show has built up over the seasons. Even though it may be the longest list of guest credits yet, all had worked on the show before, either returning to voice some of the lesser known characters or taking on new ones. Lower Decks has relied on a stable of funny and talented voice actors like Nolan North, Artemis Ebdani, Ben Rodgers, Charlotte Nicao, Jessica McKenna, Paul F. Tompkins, James Sie, Mary Holland, Phil Lamarr, Paul Scheer, and many others. The episode almost felt like one last hurrah for the gang to all get together and have a little fun before heading into the final two episodes, which we know will be linked together. Presumably the season plot of the space fissures will return and our core lower deckers will take center stage, but this episode made it clear that the Cerritos is in good hands, and (as noted by Tendi), the commanders “are the leads of their own stories when we are not observing them.”
Freeman, when the bugs came.
Final thoughts
This was a special episode that likely plays best for those who love the show and the characters already, and that’s just fine. We are five seasons in and the show has built enough of its own universe to explore without ever leaving the ship. But this little break to celebrate the show’s secondary characters also highlights how things are coming to an end as we head into the final episodes of the series.
Shaxs rages over there only being two episodes left.
RANDOM BITS
- Billups notes the bagel he had for breakfast gave him a tummy ache, a callback to “Starbase 80” when Tendi revealed he was trying to expand his breakfast palate.
- Ransom’s surfing story from “a few hundred stardates ago” included Kimolu and Matt, indicating he has been friends with the Cerritos whales for a long time.
- If his latest one-man show was autobiographical, then Winger Bingston, Jr. previously served for a year on the USS Manticore, an Oberth class ship described as one of the fleet’s “fun ships.”
- The “Cordry Rocks” are likely named for Marian Cordry, director of Star Trek brand management for Paramount Global.
- Castro is voiced by Gabrielle Ruiz, who also voices T’Lyn.
- In case you were curious, a key difference between a sousaphone and tuba is how the bell is aimed outward, which Barnes used to great effect fighting the Clickets.
Good thing you didn’t prefer the tuba.
Easter eggs and more to come
We will take a deeper dive into the V’Ger pumpkin and all the Easter eggs and canon connections this weekend and will discuss this episode on Friday’s All Access Podcast.
New episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks premiere on Thursdays, streaming on Paramount+ in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, and Europe. Lower Decks also airs on Thursdays in Canada on CTV Sci-Fi Channel.
Keep up with all the news and reviews from the new Star Trek Universe on TV at TrekMovie.com.
This episode got the most laughs out of me of any episode this season.
Loved how they gave an actual engineering explanation for the ‘bridge rocks.’
Also Billups’ personal log – saying a bagel gave him a tummy ache, and ending it with “okay, bye!”
Does Boimler get anything important to do this week?
In the last two episodes he has:
Meanwhile Mariner is the star. As usual.
It’s so frustrating.
You clearly haven’t watched this week’s episode or last week’s since last week the “star” was clearly Tendi- and Mariner barely featured this week.
If you are going to complain about the show, at least base it in some kind of truth, Emily. Don’t make things up just to moan. It just makes you look incredibly dumb.
Wow! You made that personal! Congrats!!!
Harry is right though, yes, Tawny-as-Mariner is the star and takes the lion’s share of the plot. But Shatner-as-Kirk was the star of TOS and that didn’t mean Spock and Bones went from being a meaningful support team to just sitting around like a couple of useless dickheads relegated to licking consoles and befriending cat ladies.
This is a significant tangent though since we’re meant to be talking about an episode that’s specifically not about the main characters at all.
I’m starting to think you and Harry are the exact same person.
And I’m starting to think you’re looking for trouble. I can assure you, I only post here (and elsewhere) as “Ambassador Sybok.”
None of the focus lower-deckers had anything important to do in this episode, which was the point of it. They are barely in the episode at all.
Weird that they give Mariner so much to do and yet also give Tawny Newsome top billing in the credits. It’s almost like they are connected.
It’s almost like she’s the…. central character?! Who would have thought!
Unfortunately she certainly is. Why are the writers incapable of giving Boimler anything to do, ever? Apart from licking consoles that is.
The episode was focused on the senior staff, not Mariner. What a strange comment to make.
Overall this seemed like another filler/bottle episode, which was really disappointing this late in the final season. I did like the shift in focus to the senior staff, and the appearance of Admiral Freeman was fun, but it felt like they tried to cram too much into the episode. I think if they knew they were getting another season they would have spread it out a little more and maybe only focused on one or two of the senior staff here.
While I know it wasn’t the main focus, the resolution to the story of the Clickets coming after the Buhgoon was also kind of silly. They were chased away by compliments, but what’s stopping them from coming back after the Cerritos leaves? It was also frustrating that they completely ignored the dimensional fissures again. They seem to bounce back and forth between addressing and ignoring them, and it makes me feel like the episodes were aired out of order.
If this was a regular season, I think I would have felt better about this episode, but knowing that we’ve only got 2 left makes it feel like they wasted time with this one. I’m hoping they did this in part to save up their pennies to make the final two episodes a real blowout that gives Lower Decks the end it deserves.
In agree with you in that the episode felt like filler. With only 2 left (an hour of airtime, unless the finale is an expanded episode), you’d think they’d be upping the ante for this “insane” finale.
Don’t get me wrong – this was one of the most interesting episodes of the season. However, it would’ve felt better in season 3 or 4, where the clock wasn’t ticking down to zero-hour for the noble crew of the Cerritos.
I dunno, I think it’s a great gesture to give the bridge crew their own episode before the end, just like TNG gave Ogawa and her friends an unexpected outing in its last year. Now’s the time to try something new. Honestly, if they’d known before plotting the season that it was the last one for sure, I bet they’d have done more ones like this or wej Duj.
Y’know, Ian, I never looked at it like that. I’ve been saying my only problem with the episode was that it felt out of place as the countdown-to-quitting time clock is ticking. But maybe, like TNG, it’s a leisurely strut to the finish line and not a mad dash. Now the placement of this episode in the final season seems a bit more… wait for it… logical.
I want to see a movie set in Dr. T’ana’s sick bay. That would be one freaky movie.
After today’s episode their first comedy-horror!
I don’t think it was the intention at the time, now that we know when the writers knew this would be the last season, but seeing this now as a proper send off to the bridge crew supporting characters, I was glad they did this. Everyone got a fun little slice and character moment, and they earned the right to flip the script.
Quite a bit more body horror than usual. Goodness!
Also, really appreciated the attempt to explain all the rocks hiding behind every console.
It seems like this should have occurred before last week’s episode; as aired, Tendi and T’Lyn should have been in the senior staff meeting.
Nice catch!
That’s a good point. Seems out of the ordinary to have both senior science officers off duty at the same time.
really enjoyed this one and appreciated how it was fun / funny without relying on deep cut references, which while i love i’m glad they don’t have to always rely on those
Just caught up with the season and these last two have been the most fun.
This was another great one. Not as good as last week’s but a lot of fun.
I think like others, it felt more like Filler and being so close for the show to end. There should be something that pushes the story forward. But I did love the reverse idea of taking the episode Lower Decks from TNG and flipping it. Although we’ve actually seen tons of adventures with the senior staff, just never without Mariner and gang until now.
And it’s amazing how many stories each character was given to fit into a 25 minute show. They packed it in and per usual very creative.
I have not loved season 5 as much I hoped but if the next two are as good and hopefully better than the last two it will finish pretty strong.
This show is ending waaaay too soon.
Best line…
Alien: “This phaser was set to kill!”
T’Ana: “So am I.” [pounce]