Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 Premiere Review: Of Merges and Moves and Moopsies
Diana Keng
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All hail the return of Star Trek: Lower Decks, the Trek that no one expected to take the fandom by storm!
The double-episode premiere is the perfect marriage of the half-hour comedy format with a long-arc mystery. On Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 Episode 1, we get a hefty dose of Voyager homage, while Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 Episode 2 tests Mariner's ability to self-sabotage.
In other news, T'Lyn is on Vulcan fire as the newest Cerritos ensign, and we are totally here for it.
While Rutherford could be content tinkering alone all his life, Tendi is a fundamentally social creature, so giving her a Science buddy like T'Lyn is fitting.
The fact that her bubbly socialness is wholly balanced by T'Lyn's lack of tact or interpersonal skills makes it brilliant.
As ensigns, our intrepid quartet (now quintet) can turn even the most straightforward mission into a comedy of errors.
On "Twovix," a mission that shines a spotlight on the history and exploits of Janeway's U.S.S. Voyager, which spent seven seasons scaling the pinnacle of space shenanigans, can only mean that the Cerritos's best will have a chance to FUBAR at historically significant levels.
Ransom: Promotions are coming up and I think you’ll be very happy.
Boimler: Wait, really? I’m getting a promotion?
Ransom: As long as nothing goes sideways today, you’ll be a Lieutenant Junior Grade.
Boimler: But stuff always goes sideways!
Ransom: Relax. You’d have to screw up in a historically significant way to mess this one up.
Boimler: Okay, yeah, what are the odds of that?
While throwing back to many of Voyager's most memorable adventures, noticeably absent are two of the most iconic voices of that cast -- Kate Mulgrew's Kathryn Janeway and Robert Picardo's Doctor.
Likely, their involvement in the "other" animated series, Star Trek: Prodigy, precluded guest starring on the more adult and less couth Lower Decks.
The throwbacks don't end with Voyager references, although those are heavily the majority of the inside jokes.
Off the top of my head, there's the Neelix Cheese, the holodeck villains -- Clown (ST: VOY S2 E23), Chaotica (ST: VOY S5 E12), and the unlikely Michael Sullivan (ST:VOY S6 E11) -- and, of course, the whole premise of the narrative, the creation and murder of Tuvix (ST:VOY S2 E24).
Kayshon: The ship was damaged by cheese?
Ransom: It’s Voyager. Sh*t got freaky.
Outside of Voyager, there's a cheeky little line referring to Mariner and Boimler's adventure aboard Pike's Enterprise on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Episode 7.
Mariner: How can you be this distracted over an empty ship?
Boimler: Uh, y’know, Chakotay served here.
Mariner: Dude, this is nothing compared to – y’know – that Pike thing we aren’t supposed to talk about?
And being self-congratulatory as only Lower Decks can manage, they drop the curtain by bringing back the Che'Ta from Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2 Episode 9, arguably the most brilliant bit of Trek perspective playing in all of the television canon.
It's unfortunate that Ma'ah gets short shrift, but I have a theory. More on that later.
As is often par for the course with Star Trek: Lower Decks, the moral quandary of whether reclaiming T'ana and Billups by eradicating T'illups is never clearly answered as T'lyn's attempt to stop the hybrids from merging the entire ship squishes all the hybridized individuals into a seemingly unsustainable morass of crew members.
T’illups: Dr. Migleemo, I need you help… uh… processing my existence.
Migleemo: Oh, what a dream. Don’t do any self-care until I get there.
So, while Tendi feels sympathy for T'illups and what they could do as a merging of T'ana's brilliant scientific mind with Billups's genius-level engineering skill, she doesn't hesitate to pick apart the conglomeration of all the hybrids as she cannot relate to it.
Meanwhile, she and T'lyn work synchronously (much like a hybridized being), using Tendi's knowledge of the crew's personalities and T'lyn's precise scientific application of transporter tech to save the crew.
The real irony is they wouldn't have been able to do it at all without T'illups's juiced-up scanner.
Seeing our ensigns -- all except Rutherford -- earn promotions for their endeavors is quite a proud moment for those who've been Lower Decks fans from the beginning.
One might even suspect the promotion is meta-symbolic of the show being so popular that it scored a Season 5 renewal before Season 4 announced a premiere date.
Boimler: What are you so bummed about? Now we get to be Lieutenant JGs together.
Tendi: All of us except Rutherford.
Rutherford: I mean, I did break Voyager. Engineers can’t get promoted for breaking stuff. We always fix things.
The two offerings that kick off Season 4 are more than a double helping of hilarity. "Twovix" segues into "I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee" with great elegance.
First, there's the opener wherein the Romulan ship's destruction paralleling the Klingon's ship's from the closer of "Twovix."
Female Romulan: Subcommander V’Reck takes pleasure in our misery. Hopefully, he doesn’t get too comfortable for soon my plans will come to fruition and his life will be ‘disrupted.’
Male Romulan: You are betraying Subcommander V’Reck? That is a pity because I am already betraying him and my plans will come to fruition first.
Female Romulan: Please. Don’t make me scoff. Your plans are barely even schemes.
Male Romulan: You wouldn’t know a scheme from a conspiracy!
My theory on the roaming ship-killer? The encounters with the unknown vessels have followed precise similarities right down to the debris field left by the decimation of the ships.
However, in each debris field, there have been no bodies seen.
Could the aggressing vessel be kidnapping the crews and then destroying the ships to leave no trace?
Boimler: Are you sure this is going to work?
Rutherford: Nope, but it feels like a kooky Voyager solution so it’s worth a try.
The next throughline between the premiere and the post-premiere (is that a thing?) is Rutherford remaining an ensign when the others move onto Lieutenants, Junior Grade.
For the crew to suddenly spawn a nemesis for Rutherford just when he needs to shine is a little on the nose, for my taste.
Rutherford: Wait, I can just ask for stuff I deserve?
Billups: I guess.
But whether Livik is a one-show pony or grows into a Moriarity/Badgey-esque adversary, there's a sweetness to Tendi solving Rutherford's promotion issue with a straightforward ask.
While Boimler's moving issues are an entertaining C Plot, the show is stolen by the Moopsie.
I guess the central plot is meant to be about Ransom and Mariner's relationship and how he plans to see her become the stellar officer she's capable of being. There's also the whole matter of how she's spent the last ten(?) years self-sabotaging herself into a perma-ensign rank.
I’m going to become an insubordination supernova and control my own fate.
Mariner
But it's really all about the Moopsie. Seriously, I want to see the Moopsie's home planet and all the varieties of Moopsies, Darwin's finches-style.
I'd also like to see how Freeman explains leaving the humans behind in the menagerie simply because they're jerks to Starfleet.
Finally, if I'm being pedantic about this, who's running the menagerie now that Narj is gone?
Considering how things were left on Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 3 Episode 10, a sentient artificial intelligence uprising would appear to be on the horizon.
Whether that is the source of the mystery ship-killer or there's a different threat lurking, we'll just have to wait and see.
Boimler: We put a lot of lightyears on these orange slabs. I promised myself I wouldn’t get emotional.
Tendi: Aw, how could you not? We spent so much time – hanging out, staying up late ranking captains by cuteness, swapping bodies because of those cosmic rays…
Rutherford: [shudder] We learned too much about each other that day.
But as long as we're waiting, it's gratifying to know that we'll be entertained as Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 continues to push the boundaries of Trek and good taste.
And, once again, YAY! T'LYN!
Beam yourself down to the comments, Fanatics, and have your say on what you want to see next! Is it new frontiers or familiar faces? Who are the guest stars on your wishlist? Now that we've seen TNG crew, the crossover with Pike's Enterprise, and the actual Voyager vessel, what else can they throw at us?
Diana Keng was a staff writer for TV Fanatic. She is a lifelong fan of smart sci-fi and fantasy media, an upstanding citizen of the United Federation of Planets, and a supporter of AFC Richmond 'til she dies. Her guilty pleasures include female-led procedurals, old-school sitcoms, and Bluey. She teaches, knits, and dreams big. Follow her on X.
