Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks “Crisis Point”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

After another one of Mariner’s freedom fighting escapades goes awry, she and Captain Freeman come to blows again, this time with Freeman sentencing her…to therapy. Instead, Mariner decides to act out her fantasies in the Holodeck through a simulation that Boimler has set up to act as a perfect one to one practice for an upcoming interview. So Mariner hijacks it and turns it into a Star Trek movie with her as the antagonist and Tendi and Rutherford as her hench-people as Boimler tries probing the holo-crew for how to do his interview. Tendi, feeling uncomfortable that she’s being stereotyped as an Orion pirate, bails quickly, while Rutherford geeks out with his favorite engineer, Billups.

Mariner ends up confusing holo-Freeman quite a bit as her role as her issues as the captain’s daughter starts leaking into her role as villain, but what she doesn’t expect is to come face to face with her holo-self, who shows herself to be fiercely loyal to Freeman and the Cerritos in ways that even the real Mariner is confounded by, to the point that holo-Mariner even destroys the ship in order to save the crew. Mariner accepts that these are her true feelings, though Boimler accidentally watches holo-Freeman reveal that Mariner is her daughter, which was apparently a secret?

OUR TAKE

Really not helping my comparisons of Mariner to Rick Sanchez, Lower Decks. We’ve got a semi-anarchist free thinking, fast drinking, fast talking, shit stirrer who is allergic to therapy? Might as well give her Einstein hair and a portal gun at this point. But putting that aside, this is a fine episode, if a bit thematically muddled. It continues the streak of this show going from an aimless, annoying, unfunny, and beholden to references, and slowly becoming much more solid and character driven. Mariner’s conflicts with her mother have been recurring since the first episode, which couple well with her unwillingness to live up to the potential people say she has. Now we see the supposed climax of that as Mariner has pretty much worked out those issues, though who knows where that will take her in the finale next week. I also have to admit that I did not get the impression that Mariner being Freeman’s daughter was supposed to be a secret, since, as far as I know, having relatives on the same ship isn’t, like, illegal or anything.

The movie setting, aside from the likely numerous franchise references throughout it, worked pretty well for laying out how contradictory and self-defeating Mariner’s mindset has been, though it feels kinda messy in its execution. Tendi finally gets her being an Orion addressed, a species that has pretty much always been associated with theft and villainy, so I imagine trying to be a Starfleet officer with that kind of baggage would be…difficult to avoid. I’m not necessarily asking for Lower Decks to get really deep into that this early on. But I’m not NOT asking them to get into that at some point, considering how Star Trek is famous for engaging with topics like that in its storytelling. Also probably gonna be a lot of porn of her in that outfit if there isn’t already. Rutherford doesn’t get a whole lot to do by himself, just be his upbeat self and Boimler is still pathetic and annoying, but I guess he’ll be getting further focus in the finale as he grapples with knowing this secret. But for now, this is Mariner’s story and it’s more or less a solid deep dive into her character. We’ve got one week left of Lower Decks Season 1, so let’s see how they close out this opening season before the break between this and the already confirmed second season.