Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks “The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
The Cerritos arrives on a resort planet to find rogue nanites and an AWOL Admiral, but Mariner has to properly break up with her ex Jennifer first.
OUR TAKE
We continue barreling towards the finale of Lower Decks, and while this series has usually been pretty good at avoiding outright bad episodes, it also doesn’t mean they’re all going to be as good as the double premiere was. Basically, to be blunt, I’m saying that this episode is “mid” as the kids are saying now. Not terrible by any means, but definitely not wowing me like the past few have to some extent. To start off on some positives, this episode puts a bow on the ongoing romantic subplot between Mariner and her one time love affair with her Andorian crewmate Jennifer, which I wanna say started around the second season? This character had popped up in the background here and there in Season 1, but started becoming more prominent at the start of Season 2 as Mariner seemed to go back and forth on her feelings about her. This led to them fully dating for most of Season 3 until the events of “Trusted Sources”, where some miscommunications led to Mariner being forcibly exiled from the crew, where Jennifer did not stand up for her, and some slight indirect actions implied they were no longer together, which was then confirmed by her not making any major appearances in Season 4 and now this.
Oddly enough, this is not the first amicable break up between two queer characters in a Star Trek fifth season that came out this year! And I do want to give it points for having some healthy closure for this relationship, as it helps to highlight Mariner’s character development by willing to have the touch conversations she would rather avoid. As for the other subplots, Boimler goes on a mission with ransom that brings him face to face with an admiral who is sick of being boxed into specific weird missions, and T’Lyn gets to meet her favorite musical artist, both of which are interesting and kind of funny, but not by much. Oddly enough, the aforementioned “Trusted Sources” is probably the closest thing Lower Decks has had to bad episode for me since early Season 1 and this week didn’t change that, but I’m hoping this will mean the remaining seven episodes of the series will be a bit more intriguing and cover less trodden ground that we got here. I’d hate to see this unintentional final season leave us on a bit of a mediocre note, something that has unfortunately happened plenty of times in the franchise’s history.
