Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks “Fissure Quest”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Somewhere off in the vast multiverse, William Boimler leads a ragtag team of slightly different variants to find out the source of the multidimensional rifts.

OUR TAKE

We’re down to the penultimate episode of this season and Star Trek: Lower Decks overall, AND…it’s an episode where the main characters are basically guest stars in their own show. Wow, with that, the gel, and the T’Pol appearance here, we really DID get an Enterprise tribute this season! But yeah, this episode, in true Lower Decks fashion, is basically bursting at the seams with fanservice and in-jokes and easter eggs and what have you. If you are someone even remotely familiar with Star Trek youtubers, you’re gonna find plenty of videos going over every single one extensively and how cool it is that they got THIS actor back or hinted at THIS plotline and such and such. And hey, I’m not made of stone, even if I haven’t seen any episode of DS9 or Voyager in full, I can see why these nods to past shows could feel significant to certain people. But my job here, as it has been since this show began, is to see how well it functions as a story on its own for those who have next to no familiarity with this franchise whatsoever. If you got to the end of its fifth season still without that knowledge or any interest to learn anything about it, congrats, that is some genuinely impressive resolve.

And thankfully I can safely say that this episode works perfectly well, if not actually pretty good, as just an episode for Lower Decks viewers alone. The focus character is William, Boimler’s transporter clone who had his death faked so he could work with Section 31, Star Fleet’s black ops team, so he is an established character within this series who people watching would be familiar with. But also he has all of Boimler’s memories up until the beginning of the second season, meaning he also knows Mariner enough to have a believable relationship with this alternate universe Mariner who turned out to be an engineer and says she’s not very daring or brave…and then still does daring and brave stuff so clearly not much of a change, but maybe that’s the point? Either way, it works well enough for this weird ersatz crew we’ve got going. Additionally, if you don’t know who the main version of these two medical officers are and why them being romantically together here is a significant departure, or who this angry bald man is, or why all of these versions of the same guy never got promoted, you don’t need to! The jokes make sense within the context of the episode! And if you DO know, then even better! The point is that it doesn’t subtract if you don’t.

But then we get to the big revelation: the rifts haven’t been created by some malicious force trying to conquer the multiverse, they were made by an exploratory team that travels to strange new UNIVERSES instead of just alien planets. Putting aside that we kinda already did this sort of plot in recent memory if you’ve seen the fourth season of Star Trek Discovery, this sort of conflict is textbook Trek to its core. A potentially lethal misunderstanding that almost leads to death and war being uncovered to be simply two groups of people seeking understanding for themselves, each other, and the universe (or in this case multiverse) at large. A shame that has to come with a massive wave of radiation that is being sent to the prime timeline out of obligation, and that the stakes are so huge that I don’t believe FOR A SECOND that the good guys will lose, AND that this whole series is set before Prodigy and Picard where nothing about this is mentioned meaning this will all be resolved without it ever being that big a deal…on top of this accidentally being the second to last episode of the show that doesn’t involve the main characters in any real way. So, you can see why this is only getting an 8. One episode remains, so hopefully they make it one worthy to take it out on. Oh yeah, and there’s another comic next week!