OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)When Mariner has a sharp uptick in her insubordinate behavior, Captain Freeman thinks back to her own time as a rowdy Ensign on the USS Illinois, when she found herself under the command of former Enterprise Chief Medical Officer Dr. Pulaski.OUR TAKEWhile we wait to find out if Star Trek Prodigy is getting removed from Netflix to become the only show in the franchise not available on streaming, Lower Decks comics continue with…a prequel episode! Specifically one focusing on Freeman’s past as a Starfleet when she had a lot of the same tendencies as Mariner, something we never got to see in the show itself. Not that we necessarily needed to, since Freeman’s dynamic with Mariner was pretty established, but it’s still nice to get that now, even if it’s in comic form. The framing device for the story is a bit odd though, since Mariner here in the “present” seems to have back-slided into her Season 3 or 4 days, when these comics have mostly taken place in the early fifth season when she should’ve shaken off this sort of behavior by now. Also, and this may have been an intentional dig at these sorts of stories, but Freeman doesn’t even begin telling Mariner about this incident, she just…starts remembering it while talking to her and we enter the flashback. But as for the flashback itself, we jump back fifteen years to around the time of The Next Generation’s third season, and since this wouldn’t be Lower Decks without a guest character from a different show, this time we get Dr. Pulaski, notable for being on that show only for its second season because of contract issues with one of the actors who then came back the following season, after which Pulaski mysteriously disappeared.Here, she’s portrayed as someone who is a bit too tightly wound to contrast this era’s Freeman, who is also a jolly prankster and looking for ways around doing work, much like Mariner would turn out to be, so the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, especially in zero gravity. Freeman is assigned to Pulaski for the doctor’s stay on the Illinois, but then Freeman’s antics with the auxiliary power get the bridge crew transported…somewhere during an encounter with a Romulan ship. Hopefully they’re not all dead, which seems likely considering Freeman wasn’t imprisoned for treason, but there are definitely going to be consequences for this. Regardless, while she initially thought this made her the highest ranking officer, it was in fact Pulaski, meaning her perhaps crazy tactics will likely help save them all, or at least just the ones we know survive like her, Freeman and a young Durango (who would later be captain in one of Lower Deck’s early episodes). And I guess we’ll see how that all plays out in the conclusion to this story next month! With the upcoming changes to the line up of ongoing Trek comics, Lower Decks continues to go strong, which will hopefully be for the foreseeable future.