Comic Review: Star Trek – Lower Decks #10

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Tendi finds herself doing double shifts on both the Cerritos and a Ferrengi ship in order to pay off her debt!

OUR TAKE

We conclude Issue Ten and this story about TenDI with probably the most clever way one of these Lower Decks comics (or at least in this run, I haven’t gone back and checked the ones before it) have finished an arc. So far, these two part arcs have usually ended with the characters involved fighting something and things building up to a crescendo as that thing being fought is defeated or destroyed or something. But with a situation like trying to pay off a debt, fighting and action in general are not really applicable. Thus, the story has to employ a more typical Trek trait in a story: its smarts. Initially in this issue, it seems like the solution of having Tendi split her work between two ships is just going to be the solution everyone goes with…but this is a spin-off comic of dubious canonicity, so this all has to get resolved by the end of the story arc. The solution comes from the place you would least expect, assuming that you would least expect it to come from the waste of another alien species that turns out to be great as an alternative fuel to dark matter, which the Ferrengi are apparently looking for. And so, with the deal made to corner the market on this new fuel source, Tendi lives to have the proper amount of bed rest another day! Unlike me, who can only dream of that.

But yeah, this is easily my favorite of these little mini arcs so far. Not just because it’s about my fave main cast member Tendi (as I mentioned last issue’s review) but also for how clever and contemporary this premise is AND how clever the resolution is. More than any of the other arcs we’ve had in this run, I could definitely see this being an episode idea that they were intending to put in the show but just couldn’t get it approved in time before it got cancelled. I have no way of proving that either way, but I can at least see it being a possibility. Also, gotta love the throwaway gag of the crew dealing with a lot of “B-Stories”, which is a term used for the lesser plot going on alongside the main one but here is used for Beta Shift, the group that our main protagonists fall under within the ship itself. Apparently we are drawing near the end of this “season” of the comic as next issue “kicks off the penultimate arc”, involving our two favorite horny belugas, Kimolu and Matt! See you next month for that!