Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks “Hear All Trust Nothing”

Overview

Captain Freeman and the Cerritos visit Deep Space 9 so that she can negotiate with diplomats from the Gamma Quadrant. This allows the rest of the Cerritos crew to navigate across the giant DS9 campus and take on their own adventures. For Tendi, it’s meeting a fellow Orion with Rutherford and taking part in a pirating adventure. With Boimler, it’s a bunch of gambling? Mariner goes off with  Jeniffer to meet her boring friends for a Salon that she’s totally uncomfortable with until trouble ensues. Lastly, Shaxs gets into a silly argument with his former DS9 colleague.

Everything comes to a head when the aforementioned diplomats attempt to arrest Quark on some bogus stolen tech that Quark has since profited on, but Freeman is able to put together a deal that gets all parties on the same page.

Our Take

Whenever anything crosses over, you have to have time for it. Family Guy, for my money, does it the best so far which probably has more to do with Seth MacFarlane’s upbringing of watching The Jetsons/ The Flintstones do it and taking notes. Whether it was “The Simpson Guy” which was 44 minutes or the 90-minute “Hurricane Sunday” that the show did with American Dad and The Cleveland Show, the really good crossovers need that room to breathe so that big casts can intermingle.

In this week’s case, the comedy for Star Trek: Lower Decks/Deep Space 9 crossover works, there are a lot of funny sequences, with extra light deserving to go to Mariner and Tendi’s plots, but those expecting a true crossover may be disappointed. Anybody who knows the way the live-action franchise ends understands why, and as such, only a couple of characters from that franchise even show up in the show. That said, just the fact that we get to see Deep Space 9 is still special. A few of the actors from the OG show aren’t even alive anymore anyway, and recasting them would’ve left a vicious sore in my mouth, so I liked the idea of just focusing on the setting of the ship and then giving each of the Cerritos Lower Decks crew a bit to play with.

I’m trying to keep the surprises as spoiler-free as I can, hardcore Trekkies will have more fun getting those than I would anyway, but I actually think this week’s episode is still rather solid. Not a ton of flashy action sequences until the end, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I’m not sure this episode advances any of the “hooks” the show has been laying in for each of the characters thus far in the show’s third season, but a solid episode nonetheless.