Review: Star Trek Lower Decks “The Spy Humongous”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Boimler is scouted by a group of hopeful ensigns who plan for promotion, while Tendi, Mariner, and Rutherford go through the Cerritos’ anomalies, and Captain Freeman negotiates with Pakled leadership.

OUR TAKE

Lower Decks carries what will hopefully be a strong trend of episodes for the remainder of its sophomore season. We continue mixing up the character pairings by having Boimler go off on his own, leaving the other three of the main for to do their own thing and play off each other. And a good opportunity to do so, since Boimler’s main character arc for the series is trying to become a captain, it makes sense that he would eventually encounter a bunch of other ensigns who are also trying to carve a path to the captain’s chair. However, these Red Shirts (making ironic use of the affectionate name for Star Trek minor characters whose main purpose is to die) seem to almost cultish in what they think it means to be a captain, mainly in that they think it involves looking like a main character and giving long winded speeches…which, if you’ve seen any given Star Trek series, is an understandable guess. But as we see later, the speechifying ends up getting in the way of Boimler actually trying to stop a later big problem. Oddly, this seems like it would be a late Season 1 episode to show how far he’s come, but I think it works here as well.

As for the other plots, Freeman and Ransom dealing with the Pakleds on different fronts is actually pretty dang hilarious, as one of the Pakleds sneaks onto the ship and is a terribly obvious spy and Freeman and Shax try getting information from the higher ups and their bigger hats. The Pakleds, when first introduced, felt like one more thing referencing something I haven’t seen and had to catch up on, but luckily we’ve seen plenty of them this season to help characterize them as an ongoing threat who is also very funny and mainly only threatening because there are a lot of them. It helps show what the bigger Federation ships are handling like Riker and now Freeman, who takes this mission to hopefully get a promotion. And then there’s what the main three are doing, which sadly is pretty reference heavy, but it does lead to Tendi turning into a giant scorpion monster lady but somehow still looking absolutely adorable. I think that staying cute no matter what is Tendi’s superpower. Overall, a good episode, even with some of the same issues. Hopefully a good sign for the rest of the season.