Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks “Veritas”


OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The Lower Decks crew appear to find themselves selected as character witnesses in a trial against their superior officers and are forced to tell the seeming prosecutor voiced by Kurtwood Smith what has been happening with the crew lately. Only problem is that, through one mishap or another, none of them really know the whole story. Boimler and Mariner got to the bridge too late to understand what was happening, Rutherford’s implant’s updates kept him knocked out for most of the time they were stealing a Romulan Bird of Prey, and Tendi was dragged on a classified retrieval operation that she has to omit details from. All of this just seems to anger the Kurtwood Smith alien asking them for details, who just puts them all in vat of burning eels. It’s only when Boimler calls out this sham of a trial that they learn…this isn’t a trial at all, but rather party to celebrate the Cerritos crew rescuing Kurtwood Smith from that Romulan ship. Clearly this is a lesson that the Upper Deck officers need to be clearer with their subordinates, but that doesn’t seem to really be changing anytime soon. Also, Q from Next Generation is there.

OUR TAKE
Okay, I do like a Rashomon style story every now and then (that being where multiple characters are interrogated about their specific vantage points regarding a specific event and how those stories tend to overlap and show multiple angles and uncover things about that event), but this one felt like…I don’t know, muddled? Apparently a “trial episode” is a pretty common story type in Trek shows, so this is a play on those. Kudos on not making the humor for that reliant on previous knowledge of Trek in order to understand the joke…even though they border on it pretty hard with a LOT of references, most notably the return of John de Lancie as his well known role of Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation, though I feel like he’s pretty well known.

The different stories between the officers are pretty clever and funny in their own right, with Mariner and Boimlers’ mainly being about faking it through an alien negotiation, Rutherford’s being about him blacking out as his implant’s updates make him autopilot through his mission, while Tendi just stumbles into her end of things but ends up doing well enough on her own. These all feel specific to their respective character viewpoints and their respective style of humor, even if the humor doesn’t quite land all of the time. The issue comes when the twist of the not-trial comes up, mainly in that the humor and the motivations of the Kurtwood Smith alien kinda fall apart for the sake this twist on the gag.

It basically gives me the impression that the creators wanted to play with this typical Trek story mold and turn it on its head, but then didn’t really think about how to make that make sense AND be funny, not really understanding that the former is kind of important to achieving the latter. Essentially, we have some good components in this episode that work fine on their own, but put together in this way end up falling flat or apart. In that sense, it kinda feels like Lower Decks is backsliding on the promise it was showing in the past couple weeks, though it’s still considerably better than it was in the early weeks. With only two episodes left until the first season concludes, I’m sure that there isn’t much chance for them to not stick the landing well enough before the end of the season, though I guess we’ll see.