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Brighter lights

I’ll stand by the position that the Enterprise augment virus arc was an error, and the “explanation” for Klingon ridges is the same one you should use for the bridge of the Enterprise looking like it was cobbled together from plywood and plastic beads. This issue was best left to Worf’s lampshade in DS9 Trials & Tribleations.

It’s really interesting which visual differences humans will accept unthinkingly and which we will demand answers for. The Klingon ridges thing comes up constantly, but I have yet to see anyone earnestly ask why all the characters in Lower Decks have huge eyes and unnaturally uniform coloration, or why hand phaser beams in TOS go so much more slowly than later phasers and why everyone agrees to stay really still while they are being fired.

The showrunners said from a very early point that the two would not get together during the shows run, and I get the distinct impression that they actively enjoy trolling shippers. So this is pretty much exactly what I expected, and I’m perfectly happy with it.

(Also, look at Tendi in that last scene, when she gets a scan of Rutherford during a conversation about them being “just friends”. She saw something on that Tricorder which she didn’t expect, and then when Rutherford gets up and has his back turned, she’s clearly checking him out. Draw your own conclusions.)

The overall Rutherford arc was less successful. I guess they seeded it previously, but I always just assumed his implant was on the fritz, so it was odd to see him suddenly blaming the ship.

I am at a loss as to how Rutherford’s implant could be flexible enough to function as part of his brain in day-to-day life, and yet somehow be incapable of helping him solve engineering problems on an old ship? Is there some kind of weird DRM installed that prevents it from opening schematics older than a couple years? Or is all the data on California class systems stored in a file format that they latest and greatest starfleet tech can’t open? Both of which would be rather colossal failures of Federation computer tech.

This was a pretty solid episode with some very good jokes (the thing about creating a warp field with one nacelle was fantastic, for example), but I left feeling underwhelmed because of the bizare “the first officer is two LTJGs” thing. Lower Decks has had a shockingly strong track record of not doing things that strike me as immediately stupid, but this is really silly. “Ransom must be pulling another twisted prank, because he’s not this bad at his job” level silly. I think it’s still better than promoting Tilly to XO, but that’s a bar I had hoped this show would remain well clear of and a close shave is disappointing.

I think I understand why they did this: there’s no obvious non-specialist XO candidate of an appropriate rank in the main cast (arguably Shax, but he’s “only” a LT and does not seem ready for the job), and they didn’t want to just trot out a handwave and say they’ll be picking up the XO at the next starbase or something. I’d also theorize that they had planned to have two more seasons in which to work Mariner and Boimler into positions where they might actually make sense for an XO billet. But they aren’t there yet, and they both know it.

Also, gosh would that alternate universe explorer thing have been useful in DISCO S3. And probably Prodigy too. It’s also a dangerous can of worms to open for future stories, because having reliable access to random slightly different universes, apparently at different points in their timelines, is incredibly useful for both anticipating and solving problems in the “prime” universe. There’s also cool stuff they can do with it and I’m sure they will, so I’m trying to keep an open mind.

Finally, props to them for coming up with a more plausible reason for our heroes to literally save the universe: because someone connected to them got unwittingly thrown into a position of enormous influence, and deliberately picked them. It’s Zeus and company antagonizing Hercules, not Michael Burnham being central to solving five (?) entirely unrelated but galactically significant disasters, apparently by pure chance.