Decrease Decks units up its finale elbowing its personal ribs

Spoilers for Decrease Decks, “Fissure Quest.”

It seems you can have your cake and eat it.

The penultimate episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks is an train in field ticking for the present’s inventive workforce. It does the grunt work of laying the desk and elevating the stakes for subsequent week’s sequence finale. But it surely’s additionally the present’s final — for now — probability to wring a gag or two out of all these deep-cut, Extraordinarily On-line Trek in-jokes. It’s lucky that whereas the episode is a bit of on the skinny facet, the stuff that’s thrown on the wall is charming sufficient for it to not matter.

For the second week in a row, we’re pulling focus from the lead quintet to compensate for William Boimler. (That, in case your reminiscence isn’t too sharp, is Bomiler’s transporter clone, final seen faking his loss of life to affix Part 31.) He’s now captain of the USS Anaximander on a secret mission to shut up the interdimensional fissures the present has been encountering all season.

Boimler, the present’s avatar of a Star Trek fan, has been choosing up stray figures from the canon throughout dimension hops. His crew consists of T’Pol, Garak and an EMH model of Dr. Bashir, all performed by their authentic actors.. And sure, Garak and Dr. Bashir are a married couple on this universe, due to course the present has to embrace that piece of fan lore that launched a thousand items of slash fiction.

The ship picks up an escape pod with Lt. Harry Kim inside, who learns many of the remainder of the crew is Harries Kim as effectively. He’s the one one who’s ever been promoted above the rank of ensign, nodding to the rumor that longtime sequence head Rick Berman mentioned somebody needed to be the lowest-ranked member of the crew. And / or as punishment for clashing with the manufacturing workforce, .

They quickly encounter an alternate universe Mariner who, in contrast to our model, is a timid engineer. She, nonetheless, has labored out a approach to observe the vessel that’s punching holes within the material of the universe. So the Anaximander lays a lure, solely to disclose that it’s an outdated Enterprise-class ship referred to as the Beagle. It’s an exploration vessel with a human and Vulcan crew, led by Lily Sloane.

Sloane isn’t attempting to tear the universe to shreds, their universe simply found to find interdimensional journey forward of warp. They’ve been leaping between universes exploring unusual related worlds, the identical life and civilizations boldly… analyzing the variations. It’s a mission assertion that outrages Boimler, who’s gorged himself on fanservice and is now searching for one thing, something new to cleanse his palate.

Naturally, that is Decrease Decks winking towards its personal main flaw, given its reverence for ‘90s period Trek. I’ve all the time discovered it fairly profitable in bobbing and weaving round merely milking the viewers’s ‘memberberries. However that doesn’t imply it isn’t a minimum of complicit within the idea of serving up the identical outdated crap, time and again.

Sloane disagrees, saying her crew seems to discover the methods by which individuals develop and evolve in numerous environments. She says she’s met a number of totally different Boimlers, all of whom have their very own Mariner, as their connection endures throughout the universes. And that exploration isn’t nearly exploring what’s past us however discovering what’s true inside us. That’s a journey that may be simply as perilous, and rewarding, as touring to the furthest edges of the universe.

Kim, outraged at his namesakes’ stalled careers, steals the Beagle with plans to return to his personal dimension. The Anaximander pursues, and whereas the opposite Kims mutiny and beam again, the Beagle efficiently makes a soar however explodes within the course of. That sends an enormous wave of power that can wipe out each universe in existence until it’s dumped in a single place. Fortunately, Boimler is aware of the place to ship it — to his transporter twin and the crew of the Cerritos.

See you subsequent week for the finale.