In The Cradle of Vexilon

 Blu-ray, Lower Decks S4 (In The Cradle of Vexilon)

An improvement after the last one, I was almost tempted to boost it up an extra star, but for a couple of reasons, namely the foul-mouthed Betazoid Gift Box (when it first appeared I wished Armin Shimerman had been brought in to voice it since he did the original on 'TNG,' but then I was glad they hadn't wasted him on such a sweary character), and the undercutting of the optimistic, if slightly naive lesson at the end of the story where our people are sitting around talking about the events and realising it's better to assume the best about people rather than the worst (even though in reality, while I'd go with that, you have to be wise enough to see the difference and that sometimes people are being their worst!), don't mistake people's intentions based on how you feel (a good message for internet posting, perhaps...). It was refreshing to have a genuinely good message, but then Dirk (in his fourth appearance), the guy who's been giving them such unpalatable tasks to do as scanning every isolinear chip in a room (including the... gasp, second layer!), shows he actually was hazing them as they first thought. I don't like that kind of nasty humour when the goodness and true character of the Starfleet world is made to look as cynically unpleasant as the real world. There can be misunderstandings and misrepresentation, but I don't want to see wilful maliciousness for the sake of a joke between superior officers, that's just the kind of attitude that sinks the higher nature of Trek in this series, and it stinks.

For all that, it does at least clear up a couple of problems I had: Dirk claims he got trapped in a Wadi Chula game when he was a child, but this is set in the early 2380s, the Wadi were first encountered in 2369 during 'DS9' Season 1, so that's got to be fourteen years at most, and with Dirk's high forehead and higher rank I got the impression he's around thirty. I suppose he could have been treating the word 'kid' to include teens, or maybe he's younger than he looks (it is tricky to tell with animation), but the actual reason his story was fine is because he made it up! That still should have tipped off at least Mariner that there was something fishy, since she served on DS9 in the years after that and should know the timeline of events... The other major nitpick was something else Dirk warned about how if even one of those isolinear chips failed it could be catastrophic for the ship, but we've heard before about Starfleet's famous systems of multiple redundancy (with Klingons its their internal organs, with Starfleet it's their technology!), so that doesn't add up (again, I'd have expected better from Mariner, she was off her game this time), but once again he's just making it up so we can sweep that problem into the Jefferies Tube, too.

It was most enjoyable that they brought back Chula, especially amusing that Rutherford rushes through it, having apparently read all the reports from DS9 senior staff on what it involved (or played it before), and it was lovely to see those sets, characters and tasks recreated in animated form. You see, for many people 'Move Along Home' is one of, if not the worst episode of 'DS9' (I'd probably go with 'Let He Who Is Without Sin...' or 'Profit and Lace,' myself), and so, in the tradition of 'LD' to draw attention to the silliest aspects of Trek of course they're going to bring it back somehow (only this time Rutherford's got to carry around the Gift Box to make it even more ridiculous), just as they like to touch on 'Threshold' from 'Voyager' or the many wacky elements of 'TOS.' But for me, the 'DS9' episode is one of my favourites from the early years - I don't know if it was the first I saw on TV in late 1995, but it would have been one of the earliest and I'm pretty sure I did see it because I always loved the 'Weird Stuff' stories in Trek, that old questioning of reality and being uncertain of whether you could trust in your senses, so it stuck in my mind. I can see what others dislike about it, it is strange, almost cartoonish, but for me, seeing Sisko, Kira and Dax dancing out a hopscotch and singing 'Allamaraine, count to four, Allamaraine, then three more,' is akin to Kirk's crew being forced into undignified horseplay for the amusement of more powerful beings in 'Plato's Stepchildren' - in that case it was more a sense of horror, while in 'DS9' it was the absurdity of seeing these serious people have to humble themselves to solve a problem.

And the fact that it's about solving problems, too, something I adore about Trek and often miss in the modern variations. The point I'm making is that referring to Chula and the Wadi was all about strong Trek connections to me, and I liked the angle of Rutherford treating it as ordinary or commonplace in contrast to the weirdness of its original, sinister and mysterious appearance in 'DS9' and so enhanced my appreciation of a story that I'd been unsure about. There's no teaser for a start, and I quite like it when they do have one, in keeping with the 90s Trek they're often trying to ape, but perhaps in this case it worked better because they didn't try to fit in any scenes connecting the episode to the ongoing arc of ships being attacked and 'disappeared' by a mysterious assailant, so that worked in its favour (knowing what it was about, and how disappointing it turned out to be), and gave them more time to tell their story. I wasn't initially sold as the setup seemed a bit non-Trek sci-fi generica: Corazonia sounds a bit too much like Coruscant of 'Star Wars' (though it may partly be the pronunciation), and the idea of this giant ring world brought to mind the Matt Damon film 'Elysium' (I'm sure it's a staple sci-fi concept, but that's what sprang to mind as relatively recent), then we've got the Captain and Ransom dealing with another planetary computer, this time an environmental system, so it was all a bit too cliched, even if that's one of the points of 'LD' to play with, and in, these tropes.

I'll give them that they did something different with it, it wasn't automatically an evil subjugation machine like Landru (and many others), and really it's more of a setting upon which to hang Boimler's first mission (or errand, as T'Lyn calls it), which teaches him more about command than he's trying to teach the lowly Ensigns under him and ultimately gives him validation through saving the day when he has to clear out his team and take the toughest job himself, getting blown up for his troubles. I do wish there had been more consequence for him, as while it's just as horrible to have to send others to their potential deaths, if not more, having to run into a burning building and getting blown up for your actions is a tough school. It is a cartoon so he just gets blasted into the air and ends up looking like he's been in an explosion from 'Looney Tunes' - all blackened with a bandage on his head. I felt it should've been touch and go for a while in Sickbay, maybe he has to be out of action for a few days otherwise it does look too easy and 'quick, we have to wrap it up in twenty-five minutes, we can't carry it over to the next episode.' But I did enjoy his trials as mission leader with T'Lyn there to provide support as Science Officer (that would make him James T.!), and she was at her best, providing blunt advice and emotionless expression, but not leaping in to force her views on him (other than saving an explosive canister from hitting the ground), which is the kind of cool that only a Vulcan can bring.

His little team was also interesting, with 'Big Murf,' the blue guy (any relation to Murf of 'Prodigy' or completely coincidental? Seeing it written down it's apparently 'Merp'), who could be an animation expression of a Zaldan from 'Coming of Age' in 'TNG' (they weren't blue, but they had webbed hands which made them fishy), some Antipodean girl called Meredith (who'd apparently been in 'Room For Growth'), and Taylor the Kzinti, always fun to see for the link to 'TAS.' You can see their simplicity, yet also growing frustration at Boimler doing everything himself. It was just a nice group setup which I enjoyed and very much felt true to the way Boimler would act when 'disarming a building-sized bomb' as he puts it. It didn't make much sense that the Captain and First Officer would take on the task of fixing a planet-wide computer system themselves, but at least Ransom makes the point that they have Engineers, so why not use them? But Freeman sees it as a chance to use her knowledge of 'Archaic Technology' from the Academy days and almost messes everything up. She does bring down Chief Engineer Billups eventually (mainly for him to tell an Engineer's joke: calling it a classic setup and asking if it's 'Unitronic,' which raised a smile for its weakness - actually there were a few smiles raised throughout the episode, it was generally more pleasantly funny than nasty or horrible and I much prefer that), but it's something he says that inspires her to a solution and of course Boimler is integral in carrying off the fix, so it was good to see the teamwork.

This would seem to be the first we've ever heard of Billups keeping a ferret called Lancelot. It would be nice to learn more about our characters so we can play with the built-up backstory as the series progresses, but that's one issue I have with it, that they don't do enough in that regard, even if they do sometimes. Fill out these secondary characters like 'DS9' and (to an extent), 'Voyager' and 'TNG' did and it only opens up the story possibilities even more and makes for a much more satisfying experience, drawing you into this world. But it's really about the main four (Shaxs didn't even appear this time, which is fine since the 90s Treks wouldn't have every character in every episode, different mixes of characters like Boimler and T'Lyn, and made for more of a feeling of variety), and it works all round. Boimler's insecurities and lack of understanding of the need for formality shows how far he has yet to go, and while he's been promoted, at heart he's still very much a lower decker. I liked what T'Lyn had to say (pearls of wisdom such as 'leading by example has proven to be inefficient,' or, 'danger is an accepted risk of Starfleet duty'), but who had the toughest job in the episode? Rutherford has to go through the Wadi game, Tendi has to rescan all the chips on her own, but Mariner had it worst: she had to keep Dirk from going back to his Quarters where they'd rigged up a Chula set to get back at him, and has to feign interest in his favourite subject of Tellarite Slop Jazz - exactly the sort of thing I imagine non-Trekkers feel when they've set me off talking about Trek, so it rang true and gave me a smile!

One thing I really appreciated and is a shame it stuck out when it should come as standard, was when T'Lyn reminds an Ensign the Lieutenant has given an order and she must obey, when Boimler orders them out and she says they can help. That's exactly the kind of hierarchical status quo I want to see more of when so much in modern Trek it's about people doing what they want or feel is necessary when obedience can be the split second between success or failure, death and life. If I was to nitpick anything else I'd be surprised at our people's excitement at having access to the 'anomaly storage room' since we've seen them dealing with this kind of stuff before (wasn't that how Tendi got turned into a giant scorpion in 'The Spy Humongous'?), even in the very first episode we saw a cupboard full of old bits and pieces of tech (though I was intrigued by the idea of an adventure where Billups was turned into a church tower by wearing a hat!). Was the surreal room Boimler dreams of where the mystical koala sits meant to be a tribute to '2001: A Space Odyssey' or just standard dream room set? They didn't have Shimerman play the Gift Box, but they could at least have said something like it reminding them of Quark as a deeper cut kind of joke that they don't seem to do so much any more, instead of getting the 'humour' from lowering the tone with its swearing 'hilarity' - and they really missed an opportunity for a classic cameo as the voice of the computer, like bringing back Jeffrey Combs for Agimus - how about Marc Alaimo or someone like that (Joel Brooks for the Wadi connection?), but otherwise this episode was on the right track, er, Trek.

**