Caves

 Blu-ray, Lower Decks S4 (Caves)

We've got one of those 'mixed' episodes where they have some fun, but it's somewhat undermined by the series' excesses in the language, gore and inappropriate humour stakes, otherwise it had the potential to have been another good one. As it is, it does at least improve on being a one-note joke: caves are seen in Trek a lot so Mariner comments on how she feels like she's been in this cave a hundred times, and it's like a third of their missions are in caves and so on and so forth. Caves were obviously a big part of Trek, mainly in the 80s and 90s (and even into the 2000s), when the famous 'Planet Hell' set was built for 'TNG' and continued to be revamped and reused for 'DS9' and 'Voyager,' so it's only fitting that this key piece of Trekness got its own episode, this being a comedic approach to Trek tropes. It's always fun when they bring in familiar elements like this and it had become something of a joke for regular viewers (in retrospect, not particularly in the moment), but at the same time they often did an excellent job disguising the set in various ways: altering the floor to be sandy or adding plants; making use of the upper level more; creating different lighting effects; smoke; constraint breeds creativity and as it was mostly the same people working in production they brought a steady stream of innovation to money-saving production budgets - 'Enterprise' took it even further with more elaborate sets, but there's something quite reassuring and comforting about beaming down to yet another cave, and after all, Trek being practically a series of stage plays, the setting itself could often be mere extraneous detail (see 'Spectre of The Gun' for the ultimate in that idea - it may not be a cave, but the point stands!).

It helps that we get all four of our characters alone together as if to prove they can still do those kinds of stories, and while it's a bit funny they'd all be assigned to this specific mission and no one else, who's to say it wouldn't happen? There are plenty of other things to level that criticism at... Take Steve Levy, the Cerritos' resident conspiracy theorist who always comes up with the wackiest ideas about what's 'really' going on. I find it hard to believe that anyone in Starfleet would be that suspicious or disbelieving, but then I think of people like Lieutenant Reg Barclay, the poster child for Starfleet officers that don't measure up to the social standards you'd expect, but make up for it with their skills in other areas. Levy isn't in the same bracket of characters like Raffi or Rios from 'Picard,' he's more in that Barclay vein so I was glad we at least got to know a little more about him, key being that he's a maths genius, that's why they put up with his 'crackpot with dangerous beliefs' persona. Obviously it's meant to be an amusing comment on the many who are taken in by internet misinformation, he even admits he goes on forums and makes stuff up, but I just feel like the world Roddenberry created wouldn't suffer from the same problems we do of having a surfeit of information and uncertainty. The difference is that we know we can't necessarily trust the organisations who have power in our lives, be they governments or corporations, but greater knowledge hasn't made people more intelligent, it's merely confused.

Having Steve Levy as a joke we can laugh at is a bit unkind, in keeping with modern Trek's more cynical attitude, but at least Rutherford and he do bond to some extent thanks to, well, Levy actually being right for once! Is this meant to placate the conspiracy-lovers in the audience or merely to turn the tables on expectations (it's clear even he didn't expect to be correct when predicting those wily old shapeshifting Vendorians from 'TAS' are behind it all with their 'morality test'!), either way I'm not entirely sure what the writing was trying to say - Boimler himself confesses he's not sure what lesson he's supposed to learn from it all: not to yell at Levy so much? I'd have preferred a more concrete idea of compassion for those with easily led minds instead of this impression of having a whipping boy upon which to show how much superior 'we' are who go merrily along accepting whatever we're told has been proved, but even in Trek we've seen numerous people in power who've been untrustworthy or have had nefarious agendas and even the very Federation itself is secretly supported by an underground society that is the stuff of conspiracies in Section 31. I suppose the answer to all this is that the so-called 'perfect' world Roddenberry reinforced for his 24th Century in 'TNG' had already been torn down long ago, undermined even within the series that spawned it, and Utopia once again crashes and burns because it's the impossible dream. The important thing is that there's some kind of understanding between Rutherford and Levy, and not to either entirely denigrate and leave room for questions is the more Trekky way.

Oddly enough, the least unpleasant flashback story of the four was actually the one featuring Dr. T'Ana when she and Rutherford were stuck in a cave where he gave birth to a cave baby. How many Trek connections can you spot here? It's a bit like 'The Passenger' from 'DS9' where a criminal passed on his consciousness to Bashir when dying, only this time the dying alien woman's touch creates a clone baby within him and he becomes a man who has to give birth (as in Trip in 'Unexpected' on 'Enterprise'). A relief they didn't actually show Rutherford being cut open with the laser scalpel and it soon becomes about T'Ana softening to this bouncing cave-baby and even to Rutherford, having complained she hates both babies and Engineers! There's even a surprising lack of swearing from her. No, they save most of that and the gore for Mariner's story when she recalls being stuck in a cave with Delta Shift, the gang with chips on their shoulders because they feel like they work on a different ship always doing nights and barely seeing anyone. I would've thought there must be some shift rotation and these wouldn't be permanently assigned to night duty, I'm sure we saw examples of some of our main characters sometimes working at night, like Harry Kim being in charge on the Bridge. The sci-fi side of it wasn't the issue - it's one of those chroniton fields as we'd seen in 'Timescape' where Picard reaches out for fruit and his hand withers, only here 'LD' has to take it beyond the bounds of good taste so that Mariner and her team are cracking up as their bones age too much for their weight, or even worse, one of them loses his already damaged leg.

I don't find that kind of humour funny, the 'gross-out' style of comedy just doesn't sit well with the optimistic tone that was Trek's hallmark, one of the reasons it simply doesn't feel very Trekky nowadays. And again we have yet another Starfleet officer displaying a bad attitude when Mariner's order is defied - it does get rather tiresome that such things are so common in modern Trek, and while I'll give this particular series credit for following the trend less fully, it still has its problems that prevent it from ever completely being the thing it's trying to ape, while yet often doing so well in many areas. I was expecting Tendi's story about being trapped in the Turbolift for hours post-rage virus on her first day aboard the Cerritos in the very first episode, a story she keeps trying to tell and is repeatedly interrupted or shot down, to be the key to their escape, so I'm glad that expectation was avoided as it seemed so obvious. Instead they put a nice little bow on proceedings by letting us see that this cave with the sentient moss (which speaks in the voice of one of those booming entities from 'TOS' - I didn't realise Jerry O'Connell (Ransom) was both the moss and a Vendorian in this, he doesn't often do other characters), is actually another Vendorian test and it was they that blocked communications (another trope of cave storytelling, as Mariner points out early on, rocks always beat centuries of technological progress - true!).

Adding to the lowered tone we have wee jokes and once again we see our people doing something to excess: namely drinking (hence the wee jokes when they're trapped in the Turbolift...), but I did at least appreciate they mentioned they thought they were imbibing Synthehol, which as we know from our 24th Century lore, is able to simulate the intoxication effects without the side effects, allowing a much higher level of control where people can snap out of the fug if they choose, except Mariner being Mariner she switched it for real alcohol. She says the catchphrase "Cerritos strong!" but I thought that came about in response to the Pakled encounters which would have occurred later in Season 1? Maybe they put it in deliberately for people like me to notice and speculate about? I'm starting to become Steve Levy! Maybe there wasn't all that much to the story and I'm not sure you could even say they really delved (delved!), into the cave trope sack all that deeply when you consider how many episodes there have been with people trapped in caves, let alone ones where they simply visited a cave (out of interest: how many are there, someone must have worked it out by now?), but it ends happily and has a nice reinforcement of their friendship.

The story isn't riddled with needless Trekferences, yet they manage to squeeze in their fair share (like Boimler's list of Levy's silly theories: Wolf 359 wasn't planned, Q exists, Picard isn't a hologram, Voyager's EMH is...), the delightful angular grey backpacks with the black straps so common in 90s Trek, Mariner saying Levy believes they're all trapped in the evil Mirror Universe, the Vendorians admitting they had nothing to do with the Klingon civil war, Rutherford says there are no natural stairways or hidden passageways from secret societies, even the grey alien lady's body disintegrating was reminiscent of Changelings when they die and desiccate, and even the Grafflax reminded me of the kind of overgrown predatory CGI creatures from the Kelvin Timeline films. Phasers get a new use as T'Ana vaporises the baby's poop bag, but can Tricorders really be used to translate and speak in an alien language? I'd have thought you'd need to tie it into the Combadge, but Rutherford didn't seem to do that. I also hate wheeled vehicles in Trek, they make no sense, just use a forcefield! I will say that sometimes reusing the voices of main cast members was a little jarring, with the lead Vendorian sounding exactly like Captain Freeman, and maybe they overuse Fred Tatasciore on this series - granted, most of the other characters didn't appear, so maybe they needed to save some money, but at least try and sound different! I'll give Fred credit where it's due: I never realised he was Levy and this was his third appearance after 'No Small Parts' and 'Trusted Sources,' I like that they bring back members of the crew: Asif (Asif Ali), was also on his third episode (Ali also doing the Grafflax' Tricorder voice), as was Karavitus (Artemis Pebdani), they've gone long enough they can refer back to characters and episodes and it's normal because so much time has passed now.

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