An Embarrassment of Dooplers

 DVD, Lower Decks S2 (An Embarrassment of Dooplers)

My dream came true! No, not Dooplers, or Shelby, or that species from 'DSC' with lots of eyes on a double horn-shaped head. No, ever since I watched the entire  'The Animated Series' in recent years my favourite thing from it was M4 Green, the little caterpillar bug guy, and I've wanted to see one in Trek again ever since - here I got at least two, so I was very happy. Doople happy, you could say! They've really been very attentive to 'TAS' right from Season 1, but it's taken them this long to bring back one of those (wish I knew what species they are). As we know, it's not enough merely to have tons of references, anyone can squeeze in those, what's really important is having a (funny), meaningful story (that's also funny), and here we have two: it's right back to the basics of Mariner and Boimler, and Rutherford and Tendi, tying in to their pasts and recent events, and most importantly displaying a beautiful sense of friendship taking place amidst a backdrop of comedic misadventure on the same level as 'The Trouble With Tribbles' - you can see that as an inspiration, since it's all about the extreme multiplication of a creature, only this time it's an Ambassador so they really have to be careful not to offend... Except it's that timid pussyfooting around, walking on eggshells that actually creates the problem, and straight-talking honesty that solves it, which could very well be a comment on modern society today as everyone's so afraid of causing offence they allow all kinds of silliness to abound and trap themselves in doing so.

It was a good lesson - not that everyone should say whatever's on their mind at any time, just that sometimes you have to be stern and you can't get on with people, avoid debate and hashing things out if you want to live in a reasonable environment. The fact I'm starting to read things into the episodes of this series is the final proof, if it were needed, that this is the closest to being 'Star Trek' as any recent productions have come. It may be couched in shopping lists of prior Trek connections, and unrealistic comedy, but it does have things to say, and most importantly of all it has that warmth, that joyfulness that's too often missing. That doesn't mean I'm all for the idea of a live action Trek comedy (which was recently announced, to be co-written by Mariner actress, Tawny Newsome), in fact I've never liked the idea ever since I heard Jonathan Frakes wanted to do a sitcom on the Titan back in the 2000s. Trek can do comedy, and do it well, but it should only be a flavour of the week, not a series' focus or goal, another thing I intensely dislike about the Kurtzman era with its 'a Trek for all people' idea of each series being rigidly aimed at a certain demographic, when in the past Trek was all things week to week. But I digress, and I should say this was probably the first episode where I really felt the comedy was working on all cylinders - it's a real giggle, bringing a new species in (Dooplers), which is suitably ridiculous, yet all so fitting for the series.

It's not even that the jokes or gags are particularly funny, but it's more of a gentle humour rather than being raucous or rude, and uses the lore to good effect: the thing with the limited edition Commander Data bubble bath, where a couple might be Lores, is exactly what I'm talking about. Or an Antedean, which Boimler calls 'fish people' (I always think of Markalians as fish people - don't think we've had one of those yet), and one of them responds "hey, we're not people." Or the visual amusement of this Gorn running a food stand, standing their impassively behind his wares. It's all so charming! We see the Kzinti crewman again, though with no lines, sadly, but this is a great one for 'TAS' buffs since we get all these races only ever seen in that before - lots of Aurelians, pictures on the wall of the alien bar which include Arex and M'Ress, and just a general love of that first cartoon series, yet also mixed in with the latest 24th Century style with so many going around in those fantastic white dress uniforms introduced, lest we forget, in 'Insurrection,' one of the great additions to uniform lore. There's more pausing the episode just to look around, as has happened a few times on the series, simply because they love to include so much familiar detail, so whether it was Mizarian Malvus' shop which featured all kinds of items from the obscure, such as Riker's tunic from 'Angel One,' to the common, with examples of Starfleet Phaser Rifles from both 'DS9' and 'Voyager' - where else would you see them together! - or whether it was Starbase 25's equivalent to the DS9 Promenade (which looks like it was based on the original designs for that, brilliantly), it all features so much great detail!

Then there's the alien bar which has an indecipherable name above the door, filled with models and pictures of all kinds of characters and ships to the extent you wish it wasn't so dingy in there and you could walk around and look at all that stuff. There's the Phoenix, and the Guardian of Forever, the Doomsday Machine and what could be Tom Paris' jukebox. The walls are filled with characters and imagery from all over, though mostly 'TOS,' but also Abaddon from that one episode of 'Voyager' ('Alice'), and the Bajoran Solar Sailing Ship from that one episode of 'DS9' ('Explorers'). It also gives the episode a particularly poignant ending where we learn Kirk and Spock visited once in the 2260s, the time of 'TOS' - yes, it may be hard to believe Kirk (much less Spock!), would ever carve their names into the wooden bar counter (more likely someone saw them there and carved it as a monument to their visit), but Mariner leaves her and Boimler's names alongside, and it's just a sweet little moment, especially with them endearingly arguing about who's whose Number One. Almost as nice: Quark gets yet another mention as there's another of his franchises aboard, so that's twice in two episodes, he's doing well! How we need to see him back in live action - hey, maybe they could get him as main cast member of the comedy series that's coming? If they're bringing The Doctor from 'Voyager' into 'Starfleet Academy,' then why not? It would certainly pique my interest...

One thing about the episode I found confusing was that this Starbase doesn't actually seem to be Starfleet - it looks similar to the mushroom-shaped style from the 'TOS' films, but they have a police force that don't wear Starfleet badges (looked a bit like Judge Dredd with those helmets), and Mariner claims they'll coerce a confession out of them and sell their Combadges on the black market, clearly not something Starfleet would do. And why would you have a civilian security force on a Starfleet facility? So it confused me, not that it's particularly important. It was really only an excuse for an action sequence where there's a wheeled buggy chase through the busy corridors (in itself amusing when they smash through various businesses: people playing Dabo, a Bolian barbers in the tradition of Mr. Mot of the Enterprise-D, a Vulcan ship, etc...). Maybe that was the only misstep to have a gratuitous action scene like that when they could have had more of the meaningful scenes, but I can see it was a chance to show off what animation can do, and it did look impressive. Maybe they could have made a connection to the superfluous chase in 'Nemesis,' but it proves they don't always milk every possible gag from every scene! We hear something else about Mariner's mysterious past in that she used to live there and has made some enemies (Malvus, whom she apparently stranded on Ceti Alpha IV, which is worse than Ceti Alpha according to him, and his Tellarite mate), though as usual we don't get any more than that.

We tie back into Rutherford losing his memory at the end of last season, with him questioning himself since he can't even get a model of the Cerritos working, and if he can't even fix a toy he feels he doesn't know who he is any more, but with Tendi to help him he recovers from his wobble and learns they never intended to finish it, it was a way of keeping others at bay for a while, showing that projects and hobbies can have more than one function. Especially good was seeing him use his implant to zoom in on the model to see it up close, an function Geordi's optical implants had which I always loved. Building models of ships from Trek is also another aspect of fandom that many loved so it's an acknowledgement of that, and it just looked lovely to see the Cerritos in miniature - and it was a lovely moment when Tendi gives him a new project to build at the end and it's DS9 (another marketing gimmick by Quark apparently!). Another good joke: it comes with both an Ezri and a Jadzia, although I'm not sure how Starfleet officers would feel if they knew they were being sold in miniature (not that Quark would tell them, they might want something in return!). The idea of a 'social deflector dish,' as in using model-making as a space-maker away from others, was a good idea, and probably quite true for many model builders - working alone (or with a friend as in Tendi's case), and with your hands, I can imagine the therapeutic benefits.

The Captain gets her own plot in the attempt to avoid setting off the Doopler Ambassador, then feeling she's earned a place at the big Starbase party - she makes an impassioned speech to overwhelm the green bouncer, and in this instance I was glad it didn't influence him as we see even a Captain's eloquence can't alter his intractability. There was something quite nice about them hanging around by the Gorn kiosk munching on kebabs! Her revenge may have been out of character for a Starfleet officer, but you can see the solution is aping 'The Trouble With Tribbles' when the whole kit and caboodle was beamed over to the Klingons' Engine Room - in this case they beam the Doopler into the party and... The party itself (which Boimler gets into, posing as his clone twin, William Boimler - interestingly, Mariner once again calls the Titan a 'capital' ship), was an opportunity to get glimpses of a couple of one-off Trek characters that hadn't been seen since they first appeared on 'TNG,' but fascinatingly were both subsequently brought back for other productions: Captain Shelby is seen chronologically many years later, potentially meeting her end in the finale of 'Picard' Season 3, while Okona, a DJ here, returns only a few years later in 'Prodigy' (though for what purpose other than the sake of having someone familiar, I don't know - all that talk about how they both have an eye patch turned out to be the merest adherence to internal canon on the go rather than anything meaningful!). I can't count them as 'appearing' since they don't have any lines, it's not the same as bringing back the actors to voice their characters, as good as it is to get another reference point for their lives and personal timeline.

This time they skip a teaser and go straight into the opening credits, which can sometimes work - usually the pre-credits on this series don't have anything to do with the main story anyway, so you can take them or leave them. If 'Tribbles' was an influence on the story as a whole, perhaps 'This Side of Paradise' was another for the solution - there Kirk realised going against the calming, hippyish attitudes induced by the spores by getting riled up was what snapped him and his crew out of their grasp, and the same happens here where Freeman gives the crew permission to berate their Doopler infestation as that makes them recombine. It's all very silly, but still feels very Trekky at the same time, and that's all you want - in too much Trek now it's silly and doesn't feel Trekky ('SNW' being the biggest culprit in my eyes), so I admire the sense of internal consistency in 'LD' as something to be applauded. What else...? Well, skants are talked about, the male skirt introduced in 'TNG' (and which looked terrible!), I love all the canon attention to uniforms with the grey-shouldered design being common off the Cerritos, unless they're wearing the white dress variant. Mariner makes up that she's from the Voyager-D (pretty sure the original would still be around at that time!). She also talks of 'chaos on the bridge,' which is a direct reference to a documentary William Shatner made about the early days of 'TNG,' so marks for managing to get that in. And Freeman claims she once escorted the Enterprise out of Spacedock as a reason she should be allowed into the party. There are many recognisable aliens (including Lurians, Morn's species from 'DS9'), and was that supposed to be a cameo for Alex Kurtzman in the Pike chair? A guy with glasses and short grey hair. Is it a comment on his vision for Trek that he almost got run over...?

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