I, Excretus

 DVD, Lower Decks S2 (I, Excretus)

The drill grading was a little like how I felt about this episode - as Boimler kept retrying his scenario, pushing the percentage success rate up each time, so this episode kept trying to boost up its rating. That it didn't quite succeed with flying colours is thanks to some of the inappropriate content (they do seem to love scenes of the whole crew naked, or close to naked...), but it certainly wasn't Boimler's fault as his scenes were the best. As usual a lot was packed into the short running time: there's a lesson to be learned about the carpet always being greyer on the other side of the ship (in other words, it's not as easy being the senior staff as the lower deckers think, and it's not as easy vice versa for the lower deckers), a temporary return to the old animosity between Captain Mother and Ensign Daughter, and tons and tons of Trekferences as I'll call them from now on! That's to be expected by now (or, actually by the end of the pilot episode, to be precise!), but they probably squeezed in more direct episode titles than any other before since much of the action takes place as a series of drills in simulation pods for each crewmember to attempt. First things first, though, and we have another strong return to a race first (and only ever), seen in 'The Animated Series' ('Bem' - a dual title that was the character's name, but also well known for being an acronym for Bug-Eyed Monster); a Pandronian, the green-skinned creature that can split itself into different parts and refers to itself as 'this one.'

Actually, first thing was the mini-teaser which ably demonstrated (far better than any of the live action series' of modern Trek ever do), that mix of beauty and adventure of being in space, not relying on ridiculous stakes, just the personal, but also not forgetting this is supposed to be a comedy, so humour's fed in, too - as usual they get that opening 'TNG' tone where there's an attractive piece of music to set things up and the four friends are on the hull of some kind of satellite or other space tech admiring a nebula or something, before the Cerritos forgets they're even there and goes off to try and rescue a ship trapped in a temporal causality loop (which keeps sending the same distress signal over and over). My only sadness is that the moment of pleasant beauty is so fleeting, but just as they fit in an entire episode of 'Voyager' into a teaser less than a minute long (Paris and Torres spent much of 'Day of Honour' floating in space), everything is sped up to maximum warp just so they can fit it all in. Madcap pacing aside, it's this sort of stuff that makes me think well of the series and why I would put this season as the best of in modern Trek so far.

It often seems as if they're daring themselves how much Trek lore and, yes, Trekferences, they can cram in one episode and far be it from me to try and account for all of them, but even when I first saw the episode I enjoyed having a Pandronian guest starring - I almost felt I recognised the voice, but I don't know the actress' name, she just did a terrific job as this outside authority coming aboard ship to test the crew and subject them to all kinds of discomfort, ostensibly for their own good, sounding like a teacher or trainer would. Any qualms about whether someone really could reverse the command hierarchy just for some kind of test can be smoothed over by the fact that, while Shari yn Yem wasn't a bogus drill instructor (I feel they should have worked in a Trekference to drill thralls somewhere...), she did have a sinister ulterior motive: to ensure the ship's failure in case her drills were no longer considered worthwhile since most starship crews pass with flying colours (as you'd expect - a good reminder of the standards of Starfleet, something easily forgotten in so many of the errant modern versions of Starfleet people, or former Starfleet people, or not quite Starfleet people yet, that populate the other series'), before turning into a cackling villain and having to be blackmailed by the Cerritos travelling into 'dangerous' spatial phenomena until she agrees to give them a passing grade (since she adjusted the tests to ensure failure).

Maybe taking an authority figure of the week on a wild ride to scare her might seem a little irresponsible (I at first assumed they'd cunningly brought her into a Holodeck simulation), and maybe it's also playing into the idea of 'teachers' (broad term), being limited by their not having personal experience, which is why Shari yn Yem is fooled by the relatively minor dangers she's put through (Crystalline entities! Black holes which have the effect of the Wormhole in 'The Motion Picture' with colourful blurry reality! - it was only missing the sloooowww mooootiooon to make it hilarious, though it was fun to see her tumbling about the Bridge like she was on 'TOS'!). They obviously enjoyed recreating the Crystalline entity (or one of its kind), so much they added it to the main titles in Season 3. It makes a change for Boimler to be the one who rises most to the challenge and actively relishes it, but then it was only a simulation. Maybe he wouldn't be quite so gung ho about it in real life, but it was such fun to see him retry the test each time, and each time finding a way to do it even better until he's got to a level where he somehow contacts a Starfleet Runabout that comes and picks him up, rescues Borg babies, captures several adult Borg, and blows up the Cube itself - great comedy escalation! But all so Boimler in his quest for perfection, another reason I liked the majority of the episode.

Other parts were fun, too: for Trekkers MU doesn't stand for Marvel Universe, it stands for Mirror Universe with Mariner's trip 'across' being a highlight (she wears Uhura's outfit from 'Mirror, Mirror'! There are images of the sword through the world logo all over! The Agoniser! She uses a double-fisted hammer punch on Mirror Shaxs! Hang on, that's not exclusively a MU trope, but I liked it all the same, especially as he merely sees it as a legitimate greeting!). I'm not sure Starfleet could actually recreate the MU in such detail, wouldn't they want to keep such things secret, that's what I always thought? Mind you, 'DSC' completely messed up the MU anyway, and as time goes by I increasingly want to think of most of this Trek era we've been going through as an alternate universe (and as much as I'd like to include 'LD' in Prime, one aspect I didn't look on favourably about the crossover with 'Strange New Worlds' was how they accepted that Enterprise and crew, thus legitimising the aesthetic and those versions of characters as 'normal'). Still, 'LD' is by far the closest in almost every way to the classic eras past and it continues to make me smile with its stunts and Trekferences: this time the big one is Alice Krige herself! Wow, a real big gun, and it begins to look like 'Picard' was copying 'LD' since they brought back Q after he'd appeared in Season 1, and then brought back the Krige version of the Borg Queen after 'LD' had her in Season 2 - just a shame they didn't do the same for Susan Gibney's Leah Brahms who'd appear in Season 3 of this, but not that (though we never did hear who Geordi's wife was, did we...?).

Krige's velvet tones, reprising the role just over twenty years after she last played her in the 'Voyager' finale, were a delight to hear, I just wish they could've brought her back physically when she reprised her again in 'Picard.' It was also really good to see a proper Borg locale, too, after the ugliness of that sanitised, clean and tidy version of a Cube in 'Picard' Season 1. 'LD' just seems to keep bringing back the old Trek aesthetic in every way (and keeps making me wish we could simply have a straight, live action drama in this mould, without the excesses of animation and comedy they insist on here - sadly, with the announcement of a live action comedy it sounds like they're going to keep going in the direction of humour more than proper Trek...), and it's also in the writing, too - okay, I could lose the contemporary expressions and attitudes which infuse all contemporary Trek, but there are also the little details such as the Borg saying 'few-tyle' again instead of 'few-tul.' It makes me warm and cosy when that happens... and then I'm jolted out of the reverie by things like the 'Naked Time' scenario from the infamous inhibition-reducing virus of both 'TOS' and 'TNG,' episodes I really don't need to be reminded of. Oh, but then there's stealing the Cerritos out of Spacedock to go for Spock's body on Genesis ('Star Trek III' would certainly have been a different film with that ship instead!), and the fantastic Old West Planet simulation where they have a Western street of facades on a blank red backdrop just as they had in 'Spectre of The Gun' because they either couldn't afford to build a full set or weren't able to shoot on an existing one - I always loved that spare, stylistic choice so the callback here was perfect (they could be Trekferencing T'Pol's dislike of horses from 'North Star,' too, since Mariner's horse hates her).

Then there's the brilliant 'The Good of The Many' scenario where Rutherford has to recreate Spock's saving the Enterprise, wearing that distinctive white Engineering suit with the target on the front, and he can't even get into the chamber because he hasn't got the gloves with him (for want of a glove, a door couldn't be opened, for want of a door opening a starship blew up...). I thought they were going to do Kirk at first since the guy who talks to him looks like him, but I think he called him Lieutenant. No doubt we were meant to get that impression, however, but I'd be very surprised if they could ever afford to have William Shatner on the series (still, for the series finale, maybe?). One I was slightly disappointed in was the 'Ethics' recreation as Tendi has a Klingon patient that wants to commit ritual suicide - it was very amusing how they reverse things and he's 'unfortunately' saved (aside from legal suicide being a creepy modern agenda), and I was delighted to see the feet sticking out the end of the bedsheet had little horns on them, but where was the chest exoskeleton (as seen most prominently in 'Sons of Mogh' where Worf's brother Kurn gets him to stick a knife in), that seems like a major oversight unless they're suggesting this guy was only half Klingon - I did enjoy the comment from the surgeon about Klingons having extra organs, or whatever he said, I just expect a higher level of accuracy from this series!

The destruction of the Enterprise (if we can assume it was, it could have been some other refit Constitution-class vessel - otherwise can we add that to the tally of Enterprises being blown up?), was fairly spectacular, but it once again raises a big issue I have with simulated environments and how they shouldn't be able to show things in an external view since it doesn't exist. Unless that was there for the benefit of the crew who were watching, that would at least make sense in this case. Something else I wondered about was why this Pandronian would carry around however many individual pods for her drills when surely it would be simpler to use the Holodeck(s)? I don't think we've ever seen a Holodeck divided up to run multiple programs simultaneously (although there was 'The Killing Game' where they had to extend the Holodeck to fit in all the scenarios the Hirogen wanted to run, so maybe that would count?), but you'd think that would be simpler than transporting all these pods from ship to ship. Perhaps it would've meant it was more difficult to tamper with the programs, though there's never been any hindrance to that previously! Even more when they had to have multiple people in the scenario (though I much enjoyed Shaxs' exasperation at the hexagonal shape of the crates they're ordered to stack during an emergency!).

Another issue I had was the use of people's likenesses in holographic form. Surely this isn't acceptable, yet it seems to happen on this series all the time. There's got to be privacy issues, even in something official like a Starfleet test - would Migleemo have agreed to being kept on a perch, tethered by a lead on a collar like Mirror Worf did to Mirror Garak? I understand why they have familiar characters because they're the ones we know, but it's difficult to believe in this series' choices sometimes in the wider Trek universe, very much because they do such a good job of recreating 24th Century tone and style in general. A lesser issue or note that came up was when Shaxs says they're all equal on this ship perhaps foreshadowing the approaching change in command structure - that could be a little jab at things like 'DSC' and 'SNW' which have been roundly criticised for failing to show a believable command structure, preferring to be 'inclusive' to anyone and everyone's butting in on decision-making or questioning orders at any time, or just generally inappropriate behaviour. Thankfully the idea is punctured quickly here by Ransom reminding him they sleep in a hallway, so clearly lower deckers aren't equal in that sense, and I think that's good to be reminded: it takes experience, hard work and aptitude to reach the senior levels of starship command (even if it doesn't always seem like that), and that's how it should be!

If I can complain about one more aspect, it was Shari yn Yem tapping the Captain of the ship she's visiting on the nose. In front of her crew. That's not a good way to encourage discipline and respect (as funny as it was), but we're supposed to feel uneasy about her is how I read it. She doesn't become a villain until much later in the episode, going as far as saying most of the Federation doesn't even know California-class ships even exist (making sense of why we'd never heard of them before this series), reinforcing the small fry impression 'LD' seeks to give us, before reminding us that they are still Starfleet, they still have the training, and maybe not the experience, but they're getting there. A couple more minor complaints, too: Boimler claims he suffers from hay fever and acid reflux which must surely be easily curable with 24th Century medicine, though there's an easy defence to this nitpick since he could simply have been making things up to dissuade the Borg Queen from assimilating him into the Collective. But Freeman giving the lower deckers a 'better' Replicator at the end? That makes no sense whatsoever, they'd only need to add the programs to the existing model. It's times like this that it smacks of trying to emphasise a story point over sensible continuity and reminds me of the original premise that described them as being people that put the yellow cartridge in the Replicator to get bananas, or something similarly inane and plain wrong.

They have come quite a long way from those early missteps, however, and the season continues to skirt the edges of genuinely good Trek stories and characters, even if it more often than not still falls slightly short. Sometimes I think the lesson of the week needs a little bit more promotion (I think of the brief period of Freeman and her senior staff remembering how lower deckers have no worries and no responsibilities), at the expense of losing some of the humour or dramatic moments, but when they do succeed and an episode is (largely), clean, there's nothing more evocative of old Trek than this. There's always the reality that we could, and probably should, just go back and watch the good ol' days, but at the same time it's nice to have new Trek. Even if they continue to tease us: the Commander in the group simulation where Klingons are supposedly taking over the ship spots a Jem'Hadar, but it's off-camera so it's one of those famous races that continues to elude modern Trek. They could have recreated some for the Changeling storyline in 'Picard' Season 3, but even there they drew a blank. Maybe they realised they couldn't match the great Michael Westmore's superb designs on that one? And speaking of harking back to greatness on 'DS9,' I write this shortly after hearing of James Darren's death - he was so great as Vic Fontaine and would've been a perfect guest star for this series. Once again it's sad how many Trek people have gone now, especially with 'DS9,' and as 'Generations' reminds us: cherish every moment, because it'll never come again.

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