Mining The Mind's Mineslo

 DVD, Lower Decks S3 (Mining The Mind's Mines)

Exactly the kind of assignment California-class ships should be doing, necessary drudge (that would have been a good title!), tasks, so it felt right from that perspective, it's just that so much of it is head-scratchingly ill-conceived, or just plain badly thought out, and oddly most of my issues aren't to do with things related to illusions where you'd expect there to be out-of-kilter nonsensical weirdness. We begin with Tendi being mentored for Science Officer training by the ship's Counsellor or psychologist, or whatever Migleemo's supposed to be. I like the oversized budgie, he's a fun character that reminds us we're in the 'TNG' era and his upbeat happy persona fits into the optimistic Tendi outlook. Except she learns a lesson about that kind of overwhelming positivity not always making sense, or at least that was my reading. The main point is what she learns from Dr. T'Ana her 'true' mentor, but I did notice how she really wants to look on the bright side as much as normal except Migleemo's lack of competence isn't giving her much confidence. It's supposed to be funny, but any time Trek is joking about a Starfleet officer's incompetence automatically gives me pause (except for certain circumstances such as Barclay, and even he could go too far in some appearances). It simply made no sense for someone without any science background to be mentoring Tendi and it's not like they make an excuse for it to try and rationalise the situation, such as there being no one else free. It's purely for the humour and since Trek is a serious entity, unless the humour comes naturally it looks out of place (one reason I'm highly sceptical about Tawny Newsome's proposed live action comedy series).

I'll give it credit for being a nice B-plot, just the kind of small character story old Trek used to tell so well in counterpoint to the main thrust of an episode, and I especially like it tying into the A-plot at the end, but too much about it didn't make sense. Even T'Ana's swear-filled advice where she hamfistedly tells Tendi she needs to make mistakes before she can learn from them and studying can't prepare you for that experience, came out sounding lopsided and inelegant ('studying's good, but there are times you need to make a mess of things before you can fix them'), and I just think it's a disconnect in modern Trek that mindsets about all kinds of things are so different nowadays that all these series' make the same kind of mistakes in tone and dialogue. 'LD' is generally less egregious about it, or covers over the bad stuff with its adherence to canon and aesthetics, but even so there are still multiple examples in the average episode. I do so hate contemporary-sounding dialogue, such as Mariner using 'mansplaining' as a term, or Dr. T'Ana having a complete lack of awareness for her patient's mental wellbeing, such as dropping casual personal things in about the state of the guy who's foot is being fed on by an alien gribbly - she then takes a chainsaw to it! At least we didn't see the gore (although we do see an illusory Andorian Jennifer get ripped in two by a nightmare werewolf doppelgänger of her which was bad enough!), but it's completely for laughs with no internal consistency to the world and makes no sense.

There continues to be a marked casual disregard for Trek's tenets, such as Migleemo's warning to Tendi that she needs to cut through the 'big egos' of Captains to 'speak for science.' Nothing about that makes sense because a Captain is in that position to make the hard decisions and so they will have gone through all the training and have the will to hear what their crew is saying, that's the whole point, that symbiotic connection. I agree Tendi needs to speak up, but it was just a wrongheaded way to look at how Captains are supposed to operate. Granted we're hearing it from a somewhat different perspective since Migleemo has his own way of looking at things, but even so it doesn't help that sense of professionalism which modern Trek so often ditches, sadly. Even the exhortation to speak for science is nonsensical, as if science itself is a singular entity with one vision and opinion. Science is a process of exploring and explaining facts and that's Tendi's role. Then there's the Captain's Log at the end where Freeman is noting it was all a plot by the scientists and Scrubble to garner sensitive Starfleet intel for selling on the black market. Again, modern Trek is so concerned with life outside the Federation yet not very interested in exploring cultures, so often ending up being piratical or rogue mercenary in nature. Why would the scientists even need to 'purchase' better equipment, they'd just replicate it, money isn't there for human motivation any more! It is somewhat funny she can't even explain the Scrubble's motivation, but also suggests it was an easy out to avoid having one.

I liked the look and name of the Scrubble (I assume the emissary on the Cerritos was voiced by Tatasciore as he tends to do the big guys, though he did sound different and I couldn't find credit for the role, but he needed to since he and Shaxs are in the same scene), even if, again, it doesn't make that much sense that they look like rubble and their name sounds like it, too, but they're being cute and I assumed the design was meant to evoke the aborted 'Star Trek V' rock monster which is always nice to see called back to, existing only in unused footage for the film, as it does. It's also pleasant to have a team-up between two California-class vessels which starts out competitive with the Carlsbad team coming across as stuffed shirts, then becomes antagonistic before understanding wins out and they bond (over a 'campfire' made from Phaser-heated rocks inside a cave - just like the old days!), which was all very nice, especially as our team assume their Cerritos has a bad reputation, but find out at the end it's considered the coolest by the other ships in the class. They may not be famous fleet-wide, but they are 'California-class famous,' which is being the big fish in a small pond the series set out to do, and so refreshing given how high stakes so much of 'DSC' and 'Picard' were. The episode goes out really well on a lovely scene, too, they're all enjoying each other's company and a laugh at Boimler's expense about his reputation being that he's some kind of tiny robot, so they got the end tone just right and you leave happy.

What should have been a major coup for an episode, getting Susan Gibney back for a cameo as Dr. Leah Brahms, the famed starship engineer of Geordi La Forge's dreams (and his Holodeck program), was a damp squib. I'm all for bringing back as many of the previous characters voiced by the originals as possible, but a couple of short scenes where she's only an illusion with no end result other than learning she's Rutherford's dream encounter was a waste to me. If they brought her back later in the episode as the real Leah, or even down the road in the season, that would have made it worthwhile (and mirrored Geordi's own experience), but that didn't happen. Gibney was one of those good, strong performers, playing the character twice, coming to 'DS9' as a separate character for another two episodes, and even being second choice in the running for Captain Janeway on 'Voyager' (after Mulgrew, third if you count original Genevieve Bujold - I feel they could have worked in a joke about that somehow, but they don't seem to be quite as obscure as they have been, unless they're being so deep even I haven't noticed!). I'm still disappointed she didn't cameo as Geordi's wife in 'Picard' Season 3! What I prefer if they're going to bring back an actor is to make the episode heavily about them, much the way Jeffrey Combs was used. He was playing a new character, yes, but he had a lot to do that suited his talents. I'd rather Gibney was here than not, of course, but I just wanted a bit more.

When it came to the fantasies and nightmares it was okay - I'm not sure about Klingon Klowns with bat'leths for arms, a Borg snake, or an Andorian werewolf, but it was another fine reference to 'TAS' with the flying snake creature, Kukulkan (no "Kukulkaaaaaaan!" joke?), even if it wasn't named as such. As were the references to the game Parrises Squares, which they're advised to think about to take their mind off any tempting from illusions. Not sure why that was Stevens' suggestion, but it was funny, especially Rutherford babbling: "Parrises Squares, iron mallet, shiny blue uniforms..." when confronted by Brahms! They're generally much better about not dropping into overuse of Trekferences - I can only think of Ambassador Spock writing the foreword to the mentoring manual Migleemo's using (and nice to think the man was still alive and well at this time in the early 2380s before he ended up getting sucked into the black hole portal thing from 'Star Trek XI' a few years later in 2387). I took it that Excelsior-class ship was meant to be the same USS Hood as one of Riker's old ships from 'TNG' - that was quite a deep cut when you realise it was in the first episode, 'Encounter At Farpoint,' and all subsequent appearances of that class on the series would have been a reuse of that footage! I enjoyed the joke, or trope is probably a better word, simply of having that class crop up since it was so often used in 'TNG.' Even though it's animation and they can draw whatever class they want, they deliberately make it that one! It's always nice to see the grey-shouldered uniforms again, too, reminding us of the 'proper' Starfleet out there. I didn't spot at the time one of the Carlsbad team was a webbed-fingered Zaldan, another pretty obscure Trekference.

The argument between young Captain Maier and 'old-school' Captain Freeman (as he titles her), about collecting trinkets seemed to be a direct commentary on younger people today, and probably specifically the age gap between younger fans and older fans who grew up with Trek and love to amass memorabilia and collectables (I have my own tidy collection!), so that was quite fun on more than one level, as poor diplomacy as it was for them to be fighting in front of guests. But that seems to be the reality of this series: it's very difficult for them to find humour without doing down the inspirational side of Trek. It's not just that - I mentioned how modern Trek often doesn't show interest in delving deeper into alien cultures, and we don't find out much about the Scrubble, other than they're indigenous to the planet and are silicate-based creatures. But even established races often fail to act as they should, which is frustrating when they all too often come off as generic American humans instead: the Tellarite member of the Carlsbad Away Team has none of that argumentative quality that made them so interesting - in the past they were able to incorporate and develop the species we saw to show how they used their attributes and different points of view to approach things, such as Nog very much remaining a Ferengi in Starfleet and using that tenacity and business head to great advantage. Even the intelligence level can sometimes appear dumbed down, such as when they can't get a signal out of the cave and Mariner picks up a large crystal so I thought she was going to demonstrate the ingenuity of the Cerritos crew by showing the others how to build a comms unit to boost the signal out of these crystals, but no, she was just arming them so they can charge out and attack the illusions... So a bit of an unmemorable episode on the whole.

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