Room For Growth

 DVD, Lower Decks S3 (Room For Growth)

Mostly fun, internalised story of the lower deckers exploring the bowels of the ship in order to get themselves Quarters which is somewhat stymied by the off-colour jokes, excessive swearing (even if it is mostly bleeped out), and acceptance of the general cynical attitude towards the fictional future humans of Trek which permeates modern Trek - it's like this series wants a return to the values and inspiration of the past, as seen in the puppy-dog enthusiasm of Tendi, Rutherford and Boimler, but it always needs to be undercut by the 'realism' of Mariner and others. It's easy to laugh at Wesley Crusher's naivety and wholehearted belief in goodness and moral actions, but such behaviour was demonstrated over and over again by the heroes of old Trek and was generally much better presented than in Wesley's over-the-top childlike innocence. But the series' mission is humour and they don't seem able to succeed often enough with presenting the good without undercutting for what I can only assume they think are modern, savvy viewers. I don't think viewers have changed all that much, it's a lack of understanding for why people loved Trek. We weren't stupid back then and we don't all find swearing and inappropriate humour inherently funny now. And it's a real shame, because the story of the friends working together for some minor end could have been a good one.

The secondary story of Billups, Rutherford and the other engineers being forced on a spa retreat due to the stress caused by Captain Freeman being taken over by a mask from the D'Arsay Archive (great to hear that), and rewriting the ship's internal structure to resemble an ancient culture's stone temple (as in the 'TNG' episode 'Masks'), was a lot better at being true to the nature of Starfleet officers while also providing humour at their expense. Even the introduction of the mask seemed at first to be an incidental teaser merely designed to be amusing in and of itself, this extreme transformation witnessed by the lower deckers as the Captain floats by, affecting their lower deck lives, but it nicely sets up their eagerness for the Quarters going up for lottery, while the Engineering team are frazzled by the demands on them to turn the Cerritos back into their ship, leading to the Captain's trip to the spa-ship Dove. But even that storyline, as cute and fun as it was with tiny puppies with huge eyes (even one with damaged hind legs which needs wheels to get around, for maximum cute factor, as ridiculous as it was with Starfleet's level of technology - it's all for the joke, reality can be dispensed with, it seems), was blighted by the cynical reality of the Edosian woman in charge who is shown to actually be a hard-bitten, sweary smoker when she's at the end of her tether. Again, it's supposed to be funny, but instead it just makes her look tragic - it's all an act rather than believing in what she's doing.

Or at the end when the engineers have turned their stress around by solving a problem, a nice, realistic, true to Trek development, it's undercut by this Edosian, Toz (a reference to 'TOS,' perhaps?), upon witnessing the incredible power of (what is really just a magical tech solution, perhaps meant to be taken as another joke on the many such instances in the past - also made me think of Dr. Giger's eternal life machine from 'In The Cards'), the relaxation machine which cures Freeman's flaring temper in seconds, ordering it to be removed from the ship as if she's worried she won't have a job any more. So rather than the future view of a character being delighted in such a technological improvement regardless of the change it will make to her work, she's just like a modern person who only sees how it affects them. When you add the weirdness (and having characters in their underwear), that would be more suited to other so-called adult cartoons, with the extreme facial expressions like when Boimler's caught in a centrifugal force deep in the ship, or prior to that when he and Mariner are affected by toxic gas and hallucinate, it all adds up to a very un-Trekky episode, especially when we know how well they can do this stuff when they want to! It is animation, I understand that, so you can do more weird and wacky things, but then you also have the inappropriate stories told about senior officers and the tone of the whole thing is disappointingly poor, more noticeable because this is quite a Trekky premise.

The main problem, however, is the motivation is purely selfish for the main three characters: to cheat in a room lottery, inspired by Delta shift, whom Tendi overhears plotting exactly that. Starfleet officers cheating? It just seems like so often in modern Trek Starfleet is portrayed either as extreme unrelatable superheroes or modern day people, neither of which is inspiring - what happened to real people that put effort into excelling? You could say that Bold Boimler rearing his head again is along those lines: being confident, holding your head up and deciding to do something is the right sort of attitude, but even then it's really more of a joke and his friends think it's going to get him in trouble. I admit I liked the two stories, and if it hadn't been based on the wrong motivation I'd have liked it even more - prowling around in the depths of a starship is fascinating, even if they seem to suggest the swamp they discover is actually meant to be there for the sake of Hydroponics above, which doesn't make any sense, rather than left over from the ship's transformation, which does! They do at least pay lip service to the fact this is immoral when Tendi says she's always wanted to explore an ethical grey area, but it came across that the writers were merely being flippant about it, it doesn't really matter. And that's quite apart from the reality of the situation: would Starfleet really arrange room occupation by lottery, shouldn't it be based on rank and merit, and why would it be affected by some computer terminal deep down in the ship?

For that matter, if anyone can just tumble into any part of the ship's systems, then surely there'd be safety protocols in place to prevent what happened to Boimler in the low-gravity room? It was nice to see such an idea from 'Enterprise' brought into a later era, even if it wasn't an on-the-nose Trekference. And in all their travels through the ship never once do they discover a vast open space filled with rollercoaster Turbolifts, although that would have been an effective joke if they'd somehow referenced such an aberration as seen in 'DSC,' which they do enjoy poking from time to time, knowing that those watching this series are going to have problems with the stupid modern way of doing Trek. And talking about banks and money as being strange and ridiculous fits with the Trek reality, even if it doesn't really make sense. But there are still irritating unrealities in this series, such as being able to walk right into a personal Holodeck program Shaxs and Dr. T'Ana are playing, without any kind of security bypass, without the inhabitants realising the program exit had been opened, and then getting out some other way... I also found it strange there would be a spa ship rather than a visit to a planet since you'd think they'd want to visit a natural environment. Otherwise they could simply recreate anything there in a holoprogram! I can see it would be useful for a ship like that to travel to where it's needed, but they weren't in the middle of empty space, it was orbiting a planet!

The continuation of the idea of Edosians being specialists in dealing with certain damaged kinds of people, as we'd seen before in 'Much Ado About Boimler' in Season 1, reinforced some texture from this series while also continuing to connect to 'TAS,' so that's always appreciated, and as usual, they got the engineering personality so right with them unable to walk past a door without fixing it, using a 'sand garden' to draw a schematic for improving ship's engine efficiency, or even before they went on the spa trip when Rutherford apes Scotty by making sure he packs an instruction manual to read (Scotty famously relaxed by catching up with 'technical journals'). The joke is doubled by his afterthought that maybe he should take two, and rather than it being on the same PADD he throws another PADD in his bag, something we saw so often in old Trek where it would be one PADD per document! That's the kind of humour that really is funny on a Trek level. Or when they engineer a workaround for the (slightly sinister), stress sensor band by putting cucumber between it and their wrist in order to please the Captain when their stress levels apparently drop and it seemed her idea had worked.

Always have to go back to the core problem with the episode: the un-Starfleet behaviour of accepting cheating was necessary to get what they wanted. It's not just our people, Delta shift are shown to be deceivers who trick them into lowering their guard when they all seem to find common ground while waiting for a hatch to open, then rush off as soon as it opens, and it's sad to see. Especially after the previous episode where they learned to get along with the crew of another ship who had preconceptions about them. I thought there was going to be some repetition, so I suppose it's good that there wasn't, but in the end they're supposed to be a crew all together. In some way you could see their ultimate decision not to tamper with the lottery and deceive their way to victory as a good outcome, but it's still couched in getting at their 'enemies' of Delta shift, and it's only because they were mistaken about how many rooms were going, so they aren't being the better man at all. Even this backfires and makes them look silly when they didn't think of putting four beds in the one Quarters and sharing, since even that would be better than sleeping in a busy corridor (there do seem to be a lot of people around in these lower decks - in 'DS9' Dax commented on how they packed them in on those old ships, but this series is supposed to be post-'DS9'!). In the end it's all academic - it would be strange if things changed, but that's exactly what would happen next season when promotion and Quarters break them up.

Without any guest star gimmick to swerve attention I do find that this has less to offer than some episodes, and with all the problems I've listed it reminds of the state Trek is in these days: we've gone through some highs with bringing back the 'TNG' cast, and I had in mind 'LD' Season 3 was another of the stronger seasons modern Trek has put out, but so far this it hasn't been all that good apart from the opening episode. Perhaps all the best episodes are in the second half because it's certainly taken a long time to get going. Not that I didn't feel that way on original viewing, but going through in a more analytical way does throw up the problems in sharper relief. I don't know what the future for Trek can be now, I'd still much rather watch this series than any of the others as a whole (and look forward to the imminent release of Season 5 on disc), but I hope Season 3 picks up soon as even the most quiet episodes of Nineties Trek had a bit more oomph to them than this - as much as I like the characters (Ransom's line, "let the dish take care of it," was typical, and apt), the title of this episode is a good descriptor for the series...

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