Dos Cerritos

 Blu-ray, Lower Decks S5 (Dos Cerritos)

The final season of yet another Trek series begins already, but that seems to be the way with streamers, ten episodes a season and done in five seasons or less, a far cry from the depth and latitude afforded to the old 'factory' production of the 90s. It was meant to be a new Golden Era with all these different Treks, at one point five series' appearing in a single year, I think, but the quality just wasn't there, so in reality this Golden Era was much more factory-like than the so-called classic period which was bashing out greats on a regular basis. But there was one shining example in all the new Trek sludge... well, maybe a lightly glinting example, anyway, and that was this 'Lower Decks,' a series that had its ups and downs, for which we can be grateful there were ups at all since most were almost entirely downs, but as with this opener, even the stories I couldn't say were particularly outstanding had plenty of little pleasures to savour and if there was one bright spot of this era, this was it (and with the recent suggestion of a potential spinoff film from creator Mike McMahan, perhaps the days of 'LD' aren't quite over just yet?). To recap: I disliked Season 1 apart from the finale, which showed promise, grudgingly purchased Season 2 and was more than pleasantly surprised to find it the best modern season of Trek with a finale that was the single best episode of the Kurtzman Era, followed by a pretty good third season, a slightly disappointing fourth (with the caveat of a strong and Trekky resolution to all three of its homegrown villains), and so, while I was onboard for more 'LD' by this point, I also didn't have high expectations for the final season.

First impressions are the slickness (and sharpness of this beautiful Blu-ray edition - for all its faults, the series looks the best with its clean and gleaming Starfleet style), followed by remembering how much out of place swearing and inappropriate laxness there is! After watching 'Voyager' the last few months it takes some getting used to return to the low standards of modernity, but in fairness most of it comes from Mariner herself rather than being spread around, and somehow the casual or contemporary speech never bothered me quite as much in animation and with the fast-paced style of this series - it's not that I can overlook it, but I've got used to it much more and come to at least like the characters, something I can't say for any of the other casts of recent times! I'd forgotten what the overarching storyline was for the season until they mention the rift in space and then it all came flooding back. It's very lightly introduced here, no indication we'll be dealing with this sort of thing season-long. They'd done Cerritos doubles before on the series, but only the comedic way of other California-class ships (or ship, I can't remember which), having almost identical crews with slight differences (like a male version of Freeman or a Boimler that looks like a fly) - what am I saying? It's all comedic! But in this case it was played a little more seriously in that it's the old trope of them meeting an alternate reality version of their ship and selves, a time-honoured tradition in Trek that I felt missed a lot of opportunities to examine humorously in this episode.

They could hardly have Other T'Lyn with a beard! And we do get bearded Boimler (which also becomes a bit of a recurring theme for the season), an entirely cybernetic Otherford, Captain Becky (so is her full name Rebecca Mariner Freeman? Either way I actually largely preferred this professional version as it showed what she could be, minus the extreme discipline!), King Billups (why is he still serving on a starship - to avoid his regal duties?), but Freeman ended up at Starbase 80 (something else to be revisited later), and Tendi left to become a pirate, devastating Otherford and turning him inwards to become our Rutherford's warning. Some nice little character work going on and after an absence it is nice to get back to these people. I just don't think the story had that much going for it - very slight. Surprisingly, Tendi isn't back with the crew at end of episode as she refuses to leave her responsibilities behind when the blue 'Oree-ons' declare war against the greens (not environmentalists, the Orions!). The series has always shown a great love and affection for 'The Animated Series' of the 1970s, and this was up there with the return of the Kzinti to Trek. They really were ridiculous (even more than green aliens usually are), but their overconfident stupidity was somewhat endearing - they came across much like Pakleds so it would be interesting to go back to 'TAS' and see if they were potentially the seeds of inspiration for the least intelligent race in Trek (to the extent they were used for one 'TNG' episode, then only ever seen as background until 'LD' - even the great 'DS9' didn't see fit to expand upon them, a service they made to so many of the 'TNG' aliens).

Tendi shines through as the most Starfleet of all, constantly restraining her bloodthirsty crew from killing, secretly healing a casualty and generally striving to impart Starfleet values to a very un-Starfleet situation, but not looking like she was striving to impart Starfleet values to a very un-Starfleet situation! If you were drawing morals from the story, her emphasis on non-lethality and not being forced into extremes of enmity by others, wasn't a bad take-home. And we learn her crew secretly wish they weren't pirates anyway - they want to bake or dance (I thought she was going to break out in the famous 'Animal Woman' dance of 'The Cage'), or teach, all typically feminine practices, which was a nice way to show that even Orion women are 'human' at heart and are drawn to the things modern society considers stereotypical and 'beneath' them, which was a nice twist. Tendi's own sister, D'Erica, holding her in hock, sums up her sibling's true desires quite effectively, even couched as a teasing insult ("You miss debating the ethics of goop"), but Tendi earns respect for staying to deal with the 'Oree-ons' who call Tendi's tactics 'un-piratical' for using laughing gas to capture this old and rare Orion medical ship that may have been used to cure The Great Plague.

We know so little (probably nothing, actually), about Orion history, so any little detail concerning them is of interest, though modern Trek is so bad at world-building and the development of species that even if it was in full production rather than ground to a halt and limping to a closure with the final seasons of 'SNW' and 'Academy' I doubt they'd ever have expanded upon anything mentioned here. There are of course the usual little Trekferences put in for the fun of it, such as Captain Becky's swagger stick (or riding crop, here - hadn't we seen a similar callback to 'Star Trek III' before on the series?), or her statement that 'no interpersonal conflict is allowed on my ship,' a dig at the Roddenberry edict that has gradually been lost through such casual and loose interpretations of Trek in recent times, but which 'LD' excels at calling attention to. You could say they call attention to the Kelvin Universe again since they have Becky's crew standing at attention whenever she walks past, something we saw on the USS Kelvin (and one aspect I actually rather liked, amazingly!), and it made sense that this alternate Cerritos considered their existence as in the Prime Universe (another concept introduced, or at least named, in 'Star Trek XI'). It was very in keeping with this series that Freeman views their closing of these rifts as the kind of 'second tier' job the Cerritos is used to carrying out, describing them as fixing 'space-time potholes.' She has a way with words, but a shame she demeans her ship as a matter of course...

The big thing for Boimler is meeting his alternate who is much more like Riker - confident, an achiever, even wearing the same beard (it looked good!), while our self-doubting fellow is pushed out of a magazine feature on the top 30 under 30 officers in Starfleet - the greater insult being not only is he not in the top 30, he's not even in the honourable mentions below, pushed out by a ten-year old Naomi Wildman (I can believe it). This Official Starfleet Magazine, 'Fleet,' as it was called, was quite obviously a pastiche or tribute to the Titan mag made in England for almost thirty years, right down to the layout of the cover. Too sad that after finally getting as close as it could to appearing in Trek, the magazine itself ended just the year after this was made (2025), but I'm sure they wouldn't have been aware that was about to happen when they were making this episode. It was my constant companion during the height of Trek's greatness, through the declining years and the fallow period, and survived to see almost all the new Treks debut, so it was nice to see it acknowledged in some way. And in the same way we get other tributes with the 'LD' logo now sporting ghost trails behind it, duplicating the effect used for Season 5 of 'TNG' - and of course they add more to the major battle in the opening credits, now joined by the green hand of 'TOS,' the Tholian web and to cap it all, when you think it can't get any more extreme, V'Ger shows up to twang its presence. Even the use of a Palor Toff-like character (not Kivas Fajo - he's the name I always remember, but it was Toff who had the metal band woven in and out of his face. Hilarious when he cries it's 'prescription' when one of Tendi's women tries to rip it out!). But did they break canon when one of his Hupyrian servants speaks? It was speaking to him, but I thought they never uttered a word in front of anyone else due to a vow of silence?

Although there were some good morals on display, I also had to question Rutherford's tampering with Otherford to program him to want to make friends. That seems a bit presumptuous to force a change in someone like that, especially as it was to benefit Rutherford! It's only a brief moment and it was for his own good, but it stood out as a kind of un-Trekky thing to do that sometimes betrays that these modern writers don't always stick as close to Trek's manner of doing things in the good times. If nothing else it shows a disadvantage to being cybernetic if you can be so easily manipulated, and of course I'm making more of it than was meant since Rutherford saw he could do some good by interfering, but still, it would have been better if he could have used his charm or logic or something other than a direct adjustment to his program to help him make a change, though time was limited, I grant. Just a little nitpick, too: I don't see Hupyrians being bested by Orions in a fight. There's a reason the Grand Nagus used them as personal bodyguards - they were big and tough. I know, it's silly trying to maintain some semblance of Trek reality in something that's little more than a half hour comedy, but that's one of the tugs of war within the series that they want to be true to Trek, and are, in so many ways compared to the live action productions, so you want them to stay true in every aspect, so when they aren't, it can stick out. Otherwise it was a fine start to the season, nothing special, but that's also the point of 'LD': to be short, individual stories that can delve into any aspect of Trek, the way Trek used to be, allowing for the broad gamut of choice from week to week. But why is Gabrielle Ruiz (T'Lyn), still not in the opening credits, she steals the show? The slight twitch around the line of the mouth was like all-out merriment for a Vulcan!

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