Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks “Moist Vessel”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The Cerritos is working with another ship in transporting a Generation Ship (meaning a ship meant to take a species to another livable world even if it takes multiple generations to get there), but Mariner is once again not taking things seriously and annoying the higher ups, including her captain mother. Captain Freeman can’t just transfer her daughter!…for some reason, so at the suggestion of Commander Ransom, they try a reverse psychology trick to give her all of the worst jobs on the ship in order to make Mariner want to transfer herself. This backfires, however, when she ends up making the best of her new tasks and turning them into fun games, so Freeman decides to bring her on as a senior officer to bore her to death. This both horrifies her and Boimler, who can’t comprehend why he was passed over with how by the books he is, so he tries breaking some rules and seeing where it gets him.

The day of transporting arrives as the two ships coordinate grabbing the ship with their tractor beams, but the other captain decides to be a showboat and get closer, yanking off a part of the ship and leaking out some fluid in it that works at terraforming, instantly forming organic matter around the ship and wrecking it. This leaks over into the Cerritos, forcing Mariner and Freeman to work together and confront some of their issues in order to save the ship, as well as the other ship’s crew. And while they reconcile somewhat by the end, Mariner is demoted back to Ensign after making fun of an Admiral’s weird mispronunciations. Status Quo re-established!

Also, Tendi attends a crewmate’s ascension and messes it up, making him furious with her and making her desperate to make things right. When the ship is attacked, the crewmate admits he was faking his ascension anyway, but saving Tendi from falling debris gives him the inner peace to finally pass on… in a rather horrifying manner.

OUR TAKE

This is probably the most interesting and infuriating episode of this series thus far, and for multiple reasons. It’s interesting in that this episode actually does some cool and visually spectacular things with its sci-fi setting, namely with the terraforming liquid invading the ship and surrounding it with water and rock formations that form so interestingly, as well as the actual ascension scene itself which is about as trippy as I think something like that probably should be. But then what kinda cancels that out is that the personal stories in this episode end up feeling so surface level and yet are so close to digging into deeper issues for the characters involved.

Take Mariner and Freeman’s A-Plot for example. We’ve known the two have had conflict since the first episode, which is where we also learned that they are mother and daughter. That’s naturally going to have some fuel for both conflicts and growth down the line, so the fourth episodes seems a good a time as any to dive into that. The episode begins with Mariner’s usual insubordination (which is honestly getting pretty annoying at this point because it’s not funny and doesn’t seem to have any real purpose besides hit or miss comedy), which is naturally going to piss off her captain mother. Mariner is on this ship with her mother because she couldn’t fit in on other ships, but Freeman wants her off, but can’t transfer her without good reason (I’m guessing), so she tries to make her leave, but the furthest we get into it is that Freeman doesn’t believe in Mariner’s abilities…which is understandable considering Mariner is constantly making a jackass of herself. Maybe it’s a bit early in the series for this, but I’d honestly like to see her start applying her intelligence towards more productive things than just being an ass simply to piss off authority. Why is she in this job, exactly? Let’s get into that?

The other real missed opportunity is Tendi’s subplot regarding the ascension, which kinda gives itself away by having the guy whose ascension she messed up…be mad about it. That kinda says right away that he wasn’t in the right mindset to become one with the universe or whatever, considering that you would think that would require letting go of earthly tethers and not hinging your self-worth on becoming enlightened. In fact, it probably would have been a bit more clever if the guy’s LACK of reaction ended up making Tendi freak out in trying to help him when he really didn’t care either way. And as a non-trekkie, I wasn’t aware this sort of thing was apparently pretty frequent in Star Trek shows, though I have my doubts they involved a smiling koala. Bleh.