Star Trek: Lower Decks is beaming down for the ninth episode of Season Three.
However, is it a case of the episode story standing out, or are we seeing some repetitive elements from previous episodes of the series?
Either way, this is the penultimate episode of Lower Decks Season 3, and as such, this is our review!
SPOILER WARNING, like always here on the Trek Central YouTube channel, we’ll be discussing this episode in FULL detail. You’ve had your spoiler warning!
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The premise of this episode is that Captain Freeman has setup an initiative to check up on planets which starfleet have done first contact with to see how they are doing,
probably in light of missions to planets like Beta III where we saw Freeman getting frustrated that Starfleet only does something when things get bad again.
So we get some nice continuation of a previous episode informing the plot of this future episode which is always nice to see in a way that doesn’t detract but adds to this episode.
But while this test mission for his initiative is going on, the Cerritos has a journalist from the Federation News Network on board to oversee the mission and show it to be successful so they can do more of them.
Weirdly the journalist does more work on the Cerritos than on the actual initiative, but I guess she could simply be doing two jobs at the same time,
while on the Cerritos doing a story on it, which makes sense.
I did really enjoy the aspects of the episode where we got a camera view of our crew being interviewed by the journalist,
which very much reminded me of the DS9 interview of “Inquisition” where Sloan did interviews with numerous crew members on Deep Space Nine.
A favourite episode of mine!
I think if the episode focused more on this view, and was an interesting episode told through interviews of a mission, I would have liked it more.
I want Lower Decks to do cool things that change how it tells a story, which unfortunately is getting a little too comfortable for me.
That's something we've touched on a fair bit with Season 3!
An aspect of this episode I really didn’t like was just Freeman’s behaviour, with it seeming to be very much a regression to season 1 Freeman who was very self-image obsessed.
But it seems like just like with season 1 it being how she deals with stress, it is stress which exacerbates it here as well.
However she does go completely over the top with her punishment for Mariner, not even getting the facts first before she makes her verdict.
Sending Mariner to Starbase 80 and eventually pushing her so far that she resigns her commission and becomes partners with Petra Aberdeen, the Archeologist seen in the Season 3 episode “Reflections”.
But this issue doesn’t even stay at Freeman, with it seemingly also extending to Jennifer, who I think hasn’t been handled the best this season.
. I know this show probably doesn’t want to focus on relationships in its stories, it makes sense with what it is trying to do.
But having this relationship set up, mentioned as going well, and only really having one episode of screentime is quite disappointing.
Only Mariner’s friends back her up, but Jennifer doesn’t and seemingly ends their relationship there and then. We will have to see where this goes, but I am not overly confident.
And though it doesn’t show a growth of Freeman's character, moving past this self-image obsession, it does very much highlight Mariner’s own growth as a character especially in this season.
Being less selfish and doing what is right, she was the only one who had praise for the Cerritos in the interviews because she wanted to make sure the full story was seen.
She put aside her grievances to do some good, and unfortunately was misunderstood and punished for it.
Finally we do see why Starbase 80 is the butt of jokes in Starfleet, and it seems like they just have very old equipment, using a Type 15 shuttlepod and having different uniforms as well which look very old.
I highly expect this entire episode to have been a set up, and that isn’t just the conspiracy of the temporal cold war mentioned in this episode.
Everything fell into place extremely well for Buenomigo to showcase his new Texas Class starship to a Federation News Network reporter,
probably to get good press and force starfleet’s hands to mass produce these new prototypes of fully automated ships.
Am i the only one thinking of Star Trek: Picard Season One
When automated ships decimated Utopia Planitia
I know they were done by the drones, or the B... what were they...
The happy droids, they're not happy, the smiley ones!
Picture on-screen, you know what i mean!
I can't remember off the top of my head for some reason.
Was it the "IHATE" Droids? I don't know, It's not a good idea
The Breen were very conveniently waiting on Brekka and seemed to only have arrived recently, due to the presence of civilians there who were shot on sight.
Beunomigo could have tempted the Breen there in some way, and used them as perfect tests for his new ships.
And just a side note, I do have to say it is amazing that we see the Breen return in this episode, we haven't seen them since Deep Space Nine,
and for a species which is just a star wars alien ported into star trek, they are a fan favourite, so getting a little bit more from them is great.
Though interestingly they seem to have updated their energy dampening weaponry to work against Starfleet ships again,
but I guess these types of weapons are always an arms race between offence and defence and which works better.
The idea of fully automated ships goes back to The Original Series with the “Ultimate Computer’s” M5, which failed due to its own sentience coming into effect and thoughts of self preservation?
So has Buenimigo cracked this centuries long issue for Starfleet, or could there be more at play?
With this fully automated ship idea not really coming into play in other series like Picard, I don’t think this particular experiment will be fully as it seems, and with this season, more is definitely going on.
Buenomigo was only introduced this season as an admiral and friend of the Freemans, with even Mariner referring to him as Uncle.
There are multiple avenues they could pursue with this, or even multiple at the same time, with some mysteries and other aspects set up during this season.
First up is Rutherford’s backstory. We learned that a high up starfleet male officer was getting him to do off the books experiments,
which eventually backfired, injuring Rutherford and got him to get his implant, which included removing the memories of this experiment.
What if this mysterious man and Admiral Buenomigo are the same characters, and this is a USS Pegasus situation with Beunomigo instead of Erik Pressman.
A ship project that is highly confidential that could shift the balance of power to Starfleet.
That was the Pegasus
Another option which we were reminded off recently, is what if these ships are powered or at least controlled by powerful sentient AI.
And what does Starfleet have a lot of tucked away in storage… evil AI at the daystrom institute.
If Starfleet found a way to control these AI, giving them an off switch or something, they could be used as tools to power these new weapons and control them.
And then whilst we are talking about a conspiracy,
this could 100% tie back to the cliffhanger from last episode of Section 31 still out there with William Boimler, perhaps Beunomigo is working with S31 and securing the Federation against future threats by any means necessary.
Overall I think this was a good episode of Lower Decks,
but near the end it was definitely rushing to accomplish what it wanted to do, not letting us sit with this revelation of the Breen or this new ship rushing to save the day.
It all felt very fast and rushing to get to the end, instead of simply fast paced.
This could be the reason it feels more like it is a setup, that it isn’t 100% true, but whether it goes that far is unlikely.
The episode does however give us some interesting mysteries to ponder over which we might see furthered in the season finale, which is highly likely, or even mysteries going further into season 4.
We’ve got to talk about the episode name “Trusted Sources”.
While this does relate to the episode topic and storylines, that being having a journalist and Mariner apparently spilling the beans, it could also be Star Trek creatives taking a jab elsewhere.
For starters, it comes from in the episode of Captain Freeman believing Beckett to have spilt the beans, when in fact, it was the whole crew.
It could also be the cased that “Trusted Sources” refers to the amount of misinformation there has been about the Star Trek franchise in recent years.
. I mean this also applies to most modern media franchises right now.
. Ever since the airing of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and the return of “Star Trek: Discovery”, sections of the Internet have claimed various things that are not true.
All this information stems from supposed “Trusted Sources”. Basically there is no one to actually verify these claims.