Star Trek: Lower Decks 507 “Fully Dilated” Review: The best season 5 episode so far

Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 Episode 7 “Fully Dilated”

Lower Decks uses its well-honed brand of humor to create a unique mash-up between two classic Star Trek episodes.

“Fully Dilated” begins with the Cerritos investigating another dimensional tear in space, which recently saw an alternate version of the Enterprise-D visit the Prime Universe before returning to its dimension. While the Cerritos crew would have enjoyed seeing this purple version of the famous Galaxy-class ship, it did leave something on a nearby planet. So, it’s up to Beckett Mariner (Tawney Newsome), D’Vana Tendi (Noel Wells), and T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz) to land on the planet and retrieve whatever the alt-Enterprise left behind, lest the pre-warp locals discover alien technology.

This mission has high stakes for the two science officers, as both Tendi and T’Lyn are angling for the open senior science officer position; Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) has yet to decide which officer gets the job. Further complicating the mission for our protagonists is that the planet below experiences time differently than those on the Cerritos. We love a good time dilation story, so this fascinating sci-fi situation made us think immediately of Voyager’s classic “Blink of an Eye” – and of course, Lower Decks references that episode, too. 

“For every second that passes on the Cerritos, one week is going to pass for you on the surface.”

“Oh, it’s like that planet Voyager went to.”

“Or like how time seems to slow down when I’m forced to go to a play.”

– Boimler, Tendi, and Mariner as the away team prepares to beam down.

A week passes on the Cerritos for every second that passes on the planet. The plan is to have Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid) and Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) beam the landing party back to the ship after just a second, which should be plenty of time for the away team to find the alt-D’s technology. However, thanks to Rutherford and Boimler enjoying a messy helping of micheladas – something Boimler knows his alternate self would enjoy – the drink is spilled on the transporter controls, leading the two men to panic to clean it up before bringing the away team back. Incredibly, the couple minutes needed for the men to lick up their food means a year ultimately passes for the three women. Now that’s some sci-fi wackiness.

What did the away team do during that year? When they first land and investigate the D’s tech, they find the head of a familiar android: Data, played here, of course, by Star Trek legend Brent Spiner. Mariner and Tendi are starstruck, naturally, even though this is an alternate-universe version of Data. As the away team waits and waits, and waits for Boimler to beam them back up, they ultimately find an abandoned house in which to live out their time on the planet.

During these months, Tendi observes how T’Lyn is the superior scientific mind; the Vulcan manages to grow incredible food to earn the team some local currency, create a windmill with which to ground grain into flour, and even juggle at a moment’s notice without ever juggling before. Tendi worries the senior science officer position is T’Lyn’s for the taking, so she uses her scientific smarts to power Data’s head and clandestinely consults the android on how to be a better science officer. Over the next months, Data witnesses how Tendi is a capable and dedicated science officer despite her jealous motivation.

Mariner, meanwhile, is obsessed with living her version of Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s famous “probe life,” which refers to the decades the Enterprise captain experienced in “The Inner Light,” commonly considered one of Star Trek’s best episodes. Her hasty attempt to form meaningful relationships and learn to play the flute (all things Picard did) backfires as she repeatedly sends herself to the local jail, whether it be for accidentally poking someone in the eye or inadvertently extinguishing an important local flame.

By the time Boimler and Rutherford spend precious minutes cleaning the transporter controls, a local lurker, Snell (Eric Bauza), who was always trying to spy on the strange newcomers to his town, finds there is indeed more to the women than meets the eye. Snell discovers Tendi and the talking Data head, and manages to knock out T’Lyn to tie up the two science officers before he runs off to tell the town.

This situation forces Tendi to admit she feels like she was in competition with T’Lyn during this mission, and vice versa. But the Orion discovers T’Lyn’s accomplishments on the planet’s surface were all in the name of rebuilding the two officers’ camaraderie after Tendi withdrew so often to their house’s attic. Considering this clear miscommunication, no small part of which was T’Lyn’s fault, the Vulcan says she plans to withdraw her senior science officer application, as she realizes she doesn’t have the communication skills needed for the lofty posting. To be fair, does Tendi have those needed skills?

To her credit, T’Lyn also takes a hard look at her motivation for being in Starfleet and addresses the fact that Tendi had a chance to reconcile her pirating past with her Starfleet service, while T’Lyn has never recovered from her banishment from her previous posting. Seems like the Vulcan has a lot of introspection to do. And there is precedent for T’Lyn not having the best communication skills. Just recently in “Shades of Green,” T’Lyn tried to cheer up Rutherford, not that the engineer ever knew that was his friend’s intention.

With this interpersonal hurdle out of the way, Tendi and T’Lyn bail Mariner out of jail and fool the local populace about having a beheaded Android. Just before leaving jail, Mariner, who was disappointed about not rising to “The Inner Light”-levels of meaningfulness in a time-dilated environment, realizes she did indeed make friends in jail. And she did even take a stab at a homemade flute made from jail soap, not that the instrument sounded anything resembling melodic. While we’re happy Mariner gained some sort of appreciation among her co-inhabitants, it would have been better if we saw her gaining these peoples’ friendship in any way throughout her visits there.

The away team manages to avoid breaking the Prime Directive long enough to have Boimler beam them back, and the Cerritos returns Data’s head through the portal to his home dimension. Before returning to his universe, though, the science officer advises Freeman about Tendi and T’Lyn’s candidacy for the senior officer position – after all, he just spent a year with the pair. To our and their surprise, Freeman chooses both the Orion and the Vulcan to be co-senior science officers. We’ve never seen a pair share such a position, so we’re dying to see how Lower Decks tackles this development in the few remaining episodes this season.

As enjoyable as this episode was, there were a couple of narrative decisions that make us cock our heads in confusion. First, we find it hard to believe Tendi could hide Data’s head from T’Lyn for so long. Wouldn’t the Vulcan have heard him speaking, or investigate more about why Tendi had sequestered herself in the attic for so long? And second, did Tendi and T’Lyn not try to rescue Mariner from jail during the months she was there? For all they knew, Mariner’s return signal could have activated while she was in jail, which would have broken the Prime Directive.

Taken together, there’s plenty to like about “Fully Dilated.” The thought-provoking science behind time dilation is always a fun concept to explore (seriously, go watch Voyager’s “Blink of an Eye”), and Mariner’s humorous reverence for Picard’s journey as seen in “The Inner Light” is contagious, and totally on brand with Lower Decks’ characteristic humor. Importantly, Tendi gained some intrapersonal perspective thanks to the alt-Data, which makes Brent Spiner’s appearance in this show a welcome and meaningful one. Meanwhile, T’Lyn gained her own growth as she realized she has much to learn about being an officer outside of book smarts – how her personal and professional relationship with Tendi proceeds will be an interesting juggling act for this show’s writers.

The fact that Lower Decks continues to bang out intriguing, funny, and thoughtful episodes makes it all the more sobering to realize there are only four episodes left.

Stray Thoughts:

• T’Lyn mentions her home on Vulcan was in the Viltan Flats, a region first referenced in the Star Trek Roleplaying Game, a physical series of publications released in the late 1990s.
  
  
• After one of the times Mariner confronts Snell, she rhetorically asks, “Why is there always a suspicious lurker when you’re in a Carbon Creek situation?” This is a reference to the Enterprise episode that chronicled Vulcans who crashed on Earth in the 1950s.
  
  
• Mariner complains that two months in jail for poking someone in the eye is “Edo-level bullsh*t right there.” The Edo were the species seen in The Next Generation season one episode “Justice,” where they sentenced Wesley Crusher to death for a relatively minor crime.
  
  
• Alt-Data experienced a similar situation as his Prime Universe counterpart, as the android explains to Tendi how he was once stuck in a cave with only his head. This situation was seen in the TNG two-parter “Time’s Arrow.”
  
  
• Notice how Mariner, upon holding her hero’s head, notes the Data in her universe “was really cool.” This use of past tense is good attention to continuity, as the Prime Universe Data would have died about three years before this episode takes place.
  
  
• This episode marks the fourth iteration of Star Trek Brent Spiner has been in, the others being The Next Generation, Enterprise, and Picard.
  
  

New episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks stream Thursdays on Paramount+.

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