Star Trek: Lower Decks 508 “Upper Decks” Review: The command crew takes charge

Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 Episode 8 “Upper Decks”

What the episode “Lower Decks” is to The Next Generation, “Upper Decks” is to Lower Decks. Yes, Lower Decks flips the script on us as “Upper Decks” tells a story focused on… you guessed it… the command crew of the Cerritos and how they deal with an alien invasion along with their undertakings.

Sure, the episode begins with a look at what the lower deckers are doing, but it wastes no time asserting who the real stars of the following 24 minutes are: Captain Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis), Commander Jack Ransom (Jerry O’Connell), Lieutenant Commander Andy Billups (Paul Scheer), Lieutenant Shaxs (Fred Tatasciore), and Doctor T’Ana (Gillian Vigman).

“You know, on other ships, it’s the command crew that gets into trouble, not, like random lower deckers.”

“That’s okay, I like our commanders.”

“I mean, so do I, but they’re not like Janeway, Kirk, or Sisko.”

 – Mariner and Tendi, shortly before “Upper Decks” turns its focus on the Cerritos command crew.

The Cerritos is within the beautiful ring system of Bhungar V as buhgoons, self-cloaking space whale-type creatures surround the ship. What has the buhgoons all riled up? That’s the mystery the command staff must solve, but as the crew completes their mission, side quests of their popup. As such, “Upper Decks” seems like a brisk affair, as the episode tells far more than the usual A/B plotlines.

Captain Freeman spends the day being a true leader to her crew, including attending musical and one-man-show rehearsals (in true TNG style) and supporting crewmates during a fertility event. The alien invasion of the Cerritos soon diverts her attention, but we’ll get to that in a minute. At the end of a trying day, she gets a wonderful surprise: her husband, Admiral Alonzo Freeman (Phil LaMarr), finds himself aboard the California-class vessel in time to celebrate his and Carol’s anniversary. Hard work does pay off, indeed.

Commander Ransom, who is busy escorting an ecologist around the ship, spots Beta and Delta shift crewmembers struggling to wrangle a buhgoon. He figures they need a bit of his leadership. Ransom falls into his idiotic gym-rat routine, seemingly more intent on having people watch him work out instead of solving problems. The commander falls asleep on a few crates after a particularly vigorous workout, which leaves Delta and Beta shifters to band together to control the buhgoons. Afterward, we learn Ransom put on that insufferable macho act to trick people into working together; this reveal is quite illuminating, considering how many times we’ve seen Ransom employ the same behavior with other lower deckers. Turns out the commander is more intelligent than we thought.

Meanwhile, Doctor T’Ana is hellbent on recalibrating her pain chart in sickbay to help her patients feel less pain while in her care, a critique she faced during the morning’s command crew meeting. As such, she enlists Nurse Westlake to expose her to as much pain as possible, and turns out the psycho doctor can take quite a bit of punishment -something that hilariously comes in handy when the Cerritos is invaded.

Shaxs, meanwhile, deals with a bit of post-traumatic stress as we see him faced with specters of the past – and Shaxs has a fairly dark past, considering he was on Bajor during the Cardassian occupation. Retiring to his quarters in the middle of the command crew’s meeting, Shaxs’ inner demon emerges as he fights imagined versions of himself and an army of Cardassians he killed during the occupation. This imagined fighting carries over into real life and inadvertently helps save Shaxs’ life during the subsequent invasion of the Cerritos.

Finally, Andy Billups, along with an engineering crewmember, discovers the ship is actually at risk of destruction thanks to some overworked patch jobs Billups made to the Cerritos recently. During emergency repairs, the chief engineer shows his penchant for leadership and techno-babble as he assumes the risky task of repairing the ship, but he also provides a valuable learning opportunity for his staff.

So, about this alien invasion. It turns out the ecologist Ransom was escorting was a Clicket in disguise, an aggressive species for which Starfleet recently issued a warning. Numerous Clicket ships bear down on the Cerritos while many beam aboard hoping to kill the senior officers, thus paving the way to harvesting the buhgoons for their cloaking organs. With the Cerritos at risk of being occupied, Freeman employs valuable intelligence she learned in the earlier staff meeting: Clickets abhor compliments and physically revolt at the merest hint of praise. It simply takes a string of compliments, then, to rid the Cerritos of all invaders, leaving the buhgoons safe.

Taken together, “Upper Decks” is certainly a different entry in this show. Spotlighting other people besides lower deckers reminds us just how much charisma those young officers have. While “Upper Decks” is naturally without that charisma, since the lower deckers take a break from the spotlight, that is not to say the command crew doesn’t make good use of their time in focus. We appreciated a look into the complex lives these secondary characters lead.

Here’s the other side of that coin: focusing on the command crew for an episode illuminates just how ripe for storytelling the Lower Decks universe is. There certainly is more to this show than just Mariner, Tendi, Boimler, Rutherford, and T’Lyn. We want to see more of the senior staff and witness how complex their lives on the Cerritos are. Despite what Mariner wants to believe, the command crew are the stars of their show when she and her friends aren’t looking; we’d be down to see more of those stories, even if it’s in other forms of media, like comics.

Stray Thoughts:

• The “Geordi and Ro wandering” reference during the stage performance Freeman attends alludes to the events of TNG’s “The Next Phase.”
  
  
• The Clicket who was pretending to be a Starfleet ecologist claims Clickets and the Cerritos have faced off before. They did, in the season one episode “Veritas.”
  
  
• Would Ransom really have stayed fake sleeping while aliens attacked the ship?

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

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