7 Ups & 1 Down From Star Trek: Lower Decks 5.1 — Dos Cerritos
There's blue, there's two, Tamarians for you, chasing potholes and Or-ee-ons in Lower Decks.
Perhaps the only way to truly know yourself is to meet a version of yourself from a parallel dimension with a 0.327% variance. Don't say the idea's never crossed your mind! That was, in any case, the premise of this strong opening episode for what is Star Trek: Lower Decks' fifth and final season.
We've been teased every which way with clips from Dos Cerritos at San Diego and New York Comic Cons and on Star Trek Day. Given the theme of the episode, however, and the Los/Dos double word play, it's no doubt only right that we'll have seen certain parts twice. Having that material in advance certainly didn't detract from any enjoyment overall.
Dos Cerritos is also an episode of two halves, adeptly making use of its Orion (Or-ee-on), Tendi-driven plot — given equal weight (and another ship) alongside the quantum fissure shenanigans. Dos Cerritos manages to pack a great deal of plot and character development into its 20-some minutes, which fly by before you've almost had the time to realise it.
This is Lower Decks, so it's equally a lot of fun — never afraid to poke some of that at itself and at Star Trek more widely. And, to echo Seán, by Apollo's hand, definitely don't skip the fantastic opening credits!
9. UP — Science Fiction — Doubles Feature
No bat'leth competition this time, but there was Kal-toh. That one Vulcan puzzle game between Mariner and T'Lyn was in itself a neat bit of visual foreshadowing to the disruption in the once more orderly branches of the multiverse. It has already been confirmed that "spacetime potholes" are the theme this season. T'Lyn's 'solve-in-one' was then equally its own Easter egg (see Cetacean Observations for more on that).
Lower Decks thrives on taking specific — not to say niche — Trek precedent and going to warp 10 with it in the service of its characters. And there couldn't be better character development than doing it twice in the same episode, all in the aim of really just doing it once in the manner only sci-fi can.
Amongst all the lessons and fair forewarnings of roads taken/not taken was the on-point comedy we've come to expect. Double trouble had us doubled over by the hyper-confident, bearded, alternate Boimler, and the varying hair lengths of both versions of Shaxs who each got their prowess from "strangling Cardassians".
Other Billups was King, the two Kayshons had a terrific argument in Tamarian, and Ransom was still as attracted to himself. Where was Captain Freeman (the parallel version of our version — Carol, not Becky)? Starbase 80. The worst place in any universe!