8 Ups & 1 Down For Star Trek: Lower Decks 5.8: Upper Decks

One of the most joyous, most outwardly peculiar things about Star Trek, if not necessarily for the poor actors who have to learn it, is all the technical — technically invented — sci-fi talk. One of the most joyous things about Lower Decks is that it is never afraid to lean into Trek's largely esoteric in the most meta way. This week was no exception, as Commander Billups and company talked technobabble.

Billups got off to a fine start in his explanation for those damned "Cordry rocks" that just won't stay in the ceiling: "Their non-centrosymmetry disrupts the charge leptons in the isolinear pathways of the main deflector, which then causes…" Makes… sense? O'Brien couldn't have said it better with a self-sealing stem bolt!

Not even a "tummy ache" from a bagel could hold Billups down (literally) in his engineering wordplay wizardry. Ensign Meredith reports a "nonfunctional indicator light behind panel 785," then all sorts of red-plasma hell (and rappels) breaks loose.

And this year's Montgomery-La Forge Award for Most Outstanding Technobabble in the Performance of Duty goes to:

Billups: We have to decouple the deuterium conduits before the thermal blankets push the valve blocks into the adjustment coils.

Meredith: And I'll deactivate the magnetic constrictors while you cycle the reactor conduits.

Well deserved! Remember, "Everybody dies, but it's the engineers who really get to live"… and play with hyperspanners!