Star Trek: Lower Decks Review - 6 Ups And 0 Downs

2. A Season Premiere, Jim. But Not As We Know It

It would have been incredibly easy for Second Contact to be a ponderous, establishing premiere that tells us a lot about the ship and its crew without actually showing us anything. 23 minutes setting every scene imaginable and getting us excited to see what sort of madcap adventures they all managed to get themselves into.

But no, Second Contact is just a series of adventures, each more progressively madcap than the last. It's a Warp 7(ish) thrill ride from start to finish and yet, somehow, still manages to load itself with world-building and character introductions along the way. From one quick scene of Mariner finding Boimler in the closet, we know exactly what they're about and, crucially, what their dynamic is.

Tendi and Rutherford feel a little less developed, but in their respective handlings of the outbreak, we get a good feel for their personalities. The former is terrified holding a man's living heart but then later admit it ruled, while the latter was more interested in fixing a faulty door than he is with getting some crisis tail.

Even the revelation that Captain Freeman is Mariner's mother could have taken up a whole episode, but worked just as well as a throwaway bomb to drop at the end.