Voyager's Harry Kim Returns In Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5
… and he has another pip. Or does he?
Well, let's not bury the lead in buffer time. Lieutenant Boimler is a "total T'Pol," and Commander Ransom is addicted to decon gel. That's the big news from the official trailer for season five of Star Trek: Lower Decks, released yesterday. Of course not! But also, yes?
Seriously though, Harry Kim, or rather multiple Harrys Kim, is back! And one of them is no longer an ensign! In her log that frames the trailer, Captain Freeman might think there's no "chaos" or "hijinks" aboard ship. But this is the Cerritos. Weird is most definitely part of the job!
Fancy a game of cards? At the end of the trailer, we join a whole gaggle of Kims mid-round, mid-PADD, and mid-clarinet ('Echoes of the Void?'), all in what looks like Defiant-style quarters and bunks. Lower Decks being ever the stickler for detail, the design of the back of the playing cards bears a remarkable closeness to that of the deck seen in the poker game aboard the Delta Flyer at the start of Collective.
Three Harrys are in their Voyager uniform, two in the Antarian Trans-stellar Rally outfit from Drive, and the rest in First Contact/DS9 grey. Now, hold on to your Jefferies tubes! "Two pips?!" The Prime (we assume) Harry is a lieutenant! He finally got that little box on his chair (see Unimatrix Zero, Part I).
Speaking of games, is that Bat'leths & BiHnuchs (B&B?) the crew of the Cerritos is playing, just writ really, really large? Introduced in The Least Dangerous Game, the Martok Ferengi-knock-off did promise expansions!
In two clips from the trailer, we see semi-transparent, Borg-like cubes and spheres creating all sorts of havoc in engineering and outside the ship. To my mind, they look like vastly scaled-up playing pieces or miniatures — an on-going parallel, perhaps, not just to D&D, but to other real-world tabletop Star Trek RPGs such as WizKids' Star Trek: Attack Wing and Gale Force Nine's Star Trek: Away Missions. That was also either a humungous D20 rolling towards Rutherford, T'Lyn, and Tendi, or, as Seán noted in his breakdown, one massively dehydrated person as per By Any Other Name.
From decon to docking at the deflectors, the alternate-looking Ransom's "firing pulse" might be a reference as much to Star Trek: Enterprise's Affliction and Divergence as it is to All Good Things… and Parallels. For the rest of the Easter eggs, I refer you back to Seán.
You now have less than two weeks before the two-episode premiere on 24th October. You'll probably need that time to buy a new laptop after spitting out your drink at the Harry reveal! The fifth might be the last "Adventure… in the making" for the Lower Deckers, but let's hope we can continue to spend time in some other form with this totally "lockstep" crew with absolutely "no interpersonal conflict".
As always with Lower Decks, that trailer was a lot of fun, and a lot of Star Trek. It really does get cooler by the second, and it seems a shame to stop. Plus, if anything, Harry needs more than lieutenant's pips!
Season five of Star Trek: Lower Decks will be available to stream on Paramount+, beginning with two episodes on Thursday, 24th October, and one per week after that until the series finale on 19th December.