“Fully Dilated”

"Heads Up":

Best episode of the Season so far with a Very Special Guest!

After frontloading many acceptable episodes, Season 5 finally belts out a good one, bordering on great.

This episode wears its influences on its sleeve, being a weird sort of mashup of Blink of an Eye (one of the best Voyager episodes, even if the concept was plagiarized) and several "undercover" pre-warp contact episodes (Time's Arrow, The Inner Light, Carbon Creek, etc.). Mariner all but breaks the fourth wall in mentioning the scenarios directly, but I think it works in this scenario. Her attempt to "pull a Picard" and try and have a meaningful life in the year they're stranded was a great off-kilter response to the scenario.

The emotional core of the episode, though, is Tendi's building jealousy of T'Lyn, and their eventual reconciliation. It was a pretty compact bit of storytelling, considering the short runtime meant to cover roughly a year of time. The writers have both of the characters down cold here. Tendi's temper and insecurity which hides under her cheerful demeanor. T'Lyn's Daria energy, which, underneath the deadpan, is coming from a place of genuine care. Snell is always there, creeping around, but the real tension/danger in the episode is that the team might not work together. The (relatively) low stakes here IMHO work much better with the Lower Decks format.

Of course, I have to mention Brent Spiner reprising Data again. The episode remembered something that the show Picard forgot regarding Data - that he's funny! I didn't laugh out loud or anything, but Data is pitch-perfect as a straight man in comedy, and Spiner has a great comedic sense.

If I have any quibbles here, it's that while the women were incognito on the planet, they should have had their hair grow out to show the passage of time. But that's a small issue in an episode that I found a much more effective use of the Lower Decks format than the season to date.

Snell needs his own Short Treks spinoff.

I think this is more the Data we wanted to see than the one we saw in Picard.

But there's a lot of court martial-able offenses this senses like Doctor T'Ana assaulting Boimler and now Boimler's screw up resulting in them losing a year of their lives.

I will say that I think Jammer's reviews have been very harsh this season because they've been "inconsequential" episodes. Isn't that the series premise This isn't supposed to be big and epic stuff. It's supposed to be the journeymen work of Starfleet.

This is a pretty solid episode all around, though (naturally) it continues to engage in a lot of the self-referential "winking" humor common to this entire series. The obligatory "big threat" of the season continues to be someone's opening of dimensional rifts (although so far, it's not clear *how* exactly this is a threat rather than a minor annoyance), which so far seems to be effective mainly at providing full employment to the likes of Captain Freeman and her crew; if this "threat" actually turned out just to be another "stupid joke" (as Miles O'Brien once put it) played by someone from the Q Continuum (e.g. the Q played by John de Lancie or Q Junior played by his son Keegan), I wouldn't be surprised. In the meantime, it gives the Lower Decks' female main characters an adventure on the time-dilated planet of Dilmer III, and the male main characters a slapstick sequence that—if their estimate of one week of the planet's time taking one second of their own is accurate—sends them into a full-blown panic trying to fix their screw-up by any means necessary for about 40 seconds.

The flesh-horned yellowish-to-orange-skinned bluish-green-haired Dilmerians the gals encounter on their way to retrieving (or destroying) the wreckage of an alt-universe Federation shuttle appear to have their civilization and its technology roughly up to the levels of our late nineteenth century or so... which suggests they were medieval only a few hours earlier (as a century of their time only takes about 1 hour, 26 minutes, and 40 seconds of our time). Also, since a year of their time amounts to about 52 seconds of ours, the gals can't have spent very long between their ship's scanning of the Dilmerians' civilization and the away team's being disguised and transported down for their mission. A further detail Mariner in particular seems not to have noticed is that even with Boimler and Rutherford's screw-up, the time dilation meant the gals were all still back in time for that Taquito Night party she was thinking she'd have to forgo for their mission. (Curiously, her mother also overlooked that detail of the mission; maybe whoever's in charge of scanning planets and their civilizations hadn't informed her of this world's temporally anomalous nature yet?)

Another significant detail that escaped several characters' notice: while the gals' Dilmerian disguises were remarkably durable (especially the flesh horns), they were clearly rather hastily contrived, as T'lyn still had to cover her pointy ears with her hair and headband while the artificial coloring on Tendi's skin was not applied to her mouth's interior: you can still see her green tongue whenever her mouth's open. Also, don't Orion and Vulcan people both have copper-based green blood? Tendi and T'lyn probably had to be extra careful to avoid any injuries that might draw blood (unless the Dilmerians were also green-blooded, in which case Mariner would be the one who was in the greatest danger of blowing their cover).

Concerning hair care, I note that even before T'Lyn developed something like hair conditioner for the Dilmerians (which was invented ca. 1900 AD here on Earth), they were looking pretty well-groomed already. While the undercover Federation gals' hair would indeed grow out somewhat in the ten months they were there, they were doubtless able to purchase shaving and trimming equipment at the local barber shop (or its supplier) to keep themselves well-groomed as well. While the dye in their hair was likely not as durable as their artificial skin coloring (and would therefore tend to need renewing as their hair grew out), several Dilmerians in the background of various scenes in this episode demonstrate that balding and graying hair is as common with them as with humans, and hair dye for concealing graying hair is a downright ancient invention (something the Egyptians were already producing some four millennia ago here on Earth); so again, the gals could likely buy some of that dye for their hair at the local barber shop, or perhaps the general store. (So in the final analysis, Karl Zimmerman, their hair remaining the same throughout their stay is not really an "issue" at all.)

Something else I notice which none of the characters seem to is how odd it is that the large expensive-looking (and rather conveniently placed) abandoned country house just out of town the gals inhabited during their stay, while it displayed considerable damage and neglect, was still structurally intact and sound enough that they had little trouble repairing it. That it was abandoned nonetheless is probably no coincidence: the crater the crashed shuttle left was clearly on the plot of land its former inhabitants owned, and the damage shown (nearly every window cracked, and a fallen tree having caved in a corner of the roof) is consistent with the effects a shock wave from an explosion might have. Most likely, the shuttle's explosive crash and the subsequent heat glow from the crater it left (probably not something any of the Dilmerians had ever seen in their lives before) combined with common local superstitions terrified the house's original inhabitants so badly that they fled to their townhouse (or some other property they owned) and never dared to return to their country estate even to retrieve their possessions.

Especially interesting to me is how, although the episode is still very much a regular character-driven situational comedy, the most intriguing parts of it have to do with wondering what will become of these Dilmerians soon after the main characters return to their ship. As mentioned, time advances by centuries for them while advancing by mere hours for everybody else in the area; so how long (by our reckoning) would it take them to start building space shuttles and then interplanetary solar sail ships and then finally star ships with warp engines? The Federation should definitely be keeping an eye on time-dilated planets like that in anticipation of imminent first contact with any sentient species that may arise on it.

In the meantime, there's also the question of what the Dilmerians might do immediately after the characters leave. One wonders whether the obnoxious Snell—who clearly didn't allow any superstitions to keep him from sneaking into that house to spy on its new occupants—might eventually return to spy on them again, only to find them gone, never to return. While judging by what we've seen of him so far, Snell is probably the kind of guy who'd prefer to encourage everyone's superstitions to make them keep their distance from the house so he could move in and take it over for himself, he might have more moral integrity than he seems to; in short, I'd be interested to know what he and the other Dilmerians did after this episode.

This wondering about what becomes of the characters and civilizations left behind when the protagonists warp out is one of the reasons Deep Space Nine was more or less my favorite series in the Star Trek franchise: in that show, even if it didn't always tie up loose ends (e.g. what became of William Riker's copy Thomas after the Cardassian "justice" system sentenced him to life in one of their labor camps), it remained that with the show's episodes mostly taking place on and around the titular space station, various situations left unresolved in previous episodes were almost inevitably bound to return for further examination later on. Lower Decks, for its part, derives some of its humor from returning to situations other series in the franchise (especially The Next Generation) left unresolved; but as in those other series, the protagonists can still warp away and leave the unresolved problem of the week behind them, only to be revisited if some future writer(s) deem its resolution necessary. I'd prefer Star Trek shows to do more of the examinations of these long-term consequences that they usually don't.

At the end when they were beaming out, how was Data able to talk when he wasn't hooked up to a power source?

@Jeffrey's Tube Maybe he still had enough residual charge to last a few minutes.

@Chase: Data doesn't seem to have been capable of storing any energy on his own, as Tendi was able to turn him off immediately after he said something to upset her simply by flipping a switch.

@Jeffrey's Tube: The way I see it, given that Data's head can apparently run on good old-fashioned direct current, and given that Tendi was a gifted enough engineer to produce a primitive hand-cranked generator from common late-nineteenth-century household materials and later hook it up to a water wheel to stabilize the current's flow, I figure she was also able to build some kind of primitive capacitor or dry cell. Since humanity actually invented the former more than a century before it found any practical use for it and the latter around the end of the nineteenth century (when Earth's most advanced civilizations were roughly at the same technological level as the Dilmerians in this episode), she probably had no more difficulty building some such primitive rechargeable battery to plug into Data (and small enough to fit inside his neck) than she did with building that generator. Also, even before the gals' final departure, you may recall she'd taken Data's fully operational head into town earlier; so she probably built that battery right around the same time she hooked the generator up to a water wheel or soon thereafter.

I liked it was Tendi when she finally got back to the ship raging "Boimler, what the HELL happened??!!"

Review now posted.

“sleep depravity”

…Pretty sure that’s usually phrased “sleep deprivation.” It gave me a little chuckle. :) Dunno if it was intentional or not.

Haha, oops!