Review Text
"Upper Decks" is the "Lower Decks" of Lower Decks — and I fully realize I've used that phrase before in completely different contexts. But it especially applies here based on the reversal of the perspective, in which the bridge crew members become the stars and the lower deckers become the supporting players. I only wish the story it tells had been better than this. The original TNG episode "Lower Decks" made the change of perspective significant, because it had a powerful underlying story to tell. "Upper Decks" is content to just be Lower Decks, with an especially excessive amount of the typical zaniness crammed into 22 minutes.
The first act is a "day in the life" episode, showing the various upper deckers as they go about their business. (It begins cheerfully goofily, with the crew in the conference room putting their hands all-in to recite a Cerritos chant in the tradition of a high school sports team.) Then Captain Freeman thanklessly patrons one crew member's personal event after another (a sousaphone performance by Ensign Barnes, who recently devolved/evolved to a cavewoman and back; a "hilariously" gory birth event; a one-man recital by a pretentious thespian). She does this as if she were everyone's mom. (This is clearly a joke on TNG, where the crew was for some reason always going to each other's recitals. Why?)
Meanwhile, Shaxs has a psychological crisis, literally going to war with his inner demons because of long-buried traumas from the Cardassian Occupation. And Ransom bores the quarreling Beta and Delta shifts to tears with his braggy stories and regimen of physical fitness (and tricks them, in a nice if predictable touch, into getting along by using his Idiot Doofus act as a strategic distraction). And T'Ana decides to revise the patient pain index, ultimately revealing herself as a masochist. And Billups does Engineering Stuff with a junior officer, at one point hoping that if he's going to die, it's at least a Spock-in-Wrath-of-Khan-inspired death.
The plot gets underway — with escalating mayhem the way only LD does it — in the second act when it turns out some alien baddie bugs called the Clickets are trying to capture the Buhgoons — space creatures that resemble a cross between a boar and a leech and are about the size of a buffalo — who have the natural ability to cloak themselves as transparent bubbles. The Clickets hope to gain galactic relevance through capturing these creatures and acquiring this trait. The Cerritos gets caught in the middle and it becomes a classic Ship Takeover Plot. But because the structure of the episode grants only two acts for this entire plot — and also has to service the mini-story of every single senior officer — the whole thing nearly accelerates out of control in its effort to cram everything in.
More ends up being less. There's so much going on that there's no focus or emphasis on any one of the, or even a few, characters. So the whole thing just becomes a mad dash that services no one adequately. It's not boring, and the pace of the cartoon action/violence is entertainingly breakneck (including literally, as Shaxs breaks the neck of his inner self as some form of self-therapy). Ultimately, the Clickets are defeated with compliments, which they can't stand. Freeman at least gets to deliver the coup de grace in victorious style, and have an anniversary date with her husband.
It's not bad, but it's a missed opportunity. The episode has little to say about the upper deckers, except that they're the opposite perspective of the lower deckers, which of course is flipped from the perspective we got in the original TNG "Lower Decks," which I guess is a meta-joke, maybe? But that was the meta-joke of the entire series already, so never mind. The lower deckers never see the Clicket invasion that happens to the upper deckers here, and are oblivious that anything on the ship has even happened. Mariner doubts anything interesting ever happens without them being involved. She might be kind of right.
Previous episode: Fully Dilated
Next episode: Fissure Quest
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9 comments on this post
Karl Zimmerman
This episode didn't do it for me at all. The concept was a good one, but the actual execution left a lot to desire.
The episode begins and ends with a framing mechanism, where the lower deckers all but break the fourth wall and directly say "It's weird how we get in all the crazy adventures, and not the command staff." First off, that's demonstrably untrue. Earlier seasons made reference to the adventures the command staff were having. Sometimes a command staff member (often Ransom) would be directly involved with an episode's weirdness. Not to mention earlier episodes which didn't focus on the main cast, like Wej Duj and A Mathematically Perfect Redemption didn't bother with the framing device. Ultimately this just feels like an excuse to ensure the main cast stayed in the credits (and got a paycheck) for the week.
We then get into the actual adventures of the upper deckers (Freeman, Ransom, T'Ana, Shax, and Billups). For 2/3rds of the episode's runtime, these were just random vignettes. The "plot" such as it was didn't really come into focus until Freeman discovered that the visiting scientist was actually a Clicket in disguise. Even then, it didn't work well. Shax and T'Ana are only "involved" in the resolution of the ship's invasion in the most tenuous way, and the warp core almost exploding on Billups was a completely unrelated crisis that just happened simultaneously.
I did like how each of the "subplots" (if you can call them that) were firmly rooted in the characterizations of the five senior officers. That said in a classic Star Trek episode, there would be one or two of these plots stretched across an hour, which would allow us to find out something new about the characters. This is five subplots across 20-some minutes. It's ridiculously fast-paced, and tells us nothing except giving the general impression that wacky shit happens on the Cerritos all the time. Which we already knew.
As a result, I think this is one of the worst episodes of Lower Decks. Normally, there's wacky hijinks, but a focus on 1-2 characters who get to have a coherent character arc. Here it's very clearly set up as "just another day." The episode doesn't take this seriously, and neither should we.
And it's not really funny either.
**sigh**
Robert
Wow, that was a fun show! First time this season where I had some real good laugh out loud laughs.
We get a funny episode that plays as a reversal of TNG's Lower Decks (which is all sorts of meta in itself), were we get all the good tropes of what senior officers are supposed to be doing:
- Captain Freeman having to do all the support crew members stuff and making them feel good as the captain (love the captain's assistant by the way)
- Ransom making sure people can work together, if in a rather unconventional way.
- Billups fixing engineering things and spouting ridiculous technobabble while doing it.
T'Ana working on her pain tolerance and bedside pain management skills (finally we see a nurse? fellow doctor?).
- And Billups literally fighting his demons.
- And somehow this all comes together when all of them (sans Billups) have to fight off some invaders.
Our own lower deckers that we love and appreciate are hardly seen and end up breaking the fourth wall. This was the best episode yet this season.
Robert
Oops, I mean Shax fighting his inner demons. Not Billups.
Extra Bread
I actually thought this was one of the funniest episodes of the series. So chaotic and silly. I don't normally guffaw watching this show but that fertility scene... The speed of it. It was like a 30 Rock flashback.
Jeffrey's Tube
I liked this episode a lot and I also thought it was actually funny at points. Doing an "Upper Decks" episode on a Lower Decks show, we're going to have really high expectations, and no, the episode doesn't quite get there. But it's still a really strong effort.
It's true that the Lower Deckers' assertion that "nothing ever happens on this ship unless we're part of it" doesn't jive with their attitude and perceptions of how things are in the earlier seasons. A notable example is when Shax dies but then comes back from the dead inexplicably and Mariner says something like "whatever, these crazy things are always happening to the senior officers, we don't want to know and we don't want any part of it 'cause it's exhausting." I'm paraphrasing but it's something along those lines. This setup--that the senior officers are run ragged by crazy things happening to them all the time that pass the lower deckers entirely by--is fodder for a lot of plot points and jokes early on. But also, that was years ago. And the way the plots on the shows have evolved and how we've seen their roles portrayed on screen, we can forgive them for their perspective having shifted. Nevertheless, the incongruity with past stood out to me too.
Mathieu
I have made a joke at your expanse. Boom.
It’s been a while since I’ve laughed this hard!
MidshipmanNorris
Maybe I’m being too hard on this show, but it just seems like a) a lot of yelling and b) a lot of stupid s#!+.
Why do I want to watch this? Why do the creators of it want me to watch it?
I’m sorry, but I don’t know.
Dark Kirk
I laughed at T'Ana's f-bombs in her medical logs. Sets the character apart from all the other doctors. They should bring in Gates McFadden to play Beverly Crusher and have her spend so much time with Tiana she starts swearing and says "Now you've got ME doing it."
The Queen
I've always liked Dr. T'Ana. I think the writers have nicely walked the line between "Oh, she's a cat person, how weird" and "She's a person with some cat attributes." Her personality is pretty much what you'd build from a cat stereotype (a little TOO stereotyped for my taste, but not bad) , and the occasional clips demonstrating her innate felinity are IMHO much more subtle than a lot of what goes on in LD. In this episode, after she concedes that she's been too harsh about pain meds someone strokes the top of her head and says, "Good kitty" (the unsubtle part) and T'Ana purrs, not loudly, for about 1 second. I call that good work.
In general, though, there was WAY too much going on in this episode. I could barely keep up. But even more than that, I clearly remember the first Clicket saying they weren't interested in the ship itself, they just wanted the buhgoons. But then they board the ship and are just everywhere! It didn't make sense to me.
I did like getting rid of them with compliments.
By the way, did anyone else notice that most of the Upper Deckers who got in trouble were rescued by the unnamed lower deckers around them? There was no mention of this in the plot.
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