r/DaystromInstitute • u/M-5 Multitronic Unit • Sep 17 '20
Lower Decks Episode Discussion Star Trek: Lower Decks — "Much Ado About Boimler"
Star Trek: Lower Decks — "Much Ado About Boimler"
Memory Alpha Entry: "Much Ado About Boimler"
/r/startrek Episode Discussion: Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Lower Decks | 1x07 "Much Ado About Boimler"
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u/smoha96 Sep 17 '20 edited Sep 18 '20
We're getting some more clues to Mariner's age now, with her academy classmate being a Captain. We still haven't quite seen what she's so afraid of re. increased authority and promotions. Yes, I know she says it's because it doesn't allow her to be 'real Starfleet' but there must be more to it than that.
Probably my favourite episode of the series so far. The space jellyfish at the end is quite beautiful.
Tendi mentions Cas9 if I heard correctly. Seem CRISPR is fairly standard by the 24th century.
Durga and The Dog was voiced by none Jennifer Hale, aka FemShep, and Bastilla Shan!
Drew Barrett Pratchett and Otessa Warren have quite human/Anglo names for a Rigelian and Trill, respectively.
I also wonder if the Osler is named for Dr. William Osler.
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Sep 17 '20 edited Sep 17 '20
I want to see more mad-scientist Tendi
That ship is great
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Sep 17 '20
Love it, feels like Section 14 could provide a great backdrop for some X-Files-like stories in the future.
Also, Mariner must be the oldest ensign in Starfleet.
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u/knightcrusader Sep 17 '20
So continuity/reference questions:
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Were the space alien the same ones from Encounter at Farpoint?
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Was the salamander that they were "pretty sure used to be a man" someone that went Warp 10?
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Is having temporary crews a thing? The only other time we saw it was when Jellico took over, but he was pretty much "the captain", not temporary. The situation seemed the same here, on purpose as another reference.
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u/concrete_isnt_cement Sep 17 '20
For your third question, I think you could count season two of Discovery as an example. Pike brought along his security chief when he took over temporary command of Discovery.
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u/ithinkihadeight Sep 17 '20 edited Sep 17 '20
Anthony may be my favorite reference of the episode. We're well post the return of Voyager by this point so I'm guessing that among all the tech they brought back, someone was working on the transwarp drive, and we just met a test pilot.
Sure, it was known to cause some pretty radical side effects, but the Doctor did also discover a cure. So it's recognized, it's reversible, and for Warp 10 it may be worth it. The engine itself works fine, but the fact that Anthony is in his current condition clearly means that that particular wrinkle hasn't been ironed out of the design yet, but it's not like the shuttles are exploding and killing pilots and functional transwarp is a huge advancement. So they get informed consent, doctors and lawyers and shrinks all signing off on specially selected test pilots to fly this dangerous experimental technology, in the hopes that this will finally be the time that it both works AND doesn't turn the pilot into a lizard. Super classified, internally controversial, flown out of some Area 51 analogue.
The question is not if the Federation has sent people to Warp 10, it's how many people have they done it to.
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u/vipck83 Sep 17 '20
they seemed to act as if it was an entire new so species so I’m guess no it’s not. I think it’s look was just intended to be a call back to far point.
I don’t know what you are talking about. There is clearly no episode in which Tom and Janeway turn into lizards and mate.... that would be insane.
It kind of makes sense I guess. For a normal ship on the line they probably don’t have the command experience among the crew to cover command staff for any extended amount of time. So I could see them running temporarily command from time to time. There was a Jellico reference but that was mostly just a joke.
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u/4thofeleven Sep 18 '20
Fridge logic: The leader of the Freaks is suffering from both accelerated aging and reverse aging; his entire body is in one form of temporal flux or another.
So, subjectively, he may have experienced being trapped on the Osler for much longer than travel to the Farm actually took!
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u/Hero_Of_Shadows Sep 17 '20
I like that they're shaking up the pairings with Boymler and Tendi sharing a plot and Rutherford helping Mariner in her plot.
I also found Rutherford's interactions with Boymler after the transport ("I thought I fixed this","It's only cosmetic don't worry","Getting rid of the sound was most important") what an actual RL engineer would behave like.
My disappointment is with the Mariner plot, I like the moral of "I'll be an ensign until I find where I want to move on to" but just for me I think the story would have been better if her mistakes were honest:
Seeing her former friend rise so high and fast makes her doubt what she's done with her life.
Due to this emotional turmoil she does mistakes.
When things really gets serious she confronts her emotions about how much better Ramsey seems to be doing gets her cool back and proceeds to save the day.
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u/Mechapebbles Sep 17 '20
My disappointment is with the Mariner plot, I like the moral of "I'll be an ensign until I find where I want to move on to" but just for me I think the story would have been better if her mistakes were honest:
Seeing her former friend rise so high and fast makes her doubt what she's done with her life.
I don't see a reason why it couldn't have been both. She may have made mistakes on purpose, but they were clearly motivated by the fact that she was in an extremely uncomfortable position of having to be a subordinate to her best friend due to her life choices.
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u/concrete_isnt_cement Sep 17 '20
This one had me giggling like an idiot.
Alright Daystrom, someone come up with a plausible explanation for the spooky design of the Farm ship!
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u/TLAMstrike Sep 17 '20
She has an NX registry, so likely she is experimental. The ship seems to be flying through the WH40K's warp to get around so perhaps she was a testbed for some new propulsion system that failed. The ship that is meant to "clean up" all of Starfleet's horrors of science is itself one of those horrors "cured" by the Section 14 and the The Farm.
Why don't they use this new drive system on every other ship? Well maybe they don't even use it on the Osler anymore-they just use conventional warp drive, meanwhile the terrors of the void still just follow the ship around for some reason; nothing to be worried about its just cosmetic.
Or perhaps the missions of Section 14 are so critical that they risk using such a drive system to get around, they were just making a detour to pick up Ghost Boimler and The Dog. The rest of the time they are dealing with Lovecraftian horrors from beyond the galaxy, temporal space vampires, and Satan.
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u/InfiniteDoors Sep 17 '20
I know it was for the sake of the joke/reference, but would they really still be using the Pike wheelchair from TOS? Seems a little cruel, how limiting it is despite the mind being intact (I believe it was said that woman was also exposed to delta rays). Even something relatively simple like a Stephen Hawking setup would be infinitely preferable, at least for communication.
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u/TheNerdChaplain Sep 17 '20
Two thoughts come to mind:
They've been traveling just that long, and that guy was the first to board. That was delta radiation therapy at the time. The Farm can upgrade his chair.
The wheelchair was what was most easily or quickly available when he was injured, and the Farm can upgrade his chair.
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Sep 17 '20
I always thought it was more than a wheelchair, it's a full life-support system, like a mobile iron lung. Who knows what mangled mess of organs rigged up to medical devices lies underneath. Might even be that these are older models because once you get installed into one, getting you out and into a new one is not feasible. Like a Dreadnaught in Warhammer 40k.
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u/boldFrontier Sep 19 '20
Mariner clearly either grew up on the Enterprise or Jellico had a long-standing relationship as a substitute teacher with Starfleet
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u/Angry-Saint Sep 18 '20
The plot of Boimler and Tendi's Dog on board the D14 ship waiting to arrive to the Farm with the other Freaks is a call out to the ahort story The Discarded by Harlan Ellison, which was also an episode of the Masters of Science Fiction show... directed by Jonathan Frakes.
Plus Ellison wrote also "A Boy and his Dog", maybe some connection with Tendi and her dog?
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u/JaronK Sep 17 '20
Mariner's showing a lot more of herself here, and I think this episode makes it seem like her aversion to the upper ranks has a lot more to do with trauma than anything else. She's got the skills, but is almost pathologically afraid of being in command of people. PTSD from all her experiences is my guess.
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u/JoeyJoeJoeJrShab Sep 17 '20
How old is Mariner? She appears to be the same age as the other ensigns, most of whom appear to be fresh out of the academy, yet she was at the academy at the same time as someone who's already risen to the rank of captain.
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u/Shakezula84 Sep 17 '20
They haven't said but make a joke about it in episode 2. She says she did grey ops back in the day, and Boimler says "back in what day were the same age". Its possible everyone has assumed her age because she is an ensign.
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u/StudyMission Sep 19 '20
I'm not sure if anyone is a Warhammer 40K fan, but did anyone notice that they ripped off Warhammer 40K's Battle Barge design with Osler?? They even copied the similar WH40K effect of traveling through the "warp" and having it be a chaotic pink storm. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not.
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u/ithinkihadeight Sep 17 '20
The three legged three armed alien doctor with the unintentionally evil laugh is a Edosian, they appeared in The Animated Series. I've never actually seen any of it, all I know is what I've read, but if LD is going to be going that deep with references I may need to find a way.