Star Trek: Lower Decks: A Farewell to Farms – TV Review

TL;DR – Crack out the Bat’leths and open the good Bloodwine casks because it is time to visit Qo’noS

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Disclosure – I paid for the Paramount+ streaming service that viewed this episode. 

Lower Decks Title Card looking over a Qo-noS sunset..

Star Trek: Lower Decks Review

When you have been watching shows for quite a while, you pick up telltale signs that something big is about to happen. One of those is the lack of a Title Sequence. Wait, the cast names not on the backdrop of a coming calamity of Borg, Tholians, Klingons, Romulans, Pakleds, oh and is that V’ger? But instead, it was on a warm sunset in Qo’noS. Well, you know something big is about to happen.

So, to set the scene, we are on Qo’noS, and Captain Ma’ah (Jon Curry) has been sequestered/banished to labouring work on the family farm. He is making Bloodwine (from worms, most likely Gagh) and raising Targ. He stubbornly avoids the comm call with a Federation signature. But if Mariner (Tawny Newsome) is one thing, it is persistent. He is stuck because the one who stripped him of his captainship is now the one who decides if he can get it back. Although Boimler (Jack Quaid) does know a lot about Klingon Bureaucratic minutia, and the Ritual of J’ethurgh is right there. We will be looking at the episode as a whole from here, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead. 

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Star Trek: Lower Decks: The Inner Fight – TV Review

TL;DR – A tail of two parts, one fascinating, the other frustrating.   

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Disclosure – I paid for the Paramount+ streaming service that viewed this episode. 

Outpost Scientists.

Star Trek: Lower Decks Review

It is the penultimate of Star Trek: Lower Decks’ fifth season, and I wondered if the show could pull all those different threads together. Since the revelation at the start of the season about a mysterious ship destroying non-Federation vessels, it felt like we were barrelling towards something. Now it is time to see if that something was worth barrelling towards.

So to set the scene, we open in on Persioff IX, where a pair of Outpost Scientists are observing a local creature that spits acid and is covered in neurotoxin, and when things go wrong, Mariner (Tawny Newsome) rushes out to fix the problem herself. Her friends, Tendi (Noël Wells), Boimler (Jack Quaid), Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), and T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz), have become concerned about this risk-taking behaviour, even the command crew. When Shaxs (Fred Tatasciore) is concerned about your risk-taking behaviour, you know there is a problem. All they need to do is distract Mariner because they must pick up notorious risk taker Nick Locarno (Robert Duncan McNeill) before he influences Mariner to do even more risky behaviour. We will be looking at the episode as a whole from here, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead. 

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