Mariner tries to impress her best friend from Starfleet Academy who is now a visiting captain while Boimler is sent to a Starfleet medical ship after a transporter accident puts him out of phase.

Lower Decks continues its theme of riffing on a popular Star Trek theme (they know there’s only so many, right?) by tackling transporter malfunctions. In this case, Rutherford tries to make the tech run faster, leaving Boimler stuck out of phase, and effectively kicked off the Cerritos to join Section 14’s ship of other failed science experiments en route to sinister sounding facility ‘The Farm’.

Boimler is joined by Tendi, who is having to drop off her genetically spliced canine variant, which transforms like the poor mutt in John Carpenter’s The Thing. On board the ship, it’s a Trekspotter’s paradise, with visual references to Tom Paris’s devolved Threshold amphibian, to Pike’s wheelchair anda ‘jailer’ who’s the same species as Arex (Edosian) in the original series. You’ll also have fun with references to Jellico (Chain of Command), measurement microcochrane and a familiar alien lifeform at the end.

Running concurrently is the B plot, which sees Mariner becoming Number One to visiting Captain Ramsay (Toks Olagundoye), an old friend from Starfleet Academy, and finally we discover just why the ensign is so rebellious and set on hobbling her own career. While the circumstances in which this comes out are fairly standard Trek stuff, this is a great reveal, and long overdue.

Verdict: The strong run continues unabated, with only Rutherford losing out on screen time. They’re burning through the tropes, but I’m sure they’ll loop back round again – and a good joke is always worth repeating! 8/10

Nick Joy