Lower Decks Finally Makes the Case for This Season’s Big Theme

Lower Decks‘ final season has run into a bit of a “problem.” While none of its episodes have particularly missed the mark in any way, as we draw closer and closer to its final end it’s become clear each of these episodes have all riffed on a singular theme: the idea of how our characters just need to be willing to talk to each other to solve their problems. It’s not a bad theme to build the season around, but its repeated place at the thematic heart of every episode has lead to a feeling of sameness—there’s little good in the idea of having to re-learn lessons if you’re constantly learning the same lesson week in, week out.

While this week’s episode, “Fully Dilated,” does once again see that lesson learned, it at least masks that sameness by distracting us with a fun riff on a mix of classic Star Trek episode formats… and concludes with an idea that, perhaps at least for some of our heroes, maybe this lesson of communication has finally been taken to heart for good.

“Fully Dilated” picks up on the overarching subplot of the Cerritos clearing up fissures between realities to give us its initial premise: a purple Enterprise-D from another reality has accidentally left a piece of technology in the prime universe on a pre-warp world on its way back home, and the Cerritos crew has to recover it without violating the Prime Directive before they can seal this latest fissure. With both T’Lyn and Tendi vying for a potential position on the bridge as the new senior science officer, Captain Freeman tasks them both, alongside Mariner, with infiltrating the pre-warp society of Delmar III, retrieving whatever the technology is, and getting back undetected.

But it’s not only a classic Prime Directive episode, it’s also another slice of Trek trope goodness: it turns out Delmar III experiences time dilation, where seconds on the Cerritos are charted in weeks on-world. So of course, when michelada-based hijinks ensue to prevent Boimler and Rutherford from beaming the away team back in a timely manner, what would’ve been a mission lasting a week or two ultimately ends up with Mariner, T’Lyn, and Tendi spending the best part of a year integrating into Delmarian society.

© Paramount

While Mariner is largely ushered out of the narrative to go obsess over using her newfound free time to pull her own “Inner Light”, the focus of the episode outside of both the Trek-y premise and the revelation that the abandoned tech is none other than the very purple head of an Alternative-Commander Data (guest star Brent Spiner) is… you guessed it, how Tendi and T’Lyn can’t talk to each other over their anxieties about the SSO promotion, leading to an unhealthy obsession that nearly leads the mission to go sideways. Admittedly, the “beef” between the two is almost entirely one-sided: Tendi, working with Purple Data’s head, becomes increasingly adamant that she has to spend their extended time on Delmar III “out-sciencing” T’Lyn’s own attempts to make the best use of their accidental extended leave. While T’Lyn is happy to find a way to sustain their temporary livelihoods through her research (mostly by growing giant plants and eventually turning them into curl-enhancing haircare products), Tendi just locks herself in the attic of the house they’ve moved into and has a bit of a mental breakdown as she imagines this malicious conflict between herself and T’Lyn.

Again, this is obviously a situation that Tendi could’ve resolved by talking to T’Lyn at the outset of the episode. It’s even something the episode itself ponders when Rutherford asks her why she doesn’t just talk to T’Lyn about the latter’s decision to apply for the SSO position as well, only for Tendi to promptly ignore his advice. Sure, you could argue that if she didn’t, there just wouldn’t be an episode of TV after that. But given that every single episode of this season of Lower Decks so far has been about situations like these—characters not communicating with each other creating a growing problem until they realize that they can easily resolve it by doing just that—with just three more episodes of the entire series left, maybe the question at this point is should there be an episode, if this is all the point is going to be?

© Paramount

Thankfully, “Fully Dilated” makes the case for itself right at the last minute. After Tendi and T’Lyn have their moment of realization when they’re forced to talk to each other (when Tendi’s obsessive tinkering with the Data head is finally discovered by the town’s local lurker, leading to him tying up her and T’Lyn as potential witches), eventually the day is saved by the duo working together, and they, alongside a mostly-“Inner Light”-ed Mariner, are finally beamed back to the Cerritos. If the episode ended there, it’d feel far too similar to the rest of this season’s ruminations on the theme. Tendi and T’Lyn would say that they’ve realized they need to communicate with each other, and then the show would just moving on to doing that realization all over again. But it doesn’t: after Purple Data makes a recommendation to Captain Freeman about who she should promote, it turns out she promotes both Tendi and T’Lyn as joint senior officers, letting them work together on the bridge and develop a bond that clearly works.

At last, someone aboard this starship actually takes this message to heart instead of just saying they will and needing to repeat it all over again! Hopefully now that we’re getting closer and closer to Lower Decks‘ end, it’s time for the rest of our heroes to do what Tendi and T’Lyn do here—both Rutherford and Boimler definitely need it, considering the latter has now fully roped the former into cribbing from Alt-Boimler’s padd to try and get ahead. Time’s running out for the show to really feel like it’s earned coming back again and again to this thematic core—but if the last few episodes are more like “Fully Dilated” than the rest of this season, then maybe it will have been worth the minor frustrations along the way.

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