Lower Decks is a lot of shows at once. It’s a typical Star Trek show, one that has to balance high sci-fi stakes adventures with thoughtful mediations about its world and characters. It’s also a Star Trek show that loves Star Trek, both in the gleeful sense of pulling characters and references from across the series’ history, and in the sincere sense of it loving its ideals and what they represent. It’s also a show that is, true to its name, often about power dynamics and the relationships between the various layers of its command cadre of heroes. That’s a lot of things to cram into a 25-odd-minute episode of animated TV, and it’s rare that Lower Decks manages to get it all in there at once.
But when it does, like it did this week, it’s something truly special—and if the show can stick the landing this penultimate episode set up, we’re in for the best sendoff a Star Trek show has had in generations.
Almost from the get-go “Fissure Quest” starts blowing your mind wide open. Like last week’s episode spotlighting the Cerritos bridge crew, once again our Lieutenants Junior Grade aren’t the stars, as we pull away from them to the shocking reveal that not only has someone else been exploring those space-time multiversal fissures that have kept cropping up all season, it’s none other than another Boimler. And not just any Boimler, but his own Riker-ian transporter clone William, who was believed to have been killed in action while serving aboard the USS Titan a few seasons ago, but was actually left mysteriously recruited by Section 31. It’s taken years for Lower Decks to follow up on this storyline and it immediately makes it having been worth the wait.
In many ways, William has become the kind of man our Bradward has been striving to be all season long. He’s the captain of a Defiant-Class escort, the Anaximander, on a mission of not just extreme importance to the galaxy, but all realities everywhere, investigating the fissures’ true creators, and their potential threatening of every parallel universe in the multiverse. He’s also doing it alongside an all-timer roster of multiversal Star Trek legends: his first officer is a version of Enterprise‘s T’Pol (the returning Jolene Blalock), his conn officer is none other than a Curzon Dax from a reality where Jadzia has yet to take on the duties of hosting the Dax Symbiont—both with a wonderful Spock/McCoy friendship. His medical officers? Pan-reality romantics Elim Garak (Andrew Robinson) and his husband, a holographic Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig). His crew? Mostly Harrys Kim (Garret Wang, as delightful as ever), it turns out, as we see them pick up another—this one a full Lieutenant, which, beyond the great gag, becomes very important later—in their latest multiverse-hopping chase of the ship creating these fissures.
© ParamountBut he’s also still kind of our Boimler, so as delightful as all this is, at this point, he’s also just a guy doing a job and is very, very tired. The Anaximander has been chasing this mysterious fissure-creating vessel, as it leaks energy between realities in damaging ways, for a long time at this point, and Captain Boimler is sick of it all. In some ways, we are too, culturally speaking, once the shock of his all-star crew wears off. Star Trek has been dealing with the concept of parallel realities since the original series, but it’s not really dove into the multiverse concept that has become du jour in pop culture as of late—doing so could feel cheap, even if Trek could defend itself by holding up a goateed mirror. But in having a Boimler who should be forever perpetually freaking out at rubbing shoulders with variants of famous Trek icons instead basically become the multiverse’s biggest hater (because it’s not new to explore, just ceaseless remixes of the familiar), immediately “Fissure Quest” has its cake and eats it. It gets to both rejoice in the fannish glee of being able to pull together this ragtag crew of returning favorites via this concept, while also admonishing the concept’s tropes in interesting ways.
Those tropes only get examined more interestingly when the Anaximander crew manages to finally catch up with their quarry, the Beagle, thanks to their latest pickup: an alternate Mariner, from a reality where she’s an engineer and nowhere near as adventurous as her prime counterpart. Forcing a crash-landing in a reality where Khowpians (the amphibian aliens from season one, another fun throwback) are a feral, hostile force, both Boimler’s crew and the Beagle‘s find themselves in prison, revealing that the latter is led by none other than an alternative Lily Sloane from First Contact (Alfre Woodard, in perhaps the episode’s best guest performance) from a reality where Vulcan and Human first contact didn’t result in the development of warp travel, but instead reality-crossing engines.
© ParamountThe rest of this season potentially sets us up for a conflict here—where neither side wants to actually talk to each other about the real issue and come to an understanding, but react off an assumption until they eventually resolve it after some drawn-out shenanigans. And “Fissure Quest” teases going there with our tired William immediately assuming that Sloane’s team has to be aware of the damage they’re causing. But thankfully, Lower Decks knows better at this point, and makes a point of it too: these are both crews of experienced explorers, of all different stripes, that have already learned these lessons. Boimler lets Sloane know what her engines are actually doing, she accepts the mistake, not having realized, and they resolve to work together to fix it. Huzzah! And we even get an even better extrapolation of the multiversal trope as the two captains begin relating to each other: Boimler, sick of the pan-reality-remixing, can only see the multiverse as a dull facsimile of Star Trek‘s idea of exploration in seeking out new worlds and new cultures. For Sloane and her people, it’s a chance to see the infinite potential of humankind through multiple lenses, the way all these different choices and decisions can shape our lives into radically different directions. It’s such a small moment in an episode that flourishes in the spectacle of its guest casting, but one that’s vitally Star Trek, all the while wrapping itself into the wider themes of this season of Lower Decks.
But of course, it wouldn’t be a dramatic Star Trek two-parter—a dramatic series finale two-parter—if we didn’t have some conflict. And that’s where Lieutenant Kim, and Lower Decks‘ love of the Starfleet power dynamic, comes back in. Throughout “Fissure Quest” we see Lieutenant Harry bristle at his fellow Ensign selves, and their willingness to put up with the potential that in the vast majority of parallel universes out there, they never rise through the ranks. Driven to bitterness by his own perceived power over them, Lieutenant Harry kidnaps the Ensigns and steals the Beagle before it’s fully repaired, hoping to taking them back to his own universe where they can thrive (at his discretion). But even with some last-minute bravery by Alt-Mariner, the Anaximander is unable to stop the Beagle from breaking up mid-fissure, creating a cascade of soliton waves that could destroy every reality in existence. Of course the final villain of this show is a Harry Kim who finally got promoted!
And again, Lower Decks jukes where we expect it to jive: you think you’re getting a Wrath of Khan needs of the many moment as Boimler and his crew realize they can shunt the energy into a singular reality, dooming it at the cost of saving every other existence. But William realizes just where to send it to… his own home, the prime Trek universe, because he knows he can trust Bradward, and all the lesson’s he’s learned apart from his transporter duplicate, to figure out a way to save the day. Once he’s stopped screaming, that is.
© ParamountIt’s a fantastic moment to bring us into the finale. Beyond the joy of seeing all these fannish reactions here—T’Pol and Dax’s begrudging friendship, the utter delight of Garak and Bashir actually getting to be together and be the bickering married couple queer DS9 fans have wanted to see for decades—”Fissure Quest” isn’t an episode of cameos for the sake of it, an empty rejoinder on the multiverse trend just because it’s hot right now. It’s a thoroughly Star Trek-ian response to it, exploring it in smart ways, while also using it to tell a pitch-perfect Lower Decks story.
Well, pitch-perfect so far at least. We’ve got one more episode to see if Lower Decks can pull off the promise it displayed here, to give us the culmination of all these lessons learned over (and over) across its five seasons. If it can? We’re about to get the best conclusion to a Star Trek show than any we’ve had in decades.
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