Hey! One I don’t have much to say about! Nothing forthrightly awful this week. Yay.
The Cerritos is helping the Vancouver implode a moon before it crashes into a populated world, and this is also an opportunity for Boimler to hang out with his long-distance-girlfriend, which, of course, Mariner must put a stop to because Boimler is not allowed to be happy.
Yet it’s handled well: Mariner is convinced that a talented, attractive lieutenant whose career is going places would never be interested in Boimler. But her reason for this is that she’s literally seen it happen before, having lost a friend years earlier to a too-perfect boyfriend that turned out to be a shapeshifting monster. But Boimler’s perfectly capable of ruining his relationship all on his own when he desperately tries to make himself seem more manly when he learns his girlfriend’s ex is the studliest operations lieutenant on the Cerritos.
Meanwhile, Tendi and Rutherford fanbeing over the Vancouver’s more-advanced systems, culminating in a rivalry to win an advanced model of tricorder promised to whoever gets their work done first.
While that’s going on, the senior officers are settling in-fighting among the natives of the doomed system, as a collection of special interest groups have various problems with the whole “Blow up the moon” plan – including a group for whom the moon has religious significance, farmers whose livelihood will be impacted by the change to the climate, and a civilization whose own moon will be rendered uninhabitable.
The plots don’t interconnect as much as you’d hope, but there’s some good thematic parity. Mariner discovers a casing from an alien brain parasite and fights Barb, but she turns out to have similar suspicions about Mariner, as she knows Boimler’s quirks are weird and unmanly, and thus can’t see why the infamously cool and rebellious Mariner would care about him. They bond over stories of Boimler’s various embarrassments, and a scan reveals that Mariner and Barb are both human. They almost had me convinced for a minute that it was Mariner who’d been compromised somehow, but it turns out to be what you probably thought: Boimler is infected with a brain parasite which enhances his pheromones in order to spread. Barb assures him that as a Starfleet officer, she would never have fallen for him just because of alien mind control…. But studying this weird alien parasite is a big break for her, career-wise, so she breaks up with him to devote herself fully to its study.
Tendi and Rutherford discover that what they were being offered wasn’t actually the tricorder, but a transfer to the Vancouver, and in the process of avoiding it, they discover that the chief pushing it through is actually trying to trade himself to the Cerritos because he can’t handle the stress. They blackmail him into giving them the tricorders, though in the last scene it turns out that they’d each stolen sacks full of them anyway.
On the bridge, Captain Freeman negotiates away all but one of the problems, but the doomed “civilization” turns out to just be one obscenely rich dude and his wife. I hope this plot ages badly, because it’s possibly the most topical thing to show up in Star Trek since that time the electric people wiped themselves out over racism. I kinda love it. You’ve got a very straightforward analogy for a lot of very timely things. The impending moon crash serves as an obvious parallel for climate change, and those who oppose the implosion reflect similar concerns to real-world interests ranging from things we definitely need to address like, “What about all the people who work in the fossil fuel industry,” to things we definitely need to ignore like, “We’re pretty sure it’s all a hoax.” And while the fact that in the Star Trek version, there’s a straightforward technological remedy for the problem diverges from reality, it’s a very Star Trek way to diverge. The best thematic punchline is the reveal that all those problems with implementing an immediate technological solution can be solved, and solved fairly easily. The one problem they can’t solve – and the one group that yells the loudest and causes the most trouble – is the rich assholes who stand to be mildly inconvenienced.
Other things I like about this episode: there’s none of the senior officers being jackasses. This whole thing with the Vancouver being a more advanced ship than the Cerritos (Their designs are very similar, but the Vancouver’s stylings are closer to the Enterprise-E while the Cerritos looks like a kit-bash of the Enterprise-D) could easily have called back to Freeman’s insecurities from “Temporal Edict” or led to a rehash of the other ship’s commander irrationally needing to flex his superiority like in “Moist Vessel”. But that doesn’t happen; the senior crew gets a subplot where they just get to act like Starfleet (The Vancouver officers are, to be honest, strangely quiet for this whole thing). Mariner’s flashback puts her in a TNG-movie-era uniform (Though there’s a reference to the events of the TNG season 6 cliffhanger as though they’re contemporary). In his bid to be “cool”, Boimler has the replicator fuse together elements from all of history’s coolest fashions, producing an outfit with many gold chains which is literally half letterman’s jacket, half leather motorcycle jacket – but better yet, Barb offhandedly mentions that it’s sexy. (Though she rightly objects to his macho posturing).
I did not like the inclusion of the “Boimler gets jealous and acts like an asshole” subplot. I don’t like that kind of plot in general, I don’t like it for Star Trek (so much better is the occasional TNG motif of “Asshole macks on Troi and tries to make Riker jealous, but Riker is just bemused because he takes polyamory for granted and is completely cool with his ex boning whoever as long as she’s into it”), and there was more than enough going on in this episode without it. My other objection is that to a significant extent, there’s a reliance on a “Boimler is a butt-monkey who must have romance denied him in order to earn him karmic points we will cash in at the end of the series,” which I hate with the fire of a thousand suns, and it also feels misplaced here, because Boimler isn’t like Steve Urkel or Xander Harris or Ross Geller: he isn’t actually a terrible person who spends his time complaining that he isn’t the center of the universe.
But otherwise, this was pretty good. A plot where the driving force isn’t people being assholes to each other? More please.
(Looks at the trailer for next week…)
Shit.