BotTalk Reviews

Continuing from last month, D'Vana Tendi is essentially placed into indentured servitude until she figures out a solution to the Ferengi DaiMon’s energy problem: turns out it’s Gormagander poop. 5 pages in I was hoping this whole story had turned out to be some weird fantasy caused by space drugs, Trelane, or it was a Ferengi holodeck experience the lower deck crew was running with a ferengi ship, all of which would have made more sense than this story. This two issue story was written by an intern who has never watched any Star Trek much less Lower Decks because Tendi is out of character which I covered in my last review, Captain Jack Ransom would never forget to hydrate, Beckett Mariner apparently decided to regress from all the character growth she’s had by the time this story takes place in, Carol Freeman wouldn’t just randomly wave any of her crew off to some Ferengi, and once again the Ferengi are just written as cartoony business villains. So this had to have been written by...

Wherein the issue opens with D'Vana Tendi having a perfect day, but it suddenly turns into a nightmare as a giant Ferengi head chased her and she wakes up to reality. Someone keeps sending her messages, which is annoying. Turns out Tendi got into some financial loans trouble with a Ferengi who loaned her money to get a flight to Earth so she could attend starfleet. And now that Ferengi has come... to collect! Dun, dun, dun! So... they do student loans in the future? Is the first thing I thought when I started this issue, followed by but Earth and Starfleet are post-scarcity and don’t use money.  But apparently the daughter of a major Orion Syndicate family doesn’t know that,  I mean she’s a pirate queen, we’ve seen her be a far smarter person on screen yet now for the sake of plot she, the pirate queen, was swindled by a Ferengi? I’m sorry that’s just weak. Plus they have computers on Orion she could have easily looked all of that up and found Glom lying. So you’re telling me...

Part two is here, Katherine Pulaski acting very out of character and so Carol Freeman and her lower decks crew mutiny and come up with a way to trick the Romulans and save the day. And as Pulaski leaves she repeats pips and the flashback story ends, and then the story ends as Beckett Mariner, Freeman, and Brad Boimler go skiing on mount Pulaski. It’s nice of them to name a holodeck mountain Durango. The flashback story wraps up nicely... I guess? Pulaski word dumps to just say she was playing the lower decks team of the USS Illinois to force them to solve the problem of the missing crew.  This could’ve been a single issue, but I get it: modern comics aren’t long novels, and you have back matter to shove in after the story... And having Mariner backslide for reasons was just to... have the flashback, which sure, sure. But I thought we already knew Freeman was a chaos goblin from the show? 7/10 Or am I thinking of some other Star Trek?

I wondered when or if Lower Decks would enter... THE LORE WAR!!!!!!! It makes sense that Shaxs would be our focus character.  So Shaxs touches Kahless’ magical Bat'leth and his normal self is restored. He manages to battle his way through the evil enterprise, assume control, trick the Gorn Captain of evil USS Cerritos, assume control of that, make it to earth and use Starfleet ingenuity to trick evil Captain Liam Shaw then turn his worst day into his best, most violent day.  And in the end who didn’t want to watch Shaxs be totally unleashed on Lore’s universe and Starfleet? I mean the issue is a little goofy and a bit self referential but it’s LORE WAR: Lower Decks, so it’s going to be a little lighter even while it’s extremely violent. But that’s okay cuz alternate universes. I liked this issue. A quick moving story that stuck to the plot and stuck the landing going from Shaxs’s worst day to Shaxs’s best. Love the Gorn captain, a Gorn in Starfleet is something Star Trek SHOUL...

The issue starts out by giving Beckett Mariner a day of being regressive and dragging Brad Boimler on a field day through the ship which inevitably lands her in Captain Freeman’s ready room where her mother once more gives her a “why are you like this?!” speech. They argue which prompts Freeman to look away heroically as we are thrown into a flashback to the time when Carol Freeman was a thirty something year old ensign, like right after TNG season 2, but still before the uniforms had collars.  Guest stars Katherine Pulaski! ‘Member Pulaski! ‘Member how Pulaski was mean to Data! ‘Member! So this arc will be diving into Carol’s past, when she was a young ensign, married with a kid, and turns out she was somewhat as bad as Mariner is in the present day. Pulaski’s experimenting on transporters and how they affect the brain and Freeman gets sucked into it which leads to her having to take command during a fight with the Romulans. Or does she? As Pulaski is still aboard and thus the ra...

And they’re on the Titanic ocean liner! And really, they’re kinda foggy on the details about the Titanic except for Brad Boimler who should know overachiever that he is. So off to another zany adventure and finding out how they get out of this one! Where they run into the bridge crew who tell us they are chasing a mysterious hooded woman who’s going through time and causing chaos like some kind of time travel chaos demon, and so combined, the crew work to figure out a way to save the day millions of years in the past. First off I just want to point out that a Dark Sith rebel without a cause Beckett Mariner got old after a while on Lower Decks, temporal psychosis seems fun and streaming trek is missing a huge opportunity to make a Temporal Wars Star Trek. Just saying, we love time travel. But instead we get academy and I’m getting off topic. This was a good conclusion but I could live without the Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home time travel heads thing. I get it, we all love Star Trek IV ...

So a time rift has opened up and Starfleet’s DTI (Department of Temporal Investigations) has to go and save the day which means the bridge crew has to go off on a separate ship to help save the universe. Meanwhile the lower decks crew remains on The USS Cerritos and deals with waves of changes to the timeline all culminating in a cliffhanger that, well seems like it will be impossible to get out of. Who doesn’t love a good Star Trek time travel story!? And this issue is a good time travel story that has most everything you could want, changes to the present because of things done in the past, altered states, lower decks sticking to the idea of following the lower decks cast while the bridge crew goes off to deal with a major time rift, Brad Boimler having a freak out because of said timeline changes only to be given a technological solution. And a cliffhanger that makes you want to come back! Vendorians and the USS Protostar from Star Trek: Prodigy get a reference! 9/10

One second I have to review a one shot issue of section 31 that starts with a present day-ish meeting with former emperor and time traveler as well as dimension hopper Philippa Georgiou as she decides to regale someone and thus the reader of her time in the winnowing. And so young Philippa is sent off to essentially learn what it takes to be the Terran emperor, which means essentially everyone fights and strategizes against each other until the 15 kids there are… winnowed to one. Which she will obviously walk away from and into her future as a genocidal and tyrannical emperor that we will all meet (have met) in Star Trek: Discovery. This story adds to her backstory that we already saw in the Section 31 movie, and it’s kind of unnecessary, I mean it doesn’t tell anything new about her or even the Terran Empire. This is like a footnote if that because the movie already explained that she was part of the hunger games... I mean the winnowing and we already know she won, and we already kno...

And now the conclusion! In order to keep the USS Cerritos in one piece engineering concocts a way to use the engines to use a warp bubble to survive inside the proto universe. Unfortunately that universe is home to an energy being called koj, which inhabits Sam Rutherford and D'Vana Tendi and talks like some kind of influencer and Rutherford and Tendi are placed inside the ships computer which has a slight 4th wall break of them being floating digital heads in the computer interface. Eventually they all solve the crisis and stop the proto universe from expanding. This works, this entire story works, it shouldn’t but because this is Lower Decks it works, the influencer energy being, the talking heads in the computer, even the ending works in a very Star Trek way that shouldn’t. Yet here we are. The energy being decides on a solution that saves the universe even while our Starfleet heroes keep trying to find a Star Trek like answer that makes everyone happy and sometimes that just ca...

The USS Cerritos has had a successful second contact with a pulp sci-fi civilization that was easily handled by all involved, though later Beckett Mariner muses on their very subservient robots… Meanwhile in another sector!  A metastability bubble has expanded and consumed a whole star cluster! It contains a small universe that would throw our universe into unstable chaos and death! The Cerritos rushes in to try and save the universe while the rest of Starfleet is on its way to do more with bigger more advanced starships! Great issue, just great, it could’ve fit in the fifth season easily, the story takes place not long after the first episode, as evidenced by Sam Rutherford ruminating on his alternate self who was a full cyborg and we now see him lightly contemplating if he should do that as that’d make him an even more efficient engineer. One thing I liked about the show, and they do this here, is when the story includes more than just the lower deckers, and in fact shows them a...

Where the first issue was a successful swing for the fences this one is… A bunt.   This issue picks up with immediately showing us what happened to the lower decks cast: The Excalbians have returned from TOS’ episode The Savage Curtain to once again kidnap four starfleet officers and have them deal with manifestations of their heroes for entertainment and learning. Only this time they face manifestations of favorite past trek characters (Boimler’s choice of Picard is funny) who all immediately turn into violent and conniving versions of themselves (Kathryn Janeway wanting to separate everyone’s dna ala Tuvix was a nice use of the overplayed Tuvix trope… Janeway did the right thing, get over it!) I’m one of those Trekkies who wants Star Trek episodes that go back to worlds and aliens from the past and I love when that happens, but Excalbians seems like an odd choice, the TOS episode intro’ing them wasn’t great and never left me wanting to revisit the Excalbians, and this one really ...

Lower decks 1. Opens with single panels following a boring and uneventful round of episodic non-adventures with each panel having its own episode title (Cerritos Factor sounds like a novel title btw). Each panel shows Mariner's annoyance at such easy mundane work, and as the lower decks cast is about to unwind on the holodeck, they’re called to the bridge where we find the U.S.S. Bonaventure lost in space since the 23rd century. An away team beams aboard the derelict ship, powers it up and learns the Enterprise under Kirk’s command had found the ship in the odd space anomaly, and the Bonaventure’s crew eventually escaped the time trap that was a pocket in the garment of time. However the ship is abandoned and powered down until the Cerritos away team powers it back up and learns from the ships logs that the crew had copied Kirk and Spock’s solution to breaking free and got out. Billups, Rutherford, and T’ana get the engines working again but some unknown cause causes the ship to ju...