Star Trek Lower Decks S2E9: "Wej Duj"

This review was fast lane comissioned by @Jenny.


God, this feels weird.

Like I've mentioned a few times, my parents were very selective of what they allowed my siblings and I to watch and play when we were kids. Until I was at least 8 or so, it was pretty much restricted to educational programming only, with very few exceptions. One of those very few exceptions, merited by its elevated vocabulary and generally-cerebral-leaning subject matter, was Star Trek TNG. I didn't see any of the SatAm cartoons and Power Rangers-likes that were on TV in the nineties, except for the occasional episode I caught at a friend's house. Instead of that stuff, I saw Star Trek.

Fastforward to 2010, and me discovering (at the time) YouTube based critic-tainer SFDebris. I'd seen other content LIKE that before, of course, but his even mixture of detailed blow-by-blow summary, thematic analysis, and running gags just really did it for me. The fact that he mostly reviewed Star Trek, something I was very familiar with, also made his work a lot easier for me to get into and digest. So, when I eventually started doing reviews myself, I took a lot of stylistic influence from him. I don't think I've ever been guilty of trying to copy him, exactly, but he's definitely my biggest role model.

So, with that in mind: it feels incredibly ironic that only now, after five years of doing this, am I reviewing my first Star Trek episode. Downright trippy, to be honest.

Well. Anyway.

Debuting in 2020, "Lower Decks" is the second animated Star Trek series, and the ninth Star Trek TV series overall. It's also one of the instalments in the sprawling franchise that I know the least about. Pretty much all of the recent Trek series have either been too hard for me to access, or gotten bad word of mouth from people whose opinions I trust, but I managed to at least see an episode or two of most of them by chance at some point. Not so for Lower Decks.

What I do know about LD is that:

1. It's set at the end of the official published timeline, right after Deep Space 9/Voyager.

2. As the name implies, it mostly follows a cast of low-ranking Starfleet officers rather than the usual captains and bridge officers.

3. When it first came out, everyone was either calling it a shitty memeified adult cartoon in a Star Trek suit that proved that Trek was finally dead for real and being eaten by scavengers, or praising it as a long-overdue return to the old whimsy and lightheartedness that had gone missing from the franchise. A year or two after that though, everyone was either praising it or just not talking about it at all. I don't know if the haters got won over by the show's quality over time, or if they just got tired of whining about it and moved on. I hope it's the former. Both because I want there to be good stuff, and because otherwise those haters are a disgrace to our people and traditions. A good hater NEVER shuts up and moves on.

The season 2 episode "Wej Duj" does seem to have a lot of talk about it in particular around the net, and the tone of it looked like it was all positive. Which probably means it has a better shot at selling me on Lower Decks than most episodes would.

I wonder what "Wej Duj" means anyway. Let's find out!


The intro sequence definitely says "parody of Trek" rather than "genuine Trek show that happens to lean on the sillier side." Not that I'm opposed to either of those things in concept, but I can see how the former being billed as a genuine instalment amid many other controversial modern entries might have gone over poorly with at least some audiences. But anyway, the intro credits are a variation of Star Trek's usual "spaceship flying passed interesting stellar phenomena while music plays" that has the ship careening sideways in and out of gravity wells, awkwardly bashing its way through ice chunks, and tiptoeing toward epic space battles only to turn tail and run away again at the last second.

Notably, our focal spaceship for this series - the USS Cerritos - isn't the type of vessel that a Trek show usually follows. And I don't just mean because of its dorky navigational antics, I mean the ship class as well. Basically, Star Trek's United Federation of Planets has two kinds of ships; the big high-powered explorers, and the smaller workhorses. While the franchise has shown a ton of variants on both of these ship roles over the course of its ~200 years of in-universe history, they've each had a consistent, recognizable sort of shape to them. The Cerritos is not one of the big explorer ships. It's one of the little picket ships that does boring work in the background except when something weird happens to it and there's an episode about one of the "hero" ships rescuing it or avenging it or whatever.

Basically, it's not just the characters who are invisible lower-decks personnel aboard the Cerritos. The Cerritos is also, itself, an invisible bottom-rung ship within the protagonist faction. Lower decks all the way down.

So, it's an effective intro. I was able to get more out of it due to franchise familiarity, but even without that it does a good job of communicating what this show is apparently all about. Whether or not that's good thing remains to be seen.

The episode opens with the Cerritos' captain explaining that they're en route to a survey mission, but they're not in a hurry and it's a good ways away, so they've got some time on their hands as they approach the mission site. So, she's letting the crew take it easy for a bit. Cut to four low-ranking members of that crew sharing a table in the mess and deciding what to do with their free time.

Well, more accurately, the guy with the crazy bangs on the right is trying to decide what to do. His buddies all seem to have their days off spoken for. The cyborg sitting next to him has some arts and crafts thing planned with one of the department commanders, the green girl next to him has a virtual reality excursion planned with her own supervisor, and the person on the far left is being forced to do some mother-daughter bonding with the captain. She's the captain's daughter, apparently. Trek has always been absolutely horrendous about its handling of family, relationships, etc, among Starfleet's ranks. Someone being assigned to serve on a ship commanded by their own parent is worse than average for the franchise, but not by a large margin. You just kind of have to sigh and roll with it.

Anyway, Bangs is frustrated that he's got to find something to do with himself during downtime. When the others remind him that getting to know your commanders does a lot for one's odds of promotion in this service, he murmurs that other space fleets probably don't have such atomized crew cultures. Like, what if he was on a Klingon ship? With their many centuries of flying through space doing goofy violent shit, the klingons have probably gotten this shipboard community thing all figured out. The others look at Bangs in exactly the "bro seriously?" way you'd expect them to look at someone who just said he envies the local Space Orc archetype, but he doesn't back down.

Smash cut to the lower crew cabin of the IKS Che'Ta', one of the Klingon Empire's many, many disposable little warbirds. A gaggle of low-ranking crew punch each other awake and take turns grumbling about their menial, low-stakes duties during this uneventful cruise as they wait to get to the mission site.

One of them is all perky because he thinks the captain might execute his immediate supervisor in the near future, which would make him a logical candidate for promotion. His crewmates all make fun of him for going on about how "logical" it would be to promote him. What is he, a vulcan or something? The conversation moves on to them just trash-talking the vulcans for being all overcerebral and risk-averse and stuff. Cueing a smash-cut to the lower decks of the Vulcan Science Directorate cruiser Sh'vhal.

Heh, okay, I'm digging this concept for an episode. Wonder if any of these alien ships appeared again before or after this episode?

Anyway, the vulcan lower decks crew are mostly just being annoyed at one of their number, T'lin, who is being weirdly inductive in her reasoning and headstrong in her choice of minute-to-minute sensor modifications. She even gets emotional enough to show excitement over the local thermal readings being slightly higher than expected, and decides to notify the captain about it without even allowing her department to arrive at consensus.

Hmm. Also, at the beginning of the scene, when they were (slowly, blandly, in the typical vulcan fashion) talking about what they each planned to do after shift, she invited one of the others to play chess. The others didn't act like this was anything out of the ordinary, and chess is a piece of human culture that I absolutely would expect the vulcans to adopt, but in light of T'Lin's later behavior...hmm. Wonder if maybe the show is implying that she's a humanaboo, and that this is starting to cause friction between her and her traditional-minded crewmates.

When she heads off, unilaterally, to report to the captain, the others stare after T'Lin and murmur about how she's truly lost all control. There's something seriously wrong with someone being that un-boring and non-stilted.

Star Trek's vulcans are honestly one of the weirdest fictional cultures I'm familiar with. I feel like the franchise is constantly on the brink of admitting that they're a horrible soul-crushing dystopia, but can never quite bring itself to say the words out loud or let in-universe characters acknowledge it. Depressingly, I can mostly buy this status quo on the Watsonian level, with the Vulcans' status as a Federation founder species buying them freedom from scrutiny by the others. I'm much less sure if this is what the OG writers intended the vulcans to be, but it's a conclusion that everyone who's written them since then has been visibly (if silently) grappling with.

Getting back to this scene in particular, I suppose its possible that the Science Directorate is just a hyperconservative organization within vulcan society, and that most of their culture isn't this intolerant. Still, they're creepy.

Back to the klingons! Crewman Whatsisname seems to have gotten his wish today, as the ship's XO and captain have finally let whatever dumb feudal politics their families hold against each other come out into the open and culminate in a duel. A duel which the captain wins, followed by him declaring that by the end of today he's going to give the XO slot to whoever impresses him the most.

Naturally, when he then says that the first order of business for today is getting that dead body out of the way, Crewman Whatsisname jumps to obey and starts dragging his supervisor's corpse off the bridge. Rather laboriously, it looks like.

Whatsisname must be weak for a klingon. They're normally depicted as strong enough to move things that weigh as much as they do pretty easily.

We now return to the Cerritos, and Bangs' quest to find something to do today, preferably something that will help him score points with a commanding officer. Bangs is named Boiler, also. Ensign Boiler. Good to know. Start with him approaching a...ohhhhh wow that is a deep cut I did not expect.

Okay, so. There was this one episode of Star Trek TNG where the characters had to figure out how to communicate with these aliens who speak entirely in mythological allegory. If you've encountered the "Darmok and Jalad on Tanagra" meme, that's where it comes from.

Apparently in the time between then and now some members of that species have begun serving in Starfleet, and one of them is an officer aboard the Cerritos. Boiler tries to strike up a friendly conversation in his people's traditional manner, and the officer is initially impressed, but then Boiler makes the mistake of mentioning Carno and Myra's adventure in the forest. Which prompts the officer to become enraged and shout about how he KNOWS he has a weight problem, he doesn't need assholes like Boiler to remind him, and then storm away.

I laughed there. Like, that was well played. I didn't even recognize the look of that species until halfway through the conversation, but when I did I lol’d.

I do wonder if I'd have been able to find any humor in it without my familiarity, though. Like, it's clear from context that Boiler is trying to do some weird poetry thing that demonstrates familiarity with the other dude's culture but fucks it up and accidentally insults him, but would that be funny without the prior knowledge? I'm not sure. Maybe? Granted, as I implied that was a fairly memeified episode, so I guess most or all of Lower Decks' target audience could be expected to get it.

Well, anyway. Boiler's next attempt has him crashing his cyborg lunchbuddy's pottery club. He greets everyone, settles in, and asks his friend's commander if he learned how to make that style of vase back on his homeworld of Bajor. Unfortunately, it apparently only takes one mention of the lieutenant's home planet to trigger his PTSD and send him on a screaming tirade about how no one has time to learn traditional pottery when there are nazi snakemen who need killing.

Boiler flees and leaves the people who know the guy better to hopefully calm him back down.

I think that bajoran lieutenant could use a psyc evaluation, but that's just me.

Back aboard the Vulcan science ship, T'Lin makes her report to the captain. He agrees that the energy readings she got are worth checking out, so since she got them they'll go ahead and do that. However, the good outcome doesn't really validate the erratic methodology in this case, and he tells her that she'd best take the next two days off for some extended meditation to get her brain back in order.

She refuses.

On one hand, I don't think this is a military ship in even the fuzzy sense that Starfleet ships are, so insubordination might not be such a big deal. On the other hand, they're still in some kind of service, and their structure is still hierarchical enough to have captains and crew, so this has got to have some kind of severity to it.

Not that the captain's order here wasn't unreasonable and wildly disproportionate to the degree of her protocol breach. Just, I feel like it's important to point out the line where T'Lin would be getting in trouble even on a ship that wasn't crewed by logic cultists.

Eventually, the captain straight-up tells her that with her wilfulness, appeal to things like instincts and hunches, and just general recent behavior all around, T'Lin is acting like a child. Interesting that he'd choose that comparison, when an equally valid one would be "adult member of literally any of the many, many alien species that we share a supranational body with." Reinforces the notion that most vulcans avoid contact with other federation member species to a much greater degree than most. And also points to some attitudes among them that, well...like I said.

...

It should be noted that, back in the original series, it was said that vulcans who don't constantly force this pseudoreligious repression on themselves become so emotionally unstable and violent that they can barely even function as a society.

There are a couple of problems with this.

One is that, both in and after the original series, vulcans are shown to be able to "slip up" without it leading to a roaring fall from grace. Which gives the impression that even if they do need to repress themselves, they really don't need to do it this much.

The other is the existence of the Romulans, a civilization of vulcan dissidents who DON'T do the repression thing and fled their homeworld millennia ago and created their own fully autonomous space empire. Now, the romulans are bad guys. They've been one of Trek's recurring antagonist factions from the 1960's onward. But the thing is, they aren't the KIND of bad guys that you'd expect them to be given the assertions about vulcan nature. They don't lack emotional control. They aren't constantly losing their shit and lashing wildly out at each other (that's more the klingons' schtick). The Romulan Empire is authoritarian, jingoistic, and ruthless, but those traits always seemed like products of their social order, imposed from the top. Individual romulans haven't ever really seemed to have the problems that the vulcans say they should. They tend to be moody and emotional, but like, not in a crazy or wild way.

I don't know what franchise creator Gene Roddenberry and the other early writers meant to be the truth of the matter (and to be fair, Star Trek had much, much less continuity back then, so these questions weren't as important). But like. Looking at how things have been codifed ever since then? The Vulcan party line is NOT looking very credible.

...

Back to the Cerritos again. Boiler crashes Greeny's holodeck mountain climbing with her commander in a fairly hilarious parody of one of the notorious Star Trek V's most bizarre scenes, but doesn't know the first thing about mountain climbing and isn't welcomed. Then he tries to say hi to the captain and her daughter, only to accidentally overhear some menopause-related griping that has him awkwardly backing away again. On his way back to his quarters after these sad misadventures, he happens to share an elevator with the ship's First Officer and two fellow Hawaian-born crew planning to do a traditional beach sim. Boiler is apparently desperate and slimy enough that he lies and pretends to be Hawaian-born himself so that they'll invite him along.

This guy. Just. This guy.

Meanwhile, Boiler's klingon counterpart is trying to ingratiate himself to his captain, but finding few opportunities to do so. As is often the case aboard Klingon ships, the higher ranking crew are all noblemen, and Crewman Whatsisface has trouble getting the time of day as they drink wine and boast at each other about family achievements.

His next task after wriggling out from under the drunk guy is walking the captain's pet pig monster. He fed the dead XO to it, and if it doesn't keep its body moving now it'll have stomach problems.

On the vulcan ship, T'Lin is irritably working on her latest tech experiment while pretending to meditate. Her crewmates come by for short sessions of their own, and...she's obviously just undergoing a dam break in slow motion. Also, she starts appealing to klingon cultural touchstones now instead of human ones, to the others' consternation.

And, back on the Starfleet ship, Boiler nearly lets a more rational friend talk him out of it before going ahead and posting the cringe.

Oof.

Meanwhile, aboard the Klingon ship, Whatsisname - I'll just call him Blurgh - finally has his lucky break when he returns the captain's pet pigmonster after it finished shitting out the dead guy's skeleton. Blurgh finds the captain in a foul mood as he glares at a map of the contacted galaxy and murmurs darkly about how the Klingon Empire was until so recently an expanding force on its way to conquering it all, but now what the fuck are they even doing. Sensing the vibe he should cater to, Blurgh says some romanticist nostalgia word salad, and the captain's eyes light up. It turns out he's been looking for young warriors from Blurgh's cohort who think as he does, and even if Blurgh is physically small and weak he'll still do! After they talk about honor and glory and how klingon blood is barely even reddish-pink anymore, they're hailed by a large Pakled ship.

Oh. Pakleds. They were another one-episode TNG species that left a much sourer taste in their wake. Basically...they're a race of DOWN syndrome patients. No, really. They were just an episode-long joke at the expense of developmentally handicapped people. No explanation for how these guys even got into space, when they barely seem able to understand which buttons they need to press to make their ships go. They've had some later bit appearances, but only licensed noncanon Trek works have ever focused on them since then...until now, I guess.

Great.

The klingon captain brings Blurgh with him as he goes to visit the Pakled ship. Blurgh thinks they're going to capture it, but nope; the captain reveals that they actually have a deal going on with these pakleds.

The klingons have been supplying them with weaponry, and the pakled in turn have been using that to raid unsuspecting Federation and allied targets around the vicinity. The idea is that the pakleds and some other catspaws can stir up enough chaos here to put the Federation on the backfoot and let the Klingons take out a bite with a surprise attack in the near future.

The pakleds haven't been very effective so far, though. Their own captain complains about how they didn't even get to use that last bomb he gave them, because after they tested it it was all gone and they couldn't use it to attack anyone, so they need another one.

-______-

Yeah, they're going to be treated exactly the same as in their first appearance, aren't they. No surprises, no subversions. Just "haha, look at the space retards, aren't they fat and stupid, haha." Great.

Blurgh was already having misgivings about this plan; it's not very honourable and glorious to make other people do the fighting for you while you sit around on your thumbs and look innocent, after all. The captain assured him that that's the beauty of it - it's exactly the opposite of how klingons usually start shit, so no one will suspect them until it's too late - but that didn't exactly help. Those misgivings got worse when the captain implied that this whole plot is a conspiracy between a few noble houses without the knowledge or approval of the Klingon High Council. And then they get even worse when the pakleds let slip that they've been detonating klingon-built weapons in space willy-nilly and probably making the system's thermal readings light up on any and every nearby ship's sensors.

Ah. I see.

Cut to the Cerritos detecting the same energy spike that the vulcan ship did, and being brought right to the klingons and pakleds in the act of arms smuggling.

The Cerritos' captain doesn't seem to be the smartest cookie in the box. Not the sharpest instincts. She sees the pakled pirate ship hovering side by side with a fully intact klingon warbird and immediately assumes that the klingons need help. Fortunately for the Cerritos, the klingon captain has already panicked and launched into a plan of action, so it's too late for him to take advantage of her stupidity. He takes Blurgh back to his ship, pulls out whatever bullshit Reinhard used in the Battle of Ishtar to scramble longranged communications, and both ships open up on the Cerritos with all weapons.

Heh, well, the jig wasn't actually up before, but it is now!

The Cerritos already has its shields raised and its weapons locked on at least one enemy ship, but still, it's just one of those little patrol cruisers that need the Enterprise to save them all the time. It's not up to winning this battle, and the klingon captain knew it when he made this decision. Down in Virtual Hawaii, the beach suddenly shakes and the sky flickers, and the crew's Hawaiian subset comes running out of the holodeck and hurries to their stations. Without having time to change clothes. It's lucky for them that the Cerritos' shields buckle and the corridor ahead of them collapses under a torpedo blast, stopping them from actually having to fight like this.

Not wanting to die in a shirt he doesn't feel comfortable in, Boiler sinks down onto the rubble and comes clean that he's from Modesto, California.

Prompting the others, one by one, to admit that they aren't Hawaiian either. The first officer (who is from the moon) lied about being Hawaiian to appeal to his own commander way back when, and then he got promoted and the others lied to fit in in turn, and then he didn't want to disappoint them. It's just so hard to find a preexisting social group to fit into aboard Starfleet ships, with how atomized their shipboard cultures are.

It turns out everyone besides Boiler is from a moon (either Earth's or a different planet's). They promptly form a new clique based on shared mooniness, and turn their noses up at dumb annoying planet-born Boiler.

Lmao.

The Cerritos gets two lucky reprieves, though. First, that Vulcan ship - which turns out to be much larger than the Cerritos, and also surprisingly well-armed for a science vessel. Heh, that's vulcans for you I guess - follows the energy readings T'lin pointed out to the scene of the battle and puts itself between the Cerritos and the pirates (for non-Trekky context; the vulcans are a member of the Federation. Basically, think state and federal governments, with each having their own spacefleets). And, it turns out that the other project T'lin was working on when she was supposed to be meditating was a set of modifications to the computers that regulate energy flow to the shields. It's untested, but when the bad guys seem to be winning even with the vulcans' intervention and T'lin begs her captain to let her prove her instincts are still as good as they were with the sensors, he relents. And, their shield regeneration speeds up by a whopping 20%.

Second, aboard the Klingon ship, Blurgh has had enough of this insanity. He might have wanted a promotion, but not if it means taking part in a criminal conspiracy against the reigning pro-Federation government, and frankly this isn't the first time a bunch of bloodthirsty nobles have tried to undermine the Klingon/Federation alliance and it probably won't be the last. Yeah, I think his calculus checks out there. When he challenges the captain and the captain starts beating the shit out of him in the traditional klingon method of regulating the chain of command, he gets a lucky break of his own. It turns out the captain should have really walked his own pigmonster more often, because when it sees them fighting it sides with the person who was nice to it most recently. The captain drops the dagger he'd been about to stab Blurgh with, allowing the latter to pick it up and finish the fight before his stronger opponent can recover.

Klingon blood definitely is still reddish-pink alright.~​

Blurgh turns to his open-mouthed crewmates and tell them to retreat, the jig is up anyway.

With the klingons fleeing, it doesn't take long for the outnumbered pakled vessel to retreat as well. The Starfleet and Vulcan ships are both battered, but they're still standing, and now the jig is indeed up.

There are two epilogue scenes, aboard the Starfleet and Vulcan vessels. T'lin is reassigned to Starfleet; her captain recognizes the value of her way of doing things, but believes that it's a better fit for Starfleet's way of doing things than the Vulcan Science Directorate's.

It's...well, I'll talk about this at the end.

Aboard the Cerritos, Boiler the failed Hawaiian and non-moonborn commiserates with the other lower deck crew again. And, this time, they decide that they'll make plans in advance for lower-deck social activities. Being redshirts is at least as much of a shared identity as being from moons after all. And, the fake Hawaiian first officer - despite being a moon snob - surreptitiously helps send more people Boiler's way. D'awwwww.


So, that was my first exposure to "Star Trek: Lower Decks." Lighthearted return to form, or cringey meme-milking machine?

Honestly, it's both.

The amount of self-referential Trek humor is going to make this hard to get into for anyone who isn't already well-versed in the lore. And...the nature of that humor is very much leaning into the "snarky self-aware internet fandom" niche, which is both very much of its time and very much not for everyone.

That said? It feels more authentically Star Trek than the bits I've seen of the new live action shows. It has the vibe. The tone. The color scheme. And also, really, the warmth. The optimism and softness.

That in itself is also a double-edged sword, though. Like, while being authentic to the franchise, it also embraces some of Trek's longtime weaknesses without really playing them for humor. Biggest example is T'lin's genius modifications that massively boost both sensor and shield efficiency with only a few minutes of software tweaking. That kind of thing coming out of nowhere and not being treated as the miracle anomoly that it is happens in Trek, but generally speaking only in bad episodes. Like, the really lazy "Voyager" and "Enterprise" ones were most notorious for this. And this in turn makes my reaction to the vulcan captain's decision at the end there probably not what the writers intended it to be. There's no recognition that T'lin is a tech supergenius, just that she trusts her instincts and impulses more than most vulcans. And, that seems like the characters - including T'lin herself - all missing the obvious.

One thing this episode does that Trek doesn't normally do, though, is take a fine-toothed comb to the late twentieth century American liberal sensibilities that the franchise normally celebrates. The overly atomized work culture where everyone is too focused on their own promotions and there's no built-in measures to give them a community by default...well, you could read this as Boiler just being that much of an unlikeable loser, but I don't think you're supposed to. That felt like it was addressed at the real world, and the way it casts the blame mostly on Starfleet as an institution definitely strikes me as an acknowledgement that the Federation - like all utopias - carries the baggage and blind spots of the people who dreamed it up.

This is the positive flip-side of the "self-referential snark" thing, you could say. Lower Decks is about earlier Star Trek media rather than just being more Star Trek media. And it seems like it has things to say about it, and is willing to criticize aspects of it with more than just memes even while still being mostly a love letter.

It's self-awareness isn't perfect though. The pakled jokes in this episode were like being yanked back into the nineties in the worst possible way. No sign of self-awareness or self-criticism in sight.

On balance, I think this is a good show. It's definitely not for everyone, though, and while I laughed at most of the jokes I think this style of humor is starting to bore me.