S01.E01: Second Contact

[tessaray]

Air date: August 6, 2020

Quote

Ensign Tendi has her first day of work on Starfleet's USS Cerritos, where she meets fellow support crew members; Boimler is tasked with a secret special assignment; Rutherford attempts to keep his dating life intact while a disaster strikes the ship.

 

 

[Chicago Redshirt]

The new animated series dropped its first episode today.

Pilot was ai'ght. I don't know if it would be tempted to get CBS's streaming service if I didn't have it already.

I look forward to it developing the characters beyond Rebel, By-the-Book, Noob, Nerd, Dr. Curmudgeon, Bajoran Worf, and Quasi-Riker.

[starri]

Given the show's pedigree, I was nervous going on, but it's definitely more Futurama than Rick & Morty.  I don't love it, but I liked it enough to keep going.  The people involved definitely love Star Trek, though.

[dwmarch]

I had low expectations going in but I was pleasantly surprised. Mariner is a lot of fun and she gets the best lines. "...and for no reason! Just because he was being a dick!" nicely sums up some of the things bad guys have done on previous Treks.

As @starri mentioned, the love for Trek lore is obvious here. Lower Decks is much better in that regard than Discovery, where they just do whatever they want even if it takes a double Klingon piss on previous lore.

Of course, no Star Trek show shall escape pedantic nitpicking. Why do the Medical staff wear white boots? Why is the ship's registry behind the bridge instead of in front of it like every other ship? Why does an EVA suit only have enough oxygen to cross part of the hull?

[vibeology]

I'm not sold on it completely yet, but I really like Beckett. I am totally sold on her as a character and cannot wait to learn more about her. And, the sound design took me right back to my 90s childhood. The doors, the transporters etc all sound so beautiful!

[KimberStormer]

I laughed (the aforementioned Klingon prison bit was my fave), which is pretty rare when it comes to "comedies", and it was fun enough to watch some more.  I like Mariner although the 'reveal' was so obvious from very early on and I also wonder why she doesn't just pull a Jake Sisko and...not join Starfleet?  Like why if you don't like it?  You can go be Kassidy Yates and be a helpful and hardworking citizen without having to deal with tedious protocol.  But perhaps we will learn more about this as the show progresses.

Green girl has some season-one-Tilly potential and I suppose I can grasp Generic White Guy Lead's role, but I'm not sure I care for Cyborg Engineer dude.  Trill Girl, you dodged a bullet here and can do better.  I do wish they had taken advantage of the animated medium to do more alien-y crewmembers that would be impossible in live action.  The old Animated Series did this!

I still wish for the serious Lower Decks that I thought Discovery was going to be for about ten minutes.  I'm hoping at least they can do some episodes of this where the bridge crew are not involved at all.  Anyway, cautiously interested in seeing more of this.

[jah1986]

I enjoyed it. Laughed out loud a couple times.  I enjoy Star Trek as much as the average person (I'm not a fanatic) so sometimes I don't get all the "in" jokes. But I didn't actively hate anyone and I was surprised at the reveal  that Mariner was the captain's daughter.  One thing I was grateful for was closed captioning, as the characters were talking so fast as some points I wouldn't have had a clue without it. Will definitely check out future episodes.

[853fisher]

There's not a lot of buzz for a new Trek show, here or in my social media, but I did enjoy it.  I recall that some folks felt the new series have been a bit too grimdark lately, more in line with the norms of so-called prestige TV than the spirit of the Trek universe, so it was interesting to see a very different approach.  I'm happy for CBS to play around and try new things with the franchise.  I would like to learn a little more about what the featured crew do on the Cerritos, but there are nine more episodes for that, and I plan to stick with it.  The plot resolution about a kind of vaccine certainly was unexpectedly timely!

[Chaos Theory]

I wanted to like this but it was to hyper for my taste.  Plus none of the characters were particularly likeable.    

Then again you can't go by me I am  part of the 1% who does like both Discovery and Picard.  

[Chicago Redshirt]

https://trekmovie.com/2020/08/07/visors-argos-and-more-star-trek-lower-decks-easter-eggs-and-details-in-second-contact/

After reading this, I want to give them a lot of credit. 

[ottoDbusdriver]

You're not alone @Chaos Theory -- I wasn't impressed.

Going all 28 Minutes Later (along the lines of the movie '28 Days Later') in the very first episode, and apparently no one was killed.  Really ? Nobody ?  Based on the amount of human feasting and violent physical interaction alone there should have been some deaths.

Did you have to be bitten or vomited on with black goo to get the infection ?  The Captain was apparently infected, and yet she didn't appear to have been bitten, so .........

The species that they were 2nd contacting with -- wouldn't they have at least had to attain warp travel to even be approached by StarFleet for First Contact, and yet somehow the locals needed fancy farming implements ? Really ?  And for some reason those farm implements had to be secretly smuggled to them -- why exactly ?

I get that it's supposed to be a comedy, but even then I couldn't see any other characters from any of the other ST shows ever acting this bizarrely or disrespectfully while wearing a Starfleet uniform (well, maybe Tilly on STD).  Honestly, I was hoping for more along the lines of 'The Office' in space.

[marinw]

I liked this, but it was a little frantic. Second Contact is actually a interesting idea.

Two biggest question:

Why doesn't Mariner just leave Starfleet?

Why did Rutherford become a cyborg? Accident? Something he wanted to do?

Speakig of, I did laugh during the opening credits when the Cerritos fled a bunch of Borg Cubes. I hope they do a Borg episode.

That muti-eyed giant bug looked really famalair. Rick and Morty?

I'm comparing this to The Orville more than anything else.

[Chaos Theory]

I know people are having season one Tilly flashbacks with one of the characters but I always thought Tilly was a fascinating character in that she was exited about being on her first big assignment like anyone would be.   We expect Starfleet to be so damn professional all the damn time that the wonder and excitement is deemed unprofessional.   Tilly’s exuberance is one thing.   But these characters all seem to be the kind of characters you find on a Maquis ship.  You know tried out for Star fleet but flunked out.  Heck even the standard white guy (whose name I can’t remember) is just sad and pathetic.  

Edited August 8, 2020 by Chaos Theory

[Kromm]

A lot of lame jokes, but I'll give them credit for being willing to try a lot of different stuff and see what sticks to the wall.  

I will say it's a bit more negative about the social divisions in Starfleet than we'd had any reason to believe before now.  But I'm not 100% sure it makes sense. All of our main characters are Ensigns.  An Ensign is an Officer.  The logical way to show a division like this would be to show the point of view of people who aren't officers. 

I think it starts with "Crewman" with 3rd, 2nd and 1st class.  Those are the people who'd be Lower Decks, with Petty Officers of various grades in charge of them, and maybe an Ensign in overall charge.  I mean all the jokes about cleaning up messes on the Bridge, but it would be an enlisted person actually doing that.  Or maybe a Yeoman, which was apparently more of a job title than a rank.

Edited August 8, 2020 by Kromm

[Kromm]

On 8/7/2020 at 4:29 PM, Chaos Theory said:

I wanted to like this but it was to hyper for my taste.  Plus none of the characters were particularly likeable.    

Then again you can't go by me I am  part of the 1% who does like both Discovery and Picard.  

To me Discovery and Picard have very different problems.  Discovery because it's revisionist just to be revisionist.  It went far beyond changes made to show that time period with modern filming techniques and into stupid crap you constantly had to roll your eyes at and ignore to maintain any sense of belief that the stuff we knew before even still happened.  

With Picard, it was pure bad execution.  Not all of it. A few episodes were actually quite good.  But a lot weren't, and the ending just plain stank.  Without spoiling for folks who never saw it, the simplest way to express it is that the ending made a Status Quo change that was just plain unnecessary and stupid, which didn't actually make the philosophical point they seem to think it was making, and set up real complications for portraying Picard's character in future installments, because you automatically have to suspend disbelief about a lot of things involving, ironically, the actual actor more than the character.

As far as the characters in this being unlikable?  Normally I don't insist on that with most shows.  But here I really had an issue with how it fed into this idea of a wide social gap between the Upper Decks and Lower.  Yes, by necessity on a ship that large with so many crew there has to be stratification.  But the other shows have always posed this as functional, not dysfunctional.  The Captains somehow (admittedly unrealistically) at least know the name and basic details of every of hundreds of crewmen.  The few they might not, the First Officer knows.  The Bridge Crew is special, but not snobby.  Someone working in Engineering, for example, isn't going to be jealous of Bridge Officers.  Admittedly someone who maintains the Replicators or does maintenance in a random Jeffries Tubes, or serves in Damage Control, or in a Bio lab somewhere, or whatever might not be as glamorous, but it's still posed as being part of an Elite organization, admittedly if not on the Enterprise or a similar First Contact-y ship not QUITE as Elite, but at least somewhat, just because being in Starfleet already is being a high-flyer.

And as I said before, I STILL don't get what THIS show is trying to say about Ensigns, all of our major characters, versus Crewmen or Petty Officers. Did we even hear anyone addressed as Crewman or Petty Officer (or even Yeoman) because I didn't hear it. It just treated the Ensigns as if they WERE those people in terms of what we saw them doing.

[Chicago Redshirt]

On 8/7/2020 at 6:27 PM, ottoDbusdriver said:

Going all 28 Minutes Later (along the lines of the movie '28 Days Later') in the very first episode, and apparently no one was killed.  Really ? Nobody ?  Based on the amount of human feasting and violent physical interaction alone there should have been some deaths.

Did you have to be bitten or vomited on with black goo to get the infection ?  The Captain was apparently infected, and yet she didn't appear to have been bitten, so .........

The species that they were 2nd contacting with -- wouldn't they have at least had to attain warp travel to even be approached by StarFleet for First Contact, and yet somehow the locals needed fancy farming implements ? Really ?  And for some reason those farm implements had to be secretly smuggled to them -- why exactly ?

I get that it's supposed to be a comedy, but even then I couldn't see any other characters from any of the other ST shows ever acting this bizarrely or disrespectfully while wearing a Starfleet uniform (well, maybe Tilly on STD).  Honestly, I was hoping for more along the lines of 'The Office' in space.

We don't know that no one was not killed for sure. But assuming that it's so, it's not unusual. Across the various ST series where they've had issues with shipwide disease outbreaks (TOS's The Naked Time, TNG's The Naked Now, for example) how many people actually were shown to have died of them? Given that Starfleet's medical technology is basically magic and in some cases have brought people back from the dead, it wouldn't be surprising that there were no deaths. 

I think the episode explicitly said the virus was airborne. We obviously saw that Tendi had black goo barfed on her and yet had not turned. Presumably there's some different levels of resistance to it from person to person, and race to race. Just like in live-action Trek.

That the planet as a whole had attained warp drive does not necessarily mean that every member of the planet had access to the same high level of technology, or even low levels of technology. In most societies today, money and resources are unevenly distributed. The episode explicitly had Mariner say that she was cutting through the required red tape for an official request through Starfleet channels.

So far, the bridge officers have acted pretty much the same way that bridge officers on the ST shows have traditionally acted. Freeman and Ransom have channelled the typical captains and XOs, the security guy is a parody of the gruff, shoot-first, shoot-second, shoot-always personality Worf (and to a lesser extent Reed) had, the Doctor is basically McCoy and the EMH except a humanoid cat.

None of the shows really spent much time on people at the rank of Ensign who were not bridge officers. Not really much that they did so far in this first episode strikes me as that bizarre or disrespectful (other than Mariner getting sloshed and accidently cutting Boimler).    

On 8/7/2020 at 6:47 PM, marinw said:

Why doesn't Mariner just leave Starfleet?

With Daddy as an admiral and Mommy a captain, I bet there is a lot of pressure to be in the family business. But from what she is saying in the pilot, she loves what she is doing in Starfleet and she's good at it. But she doesn't want to be about the promotions and the bureaucracy and the quest for glory.

Whether that is true or sour grapes because of whatever got her demoted, I look forward to seeing.

3 hours ago, Kromm said:

As far as the characters in this being unlikable?  Normally I don't insist on that with most shows.  But here I really had an issue with how it fed into this idea of a wide social gap between the Upper Decks and Lower.  Yes, by necessity on a ship that large with so many crew there has to be stratification.  But the other shows have always posed this as functional, not dysfunctional.  The Captains somehow (admittedly unrealistically) at least know the name and basic details of every of hundreds of crewmen.  The few they might not, the First Officer knows.  The Bridge Crew is special, but not snobby.  Someone working in Engineering, for example, isn't going to be jealous of Bridge Officers.  Admittedly someone who maintains the Replicators or does maintenance in a random Jeffries Tubes, or serves in Damage Control, or in a Bio lab somewhere, or whatever might not be as glamorous, but it's still posed as being part of an Elite organization, admittedly if not on the Enterprise or a similar First Contact-y ship not QUITE as Elite, but at least somewhat, just because being in Starfleet already is being a high-flyer.

And as I said before, I STILL don't get what THIS show is trying to say about Ensigns, all of our major characters, versus Crewmen or Petty Officers. Did we even hear anyone addressed as Crewman or Petty Officer (or even Yeoman) because I didn't hear it. It just treated the Ensigns as if they WERE those people in terms of what we saw them doing.

I don't think the other shows have given much thought or expression to the ensigns or the enlisted people at all. The ones we saw briefly tended to serve their plot purpose or to be in the background (plotting courses, pushing buttons, energizing, getting redshirted). And of course, we were generally seeing what was supposed to be the 1 percent of Starfleet on the various Enterprises and the other ships. So even accepting for discussion's sake that things were super-harmonious among the lower crew on those ships, that doesn't mean that it would hold true on a more average ship like the Cerritos. 

One of the things that separates the various Treks from modern day mindsets is that unrealistic "our crew is one big happy family" mindset. That has probably not actually been in the case in real life that any comparable organization to Starfleet or an individual ship has not had people who were jealous of others, whose contributions were not properly recognized, who were slacking in their performance or overly ambitious and what not.

There were no references to crewmen or petty officers explicitly. Presumably the serving staff in the bar were crewmen, but none of them had lines. Maybe later down the road, the show will play with the notion about possible divisions between enlisted officers and non-enlisted. But there was a lot to chomp on for just like 23 minutes of runtime already.

[ottoDbusdriver]

Plus, way too many fingersnaps or finger guns.  Had any of the writers previously written for Clone High (where Ghandhi was the king of the fingersnaps) ?

[KimberStormer]

19 hours ago, Kromm said:

And as I said before, I STILL don't get what THIS show is trying to say about Ensigns, all of our major characters, versus Crewmen or Petty Officers. Did we even hear anyone addressed as Crewman or Petty Officer (or even Yeoman) because I didn't hear it. It just treated the Ensigns as if they WERE those people in terms of what we saw them doing.

Miles O'Brien has always been, and always will be, the only enlisted man in Starfleet.  I tend to think that by linguistic changes over the centuries (like how "you" used to be plural) the concept of "officer" has just come to mean "anyone in the organization", but O'Brien is a stickler for history and prefers to use the word "chief".

15 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

With Daddy as an admiral and Mommy a captain, I bet there is a lot of pressure to be in the family business. But from what she is saying in the pilot, she loves what she is doing in Starfleet and she's good at it. But she doesn't want to be about the promotions and the bureaucracy and the quest for glory.

My respect for Jake Sisko has no bounds.  The great thing about DS9 is it pushed back somewhat on the very strong attitude in TNG that if you weren't in Starfleet you were a total loser with nothing going on in your life -- the way some people talk about college today.  Jake had no interest in being in Starfleet, so he didn't join up.

I do think as far as doing good and not bothering with bureaucracy, as I said before, the Kassidy Yates option is there.  

Quote

One of the things that separates the various Treks from modern day mindsets is that unrealistic "our crew is one big happy family" mindset. That has probably not actually been in the case in real life that any comparable organization to Starfleet or an individual ship has not had people who were jealous of others, whose contributions were not properly recognized, who were slacking in their performance or overly ambitious and what not.

BUT this is exactly what is different about "Lower Decks", the episode, and the Lower-Decks-ish episodes of Voyager.  The former has the ambitious young guy who wants to get ahead and is futilely trying to get Riker to like him, etc.  And there's that Voyager one about the misfit toys who would, according to the episode, probably have been washed out of the service if they weren't on the wrong side of the galaxy.  At least for me that's part of what I like about the "Lower Decks" concept and what I hope for from Lower Decks, the show.

[aemom]

By fluke, I happened to see that this show was airing. I hadn't really heard anything about it, but I'm always up for ST. I set the PVR to tape a re-air and the 2nd ep.

I was surprised to see that it was only 30 minutes long which made me suspicious. I quickly figured out that it was animated. 

As with all things ST, we sat down to watch it as a family.

It was not what I expected.

My sons (18 and 21) loved it, and hubby and I are intrigued.  It makes The Orville look super serious. 

I'm in for now - there's really nothing else to watch anyway! 😁

Edited August 16, 2020 by aemom
Typo

[Trini]

The first episode is online for free for a limited time.

As someone else mentioned, this reminds me of Futurama. The character that I feel is going to get tiresome is Ensign "break all the rules" Mariner. Star Trek has decades of material to parody, so I don't have a problem with the show because of that.

I'm sure there were tons, but the one easter egg I got right away was Sisko's baseball in the captain's office.

[Affogato]

On 8/7/2020 at 11:57 PM, Kromm said:

A lot of lame jokes, but I'll give them credit for being willing to try a lot of different stuff and see what sticks to the wall.  

I will say it's a bit more negative about the social divisions in Starfleet than we'd had any reason to believe before now.  But I'm not 100% sure it makes sense. All of our main characters are Ensigns.  An Ensign is an Officer.  The logical way to show a division like this would be to show the point of view of people who aren't officers. 

I think it starts with "Crewman" with 3rd, 2nd and 1st class.  Those are the people who'd be Lower Decks, with Petty Officers of various grades in charge of them, and maybe an Ensign in overall charge.  I mean all the jokes about cleaning up messes on the Bridge, but it would be an enlisted person actually doing that.  Or maybe a Yeoman, which was apparently more of a job title than a rank.

I doubt starships have janitors or housekeepers. I’m guessing cleaning your area is part if the job (with magical roomba to help). That said a really nasty bridge would fall to the ensigns to clean up. 

a yeoman is a naval petty officer who does clerical duties. yes, I googled it. Noncommissioned officer. But O’Brien was highly educated for all he wasn’t commissioned. When off the bridge Rand could have Had three doctorates and a research project deeply important to the future of the Federation. 

i think star trek had a lot of people without commissions. Scientists. 

Edited August 23, 2020 by Affogato