“We’ll Always Have Tom Paris,” written by M. Willis — who scripted last season’s “Much Ado About Boimler” — is another great episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks which packs an A, B, and C story into just 24 minutes. The episode skillfully brings back a fan-favorite legacy character, surprises us with a return of a Lower Decks character we thought was out of the picture for good, and finally gives us a great pairing between the female leads of the show.

In this year’s pre-season interviews, Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan indicated that we would see more legacy characters in Season 2, and just three episodes in, we’ve already gotten a big one: it’s a treat to see Tom Paris again (wearing a First Contact uniform for the first time!) and to hear Robbie McNeill voice the character once more… as two different versions of the Star Trek: Voyager helmsman.

With all the legacy characters that have had speaking parts so far — Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes), and both Q (John de Lancie) and Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) last season — the show does a nice job of using those characters to elevate the Lower Deckers rather than just let them disappear into the background behind these beloved characters.

Riker and Paris’s presence on the show has served Boimler’s story in both cases, rather than the other way around. And I appreciate that as it allows Lower Decks to continue to craft its own identity.

In addition to legacy characters, it’s so fun the way in which this show weaves together not just nostalgic tropes from the franchise’s on-screen history, but it’s off-screen life as well. Collectors’ plates from the Hamilton Collection were a huge market in the 1990s, and are a staple of every Star Trek convention vendors room to this day.

Most fans have seen one, owned one, or been gifted one they don’t quite know what to do with, and there were probably close to 100 plates in the collection by the late 90s. So, it is a lot of fun that Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid), who in many ways is a stand in for nerdy Star Trek fans on this show, has his own collection of plates featuring the VOY crew that he is getting signed.

And in a cool ouroboros of what’s real (Hamilton plates) becoming fictional (Voyager collectors’ plates) becoming real again, Star Trek Unlimited is selling a limited-edition Tom Paris collectors’ plate – straight from Boimler’s collection — right now.

The decision to pair Tendi (Noel Wells) and Mariner (Tawny Newsome) together for the episode was also great, and felt distinctly like it was done as a direct response to Season 1 reviews of Lower Decks that encouraged the show to shake up the traditional Mariner-Boimler/Tendi-Rutherford pairings in future episodes.

“So weird we haven’t teamed up before now… sort of, like, a glaring omission,” Mariner jokes, in a wink to Lower Decks reviewers everywhere. Mariner and Tendi’s trip through TNG Seasons 5 and 6 locales gives the two characters a nice opportunity to bond and interact, which we haven’t had outside of group conversations thus far.

And lastly, while the decision to bring back Shaxs (Fred Tatasciore) is slightly disappointing from the perspective of wanting this show not to get locked into the “everything always stays the same” mold of other adult animated comedies like The Simpsons, you can’t fault the way the character was reintroduced. (After all, the bridge officers pretty much do always come back!)

Just having Shaxs casually appear — and to have everyone acknowledge he’s back from the dead but not explain how — is so perfectly Lower Decks. Because the reality is, for most crew aboard a starship, they would not know the true details behind our hero characters’ deaths and resurrections throughout franchise history.

TREK TROPE TRIBUTES

• Boimler and Mariner run through a number of possible ways in which Shaxs might have returned from the dead, including:
   
  • A transporter pattern buffer thing (“Relics”)
  • The Borg rebuilt him (“Mortal Coil”)
  • That he was a restored katra or that he got Genesis Device’d (Star Trek III: The Search for Spock)
  • A Mirror Universe switcheroo (“The War Without, The War Within”)
  • Being a future son from an alternate timeline (“Firstborn”)
  • He was trapped in the Nexus (Star Trek: Generations).

• “Bridge crew always come back.” Pretty much! Save for exceptions like Tasha Yar or Jadzia Dax, characters from Montgomery Scott (“The Changeling”) to Wesley Crusher (“Hide and Q”), from Harry Kim (“Deadlock”) and Neelix (“Mortal Coil”), and from Miles O’Brien (“Visionary) all the way to Hugh Culber (“The Wolf Inside” and “Saints of Imperfection”) have all died and been restored to life through various sci-fi means over the years.
   
• This episode gives us a classic “Turbolift: halt.” scene as Shaxs explains to Rutherford how he came back from the dead.

CANON CONNECTIONS

• Mariner and Tendi’s first stop is Qualor II, also home to the starship supply depot visited by the Enterprise-D in “Unification.”
   
• Qualor II has a similar vibe to Freecloud, including a Quark’s Bar, a Vic Fontaine lounge (I guess he franchised too!), the Zebulon Sisters of Chu Chu dance fame are in town — and Amarie, the four-armed piano player from “Unification” is also featured on a billboard, so it seems she’s still in residence there.
   
• Tom Paris’ reputation as a holodeck programmer is well known, as Boimler calls him “The creator of Fair Haven, Captain Proton himself!” (Mariner of course knows him as the guy who got turned into a salamander.)

• After Qualor II, Tendi and Mariner head to Starbase Earhart, and the Bonestell Recreation Facility — complete with dom-jot table — where Jean-Luc Picard got stabbed through the heart in “Tapestry.”
   
• The design of Starbase Earhart is based upon the Starfleet facility seen on planet Relva VII in “Coming of Age.”
   
• Like the Enterprise NX-01, the Cerritos has a large catwalk area that can super-heat without warning — while the NX-01’s is inside the warp nacelles, but above the ship’s gravity stabilizers.
   
• Rutherford’s vision of Shaxs’ return from the dead includes the surly Bajoran appearing as a Borg, wearing a Terran Empire uniform from the 2260s (“Mirror, Mirror”), dressed in Neelix’s flashy clothing, wearing Picard’s Victorian-era costume from “Elementary, Dear Data,” donning a red-striped Enterprise-era uniform, and a classic Star Trek security red-shirt uniform.

• Calling back to Picard’s fantasy from Star Trek: Generations, Rutherford’s vision of Shaxs ominously proclaims that “In the Nexus, it’s always Christmas!”
   
• Tendi’s sickbay nemesis, Ensign Escher, got promoted after curing Captain Freeman’s Terellian Death Syndrome, a disease Reg Barclay incorrectly believed he had in “Genesis.”
   
• One of Tendi’s favorite Klingon acid punk songs is about the Caves of Nu’Mat, where Worf described having a vision of Kahless as a young boy (“Rightful Heir”).
   
• Mariner being easily turned green to emulate Orion coloring is yet another medical marvel from the Star Trek universe, as once again a simple make-a-human-look-alien procedure allows the ensign to go undercover. (At least, temporarily.)
   
• Thanks to his disheveled nature, red complexion, and truly awful hair, Paris mistakes Boimler for the Delta Quadrant’s resident Kazon — the antagonistic species from the first two Voyager seasons.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

• The circular Jefferies Tube aboard the Cerritos seems to be based upon a similar crawlway aboard Cold Station 12.
   
• This episode’s title, of course, is a play on “We’ll Always Have Paris,” from the early days of The Next Generation.
   
• Star Trek: Lower Decks appears to take a definitive stand on the age-old debate about whether Star Trek: Voyager’s acronym is VOY or VGR: VOY is now canon!
   
• Boimler hums the Star Trek: Voyager theme, and every time Tom Paris appears – both in real and plate form – the music includes a couple of distinctive notes from the Voyager title music. (Similar musical callbacks were used for a few of Jeri Ryan’s appearances on Picard.)
   
• Boimler attempts to order a pupusa from the mess hall’s replicator, while Shaxs orders a hot dog with spicy kiwi ketchup. (Gross.)
   
• In a Lower Decks nod to the TNG episode “Lower Decks,” Tendi asks the punk Caitiain about the music he is playing if “[it is] gik’tal?” Gik’tal is the Klingon word for “to the death,” which is what Worf called the fake test that made Sito Jaxa realize Captain Picard was treating her unfairly.

• Much like the Vulcan pon farr, Caitians have to be intimate once a year or “their hormones make them go crazy.”
   
• Mariner’s romantic outlook is without limits — except for Boimler! — as she goes for “bad boys, bad girls, bad gender-nonbinary babes, ruthless alien masterminds, and bad Bynars.”
   
• While we saw Mariner aboard the USS Quito while docked at Deep Space 9 last season (“Much Ado About Boimler”), here we learn that she was actually posted to the Bajoran space station during the latter half of the 2370s — during Worf’s time as strategic operations officer.
   
• Like the California-class uniforms, Tom Paris’ “standard” First Contact-style uniform also comes with boots that reflect his red division color on their soles, along with the same Starfleet delta seen on the base of other Lower Decks uniform boots.
   
• Mariner mentions Odo as an example of someone with just one name, though technically his name began as “Odo’ital,” the Cardassian word meaning “unknown sample” — though it’s likely she would not know this, as it was a story Odo was not comfortable telling. (“Heart of Stone”)

• Tendi clarifies that she’s not even “[the] kind of Orion” who can control her pheromone output, making her biologically different from the trio of Orion women who nearly commandeered the Enterprise NX-01 in “Bound.”
   
• While she may not be able to control them with pheromones, we do learn that like the “Bound” trio, Tendi does command the immediate respect and deference of some Orion men, as the former “Mistress of the Winter Constellations” gets what she wants from her larger, male cousin with a minimal amount of effort at the pirate base.
   
• Cat owners will particularly appreciate the resolution to the Doctor T’Ana sex post storyline; she was never interested in the post, only in the box it was delivered in.
   
• In what may be the deepest of cuts from this week’s episode, half-buried among overlapping dialogue, the Enterprise-uniform-wearing Shaxs wonders a long-asked question: “What was the deal with T’Pol’s hair for that one year?'” likely referring to Jolene Blalock’s Enterprise Season 1 ‘helmet-hair’ wig.

While “Kayshon, His Eyes Open” is worth a re-watch for all the visual Easter eggs, “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris” is worth a couple of watches just because there’s a lot of cool story in this one that’s worth taking time to appreciate.

Now go buy a Tom Paris commemorative plate and be just as cool as Boimler.

Star Trek: Lower Decks returns on September 2 with “Mugato, Gumato” on Paramount+ in the United States and CTV Sci Fi Channel in Canada, followed by Amazon Prime Video (in select international regions) on September 3.