In writer Ann Kim’s “I, Excretus,” Star Trek: Lower Decks delivers another huge episode that finds a very fun way to drop our characters into familiar-to-us situations that their rank and station would likely never warrant.

Even though this show is about the lower decks of the Cerritos, I wondered how Boimler would handle the Borg Queen (voiced by Alice Krige, no less!) or how Mariner would handle the Mirror Universe — and now we know the answer!

Thanks to the array of training simulations, this episode lovingly references past Star Trek adventures — from well-known tales like “Mirror, Mirror” and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to lesser-remembered stories like “Ethics” and “Spectre of the Gun.”

From Ensign Boimler (Jack Quaid) being so bookish that he needs to redo the Borg simulation until he gets a perfect score, Ensign Mariner (Tawny Newsome) throwing herself out an airlock to end her “Naked Time” scenario, Ensign Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) deciding to use boots on his hands instead of gloves to open a hot door, and well-meaning Ensign Tendi (Noel Wells) being pushed aside in her “Ethics” experience while sickbay orderlies desperately attempt to beat a Klingon to death, there’s a ton to enjoy here.

And the underlying message about how the senior staff and the lower deckers need to understand and appreciate each other’s roles and responsibilities on the ship is an important one. The ensigns think playing captain is going to be cool — until it isn’t — and the senior staff think going back to the ‘simple life’ of lower-decks duty is easy, but find that it’s more difficult than it seems to be shut out of the loop.

If there’s one weakness to this episode, it’s a growing sense that Lower Decks is performing an extensive box checking exercise to reference back to absolutely everything unique about The Animated Series.

You know we love callbacks and references here at TrekCore, but I increasingly find myself wondering what kind of Animated Series connections each episode will hold before I begin to watch — and that feels like things are going just a bit overboard.

While there were a few joyful Animated Series references in Season 1, the growing TAS tie-ins this year — like Spock Two’s skeleton in “Kayson, His Eyes Open,” the Skorr in “An Embarrassment of Dooplers,” and the Kzinti ensign in “The Spy Humongous” — are starting to feel a bit like a slog. There is some humor to the Pandronian drill instructor Shari Yen Yem (Lennon Parham), from her bodily separation to the repeated “This one…” phrasing, but we’re fast running out of interesting concepts from the 1970s show.

But what’s also beginning to pay off, in increasingly hilarious ways, is the show has given names, faces, and personalities to so many of the secondary characters among the Cerritos crew. Characters like ‘so hot’ Ensign Barnes, Jennifer the Andorian (who gets a last name in this episode), and smarmy Winger Bingston Jr. drop in and out of the show, but when you get the whole crew together you really start to see how many additional characters there are that we know in some capacity.

It’s a nice touch that has grown over time.

TREK TROPE TRIBUTES

• “Trapped in cowboy land? It’s a Starfleet classic!” Mariner’s joy about heading back to the Old West certainly is a longstanding Trek staple, from “Spectre of the Gun” in the Original Series and “A Fistful of Datas” in The Next Generation, all the way to “North Star” during Enterprise Season 3.
   
• After being recovered from their spacewalk, Mariner and the ensigns warm up in the ever-present shiny metallic blankets, found in Starfleet sickbays for decades.

CANON CONNECTIONS

• Shari Yen Yem is a Pandronian, previously encountered in “Bem.”
   
• Mariner’s spiral armband in the Mirror Universe simulation is the same worn by Uhura in “Mirror, Mirror,” and mirror-Boimler’s agonizer device originated in that same episode.
   
• The jagged knife which the Klingon patient presents to Tendi is the same design Worf wanted to be killed with in “Ethics,” while the orderlies (who are wearing red TNG-era medical scrubs) stress about how the Klingon has “so many backup organs!”
   
• The ‘Naked Time’ simulation features both SINNERS REPENT and LOVE MANKIND graffiti, as in the original episode.
   
• The ‘Old West Planet’ simulation is a direct callback to the Malkotian encounter in “Spectre of the Gun,” with both a bright red sky and only facades of buildings along the street.

• Aside from the the “Ephraim and Dot” Short Trek, the ‘Needs of the Many’ simulation marks our first time seeing a refit Constitution-class ship since Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and the first time the red ‘monster maroon’ uniforms have been seen since Voyager revisited the USS Excelsior in “Flashback.”
   
• The Cerritos‘ encounter with a Crystalline Entity is the first time one if its kind has been seen since “Silicon Avatar,” this time establishing that the space entity is a species and not just a one-off being.
   
• While the Borg Queen will be played by Annie Wershing next season on Star Trek: Picard, this episode marks Alice Krige’s first turn as the cybernetic leader since “Endgame,” and she blows on Boimler’s bare arm like her intimate moment with Data in Star Trek: First Contact.
   
• The cube has an “escape Sphere,” a concept introduced in First Contact.
   
• Much of the design of the Borg Cube interior is based upon “Q Who,” from the decks of regeneration chambers to the drawer of Borg babies.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

• The Cerritos warps off to rescue the time-looping USS Bakersfield during the teaser, which is likely another California-class ship.
   
• Ensign Barnes, the Trill who’s been out on dates with Rutherford, works in Cetacean Ops aboard the Cerritos — so it’s no wonder she got such a high score on the ‘Whale Rescue’ simulation.
   
• Mariner’s Andorian nemesis’ full name is Jennifer Sh’Reyan, a nod to the Andorian naming convention established in the Star Trek novel continuity.
   
• The Mirror Universe logo used in this episode’s simulation is based upon the sword-and-globe design created by art house Styleworks Creative, later used for the ongoing Mirror Broken comic book miniseries from IDW Publishing.
   
• Mariner’s “evil” Mirror Universe laugh is the same as her Vindicta laugh from “Crisis Point.”
   
• Like a video game, the Borg simulation’s music repeats every time Boimler restarts the program; the score is Ron Jones’ “Captain Borg” track from “The Best of Both Worlds, Part I.”

• While our Billups is stalwartly chaste — even in the “Naked Time” simulation, he’s just reading a padd while the rest of the crew gets busy with each other — Mirror Billups is “horny all the time.”
   
• During Ruthorford’s “Needs of the Many” simulation, calling back to Spock’s sacrifice in Wrath of Khan, the holographic engineering room has an LCARS display of the refit Constitution-class ship designed in Star Trek: Enterprise-era graphic styling.
   
• Shaxs gets in a dig at years of Star Trek cargo bay set dressing, as he frustratingly complains about the un-stackable shapes of Starfleet cargo containers.
   
• “You’re on a California-class ship… Most of the Federation doesn’t even know you exist!,” Shari Yen Yem tells Captain Freeman, a nod to why we never heard about the “second contact” fleet until Lower Decks.
   
• The black hole anomaly that Freeman takes the Cerritos into is right out of the Star Trek: Lower Decks opening title sequence, while the streaky “timequake” effect on the crew is right out of the wormhole encounter from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

• A great many of the simulations are based upon previous Star Trek movies and television episodes.
   
  • MOVIES: ‘Carbon Based Units’ (The Motion Picture), ‘The Good of the Many’ (The Wrath of Khan), ‘Escape from Spacedock (The Search for Spock), and ‘Whale Rescue’ (The Voyage Home).
     
  • EPISODES: ‘Time Trap,’ ‘The Tholian Web,’ ‘Tribble Troubles’ and ‘Tribble Infestation’ (“The Trouble with Tribbles”), ‘Cause & Effect’ and ‘Time Loop’ (“Cause and Effect), ‘Evolution,’ ‘Chain of Command,’ ‘Hero Worship,’ ‘Naked Time,’ ‘Mirror Universe Encounter’ (“Mirror, Mirror”), ‘Medical Ethics’ (“Ethics”), ‘Old West Planet’ (“Spectre of the Gun”), and ‘Escape the Void’ (“Where Silence Has Lease”).
     
  • OTHERS: ‘From Q to Q,’ ‘Borg Encounter,’ ‘Natural Selection,’ ‘Survival of the Fittest,’ ‘Extreme Engineering,’ ‘Klingon Encounter,’ ‘Teleportation Death Tag,’ ‘EMH Tak[es Command]’ (?) and the classic ‘Kobayashi Maru’ simulation.

Overall, “I, Excretus” is a hoot of an episode that exposes our characters to fun scenarios from the Star Trek canon — without having to resort to time travel or other complications! — and gives fans a chance to revel in seeing the show’s takes on those franchise favorites in a way that’s entirely faithful to the Lower Decks way of doing things.

Star Trek: Lower Decks returns with “wej Duj” — that’s Klingon for “Three Ships” — on October 7 on Paramount+ in the United States and CTV Sci Fi Channel in Canada,  followed by Amazon Prime Video (in select international regions) on October 8.