The back half of Star Trek: Lower Decks’ season kicks off with “The Spy Humungous,” an episode which ups the ante on the simmering tensions between Starfleet and the Pakleds, while at the same time giving our eager ensigns a fun pair of stories aboard the Cerritos.

The joy of this episode for me was the way in which it told a great story without relying too heavily on Star Trek Easter eggs or references — something which some of you in our comments section were just talking about.

While looking for all the callbacks and references has become a big feature of watching Lower Decks each week, it’s nice for the show to mix up episodes that lean heavily into nostalgia with those that let the Lower Decks characters stand alone. It is important for the show that the “all you can eat” buffets of references are balanced by trying to do and say new things, and this episode succeeds greatly at that.

The Pakled Planet storyline is the closest this show feels like it has come to a standard Next Generation-style episode, with Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) ably navigating negotiations with a hostile race while never seeming to lose the upper hand — and though this storyline has a definite Lower Decks spin to it Freeman is exceedingly competent in her role.

On the ship, Commander Ransom (Jerry O’Connell) and Lt. Kayshon (Carl Tart) make a hilarious team trying to keep the reigns on the less-than-subtle Pakled spy, even if they do think a little too highly of themselves. (But it’s sure great to see Kayshon back in this episode after a few weeks away!)

The senior-officer storyline may play as a joke about the Pakleds’ incompetance, but it reveals what may be the endgame in their conflict with the Federation: the Varuvian bomb which Freeman tricks them into talking about uses the same ore that the Titan undercover mission was all about back in “Kayshon, His Eyes Open” — a substance which terrorists used “to try to blow up Starbase 58.”

This likely won’t be the last time we hear about Varuvian ore this season!

The whole concept behind “Anomaly Collection Duty” is another way in which Lower Decks has taken something about Star Trek and added depth to it. Starfleet senior officers love to do science experiments — even ones that might involve dangerous, mysterious sci-fi stuff.

All those weird artifacts need to go somewhere, and this week it’s up to Tendi (Noel Wells) to collect them, while dragging Mariner (Tawny Newsome) and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) along despite their growing complaints about pulling such a low-brow assignment.

Anomaly Collection Duty is a neat concept, perhaps most of all because it reinforces the idea that even though the bridge crew may be the “cool” ones on the ship, they’re still all science nerds at heart with their own science labs and experiments.

It sure seems like the Cerritos has some very interesting missions in between episodes!

Meanwhile, Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid) gets an interesting opportunity following his return from the Titan, as a group of “cool kid” career-minded ensigns welcome him into their “Redshirts” club. These three egotistical ensigns are everything Starfleet officers should not be — and that’s the point of this story, dear commenters — as their minds are focused only on getting promoted, at the expense of anyone else around them.

The episode does a nice job of showing that, for as ridiculous as the antics of our Lower Deckers can be, our four leads are much more “Starfleet” than some may thing — because they do the work that needs doing, rather than just giving motivational speeches and trying to “be the captain.”

Boimler realizes (at his own expense) that Tendi finds slapstick humor hilarious, so when he correctly identifies an Ataxian mood shifter as the cause of her insectoid transformation, he proceeds to engineer a series of slapstick moments to snap her out her scorpion form.

While he takes action to save the day, all the “Redshirts” can muster is to deliver overlapping speeches — what someone might think happens on Star Trek, if they’ve entirely missed the point. To drive the point home about who was ultimately in the right, while Ensign Casey may have gotten his five seconds of glory up on the bridge, Boimler is the one who got earned real, direct praise from Ransom for saving the day.

Sometimes being a real leader is covering yourself in food, and that’s a point that Lower Decks is uniquely positioned to make.

TREK TROPE TRIBUTES

• The captain and security chief beam down to negotiate peace on a hostile alien world — only to be captured and forced to bargain for their safety. Any Star Trek episode that starts like that has my attention!

CANON CONNECTIONS

• Just like the Pakleds mistook both the Cerritos and the Titan for the Enterprise in “No Small Parts,” here they mistake Captain Freeman for Voyager’s Captain Janeway.
   
• Rumdar references wanting to see the Cerritos‘ “crimson force field,” a reference to the fictional weapon that the Enterprise used against the Pakleds in “Samaritan Snare.”
   
• “We’re not exactly dealing with the Tal Shiar here,” Ransom tells Kayshon about the obvious spy Rumdar, referring to the Romulan secret police.
   
• When Boimler gives his mock captain’s speech for the Redshirts, he mentally sees himself on the bridge of a Galaxy-class starship, the first time we’ve seen those familiar beige seats since Star Trek: Generations.
   
• After he got name-checked back in “No Small Parts,” we actually go back to planet Vagra II to check on Armus himself — the first time the old oil slick monster has been seen since 1988’s “Skin of Evil.” Who ever thought THAT would happen?!

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

• The Pakled planet is called Pakled Planet. Makes sense.
   
• The Pakleds are governed by a king, queen, and an emperor each with a helmet larger than the last.
   
• The USS Ventura is another California-class vessel in the fleet.
   
• That annoying improv artist, Lt. Winger Bingston Jr., has a one-man show in which he performs as all the moons of Jupiter. What a guy.
   
• When the Kzinti ensign redshirt tells Boimler his posture is not captain-like, he hunches over in a posture similar to how the Kzinti prowled around in the Animated Series.
   
• The solution to making Boimler’s uniform look more like a captain is… bigger shoulder pads and skin-tight tailoring. Sounds about right!
   
• “We work in Starfleet. They work for Starfleet,” has got to be one of the slimiest things we’ve ever heard one Starfleet officer say to another — so I was glad to see Ensign Casey assigned to Pakled latrine duty after that ego trip.
   
• Boimler’s order of “Birthday cake. Lit candles. Various temperatures!” continues the hilarious joke of making ultra-specific requests to the replicator system about food temperatures.

Writer John Cochran’s “The Spy Humongous” appears to set us on a course for the remainder of the year’s stories, with more Pakled fun as promised.

But Lower Decks never strays far from its core, this week teaching Boimler a really important lesson about what it really means to be part of a team — and what it means to ultimately lead that team in whatever circumstance you find yourself.

We could all do with remembering more often that leadership is just as often about helping others, as it is about making speeches.

Star Trek: Lower Decks returns with “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie” on September 23– on Paramount+ in the United States and CTV Sci Fi Channel in Canada — followed by Amazon Prime Video (in select international regions) on September 24.