Star Trek: Lower Decks wraps up a stellar second season with its most exciting and ambitious episode to date. After serving up a delicious meal in last year’s finale, “No Small Parts” — which I thought was the best season-ender since 2004’s “Zero Hour” — I was quite nervous heading into “First First Contact.”

Could Mike McMahan and his team top last season’s ending? I am please to report that I think they have, giving us everything we could have wanted in their Season 2 conclusion.

Relying this year a little less on legacy star power (after “No Small Parts” brought Riker and Troi in for a last-minute rescue), writer and series showrunner Mike McMahan leans hard into the character work that’s been carefully built up over the course of Season 2, pushing each our Cerritos pals forward in a more significant way than we’ve seen to date.

Half-remembered Star Trek: The Next Generation ensign Sonya Gomez (Lycia Naff) returns to duty as the captain of top-of-the-line Starfleet vessel, with enough time having passed since her time as an Enterprise engineer to credibly be an old friend of Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis).

“Sonia Gomez was one of the original Lower Deckers on the Enterprise-D,” said Mike McMahan when we asked him about the character’s return.

“While it was fun and surreal to get to bring back Riker and Troi (and to work with Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis!), I wanted to highlight a deeper cut hero for the second season. She’s as ‘lower decks’ as you can get, and I was thrilled to have Lycia Naff reprise the role so many years later.”

Assigned to support the USS Archimedes with a first contact mission to the Laap system, the Cerritos hangs back to let Captain Gomez and her crew approach a new Alpha Quadrant world when disaster strikes — leaving the Archimedes without power, and hurtling toward the pre-warp planet.

A dangerous asteroid field now prevents the Cerritos from mounting a rescue, and they can only get close to the Archimedes after they strip all of the outer hull plating from their ship — an out-of-the-box idea from Ensign Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) that puts every member of the Cerritos crew to work.

It’s a BIG episode — but the most impressive thing about “First First Contact” is that amidst all the ticking-clock plot points and technobabble wizardry, there’s so much well-used time devoted to furthering our characters’ personal journeys.

Freeman has to navigate her own feelings about getting the recognition she’s been craving all season, Ensign Mariner (Tawny Newsome) must come to terms that her mom’s success will mean she’s lost someone who can protect her from herself, Ensign Tendi (Noel Wells) thinks she’s failed in sickbay and being kicked off the ship, Rutherford worries about losing his memories of Tendi a second time — and even Andorian rival Jennifer Sh’reyan (Lauren Lapkus) finds a moment to consider her outward attitude.

There’s no way all of this can fit into a half-hour episode — but somehow the Lower Decks team makes it work, and it’s impressive to think how quickly fans have fallen in love with these characters after just 10 hours of screen time.

I think what I appreciated most was seeing just how badass the Cerritos crew can be when they all work together! Because of the comedic nature of the series, we often see these officers on far from their best days — like when Ransom and the senior staff blow up at Captain Freeman for hiding the news of her impending departure, or Tendi having to chase Dr. T’Ana (Gillian Vigman) around the ship for a medical scan.

But here, when the mugato dung hits the fan, the entire contingent comes together to overcome impossible odds and rescue the Archimedes. From Commander Billups’ (Paul Scheer) leading the hull-removal spacewalk to Commander Ransom’s (Jerry O’Connell) expert piloting through the asteroid, the entire team — from bridge to Cetacean Ops! — works as one… as all well-trained Starfleet crews should.

The crew even gets their moment in the spotlight, coming to save the Archimedes in the nick of time — mirroring the Titan‘s rescue of the California-class ship last season.

Like all good season finales, “First First Contact” also made clear strides to set up what’s to come in Season 3, from the hopeful to the harrowing: Tendi’s getting a well-deserved career boost, sparks fly between Mariner and Jennifer, and Boimler gets to save the day… while Rutherford unlocks a mysterious memory about his cybernetic implant, and Captain Freeman gets hauled away for supposedly destroying the Pakled homeworld.

“I knew that I wanted Season 2 to end with Captain Freeman in trouble,” McMahan told us, “but it wasn’t until late in production that I realized it would be a perfect moment to use the on-screen To Be Continued… that used to strike fear in my heart back in the 90’s.”

While it’s possible that Freeman’s arrest may be resolved as quickly as Boimler’s temporary trip to the Titan, the Rutherford and Tendi paths forward seem like they’ll have much bigger impacts on the series — and the group dynamics of our Lower Deckers.

That’s unabashedly a good thing, because after two years of setup, it’s time to take the Star Trek: Lower Decks story to the next level.

TREK TROPE TRIBUTES

• Captain Freeman gives an inspiring speech over the ship’s intercom about the dangerous rescue mission the ship is about to undertake, with quick shots of the ship’s crew listening from various locales. Though, because it’s Lower Decks, she also has to break the bad news that the ship’s ballroom dancing competition will need to be postponed.
   
• A Starfleet ship is in distress, and our crew need to overcome impossible odds to rescue them with very limited time. It’s the classic definition of a Trek trope.
   
• Tendi is excited at the prospects of becoming a senior science officer like Jadzia Dax — but T’Ana subverts the Lower Decks trope of referencing 90’s-era Trek characters, exclaiming that she’s got no clue who that is. “No, like Spock!” the Caitian exclaims, mimicking the majority of humanity who never watched Deep Space Nine.

CANON CONNECTIONS

• The Cerritos has a manual steering joystick able to pilot the ship manually — but unlike the bulky console on the Enterprise-E’s bridge, the hand control pops out of the first officer’s chair armrest.
   
• Ransom pilots the Cerritos through the debris field using only the ship’s RCS thrusters, just as Picard flew the Enterprise-D out of the asteroid field in “Booby Trap.”
   
• Admiral Freeman appears to have the model of an Akira-class starship in his office.
   
• Sonya Gomez comforts the nervous ensign on her bridge by joking about her own run-in with a “much more intimidating captain,” an oblique reference to her hot chocolate incident in “Q Who?”

• After teasing it for two full seasons, we finally pay a visit to the aquatic Cetacean Ops department, where beluga whale officers Matt and Kimolu work on navigation research.
   
• Boimler is excited to celebrate Captain Freeman Day, and mocks up a banner that looks just like the Captain Picard Day banner from “The Pegasus” — but even the whales in Cetacean Ops know that celebrations for calves.
   
• “We could end up with some weirdo with a riding crop,” Mariner frets about the possibility of a new captain, referring to egotistical Captain Styles of the Excelsior in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
   
• Boimler gets excited for the chance to honor the Starfleet tradition of lining up in the hallways to see honored crewmen off the ship, seen previously in “Redemption” and in “Homestead.”

• After a few references to it last season, was fun to finally see that even a ship like the Cerritos carries a captain’s yacht. While one appears on schematics of the Enterprise-D, the only one seen in use to date was aboard the Enterprise-E in Star Trek: Insurrection.
   
• The magnetic interlocks utilized to eject the ship’s outer hull plating are designed to emulate similar controls used to free the Enterprise-E’s deflector array in Star Trek: First Contact.
   
• Several Starfleet vessels rendezvous with the Cerritos and the Archimedes at the end of the episode: a blue-stripe (sciences) California-class, an Oberth-class, a Parliament-class, and what seems to be an Antares-class ship assist the damaged vessels, while Starfleet Security takes Captain Freeman away in a Nova-class starship.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

• As revealed on Twitter yesterday, the USS Archimedes is an Obena-class starship — a mix of Excelsior and Sovereign designs — named after the series’ art director, Nollan Obena.
   
• Keeping with the Ancient Greece theme, the Archimedes’ shuttlecraft is named Adonis.
   
• The docking arm inside the starbase, seen during the episode’s opening moments, is based upon this matte painting from “11001001.”
   
• When Rutherford dumps his implant’s saved memories of Tendi, we see brief flashes of never-seen events, including: the pair attending an art class, sketching a nude Ransom; celebrating New Year’s 2381; and getting caught in a Chinese finger trap like Data.

• Like Harry Mudd’s helmet, the top of Jennifer’s spacesuit has two little extensions to accommodate her Andorian antennae.
   
• A nearly-drowned Boimler tells Tendi that he had a vision of a koala, the universe-spanning creature Lieutenant O’Conner saw while ascending back in “Moist Vessel.”
   
• The Bajoran that Tendi treats in sickbay is the same crewman Rutherford almost killed during his sickbay rotation in “Envoys.”
   
• The golden look of the ‘naked’ Cerritos is one of the coolest things this season.

In one of the deepest-of-deep-cut gags this season, Tendi thinks she and Rutherford are off to see “the rubber ducky room,” a joke which only makes sense if you know about the many visual Easter eggs in the Enterprise-D’s master systems display graphic… and only clearly visible in tie-in reference works like The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual.

Added to the big Main Engineering display for TNG Season 3 (and typically covered up with black tape when the camera got too close), the joke graphics are barely visible on-screen in “Galaxy’s Child” and in “Brothers” thanks to the high-definition remaster — and nearly impossible to see in the broadcast-quality original editions.

That original MSD graphic was created for Star Trek: The Next Generation by Mike Okuda, who returned to the Trek fold this season to expand some of the Cerritos‘ technical designs for Star Trek: Lower Decks — and help correct one design element of the ship’s interior layout you may not have noticed.

“We met with Mike Okuda after Season 1,” Mike McMahan told us back on Star Trek Day in September, “and we had a couple of meetings with him where we went through [the Cerritos] deck-by-deck and really talked about what we wanted to do with the ship in the future, our plans for it.”

One of the things Okuda “pushed for, real hard” was to reorient the energy conduits in the Cerritos engineering bay from their original ‘uphill’ angle, to a more-appropriate ‘downhill’ position — which only makes sense, because the ship’s warp nacelles are located below the engineering pod between them.

“Working with the Okudas is a dream I didn’t know I had, it’s literally so amazing I couldn’t even imagine it,” McMahan said when we spoke again this week. “They’re both so friendly, and thoughtful, and DEEPLY smart about Star Trek design — both in what looks right and how to tell a story with it — that we immediately hit it off.”

Along with the engineering change, Mike Okuda also designed the hyper-detailed Cerritos master systems display graphic seen in “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie,” along with the barely-visible California-class logo that we hope to see in higher-resolution someday soon.

“Both of the Okudas are ambassadors for everything I love about what Star Trek looks like,” McMahan continued. “They they also embody the goodness and morality of Star Trek, and I truly feel lucky to have been able to geek out with them over California-class designs and schematics. I also LOOOOOVE the Cali-class logo that Mike designed for us as a surprise!”

After a pulse-pounding episode with a seemingly-happy ending, Captain Freeman’s arrest comes as quite a shock — but it’s a classic Star Trek cliffhanger, and one that’ll make the year-long wait for Lower Decks Season 3 even longer.

Lower Decks is probably the best thing about this modern era of Star Trek, certainly something none of us expected when the show was first announced back in 2018. It’s been a terrific season, with only one real misfire along the way, and I hope this show continues for as long as Mike McMahan and his team want to continue making it.

Wherever the series takes us in Season 3, I know I’ll be aboard for the ride.

Star Trek: Lower Decks may be done for 2021, but the already-in-production Season 3 will return to Paramount+ in the United States, CTV Sci Fi Channel in Canada, and to Amazon Prime Video (in select international regions) in 2022.