“Room For Growth” is an episode whose central theme is fully encapsulated by its title, that everyone aboard the USS Cerritos has room for personal and professional growth. And though our characters all learn something in both storylines, the week’s A-story felt inconsequential to me and largely fell flat.

After the Cerritos encounters a D’Arsay archive that transforms the ship into an ancient alien city, Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) orders mandatory shore leave for the ship’s overworked engineers. Meanwhile — in the downtime created by the captain’s absence from the ship as she supervises the engineers — Ensigns Boimler (Jack Quaid), Mariner (Tawny Newsome) and Tendi (Noel Wells) race to beat their rivals in Delta Shift to rig a lottery for newly-available quarters, by plotting a route to the terminal that controls the lottery through the ship’s maintenance systems.

I really liked that this episode let us see parts of the ship that we’ve never visited before, including a swamp underneath the hydroponics bay and inside the ship’s main deflector. Lower Decks has never shied away from showing us things on a starship that live action has not yet or likely could not, and so it’s always cool to visit new places.

But the room lottery storyline just did not do it for me — I have just never particularly enjoyed Star Trek episodes that revolve around characters being jerks to each other on purpose, particularly when that is meant to be the main driving source of humor from the plotline. That’s what the room lottery storyline hinges upon: the Delta Shifters are jerks!

There’s some nobility and personal growth in our Lower Deckers deciding they don’t want to be split up and stay together for as long as possible, but there’s no greater depth to their antagonists than that they are jerks.

As a source of character conflict within Starfleet, I just find that really boring; it just feels so inconsequential and petty. There’s nothing wrong with Star Trek exploring pettiness or conflict between characters, but when that’s all that is ultimately driving the story here, it just feels lacking.

This is not to say that I subscribe to Gene Roddenberry’s no-character-conflict rules from The Next Generation — that it never happens between Starfleet characters — but there are interesting ways to do it, and there are easy ways to reach for laughs. Sadly, in the room lottery storyline, “Room For Growth” reaches for the latter.

But what’s strange about this episode is that where the room lottery storyline fails for me, it succeeds in the B-story’s character conflict between Captain Freeman and the Cerritos engineering team aboard the spa vessel. The conflict in this plotline is about Freeman’s desire to do what’s right for her crew by providing them a space to relax, butting up against the engineering staff’s need to relax in their own way.

Both parties have to learn to be flexible to each other’s needs, and that’s ultimately a real message — and demonstrates real growth by everyone. While the storyline isn’t all that consequential, though the idea of a Federation starship entirely devoted to relaxation is an interesting and humorous one, it still feels like the episode ends with a substantial outcome from that story.

That’s the kind of Star Trek story — and the kind of Lower Decks story — that I enjoy watching.

TREK TROPE TRIBUTES

• Freeman accuses the Cerritos engineers of all being “goddamn Geordi La Forges,” referring of course to the Next Gen chief engineer, furthering the Trek trope that Starfleet engineers never know how to take a break. (Any real engineers reading this, let us know in the comments if that’s true for real life too!)
   
• Apparently Will Riker isn’t the only Starfleet first officer to de-evolve into a caveman, as the same thing apparently happened to Commander Ransom (Jerry O’Connell) in one of the Cerritos’ previous (unseen) adventures.

CANON CONNECTIONS

• The D’Arsay archive seen transforming the Cerritos in the cold open is a reference to The Next Generation episode “Masks,” where another D’Arsay Archive transforms the USS Enterprise — though the archive the Cerritos encounters (apparently not even the first!) is dedicated to the god Minooki.
   
• Taz, the administrator aboard the Dove spa vessel, is the third Edosian seen on Star Trek — and the second in Lower Decks, following the Osler commander seen in Season 1’s “Much Ado About Boimler.” It seems that this species gets to manage Starfleet’s more unique service vessels!

• It looks like the Doopler emissary from “An Embarrassment of Dooplers” left one of his split bodies behind — a Doopler corpse is tucked behind one of the roots in the swamp beneath the hydroponics bay.
   
• The mud from the mud bath aboard the Dove comes from the Tellarite homeworld, Tellar Prime.
   
• One of the relaxation technicians aboard the Dove is the same avian species as Doctor Migleemo.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

• Boimler’s padd gives us another good look at the detailed Cerritos cross-section map designed for Season 2.
   
• Towel Guy, who we’ve seen in multiple previous episodes, has a name: Federov! And Mariner is right, he really could replicate a bigger towel.
   
• Shaxs (Fred Tatasciore) and T’Ana’s (Gillian Vigman) foreplay is to commit crimes together on the holodeck, similar to Dixon Hill, but working for the other side, and with the holodeck safety protocols turned off. And that’s all we need to say about that!
   
• One of Shaxs’s complaints to T’Ana is that he died and they “never talked about it” — a reference to the Bajoran’s death at the end of Season 1 and unseen resurrection in Season 2.
   
• The color transition work as Tendi, Mariner and Boimler pass between the black-and-white holodeck and the full-color Jefferies tube environment is really well done.

• We do learn that Doctor T’Ana lost her tail when she was serving aboard the USS Algonquin, and now Shaxs is the only other person who knows the full story.
   
• Shaxs wants to phaser the incoming asteroids, but Ransom reminds him that’s the deflector dish’s function aboard a starship. The deflector: often mentioned but rarely explained!
   
• In the funniest aside in the episode, Boimler, Mariner, and Tendi discuss what they’ll say to let people enter their quarters, referencing Riker’s use of “come!” Tendi’s suggestion of “Enter, friend” is a little more inviting, though.
   
• Boimler is still leaning into the Bold Boimler persona from “The Least Dangerous Game.”

Overall, sadly, “Room For Growth” is the least successful Lower Decks outing in some time. The episode’s A-plot just did not come together for me, and the episode as a whole just feels rather inconsequential — and lacking in the explosive laughs that Lower Decks is more than capable of.

It’s not a bad episode, exactly, it just does not live up to the show’s potential.

Star Trek: Lower Decks returns with “Reflections” on Thursday, September 22 on Paramount+ in the United States, Australia, Latin America, and the Nordics, as well as on CTV Sci Fi Channel in Canada and on Prime Video in many other regions.