“Caves” is a wonderful episode that uses the familiar Star Trek visit to the standing cave set — aka the franchise’s “Planet Hell” Stage 16 set used in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise — to tell a deeply thoughtful story about the Lower Deckers’ newfound responsibilities since their promotion.  “Caves” also doubles as an examination of how, as we grow and our responsibilities increase, our friendships also change and grow in unexpected ways.
 
Boimler (Jack Quaid), Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), Tendi (Noel Wells), and a reluctant Mariner (Tawny Newsome) are assigned to an away team to study moss in the caves of Grottonus, where they become trapped — and share stories about their experience with cave away missions while they work to find an escape.
 
Throughout the episode, we see glimpses of other Cerritos missions that weren’t featured in an episode of Lower Decks, and how our core foursome of Lower Deckers have seen their relationships evolve since their promotions.
 

At New York Comic Con last Saturday, series creator and showrunner Mike McMahan discussed how this episode was designed to show the way in which, as we move through our 20s and early 30s and our jobs change and responsibilities increase, it can become harder to hold onto our core relationships. I think “Caves” demonstrates this exceptionally well, as the Lower Deckers are forced to confront the ways that their friendships have evolved — and ultimately, they rediscover the inspiration and motivation for their enduring bond.

Tendi’s story about how the Lower Deckers got trapped in a turbolift following the events of the series pilot provides a nice juxtaposition with these characters’ lives four years later — and the other flashbacks to previous cave missions give us wonderful snippets events that we have never seen before. Each has an appropriate Lower Decks level of zaniness, and they’re all creatively executed.

“Caves” is another solid example of how Lower Decks can use its Star Trek setting and its genre to such great effect, by taking a Star Trek trope and using humor to thread together a great ensemble character story.

The joke about all cave sets in Star Trek looking the same is a quick and easy one — but “Caves” takes the joke and adds a layer of complexity and nuance to it, making the episode not really about the aforementioned caverns, but about the people in those subterraneous locales. Which is what every other cave episode of Star Trek also does, thus completing the circle of telling a great Star Trek story in a way that only Lower Decks can!

The animators also do a great job of making all the caves feel very same-y. Given that Lower Decks is animation and not limited to the use of one set, they could have gone further in terms of introducing variety of settings, but that would have killed the joke.

This episode feels like a good pause on our Lower Decker core foursome before the season’s final two episodes, which McMahan promised will be very big — and that he didn’t want press to get them early to keep any hint of spoilers outside of the public eye.

It’s a wonderful moment to take a breath, but there are great character moments for the Lower Deckers (Rutherford giving birth! Mariner leading an away mission! Boimler getting friendly with Levy!), a bunch of cool aliens (Vendorians! The Graflax!), and some nice character moments for the secondary cast, like Levy the conspiracy theorist, and those losers (well, maybe they’re not that bad…) from Delta Shift.

TREK TROPE TRIBUTES

• Obviously, the big one that this episode hangs its hat on is the frequent use of caves as a story device in Star Trek, and that most of those caves all looked the same because they were filmed on the same standing set on the Paramount lot. As Mariner archly notes, “it feels like a third of our missions are in caves” and “all the caves look the same.”
• The Rutherford/T’Ana story uses the Trek Trope of a character becoming unexpectedly pregnant, previously seen in episodes like “The Child” and “Unexpected.”
• In the Boimler flashback to Kyron IV, he becomes trapped with Levy because “an ion storm blew in out of nowhere.” The use of ion storms to explain particular story circumstances and set up an episode goes all the way back to the Original Series.
• The aging field Mariner’s away team encounters on Glish plays with the trope of characters undergoing rapid aging or de-aging.
• And Tendi’s “trapped in the turbolift” story mirrors many such a story from Star Trek, with the most similarities to Harry Kim and B’Elanna Torres being stuck in the turbolift in “Year of Hell.”

CANON CONNECTIONS

• The Vendorians of The Animated Series fame get a starring turn here in “Caves,” but also previously appeared in the Lower Decks episode “Envoys.”
• The single seat vehicle found by Boimler and Levy looks similar to the Argo-type vehicle from Star Trek: Nemesis (also seen in previous Lower Decks adventures).
• Levy contends — and the Vendorians do not deny — that they were the source of “falsified data” that going to warp speed damages subspace, the central idea behind 1993’s “Force of Nature” that was very quickly forgotten. The Vendorians do deny, however, that they were behind the Klingon Civil War.
• Pergium, the substance needed by Mariner’s away team to re-start the shuttle’s engines, was the substance that the Federation was mining that led them into conflict with the Horta in “The Devil in the Dark.”

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

• The cave planets seen in this episode are “Grottonus,” “Kyron IV,” “Balkus 9,” and “Glish” — I love the way Lower Decks uses both numbers and Roman numerals for planets like there’s some rhyme of reason to it.
• Add “gammanite” to the list of made-up Star Trek minerals!
• While we don’t see much of the Cerritos senior staff on screen in this episode beyond T’Ana (Gillian Vigman) and Shaxs (Fred Tatasciore), both Dawnn Lewis and Jerry O’Connell lend their voices to the Vendorians and the other aliens seen in this episode.
• I don’t think I would enjoy having Porkian swamp rash.
• The ability to vaporize a dirty diaper would likely be a godsend to parents everywhere.
• We only hear about one more cave adventure: the time that the Lower Deckers met themselves, thinking it was them from the future, only to discover it was aliens pretending to be them, but who also turned out to have been from the future.

“Caves” is a solid character episode that lovingly sends up Star Trek’s reliance on cave episodes while giving us a deeper examination into the advancing lives and careers of the Lower Deckers. This is a great episode because its central theme is only possible after four seasons and career advancement for our characters, allowing us to reflect on how far they have come since the series pilot.

It’s a good pause before the season’s last two episodes, and I can’t wait to see how Season 4 rounds out.