Star Trek: Lower Decks returns for its fifth and final season with “Dos Cerritos,” a season premiere that explores the road not taken for our Lower Deckers.
 
For Mariner, Boimler, and Rutherford, that’s meeting their doppelgangers from an alternate dimension when the Cerritos is accidentally caught in a quantum fissure — and for Tendi, it’s taking up the mantle of the Mistress of the Winter Constellations and trying to stay true to herself and her commitment to her sister to rejoin the Orion family business.
 

It’s so nice to have the Cerritos gang back, even if it is a little bittersweet knowing that this is one of the last episodes we’ll get from Star Trek: Lower Decks in this form. “Dos Cerritos” is a classic “our heroes meet themselves, but they’re not quite the same” of the genre that was first pioneered with “Mirror, Mirror” and continued through episodes like “Parallels,” and “Crossover.” And it’s successfully Lower Deck-y, giving the show’s unique twist on a familiar Star Trek trope.

The episode serves as a successful epilogue to last season’s two-part finale — “The Inner Fight” and “Old Friends, New Planets” — in showing how much Mariner (Tawny Newsome) has grown over the course of the show. Becky Freeman is the mirror image of Beckett Mariner, the logical conclusion of a darker path for Freeman’s growth that sees her lean into her ambition and darker tendencies. To watch our Mariner so visibly recoil from that vision of what her future could look like is a rewarding one, given how much inner fighting the character has had to do over the course of the series to date.

Meanwhile, Tendi (Noel Wells) is on a parallel path. She doesn’t meet her actual alternate-dimension counterpart the way the Cerritos does, but throughout the episode she’s constantly confronted with the role that she is supposed to be playing… rather than the one she wants to play.

Lower Decks has another loving homage to The Animated Series with the “Blue Oreeons” — a loving gag poking fun at the strange look and pronunciation of “Orions” in 1974’s “The Pirates of Orion” — and the show continues its efforts to deepen the previously one-note race. Discovering that her pirate colleagues are also seeking lives outside of piracy was a nice touch, and shows that Tendi is not a uniquely different Orion, but one who has just been given the opportunity to thrive.

Rutherford’s (Eugene Cordero) need for his relationship with Tendi gets reinforced in this episode, and Boimler’s (Jack Quaid) story is all comedy. The confident, bearded Lt. Boimler of the alternate Cerritos is a hilarious counterpoint to Bradward’s anxious mess.

From the synopsis and trailers for the season, we can surmise that these quantum fissures are the latest meta-narrative overlaid on top of Lower Decks’ largely episodic format. It’s a little frustrating that this particular story construction — small plot points that impact episodes throughout the season crescendo to the big finale — is being repeated for Season 5 after it was used to similar effect in Seasons 3 and 4, but given last season this same type of storytelling resulted in the phenomenal last two episodes, I’m willing to go along for the ride for Lower Decks’ final season.

TREK TROPE TRIBUTES

• This episode has all the trappings of any time previous crews have met themselves from alternate timelines — see episodes like “Parallels,” “Deadlock,” and “Endgame” — including the weirdness and sometimes the frostiness that comes along with that.

CANON CONNECTIONS

• Tendi is masquerading as a Haliian in the cold open, the same race as Lt. Aquiel Uhnari from The Next Generation episode “Aquiel.”
• While the character is not named in dialogue, the collector that Tendi robs from is almost certainly Palor Toff, who previously appeared in “The Most Toys.” The character’s appearance, attire, and unique metal headpiece are all the same, as well as Toff’s pride over his Veltan lust idol (referred to as a Veltan sex idol in the TNG episode.)
• Included in Toff’s trophy room is the remains of the Bajoran tablet that almost brought about the Reckoning in the Deep Space Nine episode of the same name.
• Toff also has a number of Hupyrian bodyguards, the same race as Grand Nagus Zek’s loyal servant, Maihar’du.
• Toff brandishes a Starfleet phaser from the same era as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

• Mariner and T’Lyn are playing Kal-toh, the competitive Vulcan logic puzzle that Tuvok and Harry Kim often played on Voyager.
• Boimler bemoans Naomi Wildman’s inclusion in Fleet Magazine, saying she’s “like 10 years old,” which is accurate given this episode takes place in late 2381 or early 2382 and Wildman was born on the USS Voyager in 2372.
• The anomaly encountered by the Cerritos is a quantum fissure, the same anomaly that Worf got caught up in that caused him to skip through parallel dimensions in “Parallels.”
• While this appears to be the first mention in canon of a Great Plague on Orion, in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Doctor Roger Korby supposedly translated medical records from ancient Orion ruins that significantly advanced Federation immunization techniques.
• Alternate Boimler performs Will Riker’s signature “swing the leg over the chair” move in reverse when his Ransom leaves him in command of the alternate Cerritos.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• The opening credits battle scene has become even bigger, if that were possible! Added to the chaos this season are Breen ships, Tholian ships, the big green hand of Apollo, and V’Ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
• The series title logo also has the blue “warp trails” which also accompanied the Next Generation series title in that show’s fifth season credits.

• The cover of Starfleet’s Fleet Magazinebears a striking resemblance to the now ending Star Trek Magazine that has been running since 1995 in the UK and 2006 in the United States.
• Ransom’s metaphors for what’s happening to the ship (his previous all time “carving us up like a First Contact Day salmon”) continue to be hilarious: “We’re dunking into the rift like a big old cookie!”

• It looks like Tendi kept the USS Cerritos model that she built with Rutherford in “An Embarrassment of Dooplers.”
• The alternate Cerritos’s crew uniform colors are slightly darker than in the prime universe; they seem to match more closely to the live-action version of the uniform seen in “Those Old Scientists” on Strange New Worlds.
• Alternate Ransom’s mullet is awful.
• This episodes does make appropriate fun of the decision in Discovery to canonize referring to the main narrative continuity of Star Trek as the “Prime Universe” — because every universe is “prime” to the point of view of the people who live there.
• It was cool to see the two Cerritos-es flipped upside down against each other, in a clear homage to the Enterprise and Columbia flipped against each other in “Divergence.”
• We finally learn Beckett Mariner’s full name – Beckett Mariner Freeman.

• I love the inclusion of the “Blue Oreeons” from The Animated Series, complete with their “ridiculous uniforms”!
• “There’s no interpersonal conflict on my ship!” Captain Becky Freeman shouts at her crew, who clearly weren’t as aware of the Roddenberry Rule as Freeman is.
• You know Becky Freeman is an asshole captain because she has a riding crop, the accessory of choice for asshole captains.
• “Don’t you give me that sarcastic Vulcan salute! Beckett! Ha. So that’s what that feels like.” is a nice homage to Mariner having done that to her mother in “Moist Vessel.”

It’s so nice to have the Cerritos crew back in a season opener that lets us enjoy a Lower Decks take on a classic Star Trek trope. Alternate universes are all the rage in genre media right now — see the Marvel Cinematic Universe, among others — but it arguably started in a big way with Star Trek.

It’s great to see Lower Decks take it on, and in the process get a chance for the character and us as the audience to see how things might have turned out if things had gone just a little differently.

Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 continues today with a second episode, “Shades of Green.”