We’re back from vacation — here’s our review of last week’s Star Trek: Lower Decks episode!

Star Trek: Lower Decks debuts its best episode of Season 5 so far with “Fully Dilated,” a loving homage and send up of all the times our crews have gotten stranded on an alien planet for longer than they were expecting and have to find a way to fit in until they are rescued.

When investigating a quantum fissure that featured the appearance of the USS Enterprise-D from an alternate universe, the Cerritos discovers technology from the alternate universe Enterprise crash landed on the pre-industrial planet Dilmer III.

Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Tendi (Noel Wells), and T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz) are sent by Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) to retrieve the technology and avoid cultural contamination in violation of the Prime Directive, but the planet experiences a time dilation effect (like in “Blink of an Eye”) where time on the planet passes more quickly than in orbit. After a transporter malfunction caused by Boimler’s hubris, the away team is stranded on Dilmer III for almost a year (when only seconds pass on the Cerritos).

The away team discovers that the Enterprise technology is a familiar face — the head of a purple, alternate-universe Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner). Forced to adapt to their situation while waiting for retrieval, there are character growth opportunities for Mariner, Tendi, and T’Lyn, particularly since Captain Freeman is trying to decide back on the Cerritos whether Tendi or T’Lyn should take the senior science officer position on the ship.

Lower Decks always seems to save the best for last, and hopefully “Fully Dilated” kicks off the same strong run of episodes that closed out each of the previous seasons. It is a standout episode — maybe one of the series’ best — that absolutely nails a popular Star Trek trope in a completely loving way that, while not necessarily doing anything new with the trope that we haven’t seen in other episodes, does it the Lower Decks way.

Brent Spiner’s return to voice Data one more time is delightful, as are the smattering of classic Data type lines throughout the episode. This is classic emotionless Data, ol’ yellow eyes himself — or purple in this instance — and it’s really nice to get to spend a little time with this Data again, and have him spend so much time with T’Lyn. By the time he meets Mariner towards the end of the episode, she’s saying what we’re all thinking — I do think about Data all the time and he is really cool — and it’s another great Lower Decks moment of allowing fans’ love for the franchise bleed into canon just a little.

The on planet shenanigans are also very Star Trek, and give good character development for both Tendi and T’Lyn. Discovering that T’Lyn’s science experiments were not ways of competing with Tendi but instead trying to deepen the relationship between them was a sweet reveal, and shows how far the T’Lyn character has grown since her introduction into the show.

The planet stuff is all great, and Boimler’s (and now Rutherford’s) hubris about not being true to themselves and adopting these reckless behaviors of Beard Boimler is clearly setting up a fall for Boimler (Jack Quaid) towards the end of the season. I hope this storyline doesn’t require until the season finale to wrap up, because Boimler is becoming irresponsible (and annoying!) in his ongoing quest to be someone who he is not.

Like “Caves” last season or “Veritas” in Season 1, “Fully Dilated” is a classic Lower Decks take on a traditional format of Star Trek episode, and it works so well. This season is fully cranked up as it heads towards the season finale in three weeks.

TREK TROPE TRIBUTES

• “Fully Dilated” includes all the stranded Prime Directive tropes: our heroes need to figure out how to fit in, there’s a suspicious native who suspects there’s more to them that it seems, and the crew pretending they come from a completely different part of the planet to explain their lack of experience with the locale. It’s in the best tradition of “The Inner Light,” “Thine Own Self,” “Time’s Arrow,” “Blink of an Eye,” and “Carbon Creek.”

CANON CONNECTIONS

• T’Lyn’s home on the Viltan Flats makes their first appearance in the Star Trek canon, but are drawn from the Decipher Star Trek role playing game’s Vulcan supplement from the 2000s.
• T’Lyn’s sensitivity to odor is a noted trait among Vulcans, most prominently mentioned when T’Pol was serving on Enterprise in Star Trek: Enterprise.
• The Cerritos crew namecheck the planet encountered by Voyager in “Blink of an Eye” that experiences a similar time dilation effect where time on the planet’s surface travels much faster than in orbit.

• “My away mission resume is going to be more padded than a Romulan’s shoulder,” references the TNG-era Romulan uniform’s aggressive shoulder pads.
• Also specifically namechecked is “The Inner Light,” and Picard’s experience on Kataan in which he lived a whole lifetime during only a few minutes unconsciousness on the Enterprise bridge.
• Data references “I have been just a head before” (back in “Disaster”), and he discusses the events of “Time’s Arrow.”
• Geordi La Forge is also Data’s best friend in the purple universe, which feels right.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• The purple Enterprise-D strayed into our universe while “battling some evil clones of Tasha Yar or something,” which sounds like a TNG episode I would enjoy watching.
• The purple Enterprise-D makes me think of the small purple Enterprise-D accessory that was packaged with the Playmates Q figure for reasons that were never fully explained. I wonder if it was intentional?

• Doctor T’Ana commenting on Starfleet doctors playing makeup artist and costumer whenever Starfleet crews need to beam down to primitive planets is a very funny observation on how strange that is. Strange New Worlds at least tried to make it a medical thing, by having the crew’s genetic code change.
• According to Wikipedia, the michelada cocktail is “a Mexican drink made with beer, lime juice, assorted sauces (often chili-based), spices, and chili peppers. It is served in a chilled, salt-rimmed glass.”

“Fully Dilated” does what Lower Decks does best and gives us a funny and sweet spin on a beloved Star Trek classic. The alternate universe storyline appears to be heating up — we know there’s at least one more legacy character who appears before the end of the season! — and I am excited for this final act of Star Trek: Lower Decks to begin.

Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 continues with “Upper Decks,” premiering December 5 on Paramount+.