“Fissure Quest” serves up an all-you-can-eat buffet of legacy Star Trek for the penultimate episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks; it’s an innovative, fun, surprising, and action-packed half hour that creates major stakes for the show’s season finale. I loved “Fissure Quest,” and I cannot wait to see how Mike McMahan and the Lower Decks team bring this show to a conclusion.
 
“Fissure Quest” picks up the story of William Boimler (Jack Quaid), Bradward Boimler’s transporter duplicate whose death was later faked by Section 31. Commanding the USS Anaximander, Boimler’s crew is made up of characters from across different realities united together to stop whoever is seemingly causing the emergence of the temporal rifts that have been appearing throughout the multiverse all season.
 

When Lower Decks was greenlit, and all throughout the show, fans have had their wish lists for which characters, ships, or situations could return to Star Trek. With animation, the sky has always been the limit in terms of getting Star Trek characters to come back, or interact with each other in surprising ways. And until its big final act, the show has been pretty restrained, all things considered. We’ve had some big legacy character appearances that have thrilled and surprised us, but they were always integral to the story being told, and never detracted from the show’s core characters.

But after five seasons of responsibly playing with the toys in the toybox, I am thrilled that for the show’s penultimate episode the Lower Decks crew went all out. Garak? Bashir? Harry Kim? Curzon Dax? T’Pol?! Lily Sloane???!!! This episode has all that… and more! It’s a joyous mélange of Star Trek surprises that kept building on itself, and for one episode, Lower Decks gorged itself on Star Trek. I’m so glad it did.

Perhaps most surprisingly and wondrously to me was the return of T’Pol (Jolene Blalock, credited here as simply ‘Jolene’ per her request). Aside from a brief appearance at one of the Star Trek Day celebrations several years ago, Blalock has hardly acted or been involved in anything Star Trek related for many years; she married Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino in 2003 and is now heavily involved in their joint charitable organization, The Rapino Foundation.

T’Pol is one of the greatest Star Trek characters ever, in my opinion, and to have Blalock back voicing the character — and one who got the happy life she deserved with Trip Tucker — was a real delight.

“Fissure Quest” also, in true Lower Decks fashion, provides a meta-commentary on the pop culture fixation with the multiverse and alternate realities. Whether it’s Star Trek, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or other major science fiction/fantasy property, the idea of alternate realities has been all the rage in recent years. Audiences have been demonstrating that they are starting to get tired of it though, and it felt like Captain Boimler’s ennui at his multiversal adventures was a commentary on the trend.

It was also rich and surprising that the “big bad” of the season wasn’t a big bad at all. After season four built up to a villain reveal in the form of Nick Locarno, it would have felt overly repetitive to have done so again this season with a different set of circumstances. Instead, the decision to make it an unintended consequence of an Enterprise-era Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard) commanding a ship exploring the multiverse was extremely smart, and Sloane’s argument in favor of the value of exploring the multiverse was pretty compelling actually. I really enjoyed that, amid all the action adventure, this is a story about the consequences of exploration. That’s a Star Trek episode right there.

If I have one criticism about this episode, and it’s a minor one, it’s that I’m pretty tired of the Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) as perpetual ensign meme. The show can’t have come and gone without including the Star Trek franchise’s “forever ensign,” (as Garrett Wang calls himself in the introduction to his Star Trek podcast The Delta Flyers,) but this is one joke that’s more than played out. But everything else about this episode was so fun, I can forgive it for getting a little obvious with the Harry Kim of it all.

TREK TROPE TRIBUTES

• Believing that someone is causing you harm but discovering their motivates are different and innocent has been a common trope in Star Trek, stretching all the way back to TOS’s “The Devil in the Dark” all the way forward to Star Trek Discovery’s fourth season.

CANON CONNECTIONS

• The Emergency Medical Hologram based on Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) is a concept that was explored in the Prime Timeline in “Doctor Bashir, I Presume.”
• Most of the Harry Kims are dressed in the regular Voyager-era Starfleet uniform, though a few wear the grey shouldered Starfleet uniform from The Next Generation movies and Deep Space Nine. There’s also a singular Kim wearing the racing uniform from “Drive.”
• Boimler speculates whether the occupant of the rescued Starfleet escape pod will be a “really big Spock,” another reference to the infinite Vulcan seen as a skeleton in “Kayshon His Eyes Open.”

• In the reality this episode’s Mariner comes from, it is Troi who has a transporter duplicate stranded on a planet for years instead of Riker, as seen in “Second Chances.”
• The Khwopians were previously seen in Season 1’s “Much Ado About Boimler.” “At least they’re not trying to drink our bones!” Curzon muses, likely a reference to the Moopsy from “I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee.”
• The USS Beagle is a modification of the Enterprise ring ship design seen on the rec deck of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, seen also in artwork on Earth in Star Trek: Enterprise and as a model in Star Trek Into Darkness.
• This Lily Sloane comes from a reality where Zefram Cochrane helped build the “quantum reality drive” instead of the warp drive.
• Captain Sloane’s uniform is the Enterprise-era jumpsuit, featuring the Beagle on the mission patch; the corridors of the Beagle are the same as the Enterprise NX-01. I’m so happy they managed to find a good way of getting some Enterprise love into the show.
• Captain Sloane’s uniform is purple, while her crew wears blue — a likely reference to how the Star Trek: Enterprise costume department dyed the original purple jumpsuit uniforms to navy blue in the latter half of the series.
• Captain Sloane and the Beagle crew have ethical directives about contacting entities that have not yet developed the technology to travel between realities, which sounds like the reality hopping version of the Prime Directive.

• We get to see a Defiant-class ship’s bridge, mess hall, quarters, engineering, and sickbay again for the first time since Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
• The explosion in the rift causes soliton waves to travel between and destroy realities. Soliton waves allowed for an alternative to warp drive in TNG’s “New Ground.”

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• Anaximander, for whom Boimler’s ship is named, was one of the earliest Greek philosophers, who helped Greek philosophy begin to conceptualize infinity and that the natural world is governed by a set of rules.
• The alternate yellow-shirt Mariner (Tawny Newsome) we meet in this episode is part of Starfleet’s engineering division.
• Given that Curzon Dax’s dialogue has only ever been previously spoken through Rene Aubjeronois in the character’s merger with Odo, that makes Fred Tatasciore the canonical voice of Curzon Dax moving forward.
• T’Pol is an “expert in human emotions after being married to Trip Tucker for decades” telling us that this T’Pol got the happy ending she wanted with Tucker.
• T’Pol’s outfit bears a great similarity to the garments worn by her mother T’Les in the Enterprise episode “Home.”

• Andrew Robinson and Alexander Siddig reprise their roles as Garak and Bashir respectively, and bring to canon the relationship between Garak and Bashir that many fans have wanted to see — and that the actors themselves have acted out in fan gatherings on prior occasions.
• After being rescued, Kim is surprised to learn there are more than two dimensions, which might be a tongue-in-cheek implication that he knows he comes from an animated universe. The implications of that hurt my head, so I am not going to think more about it beyond a nice wink to the show’s animated nature.
• One of the potential villains Boimler theorizes about is a “Borgified Kirk,” which might be a passing reference to the William Shatner novel The Return, where the Borg play a role in bringing Captain Kirk back to life after the events of Star Trek: Generations.
• I cannot believe Alfre Woodard is back in Star Trek. What a coup for Lower Decks!
• Sloane’s explanation of the exploratory power of traveling between different realities is touching:  “It’s fun to learn about aliens, but learning about humanity, that’s something else. I’ve met humans who’ve built rings around the sun. I’ve met others whose ships are the size of continents. I’m learning about what humans can be. Mapping our potential. So far, it’s limitless.”

“Fissure Quest” provides an explosive love letter to the Star Trek franchise as a whole, and takes Lower Decks to the maximum. It capably sets up big stakes for the series finale, which looks like it’ll focus more tightly on our core characters as they work to save their universe from destruction.

I can’t wait to get one more episode with Boimler, Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford, and while I am sad that it’s ending, based on the first part of this series finale, it’s going out on a high. I love Lower Decks!

Star Trek: Lower Decks concludes next week with “The New Next Generation,” premiering December 19 on Paramount+.