Passing the midpoint of the final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks is a sobering experience. On one hand, Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 is ending, which is a little upsetting. On the other, the episode quality has never been higher. It’s nice that the series is, at least so far, going out with a bang. Hopefully, this week’s episode, “Of Gods and Angles”, will live up to that high bar.
With returning writer Aaron Burdette, who previously contributed to the premiere episode “Dos Cerritos,” this has a solid shot of being the case. This episode features the Cerritos hosting peace talks between warring civilizations, a staple Star Trek format. Meanwhile, Mariner (Tawny Newsome) teams up with a troubled ensign to solve a mystery. It has all the makings of a fun ride and a nice meditation on Mariner’s behavior.
WARNING – Spoilers below for Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 Episode 6 “Of Gods and Angles”
Cubes and Spheres
This week’s episode is, for the most part, a fairly standard diplomatic mission. It’s nothing that we haven’t seen in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Cerritos is trying to broker peace between two alien races and get an end to hostilities formalized in writing. What’s so special is that these alien races are sentient, glowing, and floating cubes and spheres.
The differences between the two species are obvious, one being blue, the other orange, as well as the whole shape thing. Star Trek as a franchise has long been moralizing about how bigotry in all its forms is bad and socially unproductive, but never have differences been so obvious on the surface. A possible exception for “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, but this episode takes it to a new level.
Where Battlefield was black and white, Angles uses geometric shapes, corners, and edges to highlight just how silly bigotry can sound. It also forced the crew into a few tight corners, with Captain Freeman removing 0’s for being too round and trying to remove edges from the ship. It played with social commentary but still did it through a humorous lens, which was much appreciated.
Ensign Demigod
The ship also has another rebellious young ensign onboard, Ensign Olly (Saba Homayoon). She’s a descendant of Zeus, or rather the psychokinetic beings from Original Series episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?”. Although she still has lightning powers, which makes her godlike enough in anyone’s book. Despite her great power, she’s still a low ranking Starfleet officer, with her rebellious spirit much mirroring Mariner through the early seasons.
The dynamic between the two of them, with Mariner trying to help Olly integrate into the ship’s morale, made it one of the more memorable guest spot characters. With the Lower Deckers all having been promoted, it’s nice to get a look at the “next generation” of ensigns coming through. It’s one of those things that just feels right as the show approaches its conclusion in a few weeks.
Watching her take control of the diplomatic situation, including some powers that wouldn’t feel out of place in a comic book movie, was a nice way to tie the episode’s subplots together. Her journey to the brig was also a fitting and funny way to close out the episode. Mariner interrogating her about Medusa was hilarious, but it was also a fitting way to close out the episode. Their friendship’s not over, and Mariner’s not done trying to help her.
The Power of a Nickname
Also trying to make new friends this week was Boimler (Jack Quaid). He’s still in possession of the PADD from the alternate universe we saw in “Dos Cerritos”. Beyond still trying to grow a beard, he’s also mimicking the actions of his alternate-universe self. In reading about the diplomatic mission, he’s basically reading about the future. Instead of trying to find the solution, he’s focused on his relationship with Dr T’ana (Gillian Vigman).
In the alternate universe, Boimler became close with Dr T’ana during this mission. So, naturally, our Boimler needs to do the same if he has any hope of being as awesome. It’s a misguided obsession, and watching him fail spectacularly for most of the episode was amazing. However thanks to some innovative surgery he needs to undergo at the episode’s conclusion, he ends up getting that nickname and book club invitation he wants.
Unfortunately for him, it’s a nickname I can’t print here. Although he rather hilariously wears it as a badge of pride. Him and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) also take very much the wrong lesson from all of this, too. I do think that this obsession with mimicking “cooler” people will come back to bite them. With the season’s arc focused on the multiverse, something done to death in modern media, it’s nice to see the impact of meeting a radically different variant of yourself.
For Peace
One of the episode’s main stories involves the disappearance of Quadralon, one of the cubes. Their room looks like a murder scene, totally torn apart, with remnants of the blue cube on the wall. Not only that, but a computer was missing from the room, presumably stolen by the attacker. It’s a nice setup, and watching Mariner and Olly go around interrogating spheres was pretty fun.
The second that the spheres mentioned the disappearance of Radiara, it’s pretty easy to clock what’s really going on. Sure, Olly mentions the computer being “melted”, an obvious tip-off that she knows what’s going on. However, it just seemed a little too obvious, like a red herring waiting to happen. A part of me was already making little comparisons to Romeo and Juliet, hoping that these secret lovers would have a less tragic ending.
Sure enough, my suspicions were proven correct. Olly was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Meanwhile, our literal star-crossed lovers got the happy ending they were after, complete with their child ending hostilities between the spheres and cubes. It’s a really sweet subplot to an episode that spent so long making fun of bigotry. The real answer and solution lie in love and understanding, a rather profound message for a 22-minute episode of a comedic Star Trek series.
Conclusion
“Of Gods and Angles” was a standard Star Trek peace brokering made special with a Lower Decks twist. Of course, the realm of animation is a portal to the sort of things that would be a production nightmare with live action. Where the series has always excelled at playing with Star Trek cliches, this one makes the most of the animated medium. Sure, the main plot was a little predictable, but it was a hilarious visual treat.
It also sets up quite the finale in a couple of weeks. While not talking about multiversal space anomalies, we are seeing how their interaction with the parallel universe is impacting their daily lives and relationships. Both this episode and the premiere, “Dos Cerritos,” written by Aaron Burdette, only deepen this connection, giving us a real roadmap as to where this series is headed for the finale episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5.
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