9.1.2 "Second Comes Right After First!"

Envoys

A step back, a leap forward.

Second Contact

We talked last time about the ways Lower Decks immediately establishes itself as a better Trek show than either Discovery or Picard. "Envoys" continues to make that case, but it also ups the ante, beginning the process of proving itself not just superior Trek, but superior television.

. Much of this comes down to a careful structuring of the show overall. Narrative and thematic coherence are something both earlier shows struggled with. Discovery has a better excuse here, given the bailing of Bryan Fuller, and is also chained to a rather smaller rock - I didn't have to fake a total collapse in production efforts to find a way to redeem "Battle At The Binary Stars". It's still worth noting though that, despite being the only one of the three series to not be either predominantly or entirely serialised, Lower Decks effortlessly comes across as the show that's been most meticulously planned.

We can see this very quickly by comparing "Envoys" with "Second Contact". Digging around online hasn't provided any specific details about the order in which episodes were worked on, but it's impossible to listen to the dialogue in "Envoys" without concluding this was the earlier episode to be written, or at least to be recorded. Mariner's tone is more subdued than normal, T'Ana's less cat-tongue rough, and Rutherford sounds almost as scattered as his career trajectory.

This is a common enough approach, of course. Plenty of shows film their premier later in the production order, to give everyone involved a chance to bed themselves in. That way, the tiny incisor marks of any teething troubles aren't visible until later, when the audience have at least some grasp of what they're watching.

What's more striking here is how clear it is "Envoys" was always intended to be the show's second episode specifically. We'll talk about why that's true in a moment, but first we should note that it wasn't strictly speaking necessary to have any episode designed to come second. Aside from Voyager, which needed to install B'Elanna Torres as Chief Engineer, not a single 20th century Trek show follows its premiere with an episode that couldn't have been pushed back in the run order by at least a slot or two.

But second episodes have a specific job to do: to follow on from charting our arrival into the story's world, by showing us what regular life in that world is going to look like.

"Envoys" delivers on this mission in a number of ways. Most immediately, it's going for funny. Like, really funny, the kind of funny where you build joke atop joke atop joke, and refuse to give a damn about the inevitable consequence of people missing solid-gold lines the first time they watch the episode, I was howling as Rutherford's attempt to follow Ransom's advice led to absurdly hyperbolic disaster, and almost missed Ransom responding with "Let's try it again, on a ship with even MORE children!". There's a breezy confidence here that people are going to want to rewatch this, and offering them an reward for doing so. This is what helped The Simpsons conquer the world, before someone backstage decided being that good was, like, just too much work, y'know?

Restart Officers

All of which is good news for the first Trek comedy, obviously, It's not what's most important, though. Indeed, while Lower Decks failing to be funny would have doomed the show very quickly, the ways the show delivers its laughs are probably the least interesting part of the whole production. What's more notable about our first "standard" adventure is its defiantly small-bore nature. Fundamentally, this is an episode about how a cab drop-off goes slightly wrong because the fare had too much to drink, and steals your wheels while your back is turned. The opening episode of the season was Trek's Sean Of The Dead. This is Trek's Taxi.

This is a savvy call. Not just because "drunk dickhead mate ruins things for everyone" is so relatable a concept, and thus an easy way to mine comedy ("Envoys" is, for my money, the funniest episode of at least the show's first four). Making our first standard day aboard the Cerritos seem so regular allows for considerations of character that would simply be drowned out by repeated phaser barrages. This is an episode about who are characters are, and who they want to be, rather than who they're forced to become by an existential crisis. Rutherford's B-plot reinforces this idea (Tendi, having been our route into the show last week, is used sparingly here), with his story revolving around how to find the balance between loving one's job, and living it.

It's with Rutherford's search that the true cleverness of what we're seeing becomes clear,. Let's talk about the ship's senior staff. I gave the upper decks no shortage of stick last time, describing them as entitled avatars of toxic competence, who pour scorn upon everyone outside the tiny circle Starfleet tells them can only contain the greatest exemplars of sentience imaginable. This doesn't actually change here - note Captain Freeman's only appearance in the episode underlines her vainglorious preening. While the senior staff aren't any less arrogant, though, we at least see that, absent an infestation of chunder-zombies, they'll take time to be supportive with their subordinates. If they fail to recognise the importance of the work done by the people below them, the senior staff still respect them as people.

This is a critical distinction which does much to define the show's story space . The problematic attitude to talent and capacity Starfleet engenders is kept orthogonal to the crew's attitude to interpersonal relationships. That approach can be summarised as "be excellent to each other". Rutherford's quest to find his place is packed with senior officers who just want him to do the best he can at whatever job he chooses. Even T'Ana is broadly supportive, at least by her standards (a clue that this is indeed not just an early recording, but an early script). She yells at him, yes, but more in concern and disbelief than ill-temper, and of course it's in Sickbay alone that Rutherford's inexperience could - and does - cause actual people actual harm.

Making this clear had to happen early in the season. It also had to be made clear after we'd already seen the senior officer's limitations and issues. Not just for the standard reasons that it's easier to make characters likeable long term if you start with their flaws and move on to their virtues, rather than the other way round. It's also about establishing early- hence this being done in the second episode - that the standard MO of Cerritos officers is to treat their subordinates with respect and dignity. The captain's inferiority complex is going to continue to cause issues, but fundamentally, we're aboard a Starfleet vessel, and an average day working on a ship like that is supposed to be a positive and enriching experience.

Back To The Future

It isn't just the people up the ladder who can ruin your work day, of course. Our principal plot here focusses on how Mariner and Boimler are each struggling with the way the other wants to do things. At first glance, this isn't all that promising - yes, it fits into the broader theme of wanting to find how to come at your job in the right way, and with appropriate support. But it's also dipping into cliche; mismatched roommates who have to learn to respect each other's differences and cooperate despite them,

Nor does it help that the specific framing of their clash this week, book learning vs. personal experience, isn't just hoary, it's an juxtaposition that's usually questionable in intent, and almost invariably wearying in effect. Worse, there seems to be little to stop us going even further, and noting their story here boils down to a smart and capable black woman feigning stupidity and ineffectualness to salve a flailing white guy's feelings - and doing to by asking someone to play up an outdated cultural stereotype, no less.

Neither criticism fails to land, but it's worth noting they don’t fully capture what’s being done here. Least mitigating, though important in the context of us discussing how tightly the show is put together, is how Boimler’s confusion as to how Mariner has had time to pick up all this life experience (including but not limited to becoming blood-bonded to a Klingon warrior) despite them both being ensigns quietly continues the work of setting up Mariner’s backstory [1]. There’s also the fact that while “you’re book smart but I’m street smart” stories are generally problematic for a number of reasons (and the ethnicities of those involved here play into this in unfortunate ways), it’s both reasonable and important to puncture the idea one can learn how to interact with a foreign culture simply by reading enough books on it. Particularly when it comes to Trek. Remember “Coming Of Age”, in which wunderkind Wesley Crusher catches sight of an angry stranger’s webbed fingers, and immediately and effortlessly intuits how to diffuse the situation? Trek, like almost all space opera, has long had a predilection to reduce entire cultures to one or two keywords (a big part of why the medium is almost inescapably problematic), and Boimler’s continuation of this approach absolutely needs taking down.

This though does raise even more questions about Mariner's decision to gift Boimler with a negative stereotype for him to feel smug about holding. To be honest, I don’t think this is fully salvageable. That said, it’s only - “only” - problematic to the precise extent all Ferengi stories have their issues, which is, to restate, that they’re perfectly reasonable and indeed necessary stories about the need to avoid cis-het white guys who’ve bought into the intersection between patriarchy and capitalism, aggravatingly outsourced to an alien race in a way that is at best shifting blame, and at worst engaging in antisemitism.

Within this admittedly difficult context, “Envoys” does better than almost any other Ferengi yarn. The idea Starfleet officers are warned about Ferengi at the Academy was established in “Caretaker”, but their society was changed forever at the end of Deep Space Nine, a fact which this episode doesn’t neglect. Quimp clearly isn’t a Ferengi in the classic mould – he engages with Mariner on equal terms, and talks about an off-world holiday with his wife, which would have been an outrageous breach of cultural mores (if not actually illegal, depending on whether Quimp is married to another Ferengi) just a few years earlier. Their cultural context has shifted hugely, or at least become far more complex (it’s not at all surprising what the show calls “creepy throwback "Last Outpost"-style Ferengi” still exist – assuming their entire society would immediately adopt to Nog’s approach is no less reductive than assuming they were all perfectly onboard with how Zek ran things), but Starfleet clearly hasn’t considered it worth updating their curriculum accordingly.

In short, the problem here isn’t in how the franchise conceives of the Ferengi, but in how Starfleet does. Quimp would have every right to be outraged by this, but he chooses instead to play into it, as a favour to his friend, and in the interests of not completely crushing a young ensign who is genuinely trying his best to be respectful to others.

This brings us to the question of who are "Envoys" actually are, here. Boimler and Mariner to some extend end up in that role, unofficially, as they head into a local community in uniform. More fruitful though is to see K'Orin and Quimp as being the titular envoys, not to the planet, but to us. This is Lower Decks sending us the kind of characters that represent what the show is going to be. The bizarrely popular Klingons are represented by a pathetic alcoholic unable to take a taxi ride without getting so drunk he ruins everyone's day, and the barely two-dimensional Ferengi are represented by a stand-up guy willing to wear the audiences' preconceptions as a cloak, just to help out his mate. In both cases, the history Trek is not just respected, but expanded and commented on, an approach Discovery frequently struggled with, and Picard considered entirely beside the point.

This, then, is what Lower Decks wants us to know about the show it will be - one in which you can make fun while still showing respect, and in which we can be clear-eyed about where things have gone wrong, without losing sight of the importance of just trying to be the best person you can. It's also going to be a show which wants to provide the space to learn who its characters want to be, rather than who they feel they have to. The focus is on who they can be on their best day, and how they work to make that day better for others, as well. Cooperation and hope are, if not defaults, at least understood as fundamental goals.

Once again, it all comes down to structure. "Second Contact" showed us our way back into Trek once more. "Envoys" demonstrates where it's somewhere we should be glad to stay.

[1] See also how Rutherford's subplot introduces both the ongoing quasi-romantic/sexual tension between him and Tendi, and the possibility his implant might be designed to do more than he currently realises. Rewatching Lower Decks I'm staggered by just how much was being quietly set up from the very start.

Ordering

1. Past Prologue 

2. Maps And Legends

3. Yesteryear 4. Envoys

5. Battle At The Binary Stars

6. Parallax

7. Fight Or Flight

8. Charlie X 

9. The Naked Now