9.1.3 Ever Decreasing Circles
- Ric Crossman
- 13 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Temporal Edict
Congratulations, 24th Century tech bros. You've invented hurrying!
Office Space In Space
"Hurried" might be the word of the day, actually. "Temporal Edict" feels as rushed, and hence as careless, as our heroes are here. It's very much the least impressive of Lower Decks' first three episodes, and I don't think it would be difficult to argue for it as the weakest entry of the season, if not the entire show.
That isn't equivalent to saying it's terrible - as we'll see, there's plenty to love here,
and Lower Decks at thrusters only is still a fun ride. It's also rather bumpier than standard, though. As with last episode, the fact this was put together before the premiere is obvious. The same variations in performance and characterisation are present. If anything, they're even more noticeable, and go beyond the rough draft nature of "Envoys" (which as I noted, was perfectly reasonable and understandable) into being actual problems. I praised the previous episode for qualifying the way that much of the Cerritos senior staff are arrogant assholes: thinking you're better than the people you lead isn't the same thing as not valuing them. Here, though, Shax, Freeman and (especially) Ransom are all repeatedly and needlessly obnoxious, worse than anything we saw in "Second Contact". Freeman pulls herself back at the end, yes, but she still steamrollers over Boimler while casting herself as magnanimous for abandoning an unworkable work model. Meanwhile, Shax violates a violin and shits on an entire religion, while Ransom hilariously throws Mariner into the brig for a uniform infarction so minor even Jean-Luc "No children or earrings on the bridge" Picard might have thought it petty to enforce.
The result shoves us full-bodied back into the "us vs them" model Mariner is fixated on, but we need the show to be better than. Otherwise, the technological advancements of the 24th century notwithstanding, we'd end up marooned in a standard office sitcom, of the kind The Office itself was supposed to have completely supplanted [1].
Also pulled from the bargain bin of old sitcom cliches is the antagonists-who-are-into-each-other subplot of Mariner and Ransom. He's a dickhead boss, she's a smart-mouthed subordinate! They constantly bicker, even when there's no reason to do so - OR IS THERE? The only update "Temporal Edict" adds to this hoariest of concepts is to throw the office flight-flirts a deadly weapon. I will grant that this, at least, is original. That said, how can it be possible that we've reached the 2020s, and I still have to point out there might be a problem with having a woman crushing on a male character just moments after he literally stabbed her because she was arguing with him.
Then there's the Gelrakians. These poor greenies are asked to operate as intolerant religious extremists, new Federation members, spear-wielding mooks, and practiced space-warfare enthusiasts, all within the same twenty minutes. The plot also requires them to be extremely unreasonable and unpleasant characters, ready to kill at the slightest provocation, and proud of the various ways their legal system lets them do just that.
And sure, this is reminiscent of any number of alien species from earlier Trek shows. It's also reminiscent of any number of non-Trek shows, and films, and books, and comics. For all Mariner's stream of references, there's nothing here to distinguish Lower Decks from any other sci-fi comedy. This is just Rick and Morty with a cleaner mouth and fewer winks at the audience.
Gross Encounters Of The Third Kind
This is a problem. There were two primary failure states for the first Trek sitcom (with a number of secondary ones). The first and most obvious would just be that it wasn't funny. By now it's clear Lower Decks had sidestepped this possibility (though if you want an episode that shows just how much this show can make you laugh, I wouldn't choose this one). The second is that the show would succeed as a sci-fi comedy, but completely fail to be Trek.
It's fair to question whether this genuinely would be a failure state. If the show does its job of being funny, isn't that the ball game? Didn't I argue when writing up "Second Contact" that Lower Decks clearly not being directly compatible with TNG is to its strength, and more, that it constituted a necessary broadening of what the franchise is allowed to be? Also Prodigy barely touched on anything familiar from the franchise for almost its entire first story Wasn't I was full of praise for “Lost And Found”?
Here's the thing, though. Both stories are deliberate departures from the (then) franchise norm. A great deal of thought had clearly gone into what those departures were meant to accomplish. What can you remove and remain Trek, and what, paradoxically, is gained through those removals? So yes, that approach to telling new stories remains not just laudable, but necessary.
The planet-bound half of “Temporal Edict”, in contrast, simply takes a generic sci-fi story,
staples a Starfleet badge to its forehead, and calls it a day. Even that can work - plenty of great episodes across the franchise are clearly sci-fi first and Trek second. Where problems arise - where the pit of failure yawns - is in mistaking a staple for a fulcrum. Good sci-fi might not necessarily make for good Trek, but you can't possibly fix that problem by making the sci-fi awful. My beef with the Gelrakians is in part that they're generic, but it's mostly that they're rubbish. Hypersensitive stablads, a right royal prick, trial by combat with a Brobdingnagian bashbastard – these are the most leaden cliches of sci-fi’s golden age, and rather mean-spirited besides. I referenced Rick & Morty above, but for all that show’s many sins, I can’t see its writer’s room letting this version of the Gelrakians through to a second draft. Not without a lampshade or two, at least.
More Haste, Less Deeds
Thank the Prophets for the episode's other plot, then. Sure, it has its flaws, as we've already covered - the Gelrakians simply don't work as invading adversaries, and the overall structure is desperately and unjustifiably basic.
It's still parsecs ahead of the show's surface story, though, because the cliches on offer are at least saying something. However aggravating it might be to see the senior staff presented as one-note pedantic bean-counters, "Temporal Edict" does take the show's mixing of Starfleet arrogance and inferiority complexes to create a potent poison, and folds in a dollop of anti-capitalism to the simmering beaker.
I realise that in my very last essay, I gave you almost 4000 words that almost entirely ignored the episode I was ostensibly writing about, in favour of focussing on politics. I don’t want to repeat that trick by talking about how Captain Freeman’s new protocol, and its ugly and inevitable consequences, ties into my daily work as a union rep. That said, though, I'm fascinated by the decision to use Freeman as an example of a manager refusing to trust her staff. There's real (replicated, guilt-free) meat here. Convinced the Cerritos has been snubbed by the moving of a peace conference (because you definitely should base where to host colossally important diplomatic gatherings on which starship captains might get pissy about being left out), and equally convinced she gets no respect because her crew doesn't work hard enough (because that's definitely something Starfleet Command both keeps tabs on, and bases high-level decisions upon), Freeman decides to clamp down on unsanctioned work breaks. The mechanism by which she attempts this is to take it upon herself (and presumably the senior staff) to decide how long each each shipboard task will take, and force each crewmember to finish each job within that allotted time, before moving to the next job on the list without any kind of pause.
There are any number of reasons why this is a terrible idea. Even just theoretically, it's an obvious non-starter. It's impossible to have a sense how long a task will take even on average, without taking into account the fact that different people need different amounts of time to do equivalent tasks. There are simply too many variables, some of which cannot possibly be known ahead of time. Some people are going to need longer, and are going to have to do a crappy job to keep up with the endless countdown. Some people are going to be able to get it done quicker, and therefore have time left over before needing to start the next job, which is precisely what "buffer time" was in the first place.
Like, sure, if you collect enough data from your workforce about their roles, it becomes possible to ballpark broad figures. You probably should do that, actually, just to get a sense of how much work actually needs doing, and how it can be appropriately assigned. Doing that properly requires actually trusting in and communicating with your employees, and Freeman very clearly has no interest in either. She's concluded the people who work for her are the enemy, or at least an obstacle. This isn't just an extremely unhealthy (though extremely common) category error among bosses, it's also an approach which creates even more work. Mistrust comes with its own labour cost. Because now, someone has to generate an estimated duration for every task that needs to be done. Someone has to make sure those estimates are appended to the right task and sent to the right crewperson, in the right place in their to-do list. Someone has to make sure people are hitting enough of their deadlines, and run whatever disciplinary procedures are being used for those who aren't.
It's also just a terrible way to structure a work day. People aren't designed to spend eight hours straight in full focus - that's why work breaks are good not just for employees, but for the employer. We also really struggle when feeling constantly stressed and harried - in extremis, this is what gets you PTSD - and we often make more mistakes and lose focus more easily in such circumstances, which is why a working environment where people aren't subjected to the minimum amount of time pressure possible is good not just for employees, but for the employer. Plus, having to rush a job because you'll get in trouble if you're not done by an arbitrary deadline makes doing the job right a secondary issue. A best, that means jobs will need redoing, ultimately costing more time than if it had just been done properly in the first place. At worst - and remember just how dangerous space is, and how much can go catastrophically wrong aboard a badly-maintained starship - rush jobs can get others hurt, or killed. Which is why prioritising the quality of work over the speed at which it's done is good not just for employees, but for the employer.
Lastly, and this is the apparently stunning revelation it takes Freeman facing a fleet's worth of enraged boarders to come around to, this approach makes your workplace extremely ill-suited to respond to unexpected developments. Partly that's because you've removed all slack from the system, but it's also because you've increased the amount of time it takes for a suddenly-necessary job to be assigned, because you have to estimate the time it'll take to repel boarders, and who needs to do it and at what level of urgency, before people can actually get to phasering the interlopers.
Tough Times Taking Things Easy
The TL; DR to all of this is that time on task is an absolutely terrible metric for how effectively people are working. The only way directing work works is when you visibly have trust in your people, and they can visibly have trust in you. It's not that mutual trust guarantees no-one will ever goof around/off at work. It's that only an absolute idiot thinks that fact is a problem that needs solving, or even can be solved without making everything objectively worse. It's the shallowest thinking of the stupidest bosses, no less idiotic than the people who insist we should make the working day longer, or abolish weekends, because working longer must mean getting more done.
It is, admittedly, baffling that a 24th century Starfleet captain somehow needs to learn all this. How can it be possible to earn four pips on a red uniform without internalising elementary lessons on workforce management? There's a callousness here that bothers me, even as I see the value in the story being told. To reach one last time for Rick & Morty as a comparison, even when that show is on the side of the angels, there's a cynical sneer to every good point made. The same feels like it's happing here. It's with stories like this that Lower Decks becomes less of a love letter to TNG, and more like low-key negging.
All the pieces are present, though. The love and the excitement and the desire to show the absolute best humanity can achieve. It's just going to take a little more time for the show to figure out how to get all of that working in the same direction. I mean, let's take a moment to consider just how difficult this was to pull off - a show about tensions between employees and management in the context of a post-scarcity society where everyone is taught the full value of everyone else? We can't possibly be surprised that not everything clicked immediately. Raging against that fact is ultimately no different to Freeman's approach. Some things are going to take longer than would have been ideal; what matters is that they're done right.
And in the meantime, if the show is going to lean a little too hard into a model of mutual antagonism, at least it's taking the right side. The last shot of "Temporal Edict" lingers on a golden statue of Miles O'Brien, remembered as perhaps the greatest Starfleet officer in Federation history. Not just a hero, a union man.
Whatever else these earliest adventures of the USS Cerritos don't seem sure about, they know precisely which side they need to be on.
[1] Fuck Ricky Gervais.
Episode Ordering
1. A Man Alone
6. Temporal Edict