Amph "Warp Me!" - Star Trek: Lower Decks [Paramount+ Animated Series]

Surprisingly dramatic episode although there were a few laughs in there

Spoiler

like the inappropriate water dwellers who kept hitting on Rutherford during a crisis. Speaking of Rutherford, holly hell, his implant seems nefarious!

also Captain Soyna was the coffee spilling ensign from Q-Who, I knew the characters/voice sounded familiar but had to look at Trekmovie to confirm it.

But yah everything wrapped up cleanly and then suddenly Captain in chains, rather unexpected and extended the Pakled plot which seems to wrap up last week, and they're too stupid to have framed her.

The whole "removing the outer hull" to make it past the blah blah blah asteroid stuff was a very Trek-like solution but also kinda funny and absurd, which fits the show's tone, and something that can really only be pulled off in animation so taking advantage of the format.

 

This season finale was amazing.

And Sonya Gomez! Holy hell, that's a deep cut!

 

I stand by my assessment that Lower Decks is the best Star Trek show in the past couple decades.

It's funny that not too long ago, there wasn't any ST shows for the first time since TNG came on the air, and now... we're here.

It makes me even hopeful for something as hopeless as Star Wars!

 

Yeah, that was a really great episode. And we finally got to see Cetacean Ops.

 

It was full-on SeaQuest DSV!

 

Rutherford's line about the rubber ducky room had me rewind it to confirm I heard it. For those who didn't look closely at the Enterprise D schematics - one of the rooms on the Enterprise (and possibly every ship in Starfleet) has a giant rubber ducky in it. This was one of the subtle gags inserted by the TNG design staff during the show's run and was always there but never visible to most folks until the Enterprise D Technical Manual was published in the 90s with prints of the schematics.

 

That was a Star Trek episode. Problem of the week solved with creativity, professionalism, and risking their own lives for the greater good. Weird Sovereign-Excelsior was a bonus.

 

I was gonna come here and ask T2Q what ship it was but it's apparently a new class of ship!

 

Last week's episode but want to pretend for an hour that you're on the Lower Decks of a Borg cube?



great comments, "This is what Seven of Nine listens to when she can't sleep." Also this final shot had me wondering, I guess it is a Lower Decks of a Borg cube like and it's all a hive mind and everyone and every task is one. But you'd figure some drones would just be stuck perpetually processing data and energy management. Or maybe it's literally the actual Lower Decks of Borg cube.

 

TIL that Sonya Gomez is the three-breasted alien woman from the original Total Recall...

 

Some good behind-the-scenes news.

 

I just finished season 2 and I'm ready for season 3. What does everyone hope to see? I'd like more of Tendi going off on racial profiling. These writers can make that work in classic Trek-deals-with-real-issues style and still make it funny.

 

I don't think we've seen the end of the TUC style Klingon conspiracy. I think they mentioned that the Vulcan lady from the across the lower decks episode is going to be a regular on S3.

 

So I've been working on a Star Trek story (like I'll ever finish that, lol), and I think I've come out with a pretty good working for Mariner's age.

The story I'm working on was originally supposed to feature Sonya Gomez as one of the characters and be set in 2368 shortly after the comic Wet Behind the Ears, but I had to switch the time placement, however, becuase I realized a certain aspect of the plot necessitated it being set after Voyager was lost in order to make sense, and so ended up having to replace Sonya in the narrative (becuase it did'nt make sense for her to be presented in the way I was writing when she would have been in Starfleet for at least six years at that point). I picked a freshly-graduated-from-the-academy Amina Ramsey to fill her role.

The story is set in 2371 and Amina, I'm assuming for the sake of the plot, is around twenty-one. Meaning she would be thirty in 2380 when she shows up as a captain in Lower Decks. Mariner I'm assuming is a few years younger, making her eighteen in 2371, twenty-seven when Lower Decks starts and eleven/fourteen when she lived aboard the Enterprise-D (assuming she actually did and is the young girl seen in When the Bough Breaks and Clues as some have assumed)

I think that works; it let's her be in Starfleet close enough to Descent to talk about it as if it's recent in the flashbacks to Cupid's Errant Arrow and also gives her room to get all the considerable experience - including Dominion War service, where she could have done her "grey ops" with General K'orin - that she clearly has, while also providing enough time for Ramsey, who was at the academy with her, to plusably work her way up to captain.

 

Dude, you're putting way too much thought into this. It's a fun cartoon. Enjoy it.

 

Taking Lower Decks seriously ruins it, and it's the best Trek we have right now so I've no need to do that.

 

Sarge, this is how some people enjoy it.
Like me.

 

It was accidental; like I said, I was writing a story and ended up using Ramsey in it, which naturally cuased me to need to assign her (roughly) an age, and the rest fell into place from there.

Though I'd be lying if I said I had'nt *already* been trying to figure out Beckett's age and what is a pluasable way to plot out the course of her life; it's certainly not something I'm pulling my hair out over, just a fun experiment that concided with a need to assign an age to an academy classmate for personal creative reasons.

Definitely easier, lol.

The issues with Mariner are a lack of concrete information that makes it hard to pin down her age and any specific dates to build her life around*, while the problem with Kirk is too much information and an abundence of dates that run contrary to each other.

*the only real one is Cupid's Errant Arrow and Well Always Have Tom Paris; the latter indicates that she was assigned to Deep Space Nine at what would have had to have been some point between 2372 and 2375, and the former implies via dilogue that the events ofDescent I & II were fairly recent and the E-D had'nt yet been destroyed as of the flashback she has (so 2370/2371).

That was a Obena-class, not an Excelsior II.

The Obena's are supposed to be new ships of a totally different class that simply resemble Excelsiors (per BTS info), while I feel like the E-IIs are probobly just either modernized/refit Excelsiors or something akin to what an ISD II or an IRL Kresta II Cruiser are relative to an ISD I or a Kresta I Cruiser.

 

Yup - the Excelsior IIs look to be derived from the basic Excelsior (smooth hull) whereas the Obena looks to be derived from the Enterprise-B Excelsior variant (bulges on either side of the deflector dish).

The dish itself, and the nacelles, look very Sovereign-ish - I would suggest that the Obena comes from the same "design era" as the Sovereign - whereas the Excelsior II is probably an older design.

 

@Iron_lord @The2ndQuest The Obana-class is probobly at least relatively new, given it's appearence. But the E-II is harder to pin down; personally I'm of three minds in terms of potential headcanons/explanations.

• 1) It's not a distinct class in and off itself, but deticated, purpose built varient of the Excelsior-class (akin to the real world Kresta II Cruiser), and is probobly fairly old but perhaps less common then the baseline Excelsiors (due to the fact we've never seen one before despite the class being all over the place)
• 2) It's just a designation given to Excelsior-class ships that have undergone extensive modifications in order to modernize their aging hulls (akin to the TMP Enterprise refit).
• 3) It's a (relatively) new version of the original Excelsior-class ship (akin to the ISD II or the IRL Oscar II submarine), perhaps based on the upgraded systems and weapons of the USS Lakota.

 

Given that the Excelsior II's nacelles are still very Excelsior-ish (whereas the Constitution-Refit has very different nacelles) I would go with 1 or 3.

I could see oval (long) saucers being a late-period thing - a switch away from oval (wide) which was itself a switch away from round saucers. Using the "fairly old" theory (1) the Excelsior II might be one of the earliest oval (long) saucer ships - starting a trend which would continue with the Intrepid, Luna, Obena, and Sovereign classes.