Decrease Decks’ Re-Discovered Classes Do not Simply Apply to Starfleet

As we make our means nearer and nearer to Lower Decks‘ end this season, we’re getting lots of reminders of the present at its finest—returning to thematic ideas it’s all the time been strongest on, wrapping up and addressing where it lost its way. It’s maybe becoming then, that this week it revisits parts from what stays as one of many present’s standout episodes, season two’s unimaginable “wej Duj”. However it’s not simply Decrease Decks replaying the hits right here: once more, it’s reminding us to bolster its strongest themes, and exploring them by new, wider lenses.

“A Farewell to Farms” (we’re persevering with a streak of very good pun titles) is basically about Mariner and Boimler monitoring down the previous’s Klingon “bestie” Ma’ah on Qo’noS as a part of, it seems, the overarching subplot this season of the fissures in spacetime the Cerritos is monitoring right here, there, and all over the place. However they discover the Klingon in a really completely different state of affairs in comparison with once we noticed him both in “wej Duj” or final season’s breakout “The Inner Fight”.

Ma’ah is spending his days discovering honor in his personal type engaged on his family’s bloodwine farm, however nonetheless wrestling with what he desires for himself, particularly after his promotion and demotion—at peace, however caught in place. However when Boimler (facial hair replace of the week: of us, we have now moustache) makes use of his personal Klingon tradition obsession to push Ma’ah into invoking the Ritual of J’ethurgh and reclaim his captaincy, a few of his outdated fireplace is rekindled, and simply as he helped Mariner final season, now it’s our Starfleet heroes’ flip to assist Ma’ah determine his place within the universe.

Identical to “wej Duj” earlier than it, “Farewell” succeeds in taking the relatable expertise we’ve had seeing our main decrease deckers in Starfleet going by, and enriching its world by bringing that lens to different Star Trek cultures. It’s particularly attention-grabbing for Ma’ah as we’re getting this sort of story in an explicitly Klingon setting—we’ve already seen characters like Worf and B’Elana Torres undergo the stability of what it means to have a Starfleet profession and likewise be in contact with Klingon tradition, however they needed to, by the character of their positions, undergo these arcs in a Starfleet setting, and thru a Starfleet lens.

Setting Ma’ah’s story on Qo’noS, and going additional and setting it outdoors the lens of martial service for essentially the most half, not solely enriches Klingon tradition as we’ve seen it presented in Star Trek up so far, however provides each Ma’ah as a personality and Decrease Decks at massive an opportunity to critique and brush in opposition to what’s beforehand been established and anticipated of the Klingons that got here earlier than him.

“Farewell” is about development for everybody concerned—Ma’ah and his brother Malor coalesce their very own views on Klingon responsibility all through the trials, whereas Mariner and Boimler get to behave as mentor figures to reciprocate Ma’ah serving to Mariner understand her self-doubting final season. Even the comparatively throwaway B-plot again on the Cerritos, about ship counselor Dr. Migleemo being confronted with two elite critics from his individuals’s food-obsessed tradition, ties again into this, with him pushing again in opposition to the disdain they present him for eschewing a standard Cloacan profession.

In every certainly one of these characters there’s an understanding of the themes Decrease Decks has been underlining all through this season to date: the universality of those journeys of self-discovery, the necessity to take heed to the individuals round you when all they actually need to do is assist come to a way of shared understanding. It’s all properly and good to see these themes iterated on repeatedly in a typical Star Trek atmosphere just like the hallways of a starship, however “Farewell” reveals simply how a lot Decrease Decks has grown over these previous few years by increasing its perspective additional throughout as many elements of Star Trek as it may well: views we all know and love, views we’ve yearned to discover extra of all through the sequence, new views that the present has created to construct on what’s come earlier than it.

Decrease Decks is coming into its final episodes with the acknowledgement of how far its heroes have come and grown, nevertheless it’s additionally repeatedly displaying us, with nice confidence, how far it has come into its personal sense of self—and the good honor it ought to really feel in having discovered that identification earlier than the journey’s finish.

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