Well, that was a heck of a surprise – at ComicCon, Paramount announced that they would be dropping the much anticipated Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks crossover episode early. So, here I am, on my Saturday, writing up a review I didn’t think I would need to have ready until Thursday. But that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make because oh my god, was “Those Old Scientists” everything we all hoped it would be and more. And, if you haven’t watched Lower Decks and are super confused at what you watched, get on the Lower Decks train ASAP. It’s a sensational series and I cannot recommend it enough. Now, onto the review.
As a Lower Decks fan, I didn’t mind that this particular episode felt more like a Lower Decks installment than a Strange New Worlds episode. Sure, both series share a more whimsical storytelling vocabulary than other series in the Trek cannon, but Lower Decks is much more in the comedic vein than Strange New Worlds on the whole. That’s not to say any of the characters on Strange New Worlds felt out of character (although Chapel almost crying when Boimler suggested that she wouldn’t be around Spock in the future to continue influencing his behavior certainly felt like a character beat that would have been better placed in an episode that wasn’t so light on her character as a whole). Getting to see Ortegas find a partner in crime in Mariner was awesome. Getting to see Una rattled at the thought something terrible might befall her in the future, only to be reassured that in the future, Starfleet uses her as the recruitment poster gal, was a really lovely beat for here, even if it was a dig at Starfleet’s continued treatment of augmented individuals*. Sure, genetic modification still isn’t cool in Lower Decks era-Trek, but Starfleet is still willing to put someone with that background on their recruitment tool – a little hypocritical, isn’t it, Starfleet? And seeing Pike decide that he should give his friends the chance to celebrate with him while they still have him around was a really lovely button – even better that it was in animation!
*It was also a nice joke to have Jerry O’Connell’s Commander Ransom call out how hot Una is, seeing as he’s married to Rebecca Romijn in real life.
The episode structure also felt a lot like a Lower Decks episode, with Boimler and Mariner encountering their issue, recognizing a key way to solve it, and providing a moral to their journey as well. We got to see Pike and La’an get key new information about the Orions, driving home that you can’t judge a race simply on the actions of one subset of it. Might this lead to better Federation-Orion relations? Might this be the catalyst that helped make it so someone like Tendi could one day join Starfleet? Who knows, but it absolutely made a difference – even if, 150 years in the future, Starfleet is still saying Pike discovered the portal and not the Orions.
It’s also interesting to me how much Strange New Worlds has dealt with time travel this season. Normally, time travel arcs drive me up the wall – and I find them particularly hard to take seriously. However, each instance of time travel within this season has played out just about as perfectly as you could hope. Sure, Boimler and Mariner broke about a million parts of the Temporal Prime Directive in their time in the past – even after La’an made sure to warn Boimler from making those errors – while La’an has been the model time traveler thus far and not revealed anything (although I suspect her secret will come out at some point this season, if only because it would provide some interesting character beats for the character, helping others to better understand her recent uneasiness with Kirk and the time travelers). But both versions of the time travel narrative worked – mostly because they both stayed true to the characters at the heart of the story they were telling. We know Boimler and Mariner are screw-ups (for different reasons), but we also know their hearts are almost always in the right place in the end. And we know La’an is a stickler for protocol at all costs and is more than willing to tamper down her own wants and needs in service of the greater good. So, I fully bought each arc. And loved watching both unfold.
But, ultimately, this episode was a chance to let the Strange New World characters let loose a bit after a string of more emotionally rich – but dramatically complex – episodes. A reminder that this cast has incredible chemistry across the board, and when allowed the chance to play the humor in their story instead of the dramatic beats, everyone shines. I was honestly sad to have Boimler and Mariner return home, since they spiced things up just enough to show us new sides of pretty much every character on the series (I’m bummed we didn’t get more interactions with M’Benga, but the fact that Boimler knew who he was bodes well for our Doctor in the future history books). Next week, we’re back to the old Strange New Worlds. But this was a hell of a fun diversion. The animated pieces were excellent. The live actions pieces were amazing. And these characters, bouncing off one another, were awesome. And we even got a classic Lower Decks DS9 reference! What more could you want?
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