I would have struggled to date the station given just the exterior, personally. A 2260s (or earlier) origin seems well within the bounds of possibility.

How many Starbases does Starfleet have? It seems that their numbering system is not truly sequential, as SB343 was existant in 2256, while SB173 was brand new in 2365. SB80 could be quite old, or relatively new but using a repurposed spaceframe from an older space station which had received a major upgrade.

I really liked this one. I think it did a good job making Starbase 80 fit into the universe as more than just a joke (why does starfleet have a starbase that everyone knows just totally sucks? Well, because of a bunch of weird circumstances, and also it’s more complicated than the reputation).

Interesting, although unsurprising, that Mariner apparently didn’t hang around SB80 long enough to figure out that there was more there than met the eye. A lot of the stuff uncovered in this episode should have been noticeable to a new transfer.

As other posters have pointed out to you, blithely dismissing OP’s question because they are asking about the meaning of “nonsense words made up by writers” is completely missing the point of this community. We all know Star Trek is fiction constructed by writers; pointing that out while adding nothing else of interest is both pointless and boring.

We don’t expect or require all answers to be from an in-universe perspective, but we do expect everyone to engage in discussion politely and seriously. If this is all you have to say on the subject, don’t comment.

I kept expecting William Boimler to show up before the end of the season, guess they’re holding onto that thread for next year

I think it would be pretty funny if they just never picked up that thread again. William Boimler, already presumed dead, joins S31, does ???? because ?????, is never heard from again.

Then again, this show could do a great job riffing off of how counterproductive and ultimately stupid S31 is, in addition to their absurdly twisted and seemingly inconsistent history. So I’d be perfectly happy to see that too.

This was an excellent finale (as all four of them have been, not at all a given with modern Trek or frankly modern television in general), and fully justifies the somewhat weaker setup episode before it.

“A paywall on a bomb?” might be the best joke this show has delivered in it’s whole run. I don’t often crack up while watching these episodes, but this one really got me. At the very least it’s up there with “It’s a bomb! You can only use it once!” from Wej Duj. I’m sensing a pattern.

In more typical lower key Lower Decks humor, Boimler and Rutherford arguing about if Locarno looks like Tom Paris was excellent.

I do wonder what the plan is with Tendi. We’ve seen supposed major shakeups like this dropped into previous finales, of course, with Boimler leaving the Cerritos for the Titan at the end of season one and Freeman getting arrested at the end of Season 2, which were quickly reverted in the first few episodes of the subsequent season. Odds are that’s the play here. I hope so, because losing Tendi would suck. She’s a delight.

Why was Boimler the acting captain when the command staff took off on the captain’s yacht? There was a full Lieutenant right behind him on the bridge, and surely tens of others on the ship who are more senior and more qualified. A little bit of a main character boost there.

This episode was okay, I guess? It feels very strange to be sitting on one half of an obvious two parter from this show, and recent Trek shows have left me with an instinctive suspicion of mystery-related plots. This is a good writing team so I have hopes they’ll carry this rather bizare setup into a satisfying resolution that actually makes sense, but I’m much more nervous than I usually am.

To play it all out: why the heck is Nick Locarno flying around in a little ship capable of disabling the systems on larger warships, transporting(?) the ships and crews to some planet while leaving wreckage behind? If this turns out to be another figurative Kelpian dilithium tantrum I’m not going to be pleased.

I like what they were trying to do with Mariner in this episode, but for whatever reason it didn’t land quite right with me. Her whole pivot into even-more-than-normal overtly reckless behavior three episodes after the supposed precipitating event felt very abrupt, and the scene where she talks it over and appears to resolve her issues with Ma’ah felt rushed, almost forced. The Sito Jaxa makes reasonable sense as a backstory component, but I found it distracting and it does add to the “small universe” syndrome that expanding IPs risk falling into. Further, the “your dead friend wouldn’t want you to have emotional problems” bit is a cliche that rarely lands with me, and this time was no different: these aren’t problems that people can typically resolve simply by recognizing that their emotional reactions are irrational, so being won over with a rational argument isn’t very convincing. It speaks well of Mariner and Rodenberry’s future humans that this worked, I guess, but it does make it less relatable.

Maybe I’ll be sold more easily on rewatch. We’ll see.

The B-plot with Freeman and her deception was decent, although as noted elsewhere Rutherford’s presence feels oddly tacked on. I guess they wanted an engineer around, just in case?

The Jaxa connection does give us a better shot at nailing down Mariner’s actual age, which was presumably somewhere between 17 and 22 (and likely on the later end of that range) at the time of the Nova Squadron incident in 2368. That puts her in her early- to mid-thirties, and lines up well with her service record. We can also confirm that Mariner was not a young child aboard the Enterprise-D, which launched when she was in her mid to late teens.

We saw a CGI model for the first time in the Ferengi episode

Can you explain what you mean by this? Isn’t everything we see in Lower Decks technically CGI?

Expanding on this, I’ve convinced myself that the whole couples dinner thing exists primarily to entertain the other diners. The way it’s set up an an obnoxious and increasingly grotesque public spectacle which I suspect the vast majority of couples would find highly uncomfortable supports this, as does the remarkable timing of the (presumed fake) removal of the fraudulent couple and Tendi/Rutherford being allowed to leave on a flimsy pretense after putting on a pretty good show of their own.

I dislike cringe humor and watching characters be uncomfortable, so I didn’t love the Rutherford/Tendi plotline, but there were enough cute moments in there to make it worthwhile. It feels like the show is openly baiting “shippers” at every opportunity, and this is the most flagrant example yet.

With that said - and making no claims about if romance is in any way necessary or inevitable here - these two being so close is adorable.

For a therapist, Migleemo is either really bad at reading other people’s emotions, or deviously brilliant at appearing clueless. Possibly both?

I appreciate the continued development of Mariner as a person who keeps getting in her own way, slowly coming to terms with that and trying to figure out what to do about it. It’s a problem I don’t relate to at all in the specifics, but the more general “why do I keep doing this” is very easy to connect to, and I know I’m not alone in that. Her Ferengi friend laying it all out for her here seems like an important step, and I wonder where she’s going to turn next.

This probably deserves a deeper dive at some point, but the further we go the more I see Mariner’s path as a more realistic and relatable trajectory for Michael Burnham to have taken. Both are superbly talented people capable of great things. Both are also reckless, supremely overconfident in their own judgement, and prone to self destructive behavior, all of which combines to put them and those around them in dangerous situations. Burnham in S1 right before the Mirror Universe jump and Mariner in the first episode of Lower Decks are in fairly similar places, both having been recently bumped down from more senior positions due to major fuckups. This is where their paths diverge: both continue to display all the behaviors that got them in trouble, but Mariner remains a lower decker on relatively unimportant assignments, with both her strengths and weaknesses clearly recognized by her superiors. Burnham, meanwhile, is fully returned to her previous high station and even promoted beyond that because her most problematic behaviors are improbably rewarded by a universe which places her in the middle of multiple extraordinarily significant events. I strongly related to S1 Burnham, and really wanted to see her grapple with her weaknesses and develop into a better person and officer over time. I didn’t get that opportunity, but Mariner gives a second chance at telling that slow-burn story and thus far, Lower Decks has done very well with it.

We see people enslaved in mines for lying about being a couple to get a discount at a restaurant!

I do wonder if that was actually an arranged bit of entertainment, with the (alleged) punishment trumped up for the sake of it. Ferengi do like to put on a show.

All posts and comments in Daystrom Institute must be substantive and explain their reasoning. Simply declaring that a season of the show is so bad that it shouldn’t exist is not sufficient.

If you want to point out specific discrepancies and argue that they are a reason to view S2 and S3 and contradictory, that would be appropriate here.

If you have something substantive to share about the episode, please feel free!

I feel compelled to note that being promoted from Ensign (O1) to Lieutenant Commander (O4) would be a triple promotion, skipping both Lieutenant Jr. Grade and Lieutenant.

The typical Vulcan response of passivity but curiosity is going to work perfectly throughout Lower Decks.

It’s just perfect, isn’t it? Hardly a surprise to me given that a huge chunk of the funny parts of “serious” Trek stem from the dry bluntness of characters like Spock, Data, and Odo. Now that T’lyn is here my only question is why it took until the 4th season for someone like her to show up.

There are relatively few direct references to Discovery in Lower Decks. More importantly, you’ll enjoy Lower Decks even if you don’t notice or “get” a handful of references.

Lower Decks isn’t good because it references older shows, it’s good because it’s funny and you care about the characters. There are people out there watching it and loving it with minimal or no prior Trek knowledge.

Grief is complicated, and two years is no time at all to recover from the death of a parent. It makes complete sense that watching something you associate with him would still be painful, and there’s nothing to be gained by forcing it.

Eventually you’ll reach the point where reminders of your father bring up happy feelings, with the pain of losing him still present, but not overwhelming. That won’t happen fast, but you will get there. That’s the time to give TNG another go, and see how it makes you feel.

Hang in there, friend.

I feel compelled to recommend this guide by a long time Daystrom Institute contributor. It does an excellent job identifying episodes as essential, unnecessary but fun, mediocre, or outright bad. A good place to work from if you want a more flexible recommendation of what to try and what not to.

Hello,

Daystrom Institute is a place for serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek. One-liner jokes and other shallow content are not appropriate here.

First off, it’s clear that the metaphor the writers initially had in mind was a computer storing data. The TNG tech manual is just vague enough to be ambiguous on this point, but very heavily implies a “scan and save a pattern -> destroy the original -> rebuild from the pattern” process. Terminology like “pattern buffer” no doubt comes out of that conception.

It’s also clear that by the end of 90s Trek at least some people with decision making power felt it was really important to explicitly shoot down a lot of the “kill and clone machine” theories about how transporters work, which is why Enterprise in particular is full of counter-evidence. Of course, TNG Realm of Fear was clearly not written by someone with “kill and clone” in mind, and stands as another very strong bit of evidence against that theory. The conflicting intentions make things confusing, but they are not irreconcilable.

My preferred explanation is as follows: When they shift something into subspace, they still need to keep an accurate track of exactly where in subspace everything is (the “pattern”), in addition to preventing whatever extradimensional subspace interference whosamawhatsit from damaging the matter itself. (If you’re familiar with computer programming, the pattern is functionally a huge set of “pointers”, not pointing to a specific piece of computer memory, but a specific point within the non-euclidian topology of subspace.) This pattern is stored in the “pattern buffer”, a computer memory storage unit with an extremely high capacity but which only retains data for a limited time. The transporter then uses this pattern to find the dematerialized transportee in subspace and rematerialize them at the target coordinates, taking great care to ensure that all these trillions of pieces are moved to the correct locations in realspace. These steps can be (and often are) accelerated, with a person beginning to materialize at the target coordinates while still dematerializing on the transporter pad (see TNG Darmok for an example off the top of my head).

The reason you can’t just tell the transporter to make another copy of what’s in the buffer is that although you have a lot of information about whatever you just dematerialized, you only have one copy of the matter in the buffer. If you try to materialize another one you’ll be trying to pull matter from subspace where none exists: the transporter equivalent of a Segmentation Fault, to use another computer science term. If you tried to use that pattern to convert an appropriate quantity of base matter into a copy of whatever was in the buffer, you’ll still be missing any information about the transported material which can’t be gleamed exclusively from a mapping of where each piece was: you won’t necessarily know exactly what every piece was, at a precision necessary to recreate it. Especially if the diffusion of material into subspace is sufficiently predictable that the pattern doesn’t need a pointer for every individual subatomic particle, but can capture a a cluster of particles with each one.

We know from the existence of “transporter traces” that the transport process does leave behind some persistent information about a person who was transported. We also know that it is possible for the transporter operator to identify and deactivate weapons mid-transport. It makes sense that a mapping of pointers could be extrapolated out to get a lot of data about the matter being transported (such as detailed information on a subject’s cellular makeup, or if there’s a device capable of discharging a dangerous amount of energy) while still falling far short of the data required to make an exact copy.

Doctor McCoy used the transporter very frequently with minimal complaining; the only complaint I can recall is from TMP and followed a horrific and unexpected transporter accident.

As for transporters in Enterprise, two things are especially noteworthy: one, they explicitly refuted the idea that the transporter creates a “some sort of weird copy” of the person or object transported, and two, those human-safe transporters were contemporary with very primitive replicator equivalents called protein resequencers. Clearly transporters aren’t building humans atom-by-atom from data alone if they can’t figure out how to do more than resequence protein molecules in any other context.

Transporters don’t do anything to affect the matter they are transporting unless explicitly intended to: by the 24th century they are programmed to filter out recognizeable pathogens, and can be used to deactivate weapons or occasionally monkey with the genes of a person in mid-transport, but things routinely pass through the transporter without issue which are either totally unknown or explicitly non-replicatable. None of this makes sense if the sequence is scan -> destroy -> rebuild, but makes total sense if the transporter is shifting the transportee into subspace (with some tweaks to allow them to exist there) and then back out of subspace at the destination.

Thomas Riker (and now William Boimler) is the one big exception. Both occured under a very specific and extremely rare weather condition, and the first time this happened the Chief Engineer on the flagship of the Enterprise was shocked that such a thing was even possible. I’m much more inclined to believe that the “transporter duplicates” are actually the result of the phenomenon that duplicated Voyager in Deadlock, not the transporter actually constructing two people from the pattern and matter of only one.