This may be Lower Decks finest penultimate episode yet. I definitely feels at this point like McMahan has a five season plan. At least for the OG Lower Deckers.

Definitely an episode that plays the emotional fiddle for TNG fans with the Sito reveal as well. Currently weighing up whether to get my partner to watch First Duty and Lower Decks before we watch it together later.

Laughed out loud at the Endor Moon base inexplicably being on this random insane weather planet.

Great to have Robbie McDunc back as Locarno as well. If nothing else this may finally kill the urban myth that they didn't use Locarno in Voyager due to royalties once and for all. I can but only hope.

I also like that they've let Freeman come into her own as a Captain more than previous this season. She's really demonstrating not just top tier tactics and diplomacy but also actually clearly keeping tabs on her crew and addressing out of character behaviour. With that said, Rutherford felt included just for an excuse to follow Freeman which was a shame.

Billups as the masked pilot surprised me. I expected it to be Locarno.

The fake out Balok puppet had be howling.

“What in the minimalist hell?” got me lmao

Talk about absolutely crushing it. I was blown away with the huge reveal. 4 seasons of buildup to "Why is she this way?"

It was Seito all along. Crushing emotions across decades with a masterclass of buildup. Bravo.

I know no one is reading this anymore, but Wa'ah helping Marriner with her issues is clearly a callout to the way the community has responded to that line in TNG "No one would suggest that a Klingon would make a good counselor" and the memes that have been created with Klingons being GREAT counselors! Incredibly straight forward, obsessed with defeating any obstacles in their way, there is no more honorable combat than against one's own challenges.

Dunno why they didn't bother promoting this episode, it was great. I was initially skeptical that it was just going to be a "Mariner is angsty" episode without much of a payoff, but they finally revealed everything. And they gave Ma'ah screen time doing it!

The confirmation of how the Dominion War scarred Mariner wasn't much of a surprise, but the tie back to the Lower Decks of old was. What an absolutely crushing reason to lose the optimism in what Starfleet can be. Props to Tawny Newsome for some good voice acting for an emotionally vulnerable moment.

Minor complaint/discontinuity: in this episode Mariner seemed surprised that T'Lyn was present at the fight against the Pakleds and the Klingon BoP in Wej Duj, although I seem to recall T'Lyn explicitly referencing that incident to her in Empathological Fallacies.

Speculation about next week: I'd hazard a guess that Locarno is a thematic version of what Mariner could become if she isn't careful. He's a Starfleet ace gone bad, and also Sito's former friend, so he's presumably got a lot to sell her on the troublemaker's life.

God, I typed a lot and didn't even get to Freeman's misdirection this episode. It was good, watch it!

Knife Rain? Wasn't expecting an adventure time reference on star trek, but I'll take it!

There's a lot of references linking back to nova squadron here, but I've got no idea how it all fits together. Looking forward to the finale.

Pretty clear “Star Wars” fan fun in the animation this episode. Tatooine-ish planet visited by Freeman’s crew, even arriving in a land speeder shaped shuttle. Mariner and Ma’ah hide in Yoda’s house. The transmitter looks like the imperial base on the moon of Endor, and Lorcano lives in a home inspired by Jabba’s palace. Love it when my nerd interests collide.

Imagine the Kolvoord Starburst you could do with a klingon, romulan, ferengi, binar and cardassian ship

There were loads of overt Star Wars references in this episode which was fun.

• Music queues were distinctly more John Williams-y.
• Scene transitions hidden behind ships travelling past the screen.
• Scariff style forcefield over one planet.
• Tatooine like architecture.
• Tatooine cantina shape and style to the bar.
• A masked bounty hunter with an unintelligible language is actually an undercover ally.
• The weather station is reminiscent of the Endor shield array.
• Attacking a technological foe with sticks and war cries was similar to the Ewok battle in RotJ.

Some folks had a good day when they signed all that off.

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.

Annotations up at: https://startrek.website/post/3057890

Hmm… according to Freeman’s intel… the Mystery ship was seeking out Lorcano… but as far as I can tell… he’s the mastermind.

Why would he want to find himself?

Really strong episode, although I am skeptical about the Locarno reveal, I could've imagined cooler things, but we'll see where they'll take it from here

Definitely a next-to-the-finale

I'm not sure what to think of this episode. The interweaving of the plotline with TNG's Lower Decks eponymous episode feels off and some of the plot beats generally too contrived but not so much that I can point to something and say "this is bad."

I might need to simmer on it for a bit, or see how the second part goes.

Definitely a next-to-the-finale

The he's a puppet misunderstanding reminded me of a similar scene in The Big Lebowski.