weJ duJ was a pretty tough act to follow, admittedly, and I didn't love everything here. I've gotten sick of Petty-Assed Abandonment-Issues Mariner and the constant emotional whiplash of her relationship with her mom; most of the time the episode spent on that frankly could have been used to flesh out the much more interesting glimpse we finally get of Jennifer and Becket building a relationship. (Yeah, I kinda ship them... but shipping or no, it was cool that we got to see Mariner grow in this particular respect.) Tendi's "misunderstanding" with Dr. T'ana struck me as a bit forced, too: I get that she's a bit insecure about her relationship with the CMO, but we've also seen by now that D'Vana is made of somewhat sterner stuff than this. It felt like the kind of artificial miscommunication that mediocre sitcoms rely on.
That said, making this a more adventure-focused episode was an interesting choice and it was really well done. There was still lots to like: the dolphins in Cetacean Ops were very funny, Boimler getting to save the day (and nearly drowning!) was cool, Jennifer saving Mariner and the whole rescuing-the-*Archimedes* premise, that casual hint about some Section 31-style stuff going on with Rutherford's implant... all really good. I was quite tickled when I finally remembered who Sonya Gomez was, good to see her get some screen time as a captain. And the final cliffhanger, with the darkly humorous implication that the Pakleds accidentally blew up their own planet with their backup bomb, was neat. I wonder who's really going to turn out to be behind Captain Freeman's arrest.
