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Spoilers Star Trek: Lower Decks 4x04 - "Something Borrowed, Something Green"

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A fun episode if kinda a lot of empty calories. I do love how they doubled down on the green theme of Orion right down to the sky being a shade of it.

I laughed at the plot to "Bound(ENT)" being explained away as Archer and his crew being a bunch of incompetent, horny idiots. I grade this a soft 7 out of 10. Nothing great but fun enough to keep my attention.
 
Really liked this one. 8/10

I like that, while played for fun, all the Orion culture stuff is clever and works well and would actually be interesting to see in live action. The format of the show allows for a LOT of exposition on the cultural systems in place and I love getting lore expanded. Lower Decks is such a great way to give us planets and cultures we haven't or can't see in the live action shows for one reason or another. SNW would be a logical place to do and Orion episode, but I'll gladly take the Lower Decks/24th Century version too. I laughed out loud when when revealed her sister's name is T'Erika, like, that's just very silly. Good silly.

Also nice to see a Chalnoth and the Raven-type vessel again.
 
Fun episode, but I wish a little more was done with the ship that is destroying the various other ships. Maybe that's the point of the mystery, but someone has to start noticing this happening, right? Maybe this is what leads to Badgey's return later in the season?

It's starting to get noticed. The captain mentions the mysterious disappearance of an Orion ship when ordering Tendi to attend her sister's wedding.

Meanwhile, "Orion plagiarist" cracked me up. :)
 
Well the joke is that Orion culture is proud of its heritage and it's Tendi who is actually the one who is kind of an oddball.

It's the reverse of "don't stereotype" people. "Don't assume they care about your values or feel shame in theirs."
But the lesson is that all the federation stereotypes of them are real, which is why Tendi asks T'Lyn to forget everything and T'Lyn throws away her PADD. It just seems at odds with the 'moral' of the story.
 
This was the weakest of the season thus far. Not bad, but just not remarkable in any particular way. Tendi is cool, so I like a focus on her. Rutherford and Boimler convincing the Freeman to dress up like Mark Twain for a negotiation was absolutely ridiculous…yet strangely delightful.

6/10
 
But the lesson is that all the federation stereotypes of them are real, which is why Tendi asks T'Lyn to forget everything and T'Lyn throws away her PADD. It just seems at odds with the 'moral' of the story.

Tendi I feel was in the wrong there.

You just know she's thinking about having her Pon Farr on Orion after all this.

In Vulcan terms, she really is the Mariner. That was full on, "WHOO HOO! THE BOD ON THAT GUY!"
 
An enjoyable, if insubstantial, outing of Lower Decks, which manages to be funny, and not merely fun.

Regarding the A-plot with Tendi, there was a lot to like here. T'Lyn has immediately fallen into a great dynamic with the Lower Deckers, and works great here as a straight man of sorts, whose deadpan wryness works with the much zanier, over-acted level of Mariner and Tendi. If I had any criticism of this section, it's that the character beats for Tendi seemed very "by the numbers." It's not as if a 25-minute episode can have any huge plot twists, but nothing here surprised me, from start to finish, which meant the episode didn't really have a chance at greatness.

The "B-plot" with Boimler and Rutherford was just filler. The whole dueling Mark Twains thing was actually pretty damn funny (particularly once the Chalnoth was also involved), however in that it was such a random aside. Still, I can't help but feel that the episode could have been better if they were entirely absent, and it used that runtime to deepen the exploration of Tendi's character.
 
I imagine the Orion are just deeply invested in their pirating subculture, which is something I understand having once lived in Florida. So, they’re not all pirates but pirate families are revered and romanticized in a way that makes other species uncomfortable. Amusingly, I thought this might have been how you could reconcile the Ferengi fo DS9 and the Ferengi of TNG. The Damons are basically where the non-conformist, warrior Ferengi go sort of like how atavisms on Earth seek out Starfleet.

But the real question is the Chanloth who eats a Bonzai tree assuming it's a sentient being like Groot or is it doing that because it's a secret omnivore/vegetarian and it's taboo?
 
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