I'm surprised there was still a working spaceship left at the junkyard, I would have figured all the useful working parts would be scavenged.
Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.
Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
What made this episode wonderful was finally taking a look at Orion culture. It’s one of the oldest races in cannon, first showing up in TOS, but we know so little about them. It was fun to dig into that a little.
While Tendi is one of my favorite characters, I do find her backstory a little cliched. Having her and Billups with essentially the same backstory seems lazy. I’m happy they called that issue out with a joke, but it feels unnecessary for Tendi.
That said, I did like how they investigated how this impacted her sister, and created good character tension there. I do hope we get more backstory at some point on all of this about why Tendi hated Orion culture so much, and why so few Orions choose starfleet.
All that said, I found this to be a mostly forgettable episode. It had its moments, but the jokes felt a little off and the plot didn’t draw me in like some of the other episodes.
I went down a rabbit hole and watched the Orion TOS episodes, the TAS episode (blue instead of green Orions!), and the Enterprise episode where watching it as just showgirls controlling everybody. Lol. They also made a joke about the one guy with the shaved head and metal coming out in Enterprise. Rabbit hole dives are the best way to enjoy Lower Decks.