It finally happened. Mike McMahan and his band of lunatic writers have finally done it: the single nerdiest episode of Star Trek ever produced.
This episode finally brings the dimensional fissure plot to a climax—though not yet to a resolution, as that will come next week—as we finally, for the first time since “Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus,” look in on William Boimler, the transporter duplicate of Brad Boimler, whose death on the Titan was faked and he joined Section 31.
Apparently 31 has sent him on a covert mission to find out why these fissures are happening. He’s got a Defiant-class ship, the Anaximander, and he’s got himself a crew of alternate versions of familiar characters, all refugees from the various parallel universes he’s bopped into over the course of this mission.
And this is the (first) nerdy part: the crew includes, from various alternate realities, Curzon Dax (who is constantly practicing with his bat’leth on the bridge, to everyone’s annoyance), T’Pol, Garak (who is a Starfleet physician in his reality, though we see evidence of his Obsidian Order background), an Emergency Medical Hologram that is patterned after Julian Bashir, and nine different Harry Kims.
To the credit of all and sundry, they got everyone back. Jolene Blalock—credited only as “Jolene”—voices T’Pol, the unexpected, welcome, and triumphant return of the actor who played the only grownup on Enterprise. Garrett Wang voices all the Kims. And Andrew J. Robinson and Alexander Siddig voice Garak and holo-Bashir—and, wait for it, the two of them are married.
Reader, I squealed. So many shippers and fanfic writers are gonna watch this episode and jump up and down on their couches. Robinson has already confirmed in the DS9 documentary What We Left Behind that he was totally playing Garak as flirting with Bashir, and to see this particular take on the relationship is a joy. Especially since the Cardassian and the hologram bicker just like a married couple and yet still act exactly like Garak and Bashir.
The Anaximander continues to bop through fissures and try to find the origin of them. For his part, Boimler is suffering from a bit of multiverse burnout, which is a spectacularly unsubtle but still hilarious commentary on the proliferation of multiversal storylines in contemporary popular culture. Throughout the episode, Boimler bitches that the different realities are so lazy, just slightly varied versions of his home universe. This is writ large with the Kims, as, with one exception, every single one of them is still an ensign—itself a nice commentary on the absurdity of Kim’s lack of advancement throughout the seven years of Voyager, despite his crewmates getting promotions at various points. And then that’s turned on its ear when it’s the one promoted Kim, a lieutenant, who goes rogue and nearly destroys the whole mission.
Before that happens, though, we find the source of the fissures, and it’s not a malevolent one! One of the alternate realities has a Lily Sloane and a Zefram Cochrane who created, not a warp drive, but a trans-dimensional drive. Sloane—wearing a version of the Starfleet uniform from Enterprise—is captaining the Beagle, a ship that is exploring strange new dimensions, seeking out variations on old life and old civilizations.
And yes, just when you think they had to have blown the entire budget on the voice actors they already got back, we get Alfre Woodard doing the voice of Sloane. Bliss.
We see the Anaximander pick up two new crew members over the course of the mission before they finally find the Beagle. One is Lieutenant Harry Kim. The other is a Beckett Mariner who is an engineer and who absolutely hates away team missions and who prefers to stay quiet and follow orders and tinker in engineering. She’s still Mariner, mind you, but this one obviously focused on engineering at the Academy and likely didn’t have all the trauma the mainline Mariner did.
At one point, Boimler bitches Sloane out, saying what she’s doing isn’t really exploring, it’s just rehashing, and Sloane gets to come back with a magnificently Star Trekkish response: seeing the variations in other realities is allowing them to explore the human condition, to see how the people are both different and the same in each reality.
And of course, relationships develop. Garak and holo-Bashir are from two different realities, but they’ve found true love. (One of their arguments is over which reality they’ll live in once the mission is over.) Dax and T’Pol have what seems to be a contentious relationship à la McCoy and Spock, the emotional and free-wheeling Dax constantly grousing about the emotion-suppressed Vulcan. That storyline has a sweet, lovely ending involving the Dax symbiote and a mind-meld, beautifully written by scripter Lauren McGuire and performed by Jolene and Fred Tatasciore (who voices Dax, since we never really saw Curzon except in a brief flash in DS9’s “Emissary,” and he had no dialogue).
Sloane is also correct that we get insights into the characters we know. For Garak and Bashir, it’s being able to move the homoerotic subtext of their relationship to the foreground—which is more of an out-of-the-box thing with it being easier to portray such on a 2020s streaming service than it was on 1990s commercial television (especially with an executive producer back then who was against the entire idea). For Mariner, it’s simply seeing a version of her that doesn’t self-sabotage, that doesn’t cover her insecurities with banter and lunacy and semi-cruel comments (though she still has plenty of insecurities), and who is a damn good engineer. For Kim, we get the possibility that maybe Janeway had the right idea keeping him an ensign, as the one who was promoted turns out to have let it go to his head, and he almost destroys the multiverse.
And we see an extremely unhappy Boimler. While a lot of it is an excuse to bitch about the repetitive nature of multiverse stories (when speculating on who is responsible for the fissures, Boimler angrily says, “they’re probably a hacky evil version of someone we all know! A reverse Picard or a Borgified Kirk or, fuck it, I don’t know, human Worf!”), it also shows that Boimler is not happy as an agent of 31. He would rather be doing proper exploring like his counterpart on the Cerritos. (Not that the Cerritos actually does that much exploring, but the grass is always greener and all that…)
Lieutenant Kim’s arrogant stupidity blows up the Beagle and causes a nasty feedback loop that will destroy everything. The only solution is to channel it all into one universe—destroy one rather than destroy all. (The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, cough cough.) Boimler tells Mariner and Sloane to have it be the universe he’s from, because he trusts his transporter twin and his friends, Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford, to figure out how to solve it.
That’s a lot to put on four junior-grade lieutenants (five, really, but William Boimler doesn’t really know T’Lyn), but it is their show. Though this is also the second week in a row where those five barely appear.
Despite the near-total lack of the regulars, with only alternate takes on Boimler and Mariner and very little of Tendi, Rutherford, and T’Lyn, this may be my favorite episode of LD, simply because, as I said, it’s so incredibly nerdy. Yes, it’s almost entirely fan-service, but that fan-service is also in service of the actual story, which is still very much the best kind of Trek tale. In particular, it follows one of Trek’s most noble tropes: the thing you think is evil and horrible turns out to be not so bad and the problem is solved by people talking to each other and coming to an understanding.
In the closing moments, when alerting the Cerritos to what’s happening, William also sends a message directly to Bradward explaining the situation. “He’ll know what to do,” William says confidently. When Mariner expresses skepticism, William adds, “Yeah, as long as he doesn’t freak out.”
Cut to Bradward freaking out and a “To be continued…” title card. To be fair, until receiving that message, Bradward thinks William is dead, which William probably didn’t take into account…
Looking forward to the grand finale (in more ways than one, sigh) next week.
Random thoughts
- The Anaximander is named after the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who was one of the first known astronomers, and who also firmly believed that the Earth was the center of the universe.
- One of the funniest throwaway lines in the episode: Lieutenant Harry Kim saying, “Whoa whoa whoa—there are more than two dimensions?”
- We see alternate versions of the Khwopians from “Much Ado About Boimler,” but these are nasty and mean and put our heroes in a jail cell.
- Boimler’s beard has fully grown in, and now it looks just like the one his alternate-universe counterpart had in “Dos Cerritos.” Also the brief glance we got of Rutherford in “Upper Decks” indicated that he had given up growing his beard, and this episode confirms it, as he remains clean-shaven.
- Finally, a minor bit of trivial housekeeping. In the comments of my review of “Fully Dilated,” critter42 pointed out that I left someone off the list of people who have played the same role on four different Trek TV series: Wil Wheaton. I totally forgot about Wheaton voicing Wes Crusher in the flashback in “Old Friends, New Planets.” So just add to that list Wil Wheaton as Wes Crusher: TNG (series regular), Picard (guest star), Prodigy (recurring regular), LD (guest star).
