In the fifth-season TNG episode “The First Duty,” we met Nick Locarno, played by Robert Duncan McNeill, who was the ringleader of a group of cadets (among them Wes Crusher) who tried to perform an illegal flight maneuver and got one of the cadets killed—and then covered it up. Locarno was expelled and the other three surviving cadets were held back a year. Wes wound up leaving Starfleet and becoming a Traveler. Another of the cadets, Sito Jaxa, graduated and was posted to the Enterprise, later dying on a covert mission in the episode “Lower Decks,” the very episode that inspired this series.
McNeill would, a couple of years later, be cast as Tom Paris in Voyager, a character with a nearly identical backstory, while Locarno was never heard from again.
Until now.
Before we go any further, I need to do a formal mea culpa, as I completely and totally misread what was going on in “A Few Badgeys More.” I genuinely thought that Badgey was behind the mysterious ship that’s been attacking various vessels all season. I should’ve known better—if nothing else, the trend in television these days is for all important events to come to a head in the season finale.
Which is nicely set up this week. In what turns out to be the first of a two-parter, we learn that the little ship that’s going around zapping bigger ships is kidnapping former Starfleet officers. These now-civilians need to be tracked down and brought into protective custody. The Cerritos is tasked with finding Locarno.
Not on that particular mission is Mariner. Freeman is worried that Mariner’s getting out of control with putting herself in danger, so she and Ransom ask her fellow lower-deckers to go with her on a mission that will keep her safe.
I really adore the scene where Freeman asks the various lieutenants for help with her daughter. The Freeman-Mariner relationship has been a complicated one, to say the least, and mostly has been used for comedy, but this scene is a very touching example of a perfect combination of a captain worried about a member of her crew and a mother worried about her daughter, and going to her friends and colleagues for help.
Because this is a television show, the simple mission Tendi suggests of adjusting a weather satellite goes horribly horribly wrong. Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and T’Lyn take a shuttle to the satellite, having convinced Mariner that it will be incredibly dangerous and hugely risky. Mariner is, of course, massively disappointed when it turns out to be routine maintenance—right up until the Klingon Bird-of-Prey decloaks…
The Klingon ship makes short work of the shuttle, but the away team beams down to the surface of the planet, which is full of nasty storms and showers of glass and other fun stuff. But of real interest is the collection of beings stranded on the world and trying to survive: Romulans, Ferengi, Klingons, Orions, Cardassians, and Bynars. Familiar-looking ones, as these are the crews of the ships that were attacked by the mystery vessel (well, except for the Cardassians). Some of them are collaborating, but mostly they’re fighting amongst themselves.
The single funniest part of the episode to me was the Romulan and the Ferengi. We see the Romulan attack the Ferengi, but a native creature is stalking them. As it gets closer, we see the Romulan muttering, “Just a little closer,” and then the creature is snared by a bear-trap. The Ferengi then jumps triumphantly to his feet and says, “I told you it would work!” The Romulan’s reply: “Yes, yes, you’re so smart. Now shut up and help me kill this thing before it gets free.” I mostly loved it because whoever voiced the Romulan sounded just like Peter Falk in The Princess Bride when he said, “Yes, you’re very smart, now shut up.”
Anyhow, Mariner insists on fighting her way through, well, everything. When the rest of the away team tries to get her to slow her roll, she grumbles and says they should get some sleep and continue in the morning. They all fall asleep, and then Mariner gets up and goes off on her own, looking for a fight.
She gets one with Ma’ah. He not only survived the attack, like the others on the planet, but the Klingon vessel in orbit is his ship. Ma’ah says that his crew betrayed him and stranded him here along with the others. (Recall in “Twovix” that we didn’t see the results of Ma’ah’s ship being fired upon the way we did with the others.) Since the Bird-of-Prey is apparently standing guard on the planet, it would seem to be involved in some way.
Ma’ah and Mariner start to fight, but they’re interrupted by a glass shower. They take refuge in a cave (with surprisingly little complaining from Mariner, given the animus she expressed toward caves last week), and wait it out.
While there, we get some backstory on Mariner. In the abstract, this backstory makes sense, but I found myself disappointed by it on several levels.
Okay, first off, the fact that this never came up before is more than a little unconvincing, especially given that we’re in season three and we’ve already gotten plenty of Mariner’s backstory already.
Secondly, the actual backstory is this: one of Mariner’s classmates at the Academy was Sito Jaxa. So yes, the lead character in Lower Decks has backstory with one of the prominent guest stars in the TNG episode “Lower Decks.” In a show that gets way too meta on a good day, this is the meta-iest meta in the history of meta-ness.
And thirdly, the exposition is surprisingly light on details. Again, this is a show that references and sub-references constantly, but this time, they went light on that, and it’s too far in the other direction. The whole scene is written as if everyone watching it will know and/or remember who “Sito” is, and that’s not an assumption they should be making. It’s not even a question of knowing the audience, because (a) at least some of the audience wasn’t even born yet when “Lower Decks” aired, and (b) there’s so much Star Trek that it’s impossible for a single human to perfectly recall every detail of every episode and movie.
Of course, Sito is also connected to Locarno, which ties things together even more bizarrely. While Mariner and the gang are stranded, the Cerritos has proceeded to an independent world full of mercenaries and bounty hunters and freebooters and such. This half of the plot works beautifully because it plays into one of LD’s strengths. The show is often at its best when it tells Trek comedy stories as opposed to comedy stories that happen to be in the Trek setting.
In this case, we see Freeman seeming to be making a complete fool of herself. She confidently talks about how she aced her “Hoodlums and Racketeers” seminar at the Academy, and then makes a total pig’s ear out of trying to be a hoodlum and racketeer in order to get information about Locarno. When she does finally get in, she antagonizes the information broker to the point where he gives the information to a bounty hunter just to spite Freeman.
Once they leave the bar, Freeman reveals to a crestfallen Shaxs and Rutherford that it was all a setup. Freeman leaned into the distrust of Starfleet that they would have in this particular wretched hive of scum and villainy (sorry, wrong franchise…), to the point that they’d happily give the information to the bounty hunter—who was truly Billups in disguise. It’s a beautifully done bait-and-switch, and a relief to see. Freeman’s level of competence has varied wildly depending on the needs of the plot, and I prefer it when she’s actually good at her job. She’s very good at it here, and it’s done in a manner that’s genuinely funny, as befits a comedy show.
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However, when they get to Locarno’s location, they see all kinds of plans and such for the very ship that they’re looking for.
Back on the planet, Mariner is able to convince the various aliens to work together to try to get off the planet instead of against each other fighting for resources. She is aided in this by Ma’ah, who argues convincingly alongside her, and Tendi, who is able to get the Orions to back off and not kill them just by showing up. (The Orions immediately genuflect before the Mistress of the Winter Constellations, and as absurd as it all is, I still love the fact that the sweet, science-loving Tendi is also this Orion badass.)
Tendi is also the one who comes up with the plan to adjust the relay station for the orbital weather satellite to make it a distress call. Ma’ah makes an amendment to the plan, knowing that his ship is up there and will probably try to destroy the distress call. Once they come into the atmosphere to blow up the relay station, the various aliens leap on board and break in and take over the ship, Ma’ah killing the captain himself, thus putting himself back in charge.
In the midst of all that, Mariner was beamed away. They assumed it was to the Klingon ship, but she’s not there. Instead, as we find out in the closing shot before the “TO BE CONTINUED…” caption, she’s been taken by Nick Locarno.
Amusingly, Locarno looks like what McNeill looks like now. When Paris appeared in “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris,” he looked like he did on Voyager (keep in mind that LD takes place only a few years after “Endgame”), but Locarno’s had a harder life, I guess…
It will be interesting to see where this goes. But we have to wait a week.
Random thoughts
- The episode’s title is a riff on the famous TNG episode “The Inner Light,” though it has no connection to that episode beyond the pun.
- The other former Starfleet officers being tracked down are Beverly Crusher, who was established as having left Starfleet some time shortly after Nemesis in Picard’s “The Next Generation”; Seven of Nine, who was established in Picard’s “Hide and Seek” as not being allowed into Starfleet following Voyager’s return to the Alpha Quadrant; and Thomas Riker, William Riker’s transporter twin, introduced in TNG‘s “Second Chances,” and who was established as quitting Starfleet and joining the Maquis in DS9’s “Defiant.” Riker is the most interesting of those, as he was last known to be in a Cardassian prison…
- Boimler is massively disappointed that the Cerritos doesn’t get to track down Beverly, as apparently Boims has a crush on Crusher. (Sorry…) At one point, he’s dreaming about Crusher teaching him to tap dance (which we saw Crusher teaching Data how to do in TNG’s “Data’s Day”).
- The bar where Freeman gets the information about Locarno is called “Mudd’s,” presumably a tribute to Harcourt Fenton Mudd, the rogue played by Roger C. Carmel and Rainn Wilson, seen in the original series’ “Mudd’s Women,” “I, Mudd,” and the animated “Mudd’s Passion,” as well as Discovery’s “Choose Your Pain” and “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” and the Short Trek “The Escape Artist.”
- The information broker looks very much like the puppet used by Balok to speak for him in a threatening manner (with Ted Cassidy’s voice) in the original series’ “The Corbomite Maneuver.” The broker also talks like Balok did through most of that episode. Freeman, as part of her con, assumes that it’s a puppet, and she only stops shaking him when Rutherford’s implants make it clear that it’s a living being.
- Locarno has only made one appearance in Trek fiction prior to this, in the Seven Deadly Sins anthology in 2010, specifically in the novella “Revenant” by Marc D. Giller, which focused on the sin of gluttony via the Borg. Locarno in the story is part of a team of privateers that boards a Starfleet vessel that’s been assimilated.
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest work is The Four ???? of the Apocalypse, an anthology published by WhysperWude, the very small press started by Keith and Wrenn Simms, who also co-edited the book. The anthology features alternate takes on the end-of-the-world avatars—the four PTA Moms of the apocalypse, the four lawyers of the apocalypse, the four cats of the apocalypse, the four cheerleaders of the apocalypse, etc.—by more than a score of authors, among them fellow Trek scribes David Gerrold, Derek Tyler Attico, David Mack, Peter David, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, and Aaron Rosenberg; New York Times best-selling authors Seanan McGuire, Jody Lynn Nye, and Jonathan Maberry; and tons more. Ordering links and the full table of contents can be found here.
