With very few exceptions, each new season of any given Star Trek series always feels like a moment for the specific show to change things up. Riker grew a beard in Next Generation Season 2. Worf crashed Deep Space Nine in season 4. Archer started unbuttoning his collar and mussing up his hair in Season 3 of Enterprise. Discovery has literally had a different captain and premise every season. Even in The Original Series, the crew got themselves some Chekov. after their first year. You get it. A new season of Trek usually means one question: What’s new? What’s the same? But, with the debut Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2, that question doesn’t work. The show doesn’t feel remotely different, retooled, or radically changed from Season 1. If anything is different it’s simply that it’s even funnier and nerdier than Season 1. In 2020, Lower Decks was still novel and strange, but, now that we’re used to it, the show is proving to be better than perhaps anyone gave it credit. The debut Season 2 episode — “Strange Energies” — is hilarious, but it’s also deeply layered, so much so, that each part of itself is like a tiny replica of itself. Like a hilarious member of a funny, and thoughtful Borg collective. The episode begins with Mariner playing out a badass fantasy on the holodeck, in which she is such a kickass Starfleet officer, that she escapes a Cardassian prison without really even trying. In this world, like last year’s “Crisis Point,” Mariner is god. She even leaves a hologram of Boimier because she’s “still pissed” at him for ditching her on the Cerritos in Season 1. Mariner has let her privileged status as Captain Freeman’s daughter go to her head, which is an arrangement neither of them likes and is pissing everyone off, including Ransom. So, when Ransom accidentally gets hit with the titular “Strange Energies,” and turns into a faux space god, the idea of someone else becoming a control freak takes over the plot. On top of this, Tendi is convinced that Rutherford isn’t his most authentic self, because — following a memory erasure in Season 1 — he now likes things he didn’t use to like, including eating pears and dating Ensign Barnes.
