Star Trek: Lower Decks‘s “Temporal Edict”

The title made me think it would be Yet Another Time Travel Story, but they went with two different Trek clichés: padding your repair estimates and the arena fight. My take on Star Trek: Lower Decks‘s third episode, “Temporal Edict.”

An excerpt:

It all started when Scotty made a remark in The Search for Spock about how he always pads his repair estimates in order to maintain his reputation as a miracle worker. That quickly became the book on Scotty, despite the fact that it was likely written as a joke on the engineer’s part. Nonetheless, it became an integral part of Scotty’s character going forward, including his rebuking La Forge in TNG’s “Relics” for giving an accurate repair estimate to Picard.

What “Temporal Edict” does is take a different look at that notion, and it’s one that leans into the part of that tendency of Scotty’s (and some other engineers) that I always thought was an important component: As a general rule, engineers are being asked how long something will take by someone who knows absolutely nothing about the specifics of what they’re doing. So Scotty can tell Kirk that a task will take two hours—who is Kirk to gainsay him? What the hell does Kirk know about engineering, anyhow?