Star Trek: Lower Decks‘s “Kayshon, His Eyes Open”

Shaka, when the walls fell! Temba, his arms wide! Darmok and Jelad at Tanagra! Picard and Dathon at el-Adrel! Lower Decks, it’s new episode live! “Kayshon, His Eyes Open,” the episode’s name! DeCandido, his review mixed!

An excerpt:

On top of that, the episode takes him out of action almost instantly, as the away team mission he leads sees him turned into a cute Tamarian stuffie. Now, for the record, I totally want a Lieutenant Kayshon stuffie please and thank you, but watching the episode I was mostly thinking, “Ah, so that’s how they’re avoiding the issue of him talking.”

If you’re not up to the challenge of having an abstruse security chief who’s hard to understand, don’t put him in in the first place.

His introduction also annoyed my inner fan-dweeb, as Kayshon said that the Universal Translator doesn’t always catch it when he goes metaphorical, and that is a swing and a miss. The whole point of “Darmok” was that the UT didn’t help—they were hearing Dathon and the other Tamarians in English. The translator was doing its job. The problem was their mode of communicating, not the words. So the UT doesn’t enter into it, it’s Kayshon himself who has to learn, in essence, a new language.