Star Trek: Lower Decks‘s “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris”

Tom Paris makes an appearance, as does his commemorative plate! Tendi and Mariner go on a mission to bond a little, and both the mission and the bonding go horribly wrong! Shaxs is back and Rutherford needs to know why! It’s a maddeningly uneven episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks — my take on “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris.”

An excerpt:

And then the ship refuses to give Boimler his food, and the doors don’t respond to his approach because of “new security measures” because of all the Pakled attacks. There is no level on which this makes anything like sense. Look, for 55 years, quite possibly the most consistent thing we’ve seen on Star Trek has been that when you approach the doors, they slide apart, no matter who you are. And the replicators have never had any kind of security on them, at least not for food. Any random schmuck who wandered onto the Enterprise or Voyager or the Defiant or even one of the runabouts or the Delta Flyer was always able to get food and have the doors slide apart when they approached them.