
An excerpt:
They manage to eat their cake and have it too by having Shaxs return in “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris,” but his method of coming back from the dead is shrouded in secrecy. This is exactly the sort of gag that Lower Decks does particularly well, taking a cliché from Trek and shining a funny light on it. Boimler and Mariner are both very blasé about Shaxs’ resurrection, because it’s just something that always happens to the bridge crew. (Witness McCoy in “Shore Leave,” Scotty in “The Changeling,” Spock in The Search for Spock, Picard in “Tapestry,” O’Brien in “Visionary,” Kim in “Deadlock,” Lorca in “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” etc., etc., etc.) And it means we get to keep Shaxs, whom I adore.