Mariner is The Ace in all things, but also a rule-breaker in a quasi-military organization. Of course she's been demoted and is on the verge of being thrown out (but isn't quite bad enough to be court-martialed yet).
Mariner's immense amount of experience and knowledge of alien races makes sense if she was raised on a starship where her parents served as officers. This makes her much more aware of the galaxy than Boimler, since he seems to have been the 24th-century equivalent of a Sheltered Aristocrat on Earth.
This is semi-confirmed with the revelation that Captain Freeman was to Will Riker as Boimler is to Mariner, thus it's very likely the starship Mariner was raised on was the Enterprise-D. Even at the oldest estimates of her real age, Mariner would only be a few years younger than Wesley was. As Boimler himself says in the Season 1 finale, Mariner qualifies as Starfleet Royalty, and with that pedigree, that's certainly accurate!
Another data point: The season 4 finale confirms that Mariner was in her first year at the Academy when Sito Jaxa and Wesley Crusher were seniors, locking her to within a few years of them in age.
Mariner's mother, Captain Freeman, doesn't want her daughter on her starship because not only does it reflect poorly on her, but it also puts her in a conflict of interests.
Rutherford choosing Loved I Not Honor More over his hot date seems like it's establishing him as Oblivious to Love, but the emergency exits shutting down during a Red Alert (i.e. an emergency) is actually something that is incredibly important.
Mariner probably got her bat'leth from General K'orin given that they are incredibly important weapons in Klingon culture (and he was probably drunk). She did mention that she got it from an old man with an eyepatch.
When Rutherford devotes a day trying out other career paths in Starfleet, he tries out the Command track holodeck training simulations under Ransom's tutelage. The first test involves dealing with a temporal anomaly that Rutherford mishandles and ends up killing 105 percent of the crew. That number may seem ridiculous - after all, how can you go over 100 percent? - except that it was a temporal anomaly as the disaster: It not only killed the current crew but also killed members of crews from previous timelines.
Boimler is in every way that matters a foolish Ensign Newbie, but he is consistently depicted as an excellent shot with a phaser. Marksmanship is exactly the sort of skill set that he could learn to excel at in a controlled training environment like the Academy.
Phasers are the go-to tools for cleaning and disinfecting the ship. Boimler is a Workaholic. His preferred workload comes with the added benefit of near-constant target practice.
One way to interpret Captain Freeman's harsh attitude is that she rose up as an officer during the Dominion War. Her severe military discipline, efficiency, and rigidness could be a reflection of knowing when that was the only thing standing between the Federation and total annihilation. However, this worldview has no place in the post-war Starfleet and it's driving her batty. This would make her a counterpart to Balthazar Edison in Star Trek Beyond.
This probably also explains why she and Ensign Mariner are on such bad terms — Freeman just doesn't seem capable of turning "captain mode" off, which means she was probably just as arrogant, self-centered, manipulative and emotionally abusive to her daughter as she is to the crew.
"Buffer time" works because the senior officers actually don't know or remember how long tasks take. So, obviously, it becomes complete and utter chaos when they start dictating when tasks have to be completed and their estimates go too far in the wrong direction (i.e. too little time instead of more than enough time).
Furthermore, the strict timelines and stacking tasks allow no flexibility for when something doesn't go according to plan, such as if two tasks conflict with each other or if someone makes a mistake... the latter explicitly becoming more of a problem as the crew become fatigued and stressed out. To say nothing of the fact that micromanaging causes the senior officers to lose sight of the bigger picture, demonstrated by Captain Freeman insisting that the crew repel the boarders while also keeping up with their task schedules.
This is a real thing in retail/customer service, usually phrased as Underpromise/Overdeliver: say a task will take longer than it normally will. If nothing goes wrong and you get it done faster, you've impressed people. If something comes up, you have time to correct it without angering anybody.
The holodeck being primarily used for [bleep] explains why their cleaning measures can eradicate human tissue as established in TNG. This always seemed like overkill before, but one presumes Picard didn't want his Dixon Hill programs to be contaminated with [bleep].
Plus it probably saved a small fortune considering Quark's primary source of income for the holosuite (before Starfleet) was for sex.
Mariner having witnessed her friend Angie get eaten alive by a shapeshifting predator that pretended to be the latter's boyfriend for months is something that goes a long way to explaining her paranoia as well as disdain for authority. When she said, "I have seen things," she was not kidding. Becomes Fridge Horror as it seems like she's never been treated for this.
We see in "Crisis Point" that she (at least initially) thinks that Therapy Is for the Weak. Though it doesn't help that the ship's counselor, Dr. Migleemo, is not very good at his job.note He comes across as incompetent compared to the only other counselor we've seen, and Troi once recommended Data experiment with emotion by trying to recreate the feeling of homicidal rage.
This is probably why she's uncharacteristically horrified and frozen in place when a werewolf version of Jennifer tears a separate Jennifer in half, in "Mining The Mind's Mines". It's bad enough that Boimler has to drag her out of the way of the werewolf biting down on her - under any other circumstances, Mariner would've seen it coming and dodged on her own. (That the illusion manages to also throw in a third fear of hers, that she'll "settle down" and retire, is overkill.)
The Cerritos having all of its systems constantly break down helps to explain why it's gotten two infections on board the ship in five episodes (the zombie plague and the neural parasite). The transporter bio-filter is clearly busted.
We've seen Rutherford mess around with the transporter with some... undesirable effects. The bio-filter might have gotten a Rutherford "upgrade" that has some holes in it, and no one's put two and two together yet.
To be fair, Rutherford was specifically experimenting on isolated transporters, and - as they still had kinks in them - only applied his modifications to the ship’s main transporter when specifically asked to in an emergency situation. Overall, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy that would go dicking around with an essential ship system while it's in use, without telling anyone.
The Red Alert system would disagree with you on that point.
Fletcher seems to be a Nice Guy who is able to diffuse conflicts among his crewmates and is a True Companions member of the Lower Decks. His personality then seems to do a 180. Except, it's not a 180 because he actually has always been using his friends to ditch responsibility and deflect blame. His Bitch in Sheep's Clothing persona just makes the enlightened humans of the Roddenberry future less inclined to think of him as a problem and more of someone needing help. Hence why it takes things reaching a crisis point to reveal he's just a lying, manipulative, Never My FaultJerkass.
Fletcher getting assigned to the U.S.S. Titan by our heroes hoping they could straighten him out also becomes Harsher in Hindsight. As we saw with Riker's handling of Reg Barclay, Ro Laren, and Sam Lavelle, he actually runs a very tight ship and is a strict disciplinarian outside his circle of friends. No wonder Fletcher lasted less than a week under him.
In The Next Generation, Riker was really good at sniffing out deception and illusions. And that's before he hooked up with Deanna Troi, an empath who can sense when people are lying to her. Fletcher's attempts to cover up his mistakes would never fly past the radar on the Titan.
Given the reveal in "No Small Parts" that Mariner knows Riker, it's possible that she knew Fletcher would easily get found out under his command, though it's debatable if she seriously hoped Riker would be able to straighten Fletcher up or just wanted to make him someone else's problem. It's even possible that she sent Riker a heads-up about his new problem so he'd keep an eye on Fletcher.
The entire episode "No Small Parts" could be considered a response to Star Trek: Nemesis:
Peanut Hamper is put in Data's position, being the AI crewmate asked to sacrifice themselves. While Data nobly did the deed of his own volition, Peanut Hamper is understandably hesitant when the idea is forced upon her and ultimately beams herself away rather than help to save the Cerritos.note That said, it wasn't strictly a suicide mission for an exocomp because her size and ability to survive in space was brought up—just far more dangerous than she bargained for.
Activating the auto-destruct sequence on a Federation vessel requires, at minimum, authorization from the captain. Distracting the villain to buy time for the Cerritos crew to escape was Holo-Freeman's plan. Holo-Mariner just hijacked it.
In this context, Holo-Freeman's panicked reaction at Holo-Mariner activating her emergency transport makes sense- it's the reaction of a mother witnessing her child sacrifice their life for hers.
Holo-Mariner being on the bridge means she was already there before the crash, putting her in earshot of freeman putting this plan in motion. Seeing her mother ready to perform a Heroic Sacrifice to save her daughter and crew would have shaken Holo-Mariner out of whatever hard feelings she'd had and fueled a Heel Realization, priming her to confront Real-Mariner-As-Vindicta as her opposite.
Also, we already know (though Freeman and Mariner don't) that Rutherford and Billups have successfully beamed the rest of the crew to safety. Once Mariner beamed Freeman out, she was the senior officer and thus the Acting Captain.
Also also, it's a movie.
The shuttle used by Shaxs is one we see worked on throughout the season, especially by Rutherford. Yet it carries weapon systems and decals that do not appear to be standard Starfleet issue. It's Shaxs' personal shuttle! We see that Shaxs likes Rutherford, talks to him still, and uses him on missions when he needs engineers. This was likely a project made for him by Rutherford.
A personal shuttle seems unlikely, but given that the shuttle spends the entire season in the workshop, it's possible that it's used as a testbed for testing assorted equipment configurations, possibly due to its apparent status as a "Hangar Queen" keeping it from being part of the regular roster of shuttles available for use. It may even officially be intended for use as an operational spare, only to be put into rotation if one of the other shuttles is lost or goes down for maintenance.
In "Much Ado About Boimler", the Ostler comes darkly lit. Part of the Bait-and-Switch is it makes the ship seem more like a prison or an asylum. There are more practical reasons for it, though. First, a lot of the patients being transported are suffering from ailments caused by exposure to some form of radiation or energy; exposure to ship lights could worsen these conditions, or at least cause additional discomfort to those whose vision was affected. Second, the Ostler spends a lot of time in transit, so keeping the lights off conserves power resources for the trip.
The fact that the apparent ranking officer is so outwardly creepy also starts to make sense when you consider that Division 14 personnel have to be capable of reacting to graphic body horror without flinching— sure, a few tours of duty in Starfleet will go some way towards desensitizing them, but edgy goth types might just turn out to be ideal recruits!
In "Crisis Point", Tendi states that Orions haven't been "capitalist, hyper-libertarian gangster pirates" for five years. Five years ago in-universe is when the Dominion War ended. The planet Orion was very close to a major Federation traffic lane running between Earth and Deep Space Nine, making it a strategic priority target for both the Federation and the Dominion.
The Federation leading the charge in winning the war may have also played a role in Orions like Tendi joining Starfleet.
The Orions have always used their neutrality as far back in TOS and TAS as cover for their criminal activities. In the DS9 episode "Honor Among Thieves", Miles O'Brien, undercover in the Orion Syndicate for Starfleet Intelligence, discovers the Orion Syndicate was hired by the Dominion to assassinate a Klingon politician opposed to the Klingon alliance with the Federation, framing Chancellor Gowron for it. Starfleet Intelligence tells the Klingons, who set up a trap to kill the assassins. The Federation is not the only polity plagued by piracy. The reason that General Korrd was exiled as a dead-end post ambassador to the joint Federation-Klingon-Romulan colony of Nimbus III was that Klingon territory was raided by Orion pirates under his watch and disgraced for it. The Dominion War ended in 2375. Lower Decks is set in 2380. Exactly five years later. The Federation and Klingon Empire are allies again and victors of the war. The Orion Syndicate working in conspiracy with the Dominion showed the Orions are not NEUTRAL one bit. And as per Enterprise, Orion space is right next to Klingon territory. The Federation would arrest you, try you in a court of law, and send you in some humane penal colony. Klingons would either kill Orion aligned criminals outright or send them to Rura Penthe aka the Alien’s Graveyard to mine Dilithium in atrocious working conditions. Pretty good reasons for Orions to quit piracy.
Actually, there's an even better explanation. Tendi states that some Orions haven't been pirates for five years. Which is probably about how long it took her to go to the Academy and become an ensign.
The design of the Cerritos departs pretty heavily from conventional Starfleet ship designs, with the engineering section indirectly connected to the main saucer section through the warp nacelles instead of having a "neck" like most Starfleet ships. That's probably the whole point: to symbolize the lower decks of the ship being almost completely disconnected from the ship's command.
In "Moist Vessel", Tendi ruins O'Connor's ascension ceremony by accidentally destroying his sand mandala, at which point O'Connor breaks down because he spent two years making it. The entire point of a sand mandala in Tibetan Buddhism is that it is destroyed in the end to symbolize the transitory nature of material life. Which is probably an early indicator that he's actually been trying for years but his heart isn't really in it.
The Enterprise is frequently mentioned, usually in regards to its importance in Starfleet. As the Cerritos is practically the cleanup crew for ships like Enterprise, her constantly being brought up hits several key points of the series:
First, the senior bridge staff, specifically Captain Freeman, are tired of being stuck in the shadows of ships like Enterprise, considering they're the ones that always have to come back around and fix problems in systems that Enterprise had already taken care of years ago.
Moreover, the prestige of the name plays up with Boimler's ambition. Getting to work on a ship like Enterprise is practically the best position possible, and though he ultimately considers the Titan to be his dream position, it still comes with the added bonus of working with not one, but two former Enterprise senior staff members who were particularly close with its captain. Assuming Boimler's time on Titan goes well for him, Riker and/or Troi could recommend him to Picard for a promotion, and the clout of working on the ship in Starfleet would easily help him build up a respectable reputation to earn a captaincy of his own.
Why would Q find Picard, who is normally his favorite human, boring? This is after Picard has retired, or moved towards it, or at LEAST moved to an Admiral position. Picard has a desk job, doesn't get into fun situations, doesn't have a crew to play off, and generally is working with wine quite a bit.
According to the press kit for Picard, he won't ascend to the admiralty until 2381, while the show takes place in 2380, only one year after Star Trek: Nemesis. Then again, to a being like Q, who doesn't follow a linear time-frame, he's probably tried bugging Picard between his ascension to the admiralty and his return to space, but found whatever life he was living quite boring (and indeed, he wasn't going to bother a Death Seeker who was wallowing in his own guilt, especially since Jean-Luc would have been in no mood to snark back at Q in his depressed state). Picard coming back, however, especially with Season 2 of that show set to feature Q, means that the old captain getting up off his rear and getting back to business means Q now has himself a target he could bug once again. But as for 2380? More than likely it's poking fun at the tepid reception towards Insurrection and Nemesis for lacking the exciting adventures that someone like Q would have more than happily butted in to give poor Picard and the Enterprise crew enough grief to last a lifetime.
The show's tone — a Work Com focusing on dysfunctional, only-semi-competent misfits — clashes with the tone of prior Trek. The Doylist reason is that the show wouldn't be funny otherwise; but fans have promoted the Watsonian theory that, in the wake of the catastrophic losses of the Dominion War, Starfleet had to populate their Table of Organization with whoever they had left, and lower its recruitment standards to make up the difference, paving the way for characters whom previous shows wouldn't be caught dead having on their casts. On top of that, the Cerritos isn't exactly considered a prestigious assignment to begin with.
There's also the premise of the show itself; these are people from the lower decks of their ships. While one can expect commanding officers to maintain a certain level of poise, the rank-and-file aren't burdened in the same way and can get away with being more casual.
Given that Starfleet's members still go through the academy, it's also entirely possible that training standards have fallen, again to meet the personnel demand. This would explain why seemingly everyone is a little more cartoony; there's a little less space between their recruitment as civilians and their being assigned to a starship.
Which makes more sense once one considers that in the final weeks of the Dominion War, the Breen launched a massive attack on Starfleet Headquarters, which is in San Francisco... along with the Academy. They could have lost a lot of the best and brightest educators and teaching equipment at that time.
"An Embarrassment of Dooplers" has Okona as the DJ at the party. That seems an unlikely side gig for the piratical dude we met in "The Outrageous Okona" on TNG. But then, the character was also used by David Mack in the novel Collateral Damage, where he was established as now working for Starfleet Intelligence, so maybe the DJ gig is a cover.
The episode's title "An Embarrassment of Dooplers" has a double meaning. The titular "Dooplers" split into copies of themselves when stressed or embarrassed. It's also a play on the expression "embarrassment (abundance) of riches". The title means that they can become an embarrassedabundant group of Dooplers.
That Kirk and Spock wouldn't be invited to the party at the Starbase isn't a surprise. Riker is just as legendary as them and he's been sent to keep the Pakleds at bay. Freeman is considered the captain of a ship that's sent on secondary missions. The brass at the party are the popular kids who don't want their party upstaged by a Military Maverick or who don't want to rub shoulders with the Soldiers at the Rear.
Freeman expected to be allowed into the party because Cerritos fought alongside the Titan. But even the Titan crew ends up being put on guard duty despite being on the guest list, so it's much less of a surprise that Freeman's crew was snubbed too.
The Doopler's biological quirk isn't just Rule of Funny, it also makes a surprising amount of sense. When they feel intimidated, they divide, but the combined mass of the duplicates is presumably the same as the original's. Like many animals that employ tricks to appear larger and hope that it will scare predators away, it's just a bluff. But when the Doopler is angry (i.e. actually willing to fight), they recombine to become stronger.
"The Spy Humungous" features the "Red Shirts", a clique of Command-division ensigns who help coach each other to ensure they get promotions. Except that, almost by definition, ensigns have no experience being promoted. So it's no wonder that most of their advice for Boimler is superficial or counterproductive.
It gets even worse when their leader speaks dismissively of Mariner, who has also been trying to mentor Boimler, and has actually been promoted in the past. And unlike them, while she is an admitted screw-up who has been demoted more than once, she actually does her job.
The show's use of Pakleds as the recurring villains. They were only featured once in the live-action series in an episode that was widely criticized for being incredibly goofy and unrealistic, with the result being a plain unfunny episode. Apart from having more dangerous tech, the Pakleds act in the exact same way they did in TNG— but because they are actually in a cartoon full of cartoonish exaggeration, they fit in with the show perfectly.
Fridge Heartwarming: The reveal of Billups' backstory in "Where Pleasant Fountains Lie" explains why he was so cool about Rutherford trying things other than engineering in "Envoys": he was giving him the same chance to find himself that Billups had.
In "I, Excretus", in Rutherford's training scenario, Rutherford fails to repair the warp core, a reference to The Wrath of Khan because the heat on the door lever burns his hands as the engineering suit the scenario puts him doesn't include gloves. The engineering suit is a copy based on the ones Scotty and the engineers wear in the film. But the ones in the film do include gloves. This is a hint in retrospect that the scenarios are rigged unfairly against the crew.
It is also an inversion of the scenario that Spock found himself in, where he did not have a suit at all, and instead stole Scotty's gloves while the latter was unconscious. This isn't Spock's no-win scenario, it's Scotty's, where he failed to repair the damage and someone else died for it.
On a semi-related note, of course Yem had to cherry-pick a seemingly incompetent crew and rig the drills for anyone to fail. Because she never served on a starship, she didn't have first-hand experience with the perils you find in space, and judging by her utter panic at dangers the crew of the Cerritos hardly bats an eye at, has vastly underestimated how threatening the average Negative Space Wedgie is. This is likely why other ships kept passing with no problem; her drills were simply much too easy. How can a desk jockey with no working knowledge of starship life create something challenging for experienced spacefarers who encounter worse than she's ever experienced on a daily basis without resorting to Fake Difficulty?
In "wej Duj", the Sh'val was shown using blue colored energy weapons. The last time Vulcan ships were televised, the color was green, implying that at some point they switched to installing Andorian-made weapons, which were also blue in color. Which means that they've come a long way since Enterprise.
Alternately, blue light is emitted at a higher frequency than green light, so it could be that these are just more powerful weapons.
T'Lyn is transferred to Starfleet because her approach to problems disrupts and disturbs the other Vulcans on her ship, even though she is (to viewers' perceptions) barely expressing more emotions than the rest of them. This brings up the possibility that most Vulcans who join Starfleet are loose-cannon Cultural Rebels, but none of their emotionally-unrestricted comrades can tell. This is backed up by Main!Spock's long disagreement with his father about joining Starfleet over the Vulcan Science Academy, and his Kelvin Timeline's choice to go into Starfleet to escape racism (his "disadvantage" of being "half-Vulcan.")
When the Sh'val intercedes to protect the Cerritos from her attackers, we get a reprise of Holo!Mariner's Big Damn Heroes theme from "Crisis Point." In the original usage, the scene was one family member coming to another's aid. Arguably the same context applies to a Vulcan ship coming to the aid of an Earther ship, with the Federation being a big family.
The Nameless Kzinti Ensign. He might be nameless on purpose. Kzinti don't get names until they earn one in their society. His full name might be "Ensign Ensign" or "Ensign Serves-With-Apes," similar to how the Kzinti who starred in Niven's Ringworld was a diplomat named "Speaker-To-Animals."
Averted when his name is revealed to be Taylor.
The Galardonian Hate Plague seen in "Second Contact" is spread by mosquitos and highly contagious... but the Galardonians themselves don't seem to be particularly worried about it. Probably because the source of the cure, the spider-cows, are what they keep as cattle. That milk they produce is probably full of the same enzyme the slime is, so a regular diet of spider-cow milk makes the otherwise horrible disease a non-issue. And since it would present itself as an effect of eliminating the milk from the diet and therefore resemble a nutrient deficiency, they may not even have realised that it is a transmissible disease.
When Queen Paolana carries out her latest deception to get Billups onto the throne, it almost works. Fridge sets in when you realize that a planet of people who pretend science is magic and act like they're at a Ren-Faire would make for perfect actors to carry out the deception.
Prank-calling Armus, a creature made of pure evil who can kill in a second, is not as irresponsible as you might think. Firstly because his powers have very limited range, but secondly, he loses his power whenever he gets upset. So pissing him off is the safe option!
When the Titan is seen in the first two episodes of season two, why doesn't Deanna appear on-screen? Based on the timeline, she's either heavily pregnant with Thad or on maternity leave after giving birth. Given that the Titan is on the front lines in the new war against the Pakleds, she might not want her baby in a warzone.
The fact that a model of Deep Space 9 made by a company Quark owns would include a Jadzia and Ezri Dax, despite the two being the same Trill and thus never meeting, is a bit of both Fridge Brilliance and Heartwarming;
It's Fridge Brilliance by allowing the model to be used to represent either pre or post 'Tears of the Prophet' without having to pay to manufacture two models and dividing profits between the two sets.
Fridge Heartwarming in that Quark considered both Dax's as his friend. His model allows two friends he had that never got to meet, to be together, even if only in a spiritual sense.
In the Season 3 trailer, one of the nightmares brought into reality by Green Rocks appears to be a werewolf version of Ensign Jennifer. Considering the Belligerent Sexual Tension between her and Mariner and Mariner's previous Trauma Button of overly perfect romantic partners from "Cupid's Errant Arrow", the Werewolf Jennifer is almost certainly one of Mariner's nightmares.
The comms get blocked in "Mining the Mind's Mines" not just because of Rule of Drama, but also because the area they were trying to transmit from would necessarily need to be hardened against prying Federation eyes.
As silly as the Dulainian culture seems to be on the surface with their focus on belly buttons and fitness, it still weirdly enough fits together when one remembers that their sentient volcano god is specifically called the "navel of the planet"; presumably they assign a religious importance to belly buttons from that, which bleeds into the rest of their society, explaining why they have religious taboos about belly buttons, why they constantly bare their midriffs, and why their space suits are activated with a button on the navel.
The religious significance of a belly button also makes a weird kind of sense when one remembers how important belly buttons actually are in the real world, as they serve as the connection point for the umbilical cord in placental mammals, providing a way for a fetus to get sufficient nutrients and grow to a healthy extent before their mother gives birth to them. As such, the Dulainians probably see themselves as the "children" of their holy god, and that their own faith in their deities is nurturing them so they can eventually be "re-born" as better people. And of course, the Dulainians wouldn't be the first culture to assign a great religious significance to belly buttons.
In hindsight, did her father want her to stay out of Starfleet because he wanted her to just stay with the rest of the exocomps, or because he knew just how bad she'd be at being a Starfleet officer? There's enough leeway that the second part is plausible.
It's not just Peanut Hamper. Badgey, AGIMUS, the M-5, Lore, V'ger, Moriarty, the Aledo... Starfleet is having a lot of bad luck with sentient A.I. No doubt they're already beginning to sour on the concept; the synth rebellion may just be the final straw for a problem that's been building for years.
In "Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus," the random side character with the map to Ki-Ty-Ha tattooed on his many, many skin folds seems like he only exists for the sake of Squick. Then you realize that the map man is wrinkled— just like the raisins that Boimler's family's farm produces. With that and how much he fears being trapped on said farm in mind, it makes sense that someone more or less resembling a humanoid raisin would play a (specifically antagonistic) role in Boimler's personal journey.
Holo-Kayshon yells "TEMBA!" when blasting at Romulans. Since "Temba, his arms wide" means "gift giving" in Tamarian, he's essentially shouting "TAKE THIS!"
Boimler's coma dream featuring Sulu comes to a sudden, somewhat surreal end when a nearby horse abruptly chomps him on the neck. It seems like just an instance of SurrealBlack Comedy on the surface until one realizes that the horse is actually illustrating Sulu's point: Boimler had an unexpected joy when he got to feed the horse and talk to Sulu, which was then counterbalanced by an entirely random death. If nothing else, one must admire the symmetry.
The Texas-class of ships are entirely automated vessels, i.e. no crew and at most a single computer intelligence running the starship. What's the state of Texas' nickname? The Lone Star State.
In "Trusted Sources" it would make sense that, of all people, it's Ransom who thinks Captain Freeman's reaction for Mariner's supposed actions was too extreme. Even though he believed Mariner was responsible for the reporter finding out about the crew's various missteps, he's also been the one overseeing all of Mariner's behavior for the season. Despite thinking that she was responsible for making everyone look bad, he has seen that Mariner has been putting in the effort to improve her behavior lately.
What would a belligerent rival to the California-class ships be called? The Texas-class, of course— as the two most populous states (and two of the largest), Texas and California have a relatively minor but ongoing rivalry.
Despite Captain Ramsay and Captain Vendome being treated as rising young stars in Starfleet, they are still both confirmed to be captains of California-class ships. Which makes sense, as even though they've both rapidly risen to the rank of captain, they are still comparatively young. So they would still be cutting their teeth as captains in auxiliary ships, rather than the larger classes of ship.
Why do three Texas-class ships manage to disable a Sovereign-class vessel when, by all standards, the Van Citters should've been far more powerful and able to stop the ships easily? The Texas-class ships are automated. They may be equipped with standard warp cores (at least as far as we know), but they don't have to worry about keeping their crew alive and all the things that go with it— life support, replicators, artificial gravity, etc. So thus, the Texas-class ships are able to draw on far more power than a Sovereign-class can, meaning their phasers and torpedoes (including the crazy purple ones) are capable of much more damage and their shields are also far more powerful. That said, two of them fall to a warp core mine, and the third meets its end at the hands of the massed California-class fleet, which as a combined force were more powerful.
Even if each ship is run by its own AI, they could be communicating and coordinating at speeds impossible for organic crews, especially on separate ships. The three Texas-class gang up on and rapidly cripple the lone, superior Sovereign-class because of superior teamwork. Which makes it appropriately ironic that the last surviving Texas is obliterated by the combined force of all the California-class.
Another major advantage the Texas-class ships have is that they can instantly reroute power, meaning they are always using their power to the fullest extent. Most importantly, Star Trek shields are location-based, meaning the AI-controlled ships can instantly lower shields that aren't facing the enemy to bolster shields that are, presenting all of their shield power towards the enemy at any given time and letting them take blows from the Sovereign-class. This doesn't help against the California-class vessels because being attacked from every direction at once forces the Aledo to keep all its shields powered simultaneously, causing the shields taking the most fire to fail.
After the entire California class arrive, the Aledo doesn't manage to land a hit on any of them. Why? Because all of its targets are the same class. A look at its POV shows that its targeting is based on threat assessments, and all its targets represent the same level of threat. A human would have picked a random target and started shooting, but the totally logical AI is stuck. The only shot it makes is at the crippled Cerritos, presumably deciding that Rutherford is the primary target, or that if all the targets are equally dangerous, take out the one it knows is weakened.
All of the California-class vessels arrive almost simultaneously. This seems like a strange plot contrivance, but the order to decommission them meant they were all already converging on the same location to report for decommissioning and wouldn't have been too far away from each other.
Starfleet Command deciding to shutter the entire Cali class just because of the Cerritos failing may seem like (hell, is) a disproportionate response, but think about it; The Cerritos, despite being a rickety ship filled with lunatics and oddballs, is seen as The Ace of the class. The others? Dayton was a neurotic screw-up. Vendome got a spear in the shoulder for screwing up a simple diplomatic mission less than a year before. Durango got his ship torn up trying to look good. And then suddenly this ship, supposedly the best of a bad bunch, gives Starfleet a major black eye in the PR department. No wonder the admiralty then finally decide "[bleep] it". They've probably had to put up with years of this nonsense and finally decide that if the best the Cali-class can manage does stuff like that, then the whole lot needs to go.
Mariner, Boimler, and the rest of the Lower Decks crew sleep in barracks-like quarters, first seen in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. While Mariner describes them as "sleeping in a corridor," several times in Real Life, lower ranking berthing is often used (but frowned upon) as passageways through various decks.
Boimler's first error in The Old Scientists, where he mentions the name of a future Enterprise's Klingon bridge officer, will be automatically averted since said officer is not the first in his family, who is not a KDF colonel at that point, with that name.
There's a bit of a Fandom Rivalry between Trekkies and people who attend Renaissance Faires, as the former group has a reputation for crashing faires in Star Trek cosplay and acting like they're in a Time Travel Episode. Hysperia's existence is a joke on this practice, but in reverse— Ren Faire enthusiasts are crashing the Trek universe!
Mariner did once again fall into her habit of self-sabotage in "I Have No Bones And I Must Flee" to pre-emptively lose her promotion under Ransom. However it's easy to dismiss the idea that she would have been the one to release the Moopsy on the menagerie, as while she wasn't aware of how dangerous it was initially, she knows well-enough not to entirely assume a strange creature is harmless. And while she has been shown to be readily insubordinate, disrespectful, and inconvenient before in her efforts to avoid or lose promotions, she's always drawn a line. Mariner is ready to embarrass or annoy her senior officers, but she won't knowingly endanger lives in the process.
Boimler is able to buy Rutherford time to sabotage Voyager's computer systems by monologuing at Chaotica. In other words, he used what he learned from his mentoring with The Redshirts and saved the day by giving a speech!
The Moopsy is an adorableKiller Rabbit because that helps it hide from predators and ambush prey. It's likely that its Pokémon Speak is both deception and, in a Shout-Out to the Trope Namer, a means of communicating to other Moopsy.
In the opening for "Something Borrowed, Something Green", an Orion is seen playing with a TOS-era phaser, then trashing it in a bin, where one can also see a phaser rifle, a PADD, and part of a tricorder. It's left to the audience to assume these items are non-functional. However, Orions are capitalists. They make their living off the value of the goods they steal and trade with. Most standard-issue Starfleet gear gets replicated and manufactured often enough and in large enough numbers to make even a working phaser worthless as a trade commodity.
In "Empathological Fallacies", one of the Betazoid envoys informs Capt. Freeman that Dr. T'ana's people used to eat them centuries ago. This is understandable after watching the TNG episode where, when the crew devolves, Troi shows that Betazoids used to have gills like fish do.
The Betazed intelligence operatives are able to effectively kick ass and do so while posing as a bunch of drunk, party-hard socialites. With that kind of efficiency, it explains why The Dominion was so quick to conquer them during the war; those kinds of skills would have exposed their infiltration efforts almost immediately.
Truth in Television - intelligence agenices have trained their operatives on how to drink (or appear to drink) during a party but stay sober. And given that both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine established that there are anti-intoxicants, it's likely that the trio had those as well.
T'Lyn has a brief episode of psychically influencing other members of the crew, and Bendii Syndrome is brought up, but dismissed as it only affects the elderly. Except, as established in ""Sarek", Vulcans know very little about Bendii syndrome, with Sarek being the first recorded case in two hundred years. It's possible that sufferers do have brief episodes in their younger years, but if they're surrounded by other Vulcans who suppress their anger and have strong taboos on discussing emotions, their companions' stoicism effectively camouflages the symptoms.
Unlike Sarek, T'Lyn is able to alleviate her symptoms by just talking things out with Mariner. While it might be due to her young age again, T'Lyn's problems are ultimately solvable by realizing that she doesn't need to be perfectly stoic to be a Vulcan. Sarek was feeling grief over his inability to express love for his son, his late wife, and his current wife, something he could do nothing about and thus just built up in his psyche until he was able to transfer it to Picard.
According to Ransom, the Cerritos crew is both the horniest and most commitment averse crew in Starfleet, which actually explains a lot. Definitely it explains why the holodeck's [bleep] filter is so gunked up all the time...
Badgey ascending was painless for him because he was already "pure energy".
The revelation that Nick Locarno is the mastermind behind Season 4's plot explains why the Cerritos crew was in charge of escorting Voyager to Earth at the beginning of the Season. Why? Because Locarno was the prototype for Tom Paris, and Robert Duncan McNeill has gone on record to say that Locarno was irredeemable, while Paris was always redeemable. Voyager herself hails from one of Trek's most divisive series, infamous for inconsistent characterization, wasting the opportunity for conflict amongst its integrated Starfleet-Maquis Crew, and Neelix— yet in modern times, Voyager has since been Vindicated by History thanks to newer Trek entries giving the characters and plot threads more time to shine and effectively show their full potential. But Locarno, who was meant to be Tom Paris at one point before the writers partially realized a character like him could never earn the redemption that Tom got, was never given a chance to redeem himself In-Universe the same way Voyager did out of universe, effectively making him a worse version of what the very character he almost was started out as.
Mariner is convinced she needs to put an end to her self-destructive behavior not by Starfleet, but by Ma'ah, who flat out tells her that she's dishonoring the late Ensign Sito and those lost in the Dominion War by marching down the path she's on. Wouldn't it have been better if Starfleet told her? Not necessarily. Even on a ship like the Cerritos, none of the crew would be able to help her outright— in fact, they might have made it worse and played into her cycle of self-destruction because they would have tried to approach the issue through a less-blunt lens than Ma'ah did, unlike back on Voyager where Chakotay had to be just as blunt to get B'elanna to stop hurting herself after learning the Maquis were slaughtered. Mariner is very much the resident Blood Knight among the lower ranks, so she's a lot more Klingon-like than most of her fellow officers, and Klingons do listen when their peers are blunt with them (recall when Ezri told Worf the Klingon Empire is rotten to the core and it persuaded him to kill Gowron himself). If anything, Ma'ah was the best person to pull her out of her cycle, because the next-best people—Boimler, Tendi, and T'Lyn—aren't aware of her Cynicism Catalyst. Even if Freeman had had time time to send her to Dr. Migleemo, it likely wouldn't have helped; he's hardly qualified to diagnose a common cold, much less a severe case of self-sabotage brought on by PTSD, meaning she doesn't trust him.
Related to the above, the revelation that Mariner was deeply hurt by the loss of Ensign Sito when she was assigned to the Enterprise and died on her first mission takes on a whole darker meaning when she got extremely angry at Boimler for getting his promotion to the Titan. She's no Enterprise, but the Titan is the closest thing to her considering that two of the D's former commanding officers were her leadership, and she was on dangerous missions every day due to the Pakleds. She wasn't mad at Boimler because he got transferred to the Titan; she was mad because he almost wound up in the same position as Ensign Sito. Just imagine how her reaction would have been had Boimler made it to the Enterprise-E; who's to say she doesn't hold a bit of a grudge against Picard for what happened to Sito, despite the respect he commands across all of Starfleet right now? It also explains her disappointment that Picard was funding her archeological expedition in ‘The Stars at Night’: she was working for the man who sent her friend to die.
In retrospect, there may be a reason that Mariner's "workout" program is escaping from a Cardassian torture prison and beating up their guards on the way out. It may be subconsciously she wants to get back at them for what they did to Ensign Sito.
B'Elanna did pretty much the same thing after learning that the Maquis were wiped out. Holographic Percussive Therapy seems to be a real thing in Starfleet.
Tendi's rather, err, bird-brained scheme to essentially cheat in the Barter by Combat by using Doctor Migleemo against the highly allergic B'eth does make sense from her perspective. The obvious pick, Shaxs, is quite visibly willing to win the fight for her, but she doesn't want someone she grew up with outright murdered.
When the Trynar shield is breached in "Old Friends, New Planets", the first Nova Fleet member to suggest fleeing is Risik, the Orion mutineer. This makes sense when you consider the Cerritos threw an Orion battleship at the shield—he knows the Orions helped the Cerritos, and he recently mutinied against his captain, so he's likely terrified that he's about to be caught. Furthermore, he just chased a friend of the Mistress of the Winter Constellations into an ion storm, and the Retribution was owned by the Tendi family, so it's not inconceivable that he knows that and is terrified of what she'll do to him if they cross paths.
The Ferengi-built Genesis Torpedo that Locarno procured worked the same as the original Genesis Device... except the Ferengi included a paywall to the deactivation code. It seems odd considering the builder didn't include a payment feature to trigger that torpedo, unless you consider how Ferengi handle their transactions. If the customer wants a bomb that can go off, that's part of the package deal and the customer's already paying for it. However, if the customer develops "buyer's remorse" and decides not to go through with the detonation, then the customer's gonna have to pay extra for that. Ferengi do not believe in buyer's remorse. It also serves as an excellent safeguard since the Klingon military sees money as beneath them and the Federation is a largely cashless society, so the only people that would be likely to have two bars of latinum on hand at any given time would be Ferengi. While the Ferengi might be hesitant to sell a weapon of mass destruction that could be used against them, the novel disarming mechanism ensures other Ferengi could disable it.
Stabbing a fellow co-worker in the leg while drunk is a court-martial worthy offense. Mariner is fortunate that she's friends with Boimler.
Given her aversion to paperwork, it's also possible that Dr. T'Ana just treated the injury without going through the administrative hassle of reporting the incident to Captain Freeman, to say nothing of the social hassle of getting involved in someone else's family drama.
She may also take doctor-patient confidentiality very seriously. She may be grouchy, but she is a good doctor.
It's very likely at least some of the crew ate each other in "Second Contact". Certainly, the Commander ate a little of someone.
Ransom: Oh, what happened? Where am I? And... did I eat flesh? Tendi: Uh, hardly any. Ransom:HOW MUCH DID I EAT?!
Mariner's attempt to lift up Boimler's spirits means that he's now going to have even more Fantastic Racism towards the Ferengi despite Starfleet being an organization that exists to celebrate diversity.
Boimler is incredibly good as a Clock King who functions well when in controlled environments with strict scheduling as well as minimal self-reflection. In other words, he excels when not having to take initiative. This is not good for his command path. (On the other hand, he Took a Level in Badass starting in season 2 and is on his way to becoming a good command officer. When he temporarily takes command of Cerritos near the end of season 4, he owns it.)
Mariner outright calls her treatment of Boimler hazing. So in other words, she knows what she's doing is wrong and potentially harmful to Boimler, but continues to do it anyway.
Badgey's A.I. Is a Crapshoot is shown to be a combination of the safeties being deactivated and its mistreatment by its creator (Rutherford). Just how many holoprograms are plotting to murder people, but restricted by their programming? This actually has precedent in canon as Voyager had to deal with a holoprogram who went homicidal.
It is also implied in the episode that Badgey's malfunction is also at least partly due to Fletcher trying to plug himself into the computer cores while Badgey was running.
Ultimately, Badgey’s psychotic sadistic nature came more prosaically: he was simply programmed that way, explicitly, by Old Rutherford as the ship AI for the Texas class project. Our Rutherford ‘improved’ this by adding the chipper, fun voice and interactive dialogue to complement Badgey’s seething hatred for… everything. So possibly Badgey is somewhere between Gone Horribly Right and later Gone Horribly Wrong once fully unleashed.
Barbara accusing Mariner of being a "rogue holodeck character" implies that a Holodeck Malfunctionhas let characters escape the holodeck. Either the mobile emitter from Voyager has been replicated, or ships have holo-emitters. Imagine a character like Badgey escaping....
Shaxs is way too eager to resort to deadly violence at the slightest provocation. One wonders what would happen if he had to take command of the Cerritos during a crisis...
It seems possible that his Sociopathic Soldier tendencies had a lot to do with his homeworld of Bajor likely having still been under Cardassian occupation when he was a child. ("wej Duj" confirms that he fought in La Résistance, and it still haunts him.)
And just like Freeman, his militaristic attitude could've also been the result of the Dominion War. His entire life has been centered around fighting one enemy after another.
It may seem cool that Exocomps have advanced to the point that they're recognized as sentient beings and granted Starfleet commissions, but this is only five years before the synth rebellion renders all of that progress moot. Even if Peanut Hamper hadn't deserted the Cerritos, her career still would've come to a sudden and unceremonious end.
Speaking of Picard, the show's publication material states that he left the Enterprise for the admiralty in 2381, when word arrived of the impending supernova. This show takes place in 2380. Let that sink in for a minute. It's not long now before the galaxy begins to change forever, and the Cerritos and her crew will undoubtedly be caught in the middle of it. If not for the impending evacuation, they may have to face the horrors of the synth attack on Mars only five years from when the show begins, then deal with the eventual destruction of Romulus two years after that. If forced to confront these events, could they walk the same path as Picard and lose faith in Starfleet?
Captain Dayton's crew from "Much Ado About Boimler" included families with children. Said crew is completely wiped out in the Season 1 finale...
If it makes one feel any better, she was commanding a new ship in the season finale, so she didn't necessarily have the same entire crew.
"No Small Parts" reveals that Starfleet has done a poor job of monitoring threats that they assume have been dealt with. It's Played for Laughs with the Betans regressing back to worshipping Landru (largely because Landru has been downgraded to Achmed the Dead Terrorist's threat level), but played horrifyingly straight when the otherwise idiotic Pakleds become powerful enough to destroy Federation starships. How many other growing threats are out there that the Federation isn't bothering to effectively deal with?
Worse... This isn't even new behavior— Khan provided this same wake-up call, since no one decided to monitor and contact the planet full of genetically engineered superhumans, provide any aid after a massive devastation of their planet and its environment, and, ultimately, led to the attack on Regula I and the detonation of the Genesis torpedo, which threatened to plunge the Federation and Klingon Empire into war over the tech. A hundred years later, Starfleet hasn't learned this lesson.
As of Trusted Sources Captain Freeman has only now managed to convince Starfleet of the need to have ships specifically dedicated to follow-up on previous missions for check-up visits, only for Vice Admiral Buenamigo to hijack it as an opportunity to push for the new rushed and defective Texas-class autonomous ships which he hopes to make his name by.
Remember Kivas Fajo? Y'know, that guy who tried to "collect" Data and was willing to kill his own mooks just to force Data's cooperation? Well, there's an entire guild of collectors like him — and according to Freeman, they've all tried to collect Data. What acts of moral depravity have they committed?
Thankfully given some Nightmare Retardent when the collector we see attempts to collect Rutherford simply by giving him a business card and inviting him to join his menagerie if he so desires. While they might get a little pushy, it seems most of the collectors simply make an offer of free housing, food, and comfort in exchange for being an exhibit to sapients.
"I Have No Bones And I Must Flee" clarifies that while collectors often pick up humans, it's most often an accident (the collector in the episode is a Plant Alien who can't tell bipeds apart) and they get quickly picked up by Starfleet. Collectors like Fajo seem to be outliers rather than the rule.
Giant Spock is dead. He was going to help the Phylosians rebuild their civilization. This Fridge Horror is only slightly mitigated by the possibility that Giant Keniclius might still be alive to help them (some humans in Star Trek can be phenomenally long-lived, as demonstrated by Bones in TNG), but is still worrisome, to say the least.
The Expanded Universe shows Phylosians in various stories in various parts of the galaxy at least through 2407. One was an infant. Presumably their sterility had been cured.
Lower Decks itself had made reference to at least one Phylosian Ensign on the Cerritos.
It is possible that there is a Spock Three who is still alive, since Keniclius would presumably have the means to make another.
Now that we know the Pakleds are being used by a rogue Klingon faction, who's to say there aren't other dangerous schemes like this?
Tendi engineered The Dog with a whole mess of Lovecraftian Superpowers simply because she had no idea Earth dogs weren't supposed to have them. What the hell is Orion's ecosystem like, such that all those freakish abilities seem reasonable?
Worse, what if Tendi was just showing off in her eagerness to make a dog? If this is what she can do just by paying around, what horrors can she make if she's pushed too far?
This series takes place a few years after the end of the Dominion War. What was life during the war like for these people? Boimler was in California and probably saw the attack on Starfleet Academy himself, and as noted elsewhere, many of Mariner's more selfish mannerisms make a lot more sense if one sees her as having undergone PTSD from fighting against the Dominion (as it's been all-but confirmed that she fought on the "front lines" during the war).
Boimler had to endure a full assimilation process in "I, Excretus." It was only a simulation, of course, but the Holodeck would presumably have had realistic detail for every moment of the extremely invasive surgery involved; he would seen (if not felt) all of the drilling, amputation, and implantation necessary to turn someone into a Borg drone and then, presumably, been puppeteered around by his own holographic implants until Mariner physically dragged him outside. It's not really happening to him, but the experience clearly leaves him traumatized.
The "Naked Time" orgy simulation also seems horribly invasive of the privacy of everyone aboard the ship. When that one skeevy dude played by Jeffrey Combs wanted to make a pornographic hologram of Major Kira on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it was treated as a major offense, but Shari Yn Yem just does it as a matter of course.
In "Room for Growth", there's a skeleton trapped in roots under hydroponics. Upon closer inspection, it's shown that it's the skeleton of the Doopler Ambassador from "An Embarrassment of Dooplers". The crew didn't get all the copies. How many others have starved to death on board the ship or worse?!
In "A Mathematically Perfect Redemption", the first people the Areore meet after their long self-imposed exile from the galactic community are a sociopathic robot who played them all for fools, her only semi-competent jailers, and the gang of Disaster Scavengers who obliterated their village while trying to steal their stuff. One only hopes that this understandably traumatic pseudo-first contact doesn't lead them into a Start of Darkness or self-destructive isolationism.
Mariner warns Boimler not to climb inside of K'ty'ha because "that thing is putting off a lot of heat." Boimler basically crawled into an oven. Evidently not hot enough to burn him, but more than hot enough to leave him soaking in sweat within seconds before he has a Freak Out and falls unconscious. His dehydration might have been due in part to Mariner taking a bit to realize he wasn't coming back out and having to go in to find out if he was OK.
The biggest concern with the above scenario is that Mariner probably shouldn't have left Boimler alone once she knew he was in serious emotional distress, because she couldn't know if he might hurt himself while alone.
Even if that's the case, he should've passed out from heat stroke long before he straight-up died! Just how long did Mariner leave him there?
She was probably counting on the holodeck safeties kicking in if anything happened, which would explain why it takes long enough to get to sickbay that he died in the interim. The better question is who turned off the safeties in the first place? Possible Section 31 getting rid of their newest recruit's identical copy?...
In "Trusted Sources", Admiral Buenamigo's new Texas-class ship saves the Cerritos from a Breen attack. However, the Cerritos never sent a distress signal and he was the only other person who knew they were there. Evidence indicates that he knew about the Breen invasion of Brekka and sent the Cerritos knowing it would be incapable of defending against the more powerful Breen warships, allowing him to deploy his pet project and save the day. Given Starfleet's disdain for automated attack ships (M5 can't have been forgotten by now, and six centuries later Starfleet still has a prohibition on AI controlling their starships), he probably did this behind Starfleet Command's back, declassifying it in front of a journalist to ensure that everyone knows of his new wonder ship and forcing Starfleet to endorse it.
Even if he didn't know about the Breen, he knows the kind of madness the Cerritos encounters on a disturbingly regular basis, both from having the rank to go through their logs and from being friends with her captain. He fully expected them to run into some kind of trouble for the Aledo to swoop in and save them from, whether they needed the help or not.
Project Swing By's entire point was trying to make sure there wasn't that exact kind of trouble lurking in places Starfleet had brief contact with, after all.
This is confirmed in the season finale.
If Buenamigo's suspicious Gunship Rescue had been just a minute or two later, the Cerritos would have been destroyed before Nuzé's report aired. Which means that everyone but the other three main ensigns would have died still falsely believing that Mariner had betrayed them, including her own mother. Imagine how much that's got to feel for everyone involved.
If that had happened, Mariner would have to live with the fact that she never said goodbye to her friends and having her mother's last words to her be that she was disowned for something that she didn't even do.
When Freeman orders Maximum Warp in ‘The Stars at Night’, the Cerritos almost immediately starts flying apart (as opposed to it usually taking a minute or two for most other ships we’ve seen). Then you realize that the Cerritos is a support vessel assigned low priority ‘safe’ missions in friendly space. This could well be the first time their engines have ever had to push a maximum warp out of desperation or run like hell from someone out to kill them. Even for the battle-hardened (by Cali-class standards) Cerritos, that’s asking a lot.
"A good engineer is always a wee bit conservative, at least on paper." is what Scotty says in TNG episode "Relics". That leads to all Starfleet vessels being over-engineered behemoths that can take much worse beating than their specifications would indicate. So the question that needs to be asked is "Engineered for what?" Even on-paper exploratory vessels like Enterprise are heavily armed and armored. Defiant and Titan are what you get when the Federation stops messing about and decides to design ships for war. So what happens when it decides to engineer auxiliary ships designed for fetch and carry? You get California-class. They are plot-armor tough (within reason) like the rest of Starfleet ships, but they are literally not designed for fighting or for speed. And because of that, they don't get top of the line parts or the newest tools (see purple tricorders as an example; Tendi and Rutherford were so enchanted with them that they stole them).
If the Texas-class had supplanted the California-class as Buenamigo intended, an entire fleet of automatic ships, just a restriction code away from going on a psychotic rampage, could have been produced.
And sent on missions to places with only marginal Federation contact. Where anything could (and almost assuredly would) go wrong.
Buenamigo was the one who told Freeman that the Vancouver was being redirected to evacuate a colony from a brown hole. As Freeman notes, brown holes don't exist. Given that he was trying to sabotage her career, that means he likely drove a bunch of colonists out of their homes under false pretenses just to advance his career.
Buenamigo is perfectly willing to screw over Carol or even just get her and her entire crew killed just to push the Texas-class. And she considered him a friend. Now remember he's an admiral, in charge of multiple captains. How many other ships has he sent to their deaths in the name of his pet project?
This brings to mind the loss of the Solvang and the near-loss of the Cerritos when they ran afoul of a group of heavily-armed Pakled clumpships. It's at least conceivable that Buenamigo was concealing evidence of how dangerous the Pakleds had become to engineer a situation to justify the use of the Texas-class, especially given that Captain Freeman was later accused of being responsible for the attack on Pakled Planet.
The fact that the Daystrom Institute has a program to rehabilitate evil A.I.s may speak well of The Federation and its ideals — but this is just a few years before the Synth Rebellion and subsequent Ban on A.I.. What's gonna happen to all these reformed A.I.s?
The various issues with AI that Starfleet has experienced could have been avoided had the incident with Control not been covered up. Had more people in the Federation been aware of this, they might not have been so eager to push for fully AI-controlled systems.
Considering Mariner is suffering from a very severe case of PTSD relating to the traumas from losing Ensign Sito and participating in the Dominion War, just how badly is everyone else on the Cerritos bottling up their traumas? It would explain how badly they've been screwing up, but it's doubly so considering that their "ship's counselor" is more incompetent at his job than Starfleet was for making an integrated fleet that The Borg would later hijack for their own ends 20 years later . How many other Dominion War veterans are on that ship, just bottling up their traumas and trying to avoid speaking to Dr. Migleemo because they can't trust he'll help them? Or what about any Wolf 359 survivors? Or just one of the thousands of incidents that have affected Starfleet since the launch of the Enterprise-D in 2363? And what will happen if those people get over their traumas, only to lose one of their friends in the Gamma Serpentis incident three years from Season 4? Or in the terrorist attack on Mars in 2385? Or when the Borg nearly take over Starfleet on Frontier Day in 2401?
While Locarno's plans are foiled by Mariner and the Cerritos, what's stopping one of the Lower-Deckers that listened to his speech from convincing others to mutiny and start their own Nova Fleet? He did raise some good points about captains and bureaucrats not caring about them and sending them off on dangerous missions.
Well, the Battle of Gamma Serpentis is only two years off from Season 4, Mars will be attacked the year after and lead Picard to resign when Starfleet won't help the Romulans, and two years after that Romulus will be destroyed. There's far too much ground for renegades to start popping up as the result of various disasters in the next five years. And let's not forget what's going to happen in 2401 on Frontier Day...
And speaking of Locarno, he was in possession of not just a "Genesis Device" but one that was half the size of the original. Despite Starfleet's best efforts a century prior to keep its existence a secret, not only was somebody able to replicate the technology but (1) they also made it more efficient and small enough to be carried by hand, and (2) since it was a Ferengi device, it was likely designed to be sold to the highest bidder.
It's all-but implied that T'Lyn has early-onset Bendii Syndrome, which normally affects older Vulcans and results in both the loss of emotional control and the occasional projecting of emotions onto sentient beings in proximity. This is never discussed further.
Somewhat mitigated by the possibility that T'Lyn doesn't have Bendii Syndrome itself (which causes Vulcans to lose their ability to regulate their emotions), but does have the level of telepathic abilities that causes Bendii Syndrome to be a problem for everyone around those suffering from it. The leap in logic for concluding that she has Bendii Syndrome was made by someone who was suffering from the effects and latched onto by someone whose active suppression of her annoyance and self-loathing caused the whole thing. The fact that it could logically be a possible source of what T'Lyn views as her biggest flaw may be blinding her to other possible explanations.
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