WMG / Star Trek: Lower Decks

Captain Sokel of the Sh'Vhal is T'Lyn's father

Every interaction between Sokel and T'Lyn, as well as how T'Lyn feels about her transfer, points to Sokel being not only T'Lyn's former commanding officer, but also her father.

• T'Lyn was created in Season 2, as the Vulcan version of Mariner. Carol Freeman, the captain of the Cerritos, is Mariner's mother. So to mirror that, it stands to reason that the Captain of the Sh'Vhal, Sokel, would be T'Lyn's father.
  • When T'Lyn "acts out" by trusting her feelings and instinct, her crewmates contact Sokel instead of their immediate supervisor or manager.
  • Sokel personally punishes T'Lyn for her behavior. But rather than dismissing her information, or requesting that she take her idea up with her supervisor, he also listens to the logic of her request to investigate the metreon particle emissions.
  • When Sokel admonishes T'Lyn, he doesn't state that she is behaving "illogically", but that she is behaving "like a child". Sounds more like what Vulcan would say to their offspring, than what a Vulcan commanding officer would say to their subordinate.
  • T'Lyn takes her shield modifications directly to Sokel during the battle, bypassing her chain of command. She would likely do this if she knew he would listen to her, even though she's a low-ranking member of the crew.
  • After T'Lyn delivers an impassioned (by Vulcan standards) plea to implement her shield program, rather than kicking her off the bridge, Sokel orders the program implemented.
  • Instead of simply booting T'Lyn back to Vulcan, Sokel transfers her to Starfleet, where he believes her personality is more suited. This is more the act of a parent who wants their child to succeed, than a superior who wants to punish a subordinate for repeated insubordination.
  • T'Lyn's "Live long and prosper...sir." is similar to Mariner's "sarcastic Vulcan Salute" to her mother, and the behavior of someone who is personally angry at their parent.
• In Season 4, T'Lyn's writes a letter directly to Sokel, rather than to the Vulcan High Command. She also states that serving on the Cerritos is "punishment". The tone of her letter reads like she's trying to convince her father to forgive her, instead of trying to convince her organization to let her transfer back to her own fleet.
  • When T'Lyn is unable to contain her frustration at not being able to send a letter to Sokel, she grows despondent, and unconsciously unleashes her emotions on the Cerritos crew. Merely not being able to contact your fleet can be frustrating, but not being able to contact a parent can generate significantly stronger emotions.
  • As she discusses her situation with Mariner, T'Lyn's argument sounds more like someone who's been rejected by their family, rather than someone who has been merely transferred to a different posting.

Section 31 becoming public knowledge

• The reason why Boimler is aware of Section 31 is because they had to come out of the shadows as part of a deal not to be charged with genocide. Given that the evidence against them was pretty overwhelming, the Federation had them over a barrel.
• The other option is that Section 31 was closed down - as Section 31. It's been reformed as something else....
  • Jossed as of the recruitment of William Boimler, it appears the organization is still functional and in possession of a Defiant-class starship.
  • Section 31 may be publicly visible (at least enough for some Lower Deckers to know of them), but a lot of what they do may be classified or secret, even from those they ostensibly answer to. Just because you know the CIA or FBI exists doesn't mean you know all of the missions that its done, even if you might have heard of some.

Tendi's medical career wasn't permitted in Orion society

• D'Vana Tendi could only pursue her medical career by entering Starfleet, given the restrictive roles placed on Orion women.
  • Jossed in a really techincal way. Tendi personally couldn't pursure a medical or science career in Orion society for social reasons, but there's nothing saying Orion women can't. (In fact, given the aggressiveness Tendi encounters while visiting Orion, basic first-aid being something like a secondary school graduation requirement seems more likely.)
• Alternately, she got "promoted" up and out into a more challenging career for the same reason Dr. T'Ana gives: she masters everything she puts her mind to and would be wasted in her current position.
  • Jossed when she reveals she left so her younger sister would inherit her family's Legacy Name.

Tendi left Orion society because of the Dominion War

• As SFDebris observed, each quadrant has a Space-Filling Empire that dominates them. The Gamma Quadrant has the Dominion, Delta Quadrant has/had the Borg - but the Alpha and Beta Quadrants have the Federation. A major power that has bested the Dominion and the Borg.
• Orions like Tendi can see the handwriting on the wall - being "gangster pirates" means fighting Klingons, Romulans or the Federation. Out of those, the Federation is willing to do business with their rivals - even if they get ripped off once and a while, as the Ferengi show time and again. Rather than get into a war with Starfleet, Orions settle for the long game of just doing shady dealings and legitimate business with the Big Good of the quadrant.
• Tendi left for Starfleet because she could do anything in Starfleet, given enough time more Orions like her will show up.
• Jossed, as far as intent goes. According to a doodle seen in a crashed Raven-type ship, Tendi had been thinking about it since she was a child. Given that the timing lines up, it's still possible that some fallout effect of the Dominion War provided the opportunity for her to leave Orion.

A familiar Borg cube?

• One of the Borg cubes in the opening credits is the Artifact in Star Trek: Picard.
  • Likely Jossed, as in Picard, the Artifact is said to have suffered a "submatrix collapse" due to assimilating a Romulan scout ship with a member of the Zhat Vash aboard, as opposed to being disabled in battle.
  • Unless of course that happens after this space battle, like if the Romulans were forced to retreat.

Mariner isn't 100% human

• The reason Mariner appears to be roughly the same age as Boimler despite having close to a decade more experience is that she has a small amount of alien DNA extending her lifespan.
  • Or just great medicare. They can grow new kidneys, for crying out loud.
  • OR she encountered one of those weird space anomalies that de-aged her a few years.

D'vana Tendi is a distant relative to Devna from the Star Trek: The Animated Series.

• Both are Orion females with somewhat similar names.
• She seemed very uncomfortable acting as a domineering Orion after assaulting her cousin.

Tendi actually is qualified to be a "cleaner", and go on serious missions like that.

• She just had to make it seem like she didn't know what was going on and was assigned by accident in her recollection because it was supposed to be classified, and that included the full details of her involvement.
• The way she laid into her cousin shows that she can handle herself in a fight.
• Tendi was a space pirate in her youth and is now The Atoner, that's why she was very uncomfortable acting as a domineering Orion...
• Her comment about "a lot of Orions haven't been pirates for like five years" seems suspiciously specific. And more to the point, about enough time to apply, test into, attend, and graduate from Starfleet Academy.
  • "Hear All, Trust Nothing" confirms that she grew up a pirate and learned a hell of a lot from her parents before running off to join Starfleet.
    • Fully Confirmed as of "Something Borrowed, Something Green" that she wasn't just a pirate, she was outright trained to be an assassin, as is traditional for the heirs-apparent of Orion's pirate families.
    • ...well, two out of three. She's certainly qualified and she's good for serious missions, but she's never shown beaming anyone out of anywhere. Yet.

Boimler is going to be in a LOT of trouble for his holoprogram in Episode 9.

• He's openly stated he's accessed the crew's private logs, something even Mariner finds distasteful, for his own personal gain. Something like this has to break several Starfleet regulations and may even be considered a felony. Boimler's eagerness to impress may have just torpedoed his own career.
  • Jossed, Freeman is annoyed with him when the secret gets out but he isn't penalized in any way and even gets himself a promotion and transfer to his dream job on the Titan.
• Though this ability to access private logs might be how he learned about "that ghost in the lamp thing" with Dr. Crusher. It's also possible that he's got some serious hacking skills we might see more of?

Mariner is adopted

• Or one of her parents is a step-parent. The characters' designs are based on their voice actors, but still. It's odd that she really doesn’t look like either of them.

The cat-like yowl Dr. T'Ana made in Episode 10 was a particularly vile Caitian profanity.

• Hence why she coughed self-consciously before speaking English. She’s not self-conscious about using English colorful metaphors because one attaches more emotional weight to their own language than a second language.

O'Connor pissed off the giant koala

• It Makes Sense in Context— O'Connor is a parody of twentysomethings who dabble in "spiritualism" or New Age beliefs. Only, since this is Star Trek, there are things way beyond mere human comprehension. The giant koala may not have the universe "balanced on its back", but it is a very powerful Animalistic Abomination.
• By dabbling in various rituals, he got the koala's attention. So why the Painful Transformation? Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence is painless if done the right way, or if the beings helping you like you (or save your life). O'Connor wasn't sincere in wanting to ascend. So when he actually earned it, the koala turned his matter into energy in the most painful way possible. And it made him Go Mad from the Revelation as he suddenly "knew everything". You want to ascend? Be Careful What You Wish For.
  • It's also possible that him annoying the koala drew its attention to the Cerritos in general, given that both Boimler and Stevens later mention seeing a koala in a near-death experience.
    • The Koala may also have facilitated Boimler's conversation with Sulu in Crisis Point II.

Mariner served in the Dominion War.

• This theory has been tossed around in other places, particularly on Tumblr (I suggest people go read this post, which introduced it to this troper and lays out all the evidence in far more detail than the below summary of it). It feels incredibly likely that Mariner served in the War in some capacity, and that much of her current personality is partly the result of an already semi-rebellious person developing issues stemming from whatever horrors she witnessed during the conflict. The evidence supplied includes:
  • Off-books grey ops with Klingons. The Federation and Klingons both had feet on the ground in the War.
  • Paranoid of shape-shifters, trying to out one in front of a crowd. Justified if you lived in fear of Changelings.
  • Field experience. Can be explained by a long career, but in that time the war would've happened.
  • Interprets "send our friends a message" as 'fire warning shot' and argues that it doesn't mean 'invite to dinner'.
  • Served on 3 ships pre-Quito. As a rebel, it'd make sense, but it's implied she hasn't always been one. So that's 3 ships that either had bad luck or were lost in conflict.
  • Coping mechanism in drinking.
  • Knows how to use a bat'leth. Difficult to master, but easier if you spent lots of time with Klingons (who she's blood-bonded with, which Klingons don't do with just anyone).
  • Holds onto scars like trophies, as if reminding herself that the War's over and they won.
  • Is probably suffering from some form of untreated PTSD.
    • Said PTSD may be related to having sent those under her command to their deaths, given her distaste for those in command, the idea of returning to a position of power, and how insistent she is that the senior staff doesn’t care about those below— she’s externalizing her guilt.
  • She stated that she served on Deep Space Nine and was involved in an incident involving Worf’s Mek’leth. Meaning she had to have been there between seasons 4 and 7 of the show. So, unless she transferred to the Quito prior to the events of “Call to Arms”, she would have been on the station during the war. Quito was also docked at DS9 while she was wearing a “First Contact” style uniform. This uniform was adapted midway through season 5 and was worn through the rest of the show. Assuming that her flashback to the Quito happened when she was shipping out, it most likely occurred as the war was reaching its zenith.
  • "Hear All, Trust Nothing" confirms that she was either stationed on DS9 itself or a ship that interacted with the station enough for her to rack up a rather large tab at Quark's, and that both Quark and Kira Nerys know her personally. (This is also the most solid piece of evidence towards the theory, as Kira asks if she and Quark are "telling war stories" when she sees them.)
  • Her using a Cardassian prison break in the Cerritos' holodeck, in "Strange Energies", just for exercising may also imply she served in the Maquis.
  • Confirmed in "The Inner Fight," Mariner was at Starfleet Academy at the same time as Sito Jaxa, Nick Locarno, and Wesley Crusher, and cites the Dominion War soon after Sito's death as part of her descent into despair.

The Pakleds got so advanced by pillaging the shipwrecks left behind during the Dominion War

• The war itself is the reason the Pakled threat went unaddressed. Some Federation ships probably saw Mondor-type vessels scavenging the Jem'Hadar, Romulan, and Klingon wrecks post-battle, but did not investigate or intervene because a.) they saw they were Pakled ships and laughed and b.) the war was ongoing and they didn't have the time or resources to secure scores of potentially dangerous technology floating in a warzone.
  • Jossed. The Season 2 finale established that they got so advanced because a rogue Klingon was using them to wage a proxy war.
    • Not necessarily. All we see of the Klingons is giving the Pakleds direction and certain weapons. Based on the various components stitched onto their ships it's likely the initial guess is still correct.

Shaxs was in the Bajoran Resistance, and was later an NCO in the Bajoran Militia, before joining Starfleet

• The Occupation of Bajor began sixty-one years before the show, and ended eleven years before. Taking into account the Bajorans' long lives (less so than Vulcans, but Els Renora was a hundred years old in Dax and still a practicing jurist), the white-haired Shaxs may have been a child when the Occupation began, or might have been born during its early years. Either way, it seems unlikely that he wasn't an active part of the Resistance, given his Blood Knight tendencies.
• At the same time, he is old for a lieutenant. It seems likely that he was in the Militia up to and including the Dominion War, after which he either came Up Through the Ranks and got a Starfleet commission if Bajor joined the Federation and the Militia was absorbed, or left Bajor to attend the Academy in his middle age.
  • Confirmed, as of "wej Duj". Further elaborated on in "Hear All, Trust Nothing" - he's a comrade-in-arms of Col. Kira.

All Star Trek is Filtered Through its Medium

• Why is everything on this show so whacky when it's meant to be canon? Because all Star Trek is filtered, at least somewhat, through its medium. What we are watching, vs. what's happening in-Universe, is an indirect translation or interpretation of what's really happening in the Trek universe. So, while what we see in this series is canon info, the humor volume has been turned all the way up. If the same characters ever cross over and appear in another, more straightforward Trek series, they will likely be far more serious in their presentation.
  • There's also the "BattleTech Hypothesis", that certain installments of the franchise exist in canon as a work of fiction in that universe, similar to how the BattleTech animated series was later retconned to be a propaganda piece produced by the Inner Sphere. There is already some precedence for this via the Star Trek: Enterprise finale being presented as a holonovel being played by Commander Riker.

Ransom

• ...Is a descendant of one Captain James T. Kirk, via a Green-Skinned Space Babe. There's an obvious resemblance both physically and in terms of disposition; they're both cheesy skirt-chasers who would lay down their lives to protect their crew.
  • It can probably just be indicative of the qualities Starfleet looks for when promoting their officers to XO positions. Ransom takes more after Season 1 TNG Riker with his arrogance and his liberal use of the Captain Morgan Pose.

Freeman's Captain's rank was a war field promotion

• The Dominion War ran from roughly 2373-2375, and Starfleet was frequently on the defensive. A lot of time went into the casualty reports, and we often saw the ships getting blown up, with few ships coming back from certain offensives. Bearing that in mind, climbing the ranks would likely be pretty swift, just in terms of "Lieutenant, you survived, congrats, have a new pip on your collar, considering that that last offensive took out the ships and senior staffs of about a hundred other command rank officers." Lower Decks takes place starting in 2380, so many of the command rank officers in Starfleet are almost certainly drawn from the survivors. This explains a lot of Freeman's determination to prove herself as one of Starfleet's best, even though the Cerritos gets the less glamorous missions available to Starfleet— she's got a need to prove, to Starfleet and maybe even herself, that she DESERVES the center chair, but given the mission parameters that the Cerritos is usually operating under, she's got little opportunity to even make the attempt.
• She's a competent diplomat and negotiator, willing to exhaust every possible opportunity for peaceful communication before going to Red Alert; she never shoots first, even in situations where self-defense would be highly advisible. It's also clear over time that this is not out of fear. None of this is surprising for someone who has seen a war up-close, and really doesn't want to see one happen again.

The California-class was originally designed as a troop transport ship for the Dominion War

• This explains some of the unusual design decisions, such as the separate engineering hull, and the ensign and crewman bunks being hallways. It was designed to have a minimal command crew and carry a large number of enlisted troops.
  • That every California-class' name and NCC are on the upper aft portion of the saucer suggests that they were meant to be seen by a disabled vessel, not unlike the unidentified craft towing an Excelsior class in DS9 episode "A Time to Stand".

The Division 14 ship looks so scary because it was a repurposed special mission ship

With the Dominion war over and Section 31 pushed into the light as it were, a lot of ships were surplus. Division 14 is necessary but doesn't need a top of the line ship. They may have had a worn out ship, and Starfleet saw this scary looking all black starship that had a configuration that fits the needs of patients going to "the Farm", and just used that instead now that it has no tactical purpose.

Jennifer the Andorian was given her name because her parents were ones for fads

• Just like some parents given their kids "hippie names" like Moon or Starlight, Jennifer's Andorian parents named her that because they thought it was cool or trendy.
• They lived in the 2300s equivalent of a hip, diverse "neighborhood", whatever that might be (colony ship? suburb in a fire planet cave? Mason, Ohio?).
• Probably related to the above, her accent and yoga practice tell me that either (a) her parents decided they liked human culture and assimilated hard, or (b) her parents were very conservative and isolationist, so as an act of rebellion she ran away to Starfleet, changed her name, and picked up these habits.

Troi won't be on the Titan in season 2 as she's on maternity leave

• In Picard season 1, which is set in 2399, it's mentioned that the Troi-Rikers' older child would've been eighteen that year, meaning they were born in 2381. Lower Decks season 1 is set in 2380, and if Lower Decks follows the 'one season = one year' rule, then Thad Troi-Riker would be born during the season. And as the Titan is a ship of the line, neither Riker nor Troi would want to put their newborn son in the line of danger.
  • That, or she's gone back to Betazed to allow Lwaxana to fawn over the grandchild she's been after for like two decades now, rather than have HER come to the Titan— because, knowing Lwaxana, she'd otherwise push for the Titan to be her own diplomatic service taxi.
  • With the Titan being on the front foot going after the Pakleds, it'd probably be too dangerous to allow Lwaxana to visit anyways, and Troi can only avoid her mother for so long, especially if there's a grandchild involved.

Boimler's transporter clone isn't a Thomas Riker scenario

• Boimler getting a Tom Riker-esque transporter clone was very heavily foreshadowed, and immediately lampshaded heavily. Which means the writers could be trying to decoy the audience away from thinking of the other time we'd met a transporter twin, with James T. Kirk being divided into the two sides of his personality: A good half and a bad half. Note that Titan!Boimler had an entirely different idea about how to resolve the dilemma of choosing which Boimler would return to the Cerritos, but he is also rather confidently kissing up to the boss, something which the original Boimler was never very good at.

Tendi's ingenue persona is an act

• Her entire Ensign Newbie schtick is put on; Orion women, as befits their role as seductresses, age very slowly. She has at least a human lifetime between her current self and the Mistress of the Winter Constellations.
  • Alternatively, given comments she's made about herself (the "not pirates for at least five years", and being uncomfortable about traditional Orion gender roles), something happened in 2375 that made her rethink her entire life, and what we see of her is what she chose to become.
    • "Hear All, Trust Nothing" pretty much confirms that she chose to be who she currently is. She grew up a pirate and learned a lot from her parents, who are heavily implied to have objected to her leaving for Starfleet, and she genuinely has a Stop Being Stereotypical view of the Orions who glorify piracy.
  • There's a good argument for how this might actually have been a large societal shift, as 2375 was also the end of the Dominion war, etc.
• Alternately, it's not an act so much as the person she's grown into after joining Starfleet. Knowing this gives a new layer to her interactions with Mesk in "Hear All, Trust Nothing" - meaning she assumes he lacks that growth or maturity.
• Jossed. "Something Borrowed, Something Green" shows that, at most, she might have had to hide it a bit as part of her social circle and family position. Her love for exploration and learning new things and SCIENCE! have been there since childhood.

Mariner participated in the events of “Homefront”/“Paradise Lost”

• According to Captain Ramsey, everybody in her academy class believed Mariner would be the first to obtain the rank of captain, indicating she was a top student, the kind who could get admitted into Red Squad (also helping would be her high ranking officer parents). Her cynical attitude towards Starfleet stems from having been involved in an attempted coup of the Federation. Assuming she was a third or fourth year cadet, it would have given her plenty of time to graduate and be posted to Deep Space Nine.
• Jossed by "The Inner Fight." Based on the timeline of events Mariner gives, she would have graduated from the Academy maybe a year or two too soon to be mixed up in Admiral Leyton's coup attempt, but just in time to see many more friends die in the Dominion War. It's still possible she was mixed up in the coup as a junior officer on Earth or the Lakota, though we don't know where she was either way during that time.

Mariner will end up as Boimler's Number One

• While it may look like it should be the other way round, once you consider their skill sets and personalities, a different picture emerges. Boimler is straitlaced, follows Starfleet protocols and regs, sees himself as an explorer rather than an adventurer, and while he's perfectly capable of kicking ass when required, he prefers to solve problems through diplomacy, in other words the Picard skill set. Mariner, though, prefers direct action, improvising in the field and getting her hands dirty even if she has to take a beating to do it, or the Riker skill set. Personality-wise, they also follow the same path; Boimler would be totally OK with sitting in the centre seat and dealing with things long distance, while Mariner would go mad having to sit the action out while sending her crew into danger.
  • This does make sense to a certain extent. The big question is whether or not Mariner would be able to keep her Control Freak tendencies in check well enough to take orders from her former junior.
  • Given additional credence in "Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus," where they fall into a very believable Picard-Riker dynamic while commanding the Wayfarer on the holodeck. Mariner even does the thing where she echoes the order Boimler just gave.

Shax has tremendous Survivor's Guilt stemming from screwing up in the Bajoran Resistance.

• He seems to take incredible offense at the implication that he had time to do pottery or any other hobbies while he was in the Resistance. It's possible that when he was younger, he slacked off and it cost the lives of many people he knew. As a result, he redoubled his efforts to be the most hardcore resistance fighter he could, but he also lashes out at anyone who might uncover his terrible secret.

Shaxs was basically the Bajoran equivalent of Old Man Henderson.

• A Crazy Is Cool Blood Knight fighting against Space Nazis? There have got to be hundreds of mutated variant stories circulating around Bajor about stuff he actually did, and some of them will be outstripped by the sheer crazy of what really happened.
• And it's not even incompatible with the above WMG, either. Having a friend die because of his mistake could have driven him over the edge from "earnest recruit" to full "WHEN YOU GET TO HELL, TELL THE PAH-WRAITHS SHAXS SENT YOU!" rage-mode and locked him there because he feels he can't go back to who he was.
• And then there's the events of "Shaxs' Best Day"...

Coital Hooks are just claws and T'ana is one kinky kitty

She wants to get her "coital hooks" into Shax, because the claws come out during sex. She displays a lot of catlike traits, and that might include being rough during sex.

The Pakleds are not as incompetent as they appear

• The Pakleds' entire schtick is that they appear doofy and then ultimately turn out to be dangerous. "No Small Parts" set them up as being very dangerous indeed, but their appearances in Season 2 have appeared to walk that back to just being doofy. But this is just an act to make the Klingons think that they're in control of the situation whilst the Pakleds engineer a conflict between the Empire and the Federation. Consider the events of "wej Duj": the Pakleds arrange a meeting with the Che'ta in System 7743.8, having already detonated a bomb there. They then convince the Klingon captain that they're such phenomenal idiots that they didn't realise that bombs were single-use weapons and, by so doing, persuade him to give them another bomb, free of charge. Meanwhile, the metreon readings from the bomb blast lure the Cerritos to the system, where the Che'ta would almost certainly have destroyed her (very likely starting a war between the Klingons and the Federation) if it hadn't been for the accidental intervention of the Vulcans. The Pakleds, meanwhile, could easily have come away from the situation with a devastating weapon and their two most powerful neighbors at each others' throats. They're not idiots: they're actually extremely cunning.
  • Why not both? They're idiots and cunning. This would explain the "good plans, terrible execution" schtick they keep showing.
• While it's unlikely that the Pakleds could have predicted that a Federation ship would notice the explosion (unless that accidental unprotected spacewalk wasn't accidental?), it's entirely possible that they could have run across, say, some unstable object that would look enough like a bomb on scanners & basically prodded it until it exploded in order to obtain a second "boomer" from their Klingon source.
  • Possibly jossed by the fact that their planet exploded. Some of them might have been cunning enough to pull off the above, but with the evidence shown during Captain Freeman's arrest, it looks like one of them was dumb enough to set off the Varuvian bomb on their homeworld. We'll know more in Season 3.
    • Now an odd mix of Jossed and Confirmed. The Pakleds did accidentally blow up their own planet... while trying to blow up their capital and frame Captain Freeman for it in order to get the Federation to move them to a better planet. So, they were cunning enough to enact a rather devious if short-sighted plan, that still went horribly wrong and was found out very quickly, with evidence pointing to them actually being dumb enough to test their one bomb and have to ask for a replacement.

T'Lyn the Vulcan lower decker is part Romulan

• Just guessing that, if she ever comes back, at some point they will reveal that she is part Romulan in some way, somehow, using her being more intuitive and impulsive as the justification.
• Alternately, she could be part-human, just like Spock. The fact that it is not brought up is more peculiar, but Spock's heritage was well known, maybe she (and her parents) were better at keeping it secret.

The Pakleds are under the influence of the Bluegill Parasites from the TNG episode Conspiracy.

That might explain why they've ramped up their capabilities while still being idiots. The Pakleds seem to be good at retrofitting technology, but can be easily fooled, so an infested Pakled could relatively easily get into a position of high power and secretly direct them to their own ends.

Mariner has a crush on Jennifer

• Why else would she be talking about Jennifer's butt?
  • Word of God says yes!
    • Now confirmed in-universe, with the psychic mines of "Mining the Minds Mines" showing girlfriend-Jennifer as Mariner's fantasy (and clingy commitment-demanding werewolf girlfriend Jennifer as her nightmare).

Carol Freeman was a Lower Decker on the Enterprise-D and Beckett partially grew up there

• Captain Freeman is old friends with Sonya Gomez and was apparently mentored by Riker; both of these facts about her background could be readily explained if she served on the Enterprise at some point. Given that the Galaxy class allowed officers to bring their families along, Mariner presumably would have been there too as a teenager, explaining how she, too, knows Riker. If this was during the early seasons, Mariner would have had time to go to the academy and become an Ensign before being posted to Deep Space Nine while Worf was there.
• It can also be shown that a girl who looks surprisingly like Beckett was on the Enterprise as a child. Given the general deep dive into lore within the series, this seems unlikely to be a coincidence.
• It would also explain how Mariner knows Q well enough to tell him off. Unless he really does make a point of messing with every Starfleet vessel simply because he can.

Season 3 will be about the Cerritos being on the run

• After being sentenced to prison or exile, the crew will break out Freeman, and the crew will go out to find proof of her innocence while being chased by Starfleet.
  • Jossed, because of the below.

The Freeman trial plot will be resolved at the start of Season 3

The Star Trek Logs Instagram has a log entry from Mariner declaring that she and Boimler are going to hit the books and figure out how to get her mom cleared of the charges. Figuring out exactly how the law applies to the situation and how to absolve Captain Freeman sounds uniquely within Boimler's skillset.

• Confirmed, sort of. The trial was resolved, but Boimler and Mariner's semi-thought-out plans turned out to be unnecessary; the trial itself was Counter-Intel Performance Art from the beginning, meant to keep the perpetrators thinking their plan was a success while the situation was investigated.

Rutherford's cyborg implant is actually from the Zhat Vash

• It's allegedly-Vulcan, can control him, and he now has a memory of the people putting it in saying that he'll think that he signed up voluntarily. The Romulans have already had a long habit of infiltrating the Federation while disguised as Vulcans, including Zhat Vash infiltrators canonically active in Starfleet during this time period.
  • Alternately: Rutherford is a plant for Starfleet Black Ops. All the stuff that was rumored about Mariner is actually true about Rutherford. Backs-against-the-wall, his implant can give him incredible martial arts skills to the point of dismembering Borg and nerve-pinching Vulcans, his implant lets his memories be edited, and it takes over when he's unconscious or otherwise incapacitated like during a restart.
    • Adding onto one/both of the above mentioned WMGs: Rutherford's super-adorable, chipper personality is ingrained by either the implant or the surgery to install it. The "real" Rutherford is a ruthless killing machine, leading his friends to revert the programming and get their "baby bear" back.
• All pretty much Jossed by "Reflections" revealing that he got the implant as a cadet, and while his personality is a direct result of the implant and memory alteration, the suppressed personality is just who he was back then... a Jerkass with no friends who was being used by some manner of clandestine group within Starfleet, but solely for his engineering abilities.
  • And the clandestine group was a man working diligently on becoming an Insane Admiral, and the whole project bit him in the ass HARD.

The Pakleds were once more intelligent but devolved into what they are now.

The assumption has always been that the Pakleds either stole or were given their technology before becoming intelligent enough to invent it themselves, but no one on the show has ever been able to confirm this, or dive enough into their history to see if it's true. What if instead the Pakleds were previously an incredibly intelligent race that developed warp capability centuries before other races, but centuries of social decay and anti-intellectualism led them to devolve into the Ralph Wiggums of the Alpha Quadrant? This would answer how they managed to make contact with alien races in the first place, line up with their ridiculous big-hat-based government structure, and explain their seemingly-random flashes of cunning. Also, Star Trek has always used alien species as allegories or cautionary tales for contemporary issues, and a race designed to show the dangers of anti-intellectualism would fit right in with the Franchise.

• Note that there is precedence for this in-universe, with the Morg and Eymorg having descended from a much more advanced civilization, by the 23rd century making use of Lost Technology and Black Box technology to survive.

The Pakleds are the end result of a "Dear Doctor" situation.

They evolved on their planet together with a more intelligent species. As that species was dying out, they simplified their technology considerably and made it entirely plug-and-play to give Pakleds a chance to use it after they are gone.

The kings/emperors/sovereigns etc. of Pakled society are really just patsies designed to fuck with off-worlders.

• As.... Cloud-cuckoo-lander-y as their society is, the Pakleds seem well organized and capable of working toward larger goals despite the random Full-Circle Revolution (which comes off like a common occurrence). This implies that there may be a more stable deeper branch of Pakled society, possibly even a Starship-Troopers-esque intelligent-caste. In fitting with the theme of the show that the "small parts" can wind up being the most important, maybe it'll turn out that the seemingly-lowest-rung of Pakeld society is actually the one that makes all the decisions, and the people Freeman and Starfleet Command keep trying to negotiate with are just idiots (even by Pakled standards) fighting over big hats.
• It's also... odd that the Pakleds have a developed stylistic sense in their clothes and structures, given what we keep seeing of them and especially their Clumpships.

Beckett Mariner is the only one on board the Cerritos who does not have a Dark and Troubled Past.

• They've been teasing Mariner's backstory for the first two seasons, and she's done what she can to fan the flames of speculation, but in reality, her backstory is unremarkable: Starfleet brat, more comfortable with life as a crewman than as an officer, maybe some minor action during the Dominion War. Everyone else, however, actually does have a sordid backstory. Tendi was an infamous pirate; Rutherford is a sleeper agent; Shaxs has so much PTSD from his time in La Résistance that he can't even hear the word "Bajor" without flying into a murderous rage; Billups is the abdicated Crown Prince of a medieval planet; and who knows what terrible personal demons Boimler, Freeman, Ransom, and T'Ana privately wrestle with. But none of them make a show of it the way that Mariner does.
  • That would be a subversion of our expectations, it's true. But it feels like something must have led to her current overall disenchantment with Starfleet. Her ex from the Academy even noted the change.
• Jossed? Season 4 makes it sound like she simply has a fairly mundane Dark and Troubled Past.

The entire series is an In-Universe creation of Lt. Picard.

• In the TNG episode "Tapestry", Q created an alternate timeline in which everything was the same except Jean-Luc Picard never rose above the rank of Lieutenant. Troi described him as having spent his entire life having lofty goals, but never taking any risks. Lt. Picard is likely a disgruntled employee who uses fantasy as an outlet, but learned from Lt. Barclay's mistake, so instead of using the holodeck to get fantasy revenge on his superiors, he uses 2D animation and fictional characters to lampoon the people and institutions he feels overlooked and underappreciated by.

Boimler's Clueless Chick-Magnet Weirdness in "Grounded"

Boimler has been shown trying to get it on with several women over the course of the previous two seasons, so why is he utterly oblivious to the vineyard girls flirting with him? Given his rant about the vineyard and increasingly-exasperated mundane advice for their pretexts, it's possible that he's entirely aware of their interest and is annoyed enough with his current situation that he's outright ignoring it.

• It's possible that he suspects they are just trying to seduce him so they can marry into eventual ownership of the vineyard, rather than for being interested in him as a person.
  • Or he gave up on romance after that stuff with Lt. Brinson and the parasite.
  • His rant in "Crisis Point 2" implies that he does definitely notice that marrying these women was/is an option for him, but he seems to associate it with "giving up" a larger purpose in Starfleet and settling down on a vineyard he hates.
• He doesn't have anything against any of them personally - he's just progressively more pissed off that their advances all involve the crop he hates with a passion.
  • The reason there's so many women hitting on him? His parents got all the candidates for his arranged marriage together, and had them work with him on the vineyard while he's home. Something, something, prove they're capable of running the vineyard, raise a family with him, etc.
    • That would explain all of the attractive and lustful women that seemed more appropriate for a pornographic holo-deck novel than an agricultural farm, maybe the first woman to conceive with Boimler would be the "winner." Whether Boimler is aware of this is unknown, but he at least suspects something along those lines.
    • It's also a Call-Back to Troi's mother trying to get her married and Picard's father and brother being "stuck in the past". With the crew grounded, his parents hoped that Boimler would take a liking to one of the ladies and settle down. But as he said, that vineyard means he's stuck on Earth - no matter how comely the ladies are, they are all working with a crop that Bomiler despises in a place he joined Starfleet to get away from.

Mariner will eventually join the Maquis or some other group like them.

• Given that Mariner now is on her last chance in Starfleet and her own issues, this wouldn't be surprising. She could even get her own version of Eddington's speech to Sisko in DS9.
  • This seems to be hinted at in the end of "Reflections". After blowing off Petra's offer for more off-the-books stuff, Mariner tellingly saves the former's contact info.
  • Maybe she winds up founding the Fenris Rangers organization that Seven joins up with in Picard.
  • As of "Trusted Sources," Mariner has resigned from Starfleet and joined Petra's organization of independent xenoarcheologists, but as of "The Stars at Night" she has returned to Starfleet after a 10-Minute Retirement.
  • Pretty firmly Jossed by "Old Friends, New Planets" when she unequivocably shut down the Nova Fleet's offer to join and called them out for their stupidity. It remains to be seen if Mariner may yet still go rogue in future (however briefly), but she still firmly believes in Starfleet's mission, even if she's not a fan of all it's nice little rules.

The Cerritos will be involved in events seen in the Picard series.

• Seeing as the third season of Lower Decks is two years before the flashbacks from the first season of Picard, it's possible Freeman and her crew will witness the Zhat Vash's plot against Starfleet at Utopia Planitia.
  • Hasn't happened so far, but they did just get attacked by three heavily armed tactical warships piloted by an insane AI. It's plausible that their experiences with that will be a contributing factor to the upcoming synth ban. (And the longstanding ban on AI-run starships even after the wider synth ban is lifted, as noted in Discovery Season 4 with Zora.)
  • Doesn't really fit with the tone of the series, but it is possible.

Boimler will call in his chits at the end of Season 3

• "The Least Dangerous Game" has Boimler agreeing to help folks out with things he'd normally avoid doing, and as a result has earned a couple of favors. By the end of the season he will have enough favors saved up to call in a small army of badasses to help out in a clinch. Boimler being Boimler, they may arrive after their help is no longer needed, natch.
  • Jossed. Boimler uses his newfound boldness to shout down the bridge crew and get them to listen to Shaxs. Mariner calls in a bunch of previously-established characters and more.

Shaxs has something to do with Rutherford's mishap and the implant

• Throughout the show, Shaxs has shown a particular interest in mentoring Rutherford, starting with his brief stint in Security, and going so far as to (temporarily) sacrifice his life to save Rutherford. During the flashback in "Reflections", we see a Starfleet officer with a distinctively deep voice but whose face is obscured making the decision to give him the implant, evidently to preserve his contribution to some sort of clandestine operation. The officer is both the wrong rank and wrong division (a Lt. Commander from Command division) to be Shaxs, but it has been noted elsewhere in the WMG page that Shaxs is old for his rank. And of course, the first two people Rutherford sees when waking up are Tendi (who works in Medical) and Shaxs (who is immediately obscured when Doctor T'Ana steps into frame).
  • Jossed, it was Lt. Commander Buenamigo, already well on his way to being an Insane Admiral.

Carlton Dennis, the transporter chief from "Grounded", is actually "Mr. Adventure" from Star Trek III

• While that character was given the name Scott Heisenberg in one of the novels, the writers for this one could have ignored that as non-canonical. However, if we assume that Dennis was born about 120 years ago — making him younger than McCoy was in "Encounter at Far Point" — he's the right age to have been born when Memory Beta speculates that Mr. Adventure was born!

The villain of Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus will be Holo-Boimler

• The characters in Crisis Point are based on their logs, the computer will be unable to deal with Boimler becoming Bold!Boimler turning Holo!Boimler into a Glitch Entity Paradox Person.
• Alternately: Crisis Point II: The Wrath of Shempo.
  • Jossed, it's some Romulans. And a procedurally-generated cult leader his and a cheesy-inspirational-quote-spouting 'god'. Seriously, it gets weird.
    • There's a lot of From a Certain Point of View going on, but there's an argument to be made that Boimler is his own worst enemy in the movie.

Rutherford is misremembering the finer details in his flashback

• The actual text is correct, but the inflections are different - a Once More, with Clarity situation. Whereas he keeps seeing the implantation surgery as part of a shadowy conspiracy, done against his will for nefarious reasons, it'll turn out to be to save him and his career in Starfleet.
  • Jossed, probably - he seems to be remembering it correctly. Admiral Buenamigo seems to prefer not killing his disposable pawns as a first step.
• Rutherford was pushed into increasingly dangerous engineering experiments, one of which nearly killed him. This ended up being a Heel Realization for the higher-up involved, and rather than let a disposable cadet die to what anyone else would assume was a misguided mistake solely of his own making, they had him resuscitated through a cyborg procedure. The memory erasure was to protect Rutherford from the consequences of the higher-up's actions, not the other way around, and his relatively new status as a cyborg is to put him as far out of harm's way as possible.
• The proof is in Rutherford still being alive. Remember in "Envoys", where he's uncharacteristically incapable of summoning up some bedside manner? It's because he suffered some similar dilithium burns in the accident - it's the shot of him in the bandage with his eye out, otherwise unrelated to the scene - which would've been quickly fatal if left alone. If all the higher-up needed was to get rid of a liability, why revive him? Why not pretend to "not get there in time"?

Dr. Migleemo is actually a genius, and possibly even a good Counselor

• 0% Approval Rating is actually very difficult to achieve by accident (and "I, Excretus" shows what happens when a crew wants to get rid of someone with one). But Migleemo seems to have earned a universally low opinion as a counselor. This is because he's deliberately tailoring his sessions to be annoying to each officer personally - if his patients don't want to see him again, to the point of considering sessions with him as punishment, their only options are to improve or to be sent back to see him. The odds of improvement or recovery are greatly increased the more a patient wants to, and Migleemo gooses the odds by taking advantage of negative reinforcement and deliberately making himself the adverse stimulus. The genius comes into play by making sessions with him unwanted, but ultimately a fairly benign experience. This makes him a terrible therapist, with paradoxically well-adjusted patients.
  • He suggests that Mariner find "an outlet for all that rage", and suggests a specific thing he knows she'll refuse - and would clearly frustrate her further at that! Instead, she goes and works out her rage another way. He then gets out of snitching on Mariner to Freeman, a massive ethics violation she shouldn't even be asking for, by referencing foods to piss her off.
  • He takes an apparently apathetic approach to mentoring Tendi, knowing that she doesn't need an instructor so much as a pep talk - which won't work coming from him, and won't sound right unless it comes spontaneously from someone she respects like Dr. T'Ana. Note how he seems to find the exact line to guide Tendi, to be The Voice Of Science!, while skimming chapter titles - minimizing the book-heavy approach she's used to and pushing her towards one that'll be useful in her new position. (This would suggest that he might have given T'Ana a heads-up to have something to say in mind...) Hilariously, "Mining The Mind's Mines" is the exact opposite of the lesson Tendi needed to learn.
  • His suggestion for dealing with the Texas-classes is, essentially, "get help" - which isn't too far from what actually happens.
  • The Mirror Universe version of Migleemo in "I, Excretus"? His opposite in every way? A mindless gimp.

Mariner was once betrayed by a superior officer

• Maybe it happened during the Dominion War, maybe it was during some other crisis on a previous ship. One way or another, one of Mariner's superior officers either let her down or let their crew down or both, and for some reason Starfleet did nothing about it. (Possibly Insane Admiral antics at play.) Maybe Mariner was at a higher rank then and wasn't able to stop it. A violent incident in particular would explain a lot of Mariner's issues - her immediate distrust of the brass and Starfleet's judicial system, her unwillingness to get promoted (possibly fearing she'd wind up acting the same way), her tendency to hide contraband weaponry everywhere on whatever ship she's on... not that she'd ever actually just tell anyone about any of this, of course.
• The betrayal was indirect. That superior officer was the one who completely dropped the ball on that shapechanger incident she talks about in "Cupid's Errant Arrow". End result: two close friends dead (it "replaced" Niko), and Mariner traumatized as well as scapegoated for their deaths. Her revenge against that superior officer worked but also got her kicked off the Quito and stuck with increasingly stubborn anti-authority tendencies.
• More likely she was a mid-range officer (Lieutenant Commander, probably on the cusp of promotion to Commander) when she was made the scapegoat for a higherup's mistake, the details of which are probably classified to aid in the coverup. Following her demotion, she would have been assigned to increasingly less glamorous positions until she ended up on the Cerritos because of her connection to the Captain, the assumption being that if she won't behave for a superior officer, she would behave for her mother.
• Would this count as Jossed? It's looking less "betrayed by a superior officer" than "let down by Starfleet's inability to stick to its ideals", but the broader points seem to stand.

Mariner was put in command once, but choked hard

• From the way Mariner naturally fell into the captain's chair in the Season 1 finale, you'd think she was an old hand at commanding a starship... and maybe she is. At some point in her past, what if Mariner wound up in command during a real no-win situation and she wasn't able to handle it? What if her hesitation or her decisions got people she knew killed? That might explain her antipathy towards responsibility... though you'd think a traumatic experience like that would make her take her Control Freak tendencies down a notch.
  • Jossed? She seems to have gotten as far as two pips in rank before, but no further. Mariner does end up in a no-win situation in "Grounded", but the closest she gets to choking is when she has no further options and thinks it's all over for her mom.
  • Semi-Jossed? As of "The Inner Fight", it seems Mariner might actively be trying to avoid this scenario specifically because of this fear, but the way she talked with Ma'ah, she hasn't yet faced it.

Mariner can't actually remember what her problem is

• Maybe Rutherford isn't the only one on the Cerritos with Laser-Guided Amnesia. Maybe whatever incident that led to Mariner's current attitude and issues was erased from her memory, albeit using different techniques that wouldn't require an implant. Maybe it was even ordered by a superior officer, leading to her vague subconscious distrust of Starfleet's upper echelons. This also left her in a state of arrested development, unable to get over her trauma because she can't fully remember it, resulting in the intensely immature personality she has now.
  • Confirmed in Season 4. She has several opportunities to say what her issue is, but finds herself at a loss for words as she realizes that she doesn't really know why she's so self-destructive.
  • Later Jossed as of "The Inner Fight", she has at least a starting point with the death of Ensign Sito, and then who Dominion War afterwards. Recognizing it is the first step towards her potential recovery.

Mariner was in command once and actually succeeded, but in the process did something she considered unforgiveable.

• With the speculation that Mariner fought in the Dominion War it's possible that one of her grey ops with Koren had her take command of either a commando group or ship and deal a devastating blow against the Domninion such as taking out a warship or space station on the Gamma side of the wormhole, but in a way that caused severe casualties in her command or a Cruel and Unusual Death to her enemies that Starfleet Command deemed necessary, damaging Mariner's faith in the organization and herself. The actual incident was covered up by Command and Mariner was sworn to silence on threat of life imprisonment, meaning she can't talk about it with anyone and avoided therapy for fear of accidentally revealing something; this resulted in Mariner's self-sabotaging nature in the present, she's terrified of being given permanent command out of fear and guilt that she might become that person again.

William Boimler is infiltrating Section 31 on Riker's orders.

• He seems way too into it for the Face–Heel Turn to be genuine, even if it's an "Evil Transporter Clone" scenario instead of the perfect copy that Bradward thinks he is. Especially since he points out how custom combadges are a bad idea for a Black Ops group in exactly the same way Bradward would, then immediately bursts into an evil laugh after the Section 31 Agent points out she could just kill him.
  • Maybe his cover for joining Section 31 hinges on convincing them that he's that kind of transporter clone. Eating the scenery is essential to the bit.
    • He could even be an evil transporter clone and still infiltrating Section 31 on Riker's orders... And even evil, he'd still be an evil Boimler.

Rutherford telling Tendi that he'd support her being captain will wind up being significant

• Rutherford telling Tendi that he'd want her as his captain anytime will turn out to be the Orion equivalent of a marriage proposal within the context of their weird BDSM culture. (When Tendi said he didn't know how much that meant to her, she meant he really didn't know.) Naturally, she knows he didn't intend it that way, but another Orion finding out might just lead to hijinks. Which in turn might lead to... more Ship Tease? A Relationship Upgrade? A few awkward moments? Who knows?
  • Semi-Jossed, nothing has come up so far despite ample opportunity, but no reason it couldn't be an influence on later decisions.

Section 31 is being controlled by butt-bugs.

• The "Conspiracy" parasites from Season 1 of TNG were randomly brought back up in "Reflections," with attention paid to the fact that their mere existence is sketchy and unclear even to members of Starfleet, and in a way that seems to highlight how the plot was never resolved. Like with the Pakleds, this is exactly the kind of random thread that Lower Decks would have fun picking back up.

Season 3 will end with Mariner being kicked out of Starfleet.

• And season 4's initial story arc will revolve around the remaining ensigns efforts to get her reinstated. Season 3 kicked off with Mariner going full military maverick to prove that her mother wasn't responsible for blowing up Pakled Planet, and she totally crashed and burned attempting it resulting in her being put under Ransom's supervision in a last chance to save her career. And as we've seen throughout the season she's making a real effort to do so culminating in Ransom praising her for passing her performance review in episode 8. In classic narrative style though this is only setting her up for a bigger fall. In the season 3 finale she will be forced by circumstances beyond her control to go "full Mariner" and start breaking all the rules, and a load of other stuff too, to save the Cerritos or the life of one of her crewmates, (maybe due to something related to Rutherford's mysterious past or William Boimler joining Section 31, though there's so much to unpack there either story line would need more than two episodes to build to), and as a result Freeman will have no choice than to strip Mariner of her rank and discharge her. Season 4 will kick off with Mariner in the Independent Archaeologists Guild introduced in "Reflections" and the rest of Beta Shift dealing with the loss while plotting how to clear her name and get her back on the ship. "Bold" Boimler will step up into the Mariner role to save his best friend, Tendi will have to recontact her family to get help from outside the normal channels, Rutherford will have to delve into his illegal space racing past and Jennifer will probably provide some help too as will the senior staff acting in a covert manner. The person who really brings it totally together though will be Beta Shift's new recruit, Vulcan ensign T'Lyn (who is apparently going to be in season 4).
  • It's possible. But if Mariner's forced to break the rules for good reasons, why wouldn't Freeman and Ransom take that into account? There'd have to be some reason she wouldn't be able to tell the higher-ups the truth about what happened. Maybe she's forced by circumstances to cover for a friend? Or in a bind where putting the truth on the official record would somehow make things worse?
  • Jossed. She resigned offscreen in episode 9 and took the job offer from Petra Aberdeen, the archaeologist from episode 5. And now she's back in Starfleet.

Mariner was assigned to the Cerritos as a way of sending her "home"

• So let's say something really bad and traumatic and edgy did happen to Mariner, to the point that it left lasting psychological scars. Starfleet could pack her off to someplace like Elba II, sure, but that'd likely do more harm than good. They need to send her somewhere familiar, to some place where she can heal. But she's a Starfleet brat. Earth's not home to her. It's just where she went to college.
• So they do the only thing they can think of — they assign her to her mom's ship. Without telling Captain Freeman about what happened to her daughter, unfortunately, because the whole thing's probably something classified for one reason or another. (Maybe her dad knows? Or maybe this is something that even he doesn't have access to.)
• Regardless, Mariner's not on the Cerritos as punishment. She's there because it's the closest thing to a home that she has. And if so... what happens when her "leave," such as it is, is up?

The Season 3 finale will involve someone stealing the Cerritos

• Because Book Ends. Bonus points if said someone is Mariner again.
• Jossed. The Cerritos goes up against a rogue drone ship developed by an Insane Admiral... and it's the drone ships that go rogue.

Plot point predictions for the season 3 finale.

• The fallout of the previous episode, specifically;
  • Everyone (except for the remaining members of the core four) coming to terms with how they essentially drove Mariner out of Starfleet. This troper imagines that Jennifer and Freeman are going be dealing with this extra hard. Meanwhile, Mariner's friends are going to be coping with the former's absence.
    • Jossed to a certain extent. We don't see anyone other than the core four (now three) reacting to Mariner's situation. Freeman herself winds up being too busy trying to save her command (and the entire California class) to spend any time angsting.
  • The reputation of the Cerritos (and Freeman specifically) taking a hit after the expose, relegating the crew to more remote, out of the way, and low-key assignments for the foreseeable future.
    • Confirmed in a way. Except instead of getting the ship reassigned, it nearly gets the entire California class mothballed!
  • The new, automated Texas-Class ships causing a Job-Stealing Robot scenario for ships like the Cerritos.
    • Confirmed! They even hold a John Henry-esque "Second Contact race" with the future of the entire California class on the line!
• Agimus and Peanut Hamper break out of the Daystrom Institute and hack the Texas' for a Take Over the World scheme.
  • Jossed. Not this season, at least.

Admiral Buenamigo knew about the Breen and used it to make himself look good.

• The Cerritos investigating the situation on Brekka was his idea, and we never see the Cerritos broadcast a distress signal during the battle, yet somehow his pet project ship comes flying to the rescue. The only way he could have know they would need help is if he knew that there was something going wrong on Brekka to begin with, and used the presence of the Cerritos along with the reporter on board to make a glorious introduction of the Texas-class. Starfleet has long frowned upon automated attack ships, so he must have had an uphill fight getting these ships approved and took advantage of the Breen invasion to reveal the ships via the FNN reporter's broadcast so everyone would approve of it. This would almost certainly result in a commendation for him, possibly a promotion, with the only real downside making the California-class look even worse by comparison.
  • Possibly an even worse reflection of his character would be if he didn't specifically know about the Breen, but after the past three years of the Cerritos running into multiple situations caused by exactly the kind of thing that got Project Swing By greenlit to begin with, he realized that they would very likely run into some kind of trouble and set the Aledo up to swoop in and save the day whether they actually needed it or not. The fact that he sounds genuinely worried that the Aledo might not have gotten there in time when he calls the Cerritos seems to indicate that the situation his stunt did end up saving them from was rather more dire than he was expecting.
  • Confirmed by Buenamigo himself. He further admits to Freeman that he let the Breen attack the Cerritos so that the Aledo would save the day.

The Zhat Vash REALLY aren't going to like the Texas-class drone ships.

• The Anti-AI Zealots are seeming a lot more justified and less paranoid with Starfleet deploying AI-driven drone warships, and this might have even been the real tipping point for them putting their plans into action instead of the goings-on with Utopia Planitia's workforce.
  • Given that there doesn't seem to be any mention of the Texas-class in Star Trek: Picard, the ships might have something happen to them to cause them to go rogue, leading to their destruction by Starfleet, or they might be specifically targeted by the Zhat Vash.
    • Confirmed. The only 3 (known) Texas-class ships are destroyed in the Season 3 finale by a combined forced of the entire California-class fleet after their A.I. issues lead to them attacking various Starfleet ships.

Badgey will make a return in Season 4.

• And team up with Peanut Hamper and AGIMUS.
  • Half Confirmed, half Jossed. Badgey returns, but never directly encounters Peanut Hamper or AGIMUS, though they do all share an episode together.

Mariner's past is directly related to Section 31

• She's definitely got the skills, plus her involvement with "off-the-books" missions during the Dominion War era, and her general distrust of Starfleet higher-ups.

Admiral Buenamigo was Rutherford's estranged father

• Consider the daddy issues inherent to Rutherford's AI code, including the repeated line "I will burn your heart in a fire." Then think about how angry and rebellious pre-implant Rutherford was. If then-Lt. Commander Buenamigo was his father, a lot of things would suddenly start to fall into place.
• Imagine a scenario, for instance, where Rutherford had a poor relationship with his father, but wound up following him into Starfleet for some reason or another. Okay, so if he hates his dad, why would we help him out with his top-secret possibly-illegal drone ship project? Well... what if Buenamigo blackmailed him with evidence of his illegal racing activities?
  • Perhaps he took this on in hopes of reconciling with his father? This would also explain why Buenamigo went to the lengths he did to keep Rutherford alive (albeit with a wiped memory an an implant) when he could have easily left him to die or just vaporized the body with a phaser.
• It would also help to explain the massive personality differences between past- and present-Rutherford. Remember, Buenamigo asked the techs to remove him from Rutherford's memories entirely. Without any memory of his contentious relationship with his father, Rutherford became a much happier and more open person, able to make connections with other people his previous Jerkass self walled out. It all starts to fit together, doesn't it?
• This theory also makes Rutherford's relationship with Shax all the more sweet and tragic; Shax fills the role of father that was left when Buenamigo was extracted from his life.

As a kid on the Enterprise-D, Mariner had a Precocious Crush on Wesley Crusher

• Leading to her reacting badly if anyone badmouths Wesley. And it will be hilarious.
• Semi-jossed, it looked like they knew each other at the Academy instead, and through an intermediary friend. But it's still possible, I suppose.

Dr. T'Ana knew Freeman and Mariner were mother and daughter from the beginning and just pretended not to.

• Freeman and Mariner's relation should be mentioned in their medical files, considering they would be each other's best blood donor in an emergency.

Ketracel White-Hot isn't lying about its Scoville rating.

• Let's face it, given humanity's already-extant obsession with breeding the absolute hottest peppers possible in the modern, real world, combined with humanity's downplayed but still present Mad Scientist tendencies in Star Trek, they actually engineered something with a rating 1 million above that of pure capsaicin.
  • And no one in the galaxy who knows humans even remotely questions that they did so. They might be baffled as to how and importantly why, but definitely not the fact that it happened.

Section 31's Custom Badges May Not Be That Stupid

• If they only wear them on their own ships and not when out on assignment, then it makes sense that you'll want to know at a glance who does and doesn't belong. For example, if you're going to make a habit of kidnapping Starfleet officers and subjecting them to a Virtual-Reality Interrogation, it only takes one victim escaping their holoprison to cause some real trouble. Alternatively, what if someone infiltrated from outside?

Boimler is an android

• Boimler is superhumanly good at almost any task that relies on technical skill, from handling a phaser to playing the violin to calculating odds at the Dabo table. He personally defeated an entire cube full of drones dozens of times in a holodeck test that was rigged against him, and he was able to outplan an evil computer. His reputation on the other California-class ships is as a "little robot who's trying to learn more about humanity", and the holographic facsimile Borg Queen told him that his "design almost passes for human." He's an android!
• An Artificial Human maybe since he's shown with muscles and bones and blood in "Second Contact", when Mariner slices into his thigh...

Mariner and Captain Freeman have ADHD

• Beckett Mariner and Carol Freeman have all the plot-convenient hallmarks of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (low frustration tolerance, low boredom tolerance, difficulty in initiating and prioritizing tasks which appears to someone outside of their head as laziness while inwardly deeply upset that they can't do things others find simple, preference for action over contemplation, random hyperfocus interests that appear for a short time before fading away, instigating minor conflict for no apparent purpose followed by suddenly getting a surge of brilliant insight that resolves the plot inconvenience of the week), and Mariner has fewer coping strategies getting in the way of the antisocial symptoms, like inappropriate displays of anger and temper.
• Also, Admiral Freeman's personality shows all the signs of a neurotypical spouse and father doing the best he can to manage his wife and daughter's ADHD and moderate them for an outside world that's not super tolerant of it.

Tendi faked her way into Starfleet using some old Syndicate contacts

• On several occasions Tendi shows a lack of knowledge about Earth-related things, which doesn't really make sense since she should have spent four years on Earth at Starfleet Academy. In "Grounded" she claims she never went sightseeing on Earth because she was so focused on her studies, which seems unlikely considering her curious personality. It's even more unlikely for her to have spent four years on Earth and not encountered a dog or sand at least once. According to "Terminal Provocations", Tendi says a clerical error let her graduate the academy without learning how to spacewalk, but that could just be her lying to hide her lack of qualifications.
• Using contacts from her pirate past to get into Starfleet seems plausible, but it's hard to believe she would want or need to fake her way in.

The real reason Commander Ransom is so... shall we say dysfunctional

• He's related to and idolized Captain Ransom of the Equinox and believed he made a Heroic Sacrifice to save Voyager in the Delta Quadrant before finding out the awful truth of what he was really like, and the Broken Pedestal left him with major issues.

The Boimler who returned to the Cerritos was the transporter duplicate

• At least partially to subvert the evil twin cliche— turns out that no, the "evil" one is the original, while the duplicate is the one who is good. Also, when Boimler left the Cerritos for the Titan, he was easily and casually dismissing the friendships and relationships he'd developed there in the name of a promotion, so willing to do what he needed to in order to advance his career. Which is what happened when one had to be sent back to the Cerritos, with William Boimler letting Brad take the transfer back.
  • Or, if it turns out the duplication was more a "good Kirk/bad Kirk" situation instead of a "Will Riker/Tom Riker" one, splitting one Boimler into two different traits and personalities, it's that "good" Boimler went back to the Cerritos and "evil" Boimler stayed on the Titan.

Boimler is partially Illyrian.

• Given the Running Gag about him not quite being human despite his insistence he is, it seems the show is genuinely shaping up a reveal about him truly being a Human Alien, or perhaps a Half-Human Hybrid. The Strange New Worlds crossover reveals that he idolizes Una Chin-Riley, keeping a poster of her in his bunk and looking near tears as he repeats "Ad astra per aspera" - a line which she specifically recited while on trial over her Illyrian heritage - to her while admitting this. It's possible that whatever amount of Illyrian DNA he has is insignificant enough for him to consider himself human, but present enough to be picked up on now and again, and he still acknowledges the struggles of his family members who had a harder time due to their heritage, keeping the poster of Una as a reminder of that.
  • Considering how chronologically close Lower Decks is to Picard, Boimler, and the family he implies being part of in Grounded, may also be among the synths that are soon to be scorned by the Federation.

Lower Decks isn't actually animated.

• The last part of the crossover with Strange New Worlds has the latter's characters animated after drinking an Orion cocktail that Mariner was able to get the last ingredient of, which suggests that whenever we see her and the rest of the Cerritos crew, it's after the stuff has altered her perception.

Pelia will appear on Lower Decks.

• She's the only SNW crew member aside from Spock who's natural lifespan is long enough to allow her to still be around and active in 120 years. She might decide to pay Boimler a visit.
  • This can be doubted since she's one of the few protags Boimler didn't trip over himself... over.
  • There is still a chance that Pelia might have interacted with Star Trek characters. She may have helped teach engineers such as Andy Billups, Geordi La Forge, Samanthan Rutherford…

The animals on the Dove are based on B4's components.

• This can be accepted by how one of the puppies reacted a bit too literally when Rutherford asked them to stop instead. We know that there's a whole series of android workers on Mars, so who's to say not all of them further out of Federation space are also bipedal, and the puppy in the "wheelchair" might have just been for variety.
  • Jossed when one of them spontaneously appears next to Freeman a few seconds before the Dove's manager is told they've had to throw in some bunnies, suggesting they're holograms.

T'Ana's cursing is bleeped in universe.

• T'Ana is the most prolific user of profanities that end up being censored. This censoring isn't because she's swearing, but because the words she's ACTUALLY using are words in the Caitian dialect she grew up with that the universal translator is basically throwing up its hands and going "I got nothin'" in translating to standard, and so the other characters actually hear it bleep her out. This also justifies when characters stare at her questioningly after she does so - they're not used to the UT glitching out like that and need a second to process it.

Who's behind the mysterious ship

• Badgey, who survived the destruction of the Pakled ship and appeared menacingly at The Stinger of Season 3.
  • Jossed. Badgey had nothing to do with it, and may not have been aware it existed.
• It's linked somehow to the Whale Probe. It has a similar effect of shutting down ship's systems and the Whale Probe is now featured in the opening sequence,
• It could very well be the Iconians, given what they get up to in one timeline and the fact that it shuts its enemies systems down before one-shotting them. In their introductory episode, their probe played havoc with the computers of two Galaxy-class ships and a D'deridex, fatally in one case and almost so in the other two, and did it by accident. Disabling ships for one-shot kills is well within the bounds of what they could do on purpose.
  • Adding onto this possibility is that the Mysterious Ship◊ bears a surprisingly resemblance in material, pattern, and coloration to ships and structures manufactured by one of the Iconian's servitor races in said universe, the Solanae, such as the Obelisk Carrier◊, and the Solanae Dyson Sphere◊.
• Someone altogether new. Lower Decks has already done yeoman's work in fleshing out asppects of the Star Trek universe. Now, they're trying their hand at creating an iconic new villain.
• Fletcher. From "Terminal Provocations", and still sore at everyone for being better than him. So he's going around and kidnapping representatives from different races to suck out their skills for... revenge on the Cerritos? The Titan? Starfleet?
• Narj, from "I Have No Bones and I Must Flee". He made a show of returning his humans to the Federation and then faked his own death by Moopsy (he doesn't even have any bones, he just deflated somehow). Now, he's collecting crews from across the quadrant to serve as displays in his new menagerie.
• All of these theories have been Jossed. The culprit is Nicholas Locarno. What a twist!

The nature of the mysterious ship

• Setting aside the meta reasoning that an actual one-shot weapon makes little sense for this franchise, it doesn't seem to be leaving any scannable traces of its effects. So, theory: it's not actually killing anyone. After a separate agent has disabled a target ship from the inside, the beam teleports that ship's organic crew into a parallel (pocket?) universe or brig or facility of some sort. Then the agent self-destructs the target ship after taking it to a location where it's less likely to be located. A particularly astute crew might have time to send out a transmission that in hindsight makes it obvious they got attacked.
  • We know what a one-shot weapon and the aftermath looks like: the Crystaline Entity in the opening credits battle from Season 3 onwards does it to a Borg Cube, and it leaves large chunks of debris broken off from the destroyed sections. That's clearly not what's happening to the Klingon and Romulan ships that got one-shotted - and the Romulan ship's debris includes clearly intact pieces from its bridge. The effects are more consistent with an internal explosion rather than an external attack.
  • The crew's screams... last past the point where the light enveloping them as a result of hull failure should mean they don't have any atmosphere.
    • Episode 7 of season 4 has revealed that the mysterious ship is not actually destroying its targets. It's just stealing them and leaving behind fake wreckage.
• There's a very odd recurring theme with all of the ships that have been hit so far, and that's betrayal. It's unclear if it even ties into literally anything to do with the ship and its choice of targets, but there have been active plots to usurp command on almost all of the ships we've seen it hit and one of them specifically involved making a deal with it and being Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves. In the case of the Klingons and the Romulans, that's pretty standard on their ships, and it's not completely unheard of for the Orions (who attempted piracy on the ship despite not having any confirmed backstabbing in progress among the crew). Oddly, the Ferengi are the only group the ship's targeted who actually discourage the Klingon Promotion (preferring non-lethally screwing their superiors out of their positions), and they're the ones where the ship was directly contacted to facilitate such a betrayal. The Bynars, the last to be hit before it was found to be theft instead of destruction don't seem particularly back-stabby, but their first appearance in Star Trek did have them take desperate measures to save their civilization without bothering to ask for help first.
  • The betrayal angle being significant is now Confirmed. Instead of hacking its targets to shut them down, it's been the result of bribing officers to sabotage their ships. The fact that Starfleet officers are ridiculously hard to bribe (between loyalty and the Federation's post-scarcity utopia) is very likely a major factor in why Nick didn't go after any Federation ships directly.
    • For the Bynars, who aren't particularly easy to properly bribe, it's likely he convinced a pair of them that what he was doing was necessary and just as with the whole "steal the Enteprise" thing, they took action without bothering to consult anyone.
• It's now Confirmed that it's taking the ships instead of exploding them. Which means whoever it is now has a freaking Genesis Device along with their already OP ship.

The Lower Decks production staff probably read TV Tropes... Possibly even this very page.

• Eh. Let's not flatter ourselves.

Tendi never went to Starfleet Academy.

• Tendi's story about her time in the Academy seems a little suspect. She says she never left San Francisco because she was too busy studying. So busy, apparently, that she never even encountered sand while she was living in a coastal city. She never did zero-g training at the Academy either, which one would assume would be a fairly basic requirement.
• So if she wasn't at the Academy for four years, where was she? There's four possibilities:
  • She was trained and tutored by someone acting as her sponsor from within Starfleet, getting the equivalent of a G.E.D. and then being transferred into the normal command roster. (But why would she feel the need to conceal that?)
  • She actually attended the Starfleet Technical Services Academy on Mars for non-enlisted officers, but somehow still obtained a commission as an officer. Possibly by using her sweet assassin skills to hack into the Starfleet personnel database.
  • She never got any sort of training at all and never actually joined Starfleet. She more or less hacked the personnel database and added herself as a commissioned officer. She's been faking it ever since via a mix of natural skill and obsessive study of Starfleet manuals.
  • She cut a Deal with the Devil with Section 31, who falsified her records within Starfleet's database and placed her into the science division. So what happens when that debt comes due?

The crew of the Solvang survived, sort of.

• This combines a few theories!
  • First, the Space Vessel Lifeform (California-class type) born from the Rubidoux didn't really have a choice about tearing the ship apart during its birth. As a matter of fact, it was actively trying to keep the crew alive by absorbing them (while they were in the sturdier interior areas), only stopping when it got phasered. It really had no other reason to grab for crew members.
  • Feeling a little bad about destroying a ship that way, after a while the SVL(CA) started keeping tabs on the Rubidoux's crew after they transferred to the Solvang. It then stepped in to "catch" the crew before the Solvang's ill-fated warp attempt killed them all.
  • Now Captain Dayton et al. are the "crew" of the, uh, SVL Rubidoux-B SSC-001. They are on a never-ending mission to explore and learn about their home, the universe.

The Xindi-Avians and the people of Areolus are related.

• Besides obviously both being avian species, the Xindi-Avians were wiped out in the Xindi Civil War, and the people of Areolus were once a war-like civilization. This trooper is still working out the theory however.

Section 31 are behind the mysterious ship

• Why? Two reasons, first the real world one. In Season 3 there were two sequel hooks. One, the reappearance of Badgey in the stinger of "The Stars At Night", was dealt with in "A Few Badgeys More", the other, the reveal that William Boimler had faked his death and had been inducted into Section 31 is still open. Now it could be that the writers are saving the tale of two Boimlers for season 5 of Lower Decks and bringing in a completely new and original party behind the mystery ship but that would probably come over as a bit flat and violate one of the basic rules of mystery writing.
• The second reason is the in universe one. Initially the mystery ship seemed like an outside context problem. It was an ambush predator, it appeared, destroyed its target and vanished, rather like the Borg where all Star Fleet was left with was a gaping hole in a planet's surface where something had scooped an entire colony up. This changed with the attack on the Ferengi where it was revealed that whoever was running the mystery ship had conspired with a member of the Ferengi crew to hand over the Ferengi ship, and was totally upended by the reveal that these aren't attacks but thefts. This isn't the work of someone from outside the Alpha Quadrant trying to break in and wreck up the place, this is someone already active inside the Alpha Quadrant running their own scam.
• Jossed. The culprit has been revealed to be Nicholas Locarno, and he's not in cahoots with Section 31.

Nick Locarno isn't actually behind the Mystery Ship

• Nick Locarno is actually trying to be a hero and stop the real masterminds behind the plot; he's collected intel on the mystery ship in hopes of destroying it, and he hopes Mariner will help him.
  • If he didn't design the thing to begin with (there weren't any exploded diagrams in the notes Captain Freeman found), there are three options for what he's up to. The first is the above, working with the people actually responsible to try to undermine and stop them. He could also be working with them genuinely out of spite against the Federation. The third is that he started out with them out of spite and either realized on his own that it's a bad idea or might be talked around to that point of view by Mariner.
  • If he did design it (or found it on his own and started making use of it), then we might have another Engineered Heroics situation, where he set the whole thing up with the full intention to dramatically stop it to try to repair his reputation. He could also have some other angle aside from spite or inventing a situation where he can play hero, involving some bigger threat that his actions are intended to stop.
• Jossed. It totally was him.

A large factor in Mariner's self-destructive tendencies is self-loathing at being so damned good at fighting and surviving - even though she signed up to be a scientist and explorer.

• She's in Command because being in Operations or Sciences would eventually force her to confront this aspect directly.
• But it's so ingrained into her personality now that it's not getting unwound anytime soon.
• The flip-side of this is that being friends with Tendi, Mistress of the Southern Constellations (until such time as D'Erika receives the title at large), has been a mellowing experience. She's walking proof that it's possible to both be ridiculously good at fighting as well as a scientist-explorer in Starfleet.
• Jossed. She intentionally sabotages her career because she doesn't want the responsibility of having to potentially order someone to die.

Season 4 secretly showed us the origin of the Fenris Rangers

• This is what all of the surviving members of Nova Fleet eventually do with their ships; they even mentioned Seven of Nine in "The Inner Fight".
  • Jossed. Nova Fleet has nothing to do with the Fenris Rangers. It's just Locarno's ego-trip.

Migleemo is The Mole and is attempting to sabotage the Cerritos from within

• Basically every other member of the crew is a Bunny-Ears Lawyer— quirky and maybe a little mentally unstable, but ultimately competent. Migleemo stands out like a sore thumb in how he actively harms everyone else on the Cerritos, being an incredibly incompetent therapist, hampering Tendi's science officer training, and failing to win a fight against an opponent who was suffocating. Even if the show is operating on Rule of Funny, other incompetent or malicious characters have been dismissed from the Cerritos before, so something's not right here.

Tendi will be back early into Season 5.

• She's extremely confident as she's getting ready to leave the Cerritos, and certainly has the skill and mindset to do something like usurping D'Erika, signing an irrevocable order assigning herself to "infiltrating" Starfleet, and then abdicating and handing things back to her sister.
• Alternately, she single-handedly destroys the entire Orion status quo, forcing it to become the kind of place that sends cadets to Starfleet and focuses on the sciences by the order of Empress D'Vana Tendi.
  • Considering she already developed a mechanism to disable pheromones, it does seem likely that she's getting ready to enact some grand plan to tear down the planet's institutions.
• Or, because that's too time-consuming, she fakes her death and rejoins the Cerritos with help from a familiar face in Section 31.

The addition(s) to the Season 5 opening credits starship battle will be...

• Starfleet. The conflict's just gotten too big to ignore so Constitution and Defiant class ships will be there, saving the day as always. With the Cerritos showing up and joining the fight as Big Damn Heroes.
• The Orions. Turns out they have a fleet of leftover, ancient dreadnaughts that they're glad to get rid of.
• The Ferrengi. Not sure how there's profit to be made there, but they'll find a way.
  • Or they could show up and decide the hewmons on the Cerritos have the right idea and join them in very sensibly noping the hell out of the increasingly-insane mess of that scene.
• Dominion ships, like the Jem'hadar? Maybe doing a suicide run?
• Maybe Tholians spreading one of their energy webs over part of the battlefield?

Attack Pattern Delta means "surround target and attack from all directions"

• Full spread, meanwhile, means "fire every weapon you have".

Petra Aberdeen is the daughter (or niece) of Vash

• It would explain her propensity for mocking Starfleet, swiping rare artifacts (with good intentions), and otherwise being a badass archaeologist. It may even be why Picard funds her excursions, to keep her on something closer to the straight and narrow compared to her mother/aunt.
• Loosely related to that, while she might be a little old... there is a small chance that the father is Picard as well (he and Vash did sleep together a few times in TNG). Even more reason to support her in a tacit manner.

Shax was a husband and father on Bajor, who lost his family during the Cardassian Occupation

• It might explain why the occupation is such a Berserk Button for him, even moreso than most Bajorans (sure, its an ugly part of their history, but few go off-the-rails after a passing mention of it).
  • It could also explain why Shax is so quick at the draw to defend the Cerritos, he doesn't want a similar tragedy befalling his new family.
  • And that ties in with his "Bear Pack" of security, and his unofficial adopting of non-security "Baby Bears" like Rutherford and Boimler. Perhaps they remind him of his children.
  • Such a theory could also explain his relationship with T'ana. It starts off casual (doesn't want to disgrace the memory of his family and wife) but as they grow closer, he seems to want more out of it (commitment) while she doesn't.

Season 5 we will meet more families of the crew, especially the Lower Deckers

• We already know Mariners mom and dad, and now Tendi's thanks to the visit on Orion, but sometime this season perhaps Boimlers staunchly traditional parents will come aboard to embarrass him, or Rutherfords parents, or siblings, who'll embarrass him or be puzzled by his sudden personality change. Possibly the same with T'lyn, perhaps confirming that Captain Sokel is actually her father. Also an excellent opportunity for Billup's mother the Queen to show up again and enact another of her schemes. Or meet some other members of the crew who've talked about family, like Barnes trill sister who has a symbiote. Maybe a chance to see if the theory about Shax's family is true as well.

Season 5 will have yet another "Movie" episode

• Possibly with a similar theme to "Generations" or "All Good Things...", maybe allow the Lower Deckers to meet their younger selves and see how far they've come side-by-side, or their future selves to see yet how far they have to go, or where they shall end up.

Season 5 the Warp Core Five will actually travel to the past

• Its a beloved trope of Trek, but barring the second "movie" (and the Pike thing they don't talk about) none of them have yet done so.
• Possibly even into an old TOS episode in the background, just like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine did with the "Trouble with Tribbles", re-using old audio from the TOS era, and the few remaining actors for voice overs or additional dialogue interacting with the Lt.j.g.s.
  • Alternately, they will visit (or be visited by) versions of themselves from the future. Or their children. Can anyone say "Captain Boimler Jr."? Or perhaps a half-orion (and quarter cyborg?) scientist/engineer?

Season 5 will feature a Mirror-verse episode

• It's a Trek staple, and yet so far has only gotten a tongue-in-cheek reference in a simulator. Seeing real alternate versions of the characters would be fascinating. Possibly subverting the usual "they're evil" by having the other universe be more "morally gray" and possibly even make the Cerritos crew look evil in comparison (which of course they're not).

Season 5 the crew will encounter Tholians

• It's one of the few Trek species they've not yet encountered or even mentioned in passing, and they're easier to animate in a cartoon than CGI is to live action. Heck, they could be in the opening with their trademarked web encapsulating half the fighters.

The series finale will feature a wedding

• Another honored Trek tradition, which involves the captains overseeing, and some happy subordinates tying the knot. Maybe Shax and T'ana, maybe some other lucky couple.

The series finale will end with the California class being decommissioned.

• The Cerritos will get one last mission to got out with diginity, but it won't be completely scrapped. Instead, she'll be donated to the fleet museum so her working componets can be used for a, as of the 2380s, certain ongoing project.

The series finale will feature the Cerritos itself being destroyed.

• It's a tough little ship, but sooner or later the Cerritos will go up against someone or something too big and powerful to survive, and it'll be destroyed as a way of "ending" the show by having them all having to move on to new assignments (possibly promotions) and new ships. Which also ties into the theory below.

The series finale will have the Lower Deckers in command of their own ship, full time.

• More and more it seems they're growing, getting ready for promotions and greater responsibility, and Boimler and Tendi at least have captain aspirations. It could even book end the show by having them in the place of the original senior staff, ready to head out on their first adventure on their brand new ship. Maybe even with Boimler or Rutherford giving some wet-behind-the-ears ensign a comforting pep talk on his first day.