Warning: SPOILERS for the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode “Fully Dilated” are ahead!
In just a few weeks, Star Trek: Lower Decks will conclude on the 2024 TV schedule after a five-season run. But there are still some exciting things to look forward to before the grand finale, like seeing Voyager’s Harry Kim meet the crew of the USS Cerritos. Today’s episode, however, brought a pleasant surprise in the form of Brent Spiner reprising Next Generation favorite Data, albeit a Data from a universe where the color purple is a lot more prominent. Ahead of the episode’s premiere to Paramount+ subscription holders, I spoke to supervising producer Barry Kelly about the story behind including Data in “Fully Dilated”, as well as how this episode delivered a “great supervision” homage for the Next Generation episode “The Inner Light”.
Why Data Was A Good Fit For This Lower Decks Episode
“Fully Dilated” saw Mariner, Tendi and T’Lyn visiting Dilmer III, a preindustrial planet where time passes significantly more quickly, just like the planet from the Voyager episode “Blink of an Eye”. The trio had to beam down to the surface because a purple Enterprise-D ended up in the Prime Universe while battling some evil clones of Tasha Yar, and they accidentally left behind a piece of Starfleet technology on that world. It ended up being the head of the purple universe’s Data. Tendi was later able to create an electric generator to turn Data back on, and he became her confidant for the rest of their time on Dilmer III. Here’s what Kelly told be about Data’s inclusion when we began our conversation:
I think it's such a classic, perfect trick set-up. They're on another planet in disguise, there's a guy on the planet who knows that they're not supposed to be there. It's such a perfect track set-up that you need that one wow moment, like, ‘Holy crap, there's a big surprise on there and it's Data.’ It’s a way that we can have fun with this whole multiverse throughline, subverted a little bit and have a Data that we make fun with, we don't really make fun of Data but it's not canon Data. It's one that maybe Generations hasn't happened yet, so we have the Data that has all the experience that we all know from TNG. He can call back to things that we know, and then our characters already know what happened because it's in logs and the Enterprise has already moved on to the E. So it's all their history that they're their own Star Trek nerds and they can all fan out about.
Although Barry Kelly’s desire to have Data and Geordi LaForge paired together on Lower Decks never came to fruition, at least the former found his way in. It’s also important to take note of how the producer mentioned that purple Data comes from his universe’s Enterprise-D, mean he also comes from the past and hasn’t had the same experiences that the main universe’s Data had from Generations onward. That’s certainly evident from purple Data’s lack of an emotion chip, but that also allowed for a return of sorts of the Data from the Star Trek days.
How Lower Decks Played With The Premise Of “The Inner Light”
As a result of Boimler and Rutherford accidentally spilling their micheladas on the transporter console and taking a minute to clean up the mess, Mariner, Tendi and T’Lyn spent a year from their perspective on Dilmer III. Initially frustrated by being stuck on the world, Mariner decided to do her own version of “The Inner Light”, the Next Generation episode where Jean-Luc Picard experienced 40 years living the life of a long-dead alien within the span of just 25 minutes in real life. On the subject of Lower Decks putting its own spin on this classic episode, Barry Kelly told me this:
What's good is like I just said, it's all in logs. So our lower deckers, just like we do, know what happens to Picard… They know the tropes, it's kind of like rigmarole to them that they're going to a planet, they're gonna be undercover, and that they're gonna be stuck there for a long time, and Mariner… she wants to do her own “Inner Light”. The Lower Decks version is it all goes terribly wrong. She gets imprisoned multiple times, knows the jailers, they're all friends. What does she say? ‘Any good rats while I was away?’ But it’s a great subversion on it because she's trying to do all the things Picard did and just failing at it miserably. And then at the same time, Tendi and T’Lyn are just having a good competition between each other to be science officer. Tendi learns and goes all crazy and batshit with Data before even we're learning that T’Lyn isn't even the competition with her anymore.
Mariner tried her best to replicate Picard’s experience in a more condensed time frame, but each attempt to ingratiate herself into the community led to her being thrown in prison. It was a comical twist on “The Inner Light,” and like Picard, Mariner came away from the experience with her own flute. That one, however, is made of soap, and she cannot play it well… at all. Classic Lower Decks shenanigans.
The final episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks drop Thursdays at Paramount+. The upcoming Star Trek TV shows include Stranger New Worlds Season 3 and Starfleet Academy, and the streaming-exclusive movie Section 31 premieres January 24.
