SPOILER WARNING: Discussion for Star Trek: Lower Decks — Season 3, Episode 4 "Room for Growth" to follow!
What’s that? Another new episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks has dropped? Didn’t we just do this, like, a week ago or something?
The still minty-fresh third season’s latest installment finds the Lower Deckers scrambling to beat their rivals on Delta Shift as a handful of fancier quarters have apparently become available on Deck 1, one of the best areas on the Cerritos.
(Spoilers: It’s really not Deck 1. You’ll see.)
There’s a lottery to choose who will win the coveted billets, and our gang learns those sneaky scoundrels on Delta Shift have found a way to rig the selection process so they win. Mariner, Boimler, and Tendi aren’t going to let that stand, are they?
Elsewhere, Chief Billups, Ensign Rutherford, and rest of the Cerritos’ engineers have been working around the clock for days on end to repair all the damage the ship suffered after an ancient alien goddess transformed it into a temple. Again! Why does this keep happening? Worried she may be overworking her people, Captain Freeman arranges some well-deserved time off aboard the U.S.S. Dove, a starship specifically designed for rest and recreation. There, Freeman and her engineers are met by Toz, an Edosian medical officer, who’s ready to help the Cerritos engineers relax.
There are few Star Trek alien species as unique and instantly recognizable as the Edosians. With their oversized heads, bright orange skin, and—oh yeah—the extra leg to stand on as well as a third arm protruding from the middle of their chests, they make a pretty lasting first impression. If Toz looks familiar, maybe it’s because you remember another Edosian character, known only as “The Specialist,” who oversaw the mysterious “Division 14” in the first season episode, “Much Ado About Boimler.”
BUT WAIT. THERE’S MORE!
Worry not, hardcore fans. I gotchu. Of course Toz and the Specialist before him are something of a callback to the 1970s series, which featured another Edosian, Lieutenant Arex, serving as a navigator aboard Captain Kirk’s U.S.S. Enterprise in Star Trek: The Animated Series.
Arex appears in 19 of the series’ 22 episodes and also sneaks into Lower Decks; he's featured in one of numerous photographs adorning the walls of the bar on Starbase 25 in the second season episode, “An Embarrassment of Dooplers.” In addition to the super cool extra limbs they bring to the table, Edosians supposedly are also very long-lived, so there’s a chance we’ve not seen the last of Arex. And if he shows up on the Cerritos, you just know they’ll give him one of the cool quarters on Deck 1.
Okay. Maybe not Deck 1.
Dayton Ward (he/him) is a New York Times bestselling author or co-author of numerous novels and short stories including a whole bunch of stuff set in the Star Trek universe, and often collaborating with friend and co-writer Kevin Dilmore. As he’s still a big ol' geek at heart, Dayton is known to wax nostalgic about all manner of Star Trek topics over on his own blog, The Fog of Ward.
Star Trek: Lower Decks streams exclusively in the United States and Latin America on Paramount+, on Amazon Prime Video in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Japan, India and more, and in Canada on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave.
Stay tuned to StarTrek.com for more details! And be sure to follow @StarTrek on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
