Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.
May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, so each week, I, an Asian American writer, am praising an Asian American performer’s work in a recent or current TV role.
I miss The Avocado’s weekly Star Trek: Lower Decks discussion thread. I’m amused by some of the ways the show’s title has been mangled by people on this site who aren’t Lower Decks fans and weren’t part of the discussion thread for Paramount+’s now-defunct animated workplace sitcom, which creator/showrunner Mike McMahan named after 1994’s “Lower Decks,” his favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episode.
Star Trek: Below Decks sounds like one of former MADtv writer Blaine Capatch’s jokes on Bluesky where he sarcastically says about a trending topic, “Quick, get MADtv back on the air so I can pitch [BLANK].”
For the 2D-animated sketch where MADtv smooshes Lower Decks together with the Bravo reality show Below Deck, I’m picturing David Herman from “Drunk President,” a sketch that was a MADtv fan favorite, as the voice of Captain Lee Ros-Spock.
Outside of The Avocado, I’ve seen people erroneously refer to Lower Decks as Lower Depths, as if it’s a spinoff of seaQuest DSV, Amblin Television’s Next Generation ripoff in which an increasingly bored Roy Scheider could barely stay awake while playing the captain of a state-of-the-art submarine.
Wow, the proofreader at Screen Rant always does a bang-up job. I’ll never forgive Screen Rant’s ass for spoiling in one of its headlines the surprise addition of Wil Wheaton as Wesley Crusher to the cast in the back half of Star Trek: Prodigy’s binge-released second season when I was only two episodes into the season—two days after the release date.
I watched every episode of Prodigy and Lower Decks because I’ve been trying to write reviews of every episode for a book project about animated Star Trek shows. However, I hit a writer’s block while trying to write about the Prodigy two-parter that centered on Chakotay’s decade-long inability to escape from an uninhabited planet.
I haven’t been able to resume writing the chapter about both parts of “Last Flight of the Protostar” because of this damn block, and now I’m wondering if I should continue with my plans to self-publish the project via Lulu or if I should restructure it as a subscribers-only series of posts on Ghost or Patreon. Instead of letting this block cripple me, I took a break from writing episode reviews for the project and concentrated on writing a bunch of other things—like this blog post about one of Lower Decks’s many funny regulars.
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Chris Westlake’s “Badgey Gets Loose,” from the scene where the brilliant Samanthan Rutherford—all out of options on how to take down the Pakleds—turns to Badgey, his out-of-control AI creation, for help and asks him to code a computer virus the crew of the Cerritos would plant into the Pakled Clumpship in “No Small Parts,” Lower Decks’s first-season finale.
Lakeshore Records released only one album of Westlake’s scores from Lower Decks episodes, and all the tracks are from just the first two seasons. “Badgey Gets Loose” was one of only three instrumentals I could find that were from scenes where Ensign Rutherford was the focus, and it was the only lively one.
The Alan Sepinwalls and Polygons of the TV cognoscenti considered Lower Decks to be underwhelming when they reviewed the first season’s first four episodes before their release in the summer of 2020. I didn’t find the first four episodes to be as mediocre as Sepinwall and Polygon did (Sepinwall thought that the Easter eggs in those episodes “seem to be holding McMahan back from making Lower Decks the wildly irreverent — and, more importantly, actually funny — comedy it so clearly aspires to be”).
The quality of later first-season episodes like “Veritas,” “Crisis Point,” and “No Small Parts” proved that we shouldn’t always listen to Sepinwall because sometimes he gets shit wrong. In another instance, I didn’t care for how Sepinwall constantly fawned over Chuck and referred to it as a much funnier show than The Venture Bros. It wasn’t. Nowadays, The Venture Bros. is one of several animated shows I like to occasionally rewatch on DVD—its later seasons were nicely animated by Titmouse, Inc., which also did exceptional work on Lower Decks—while Chuck is the Get Him to the Greek of spy shows: totally unwatchable now because of certain cast members who are pond scum. That sucks because frequent Chuck episode director Robert Duncan McNeill—a.k.a. Tom Paris from Star Trek: Voyager—did a good job on Chuck.
Lower Decks (which currently lives on as an IDW comic written by Ryan North of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl fame) evolved into the best show of the Trek franchise’s current era. I didn’t expect to end up caring about the crew of the Cerritos as much as I did about the characters on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
As a Filipino American fan of Lower Decks and DS9, I noticed that Filipino actors were a rare thing in the otherwise inclusive Trek franchise. Barbara Luna guest-starred as Marlena Moreau, Kirk’s sultry love interest in the Mirror Universe, in 1967’s “Mirror, Mirror.” The late Pilar Seurat, the mother of Leverage producer Dean Devlin, played an empath who helps the Enterprise crew track down a serial killer in 1967’s “Wolf in the Fold.” Future Grimm regular Reggie Lee showed up as a Kobayashi Maru test administrator at Starfleet Academy in the first Kelvin Timeline flick. Multiple characters on Star Trek: Picard were played by Isa Briones, the daughter of Broadway star Jon Jon Briones and a current regular on The Pitt (a show I’ve read a lot about but do not plan to watch because I don’t have HBO Max, and I’m not really into medical dramas anymore), where she plays its most divisive character. And that was about it for Filipino American representation.
Then Lower Decks emerged in the first summer of COVID. It introduced the first officially Filipino Starfleet officer character in a Trek project (not counting Sulu, whom the late Vonda N. McIntyre revealed was half-Pinoy in her Pocket Books novelization of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home). He was voiced by Eugene Cordero—a great Pinoy improv comic, a scene-stealer as Pillboi on The Good Place, and a surprisingly ripped action hero in Kong: Skull Island, where he had a minor role as a Vietnam War-era door gunner—and I was as jazzed as Shaggy and Scooby at a sandwich buffet.
However, it took nearly three seasons for Lower Decks to confirm that the brown-skinned Rutherford, a cybernetically enhanced engineer aboard the Cerritos, was Pinoy just like Cordero and not South Asian or Black.
In 2022’s “Reflections”—a series highlight for Cordero, who played dual roles in this McMahan-penned episode—Rutherford discovers that his cybernetic implant, which was installed by a mysterious team of surgeons to restore his badly damaged left eye, is being hacked by his previously dormant evil personality. The closed captions referred to the darker personality as “Red Rutherford.”
Before the installation of the implant, which erased almost all of his memories prior to his injuries in an engineering-related explosion, Rutherford was a reckless and narcissistic cadet who disrespected women. He was the complete opposite of the Rutherford who solves engineering problems carefully, enjoys being a team player, and is best friends with one of the hardest-working women aboard the Cerritos, Orion science nerd D’Vana Tendi.
Rutherford’s younger self survives in the form of Red Rutherford, and he wants complete control of his mind and body again. But present-day Rutherford likes being kind to others, and as he fights Red Rutherford for ownership of his mind and body, he briefly becomes reacquainted with the space hot rod he illegally built when he was younger to defy Starfleet Academy’s rule against cadets installing warp engines into hot rods or homemade ships. Rutherford called his hot rod the Sampaguita—a nod to the national flower of the Philippines.
“That was a Mike McMahon [sic] thing,” said Cordero, who currently plays Mary Elizabeth Ellis’s husband (and Ted Danson’s son-in-law) on A Man on the Inside, at a 2024 Newport Beach Film Festival Lower Decks panel discussion that was partially transcribed by That Hashtag Show. “I think it was a world of people asking what the ethnicity was of Rutherford. And I always was hoping that since it’s us [playing the characters] that it would be us. And Mike said it was, then he made it canon. I couldn’t be prouder to bring another aspect [of my culture] into another amazing franchise. We’ve had some Asians in space, but specifically Filipinos? No. And a lead of a show? Not often. I’m happy that I’m going to be one of the many in the future, but one of the few right now.”
The Sampaguita ended up being the show’s only reference to Rutherford’s Pinoy heritage (other than a Filipino accent Cordero snuck into one of Rutherford’s “attitude selector” malfunction scenes in “No Small Parts”). Unlike the original Trek, which worked Nichelle Nichols’s past as a backup singer for Duke Ellington into some episodes, and TNG, which allowed Jonathan Frakes to share his trombone skills, Lower Decks didn’t insert some of its cast members’ off-screen interests or a lot of ties to their heritages into their lower decker characters’ activities.
Beckett Mariner wasn’t obsessed with the Talking Heads like Tawny Newsome is (before she became known for voicing Mariner, Newsome sang for a Talking Heads cover band called This Must Be the Band), and Tendi didn’t release melancholy pop songs that Texas Monthly described in a 2019 profile of Noël Wells as a cross between Lana Del Rey and Laurel Canyon like Wells has done. (However, Captain Freeman, one of the show’s upper deckers, was a scat singer off-duty—a nod to the musical side of her portrayer, A Different World alum Dawnn Lewis, who wrote A Different World’s theme song.) Lower Decks wasn’t the kind of show where Rutherford would be seen teaching Dr. Migleemo—the Cerritos counselor who comes from Klowahka, a planet of ornithoids who are hardcore foodies, and was the show’s parody of earlier Trek counselor characters like Deanna Troi and Ezri Dax—how to bake bibingka in the mess hall kitchen.
Rutherford was the type of fictional Pinoy who didn’t get to be Pinoy all that much. Despite that, Cordero breathed a lot of life into Rutherford, whose friendship with Tendi (charmingly voiced by Wells) was at the center of many of the show’s most emotional moments (a large amount of Lower Decks fans shipped Rutherford and Tendi).
However, Rutherford’s friendship with Bradward Boimler, especially when they became roommates, had a few moments that were even funnier than the Tendiford stuff.
Lower Decks implied that Mariner hated theater kids, and that disdain for them must have increased due to being around Boimler, who, in 2021’s “Kayshon, His Eyes Open,” had a memorable monologue where he said that he admired how Will Riker, his new captain, always stayed true to himself aboard the Enterprise-D and didn’t care how dorky he looked when “he was out there jammin’ on the trombone and catching love disease and acting in plays.” When Boimler and Rutherford started fighting with each other over a bonsai tree in the quarters they shared, they found an unusual method for conflict resolution. It was the most theater kid thing that took place on Lower Decks: They both dressed up in the holodeck as Mark Twain (who was played by future X-Files semi-regular Jerry Hardin in TNG’s “Time’s Arrow” two-parter in 1992) and talked things out in what they assumed was Twain’s voice.
Cordero and Jack Quaid’s impressions of terrible impressions of Twain—whose voice remains a mystery because, as William Shatner pointed out in a CBC behind-the-scenes featurette about his 2015 guest appearance as Twain on Murdoch Mysteries, there are no recordings of Twain from when he was alive—were reminiscent of the unscripted and often funny Dead Authors Podcast, which happened to be hosted by Paul F. Tompkins, Migleemo’s portrayer. On that now-defunct pod, Tompkins dressed up as H.G. Wells and interviewed in front of a live audience other authors, many of whom died long before the film and radio industries were capable of capturing recordings of the voices of popular writers. The performers who played these dead authors—Cordero was one of them, and he portrayed Confucius—turned to the magic of improv comedy to imagine how they talked.
The “Twin Twaining” in Act 1 of “Something Borrowed, Something Green” (“YOH-er more stubborn than a senate mule”) led to a moment that made me laugh the longest when I watched Lower Decks. Freeman follows Boimler and Rutherford’s advice and attempts to settle a dispute with a temperamental captain—voiced by another great Pinoy comedian, current Looney Tunes voice genius Eric Bauza—from planet Chalna, whose inhabitants first appeared in the 1990 TNG episode “Allegiance,” by Twin Twaining in the holodeck as well. Freeman’s negotiation with the Chalnoth captain in the holodeck goes as smoothly as the filming of the rock monster that had to be deleted from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
I saw a few non-American Lower Decks viewers complain in forums and on blogs about not being able to enjoy or understand the Twaining scenes. They hated those scenes. Yeah, these folks clearly didn’t grow up watching things like James Whitmore as the voice of Twain in the 1985 clay-animated movie The Adventures of Mark Twain—a Disney Channel staple in the late ’80s and one of several kids’ movies that contained a disturbing moment of horror that didn’t cause me to say, “This is awesome,” and instead caused me to say, “I wish I could kick the director of this in the balls”—or that Cheers episode where Woody shows up to work while still wearing a Twain costume from one of his community theater plays, and he gets hit on by an elderly woman who thinks he’s a hot zaddy.
Twin Twaining is one of many examples of why Cordero is a great addition to the Trek franchise, and if you skipped Lower Decks because you can’t vibe with 2D animation, adult animated sitcoms, Titmouse’s approach to animation, the streaming era of Trek, or the fast-talking energy of Quaid and the talented improv vets who voiced Rutherford, Tendi, and Mariner, well, YOH-er more stubborn than a senate mule.