Below Deck with Lower Decks: Nanite Your Business

Another week, another all-new episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks!

Tendi has returned to the Cerritos, and nothing says, "The band is back together," like our favorite junior officers getting assigned to an away mission! The ship has docked with the Cosmic Duchess, a massive, moon-sized interstellar cruise ship with all sorts of fancy amenities. Are they there for shore leave? Of course not! If there's one thing we can count on after five seasons, it's that the Cerritos gets all the best jobs.

This time, the crew is tasked with containing a bizarre infestation of "nanites," microscopic robots working together in a cluster, that's infested the Duchess. This mass or "glumpus" of little buggers is eating all the metal it comes across, using it as raw material to facilitate replicating even more nanites and thereby increasing the cluster's size.

Sounds simple, right? It does? Come on. If you've been watching the show all along, then you know by now how something like this is going to play out, right? I mean, this isn't even the first time the Lower Deckers have experienced a nanite mishap. Does anyone else remember that time in "The Spy Humungous" when Billups forgot to seal a sample container filled with nanites and a bunch of them got loose? Good times, amirite?

With Boimler recruited by Commander Ransom for a special top secret "side quest" to retrieve an admiral who's spent too long on vacation and is now AWOL from Starfleet, Mariner, Tendi, Rutherford, and T'Lyn are joined by Jennifer Sh'reyan, Mariner's former girlfriend, to hunt down and capture the nanites. All of this goes about as well as you should have come to expect by this point.

Until it doesn't. Duh duh DUUUUHHHHHHHH!!!!

Because that is also the Lower Decks way.

Nanites certainly aren't new to Star Trek, of course. Longtime fans will likely remember their first appearance in "Evolution," the third-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as part of an experiment conducted by acting Ensign Wesley Crusher. A couple of his test nanites get loose and begin replicating and evolving their abilities, allowing for the ensuing of hijinks and hilarity. Not cool, Wes.

Nanites have shown up in episodes of other Star Trek series, as well. In "Meld," a second-season episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the ship's holographic Doctor creates a batch of nanites which he then uses to examine and identify unique or unusual patterns found in humanoid DNA. Using these nanites as a forensic tool, he's able to identify the Betazoid DNA of Lon Suder, a Voyager crewmember responsible for murdering a shipmate.

Over the course of Star Trek: Discovery's second season, Section 31 agents Leland and Gant are infected and manipulated by nanites injected into them by Control, the covert intelligence agency's artificially intelligent threat assessment system. This enables the computer program to move independently with the compromised agents as hosts, forcing them to carry out acts against their conscious will.

And while they're exactly not the same, there's no way we can’t mention the nanoprobes used by the Borg to assimilate other lifeforms into their collective. We saw those in action for the first time in Star Trek: First Contact, when a group of Borg infiltrate the Enterprise-E and start converting its systems (and people!) to service their needs. It’s always something with those guys.

Do our heroes manage to rein in the nanite cluster and save the Cosmic Duchess from such a huge mess? Could it be that the nanites are more than meets the eye? The answers to those and many more questions can be found in this week’s episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks!