The running theme of Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2 is clearly all about how to be your most authentic self, even when the science fictional nature of the 24th century is trying to tear you apart. In “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris,” the titular Voyager reference is just a microcosm that illuminates this theme, but, hilariously, the funniest thing about the episode has nothing to do with Mr. Paris himself. Instead, this episode shines with the running joke that in space, you never really know everything about someone until they’ve either died, or you’ve gone on an undercover mission together. In a sense, “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris,” is kind of a reset button episode for Lower Decks. This is the first regular episode of the new season in which Boimler is just happily back on the Cerritos, and also the first episode to feature an adventure focused on Mariner and Tendi teaming up for a “girls’ trip.” As both characters joke, they each tend to get paired with Boimler and Rutherford respectively, and this episode is a moment to “switch it up.” What happens, of course, is that both Mariner and Tendi realize they know very little about each other, which leads, at first, to resentment, and then, to mutual understanding. Even more than last season, each new episode of Lower Decks Season 2 keeps hammering home the same message: This show is a Next Generation-era Trek series, in which mutual understanding and personal epiphany are more important denouements than anything having to do with phasers or warp drive. In fact, Lower Decks intentionally avoids answering a huge WTF question when Shaxs randomly just reappears at the beginning of the episode. Although some fans spotted him in an early trailer, the return of Shaxs from the dead is never fully answered, which brilliantly sends Rutherford into an existential spiral. When he finally does get the answers from Shaxs, the audience is then kept in the dark, meaning that the disturbing secret to Shaxs’ return is played for a laugh. In previous Treks, the point-of-view of bridge crew characters would mean the audience is always in on how various resurrections took place. But, in this episode, Lower Decks gestures at a kind of funhouse mirror realism: If this kind of thing actually happened fairly often, the details would be largely unknown to most people.
