WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2, Episode 7, “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie,” streaming now on Paramount+.
A routine repair mission, with the Cerritos providing aid, leads to an uncomfortable family reunion for Chief Engineer Andy Billups with his mother while revealing his surprise royal heritage. And as the crew of the Cerritos finds itself at the unexpected center of some royal intrigue, Beckett Mariner and Brad Boimler endure an escort mission gone wrong as they find themselves stranded on a remote planet with one of Star Trek‘s oldest tropes: a sentient computer intent on manipulating and eliminating all organic life.
The Cerritos visits a world where civilizations were tricked by a sentient supercomputer into warring amongst themselves, with the rogue computer training to trick Commander Jack Ransom into hooking it up to a mainframe before it is sent off to confinement at the Daystrom Institute. As the Cerritos cruises towards its next mission, the ship receives a signal that bids Billups to assist his mother, the Queen of the Federation world of Hysperia, with Billups having given up his royal birthright to escape his overbearing mother and join Starfleet. Billups reveals that if he ever has sexual intercourse, he will be required by Hysperian law to claim the throne as he prepares to help repair their engines.
Sam Rutherford joins Billups on his repair mission while Boimler and Mariner are tasked with escorting the ultimate computer to the Daystrom Institute in a small shuttlecraft. The shuttle hits a cosmic anomaly en route and crashes on a remote world, with shuttle’s comms down and the computer urging the two junior officers that he can help them if they allow him to interface with their systems. As the shuttle is attacked by a native beast, raiding the rations, the computer takes advantage of the situation to interface with Mariner’s datapad. With the shuttle’s replicator damaged, the two officers leave to find food and water with the computer in tow, forced to drink fruit juice that tastes like black licorice.
As Mariner and Boimler become more haggard and dehydrated, the computer pits the two friends against one another by revealing that it was Mariner that got Boimler reassigned to go on the Daystrom Institute mission, feeling he wasn’t ready for more active work. This leads to a full-on physical altercation between the two that culminates in Boimler stunning Mariner with his phaser. The computer eggs them on from the sidelines before Boimler hooks the computer up to a nearby vessel stranded on the planet’s surface. As the computer appears to seize power, Boimler reveals that he didn’t hook up the computer to a console at all, but instead used the computer’s power cell to transmit a distress signal and foil its plot.
Billups and Rutherford seemingly repair the Hysperian engines only for an accident to result in a massive explosion that appears to kill the Queen and severely damage the vessel. With the throne vacant and the Hysperian people in peril, Billups resigns on the spot and prepares to take the throne to lead his people. As D’Vana Tendi investigates the situation further, she learns that the entire incident was the Queen’s latest ruse to trick her son to accept his royal destiny, with the Queen and Rutherford teleported to a different part of the ship. Rutherford stops Billups from losing his virginity in the nick of time, before the party returns to the Cerritos.
Mariner and Boimler are picked up by Starfleet and transported to the Daystrom Institute, with the computer pleading to be released and claiming to have erased all of its malevolent subroutines and programming. This, of course, is another ruse as the computer threatens them with annihilation as it is stored alongside the other rogue computer programs recovered by Starfleet over the years — another addition to the backlog of Star Trek‘s propensity for technological advances gone wrong.
Star Trek: Lower Decks is streaming now on Paramount+, with new episodes released on Thursdays.
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