Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5's Most Obscure Joke May Be The Nerdiest Deep Cut Ever

"Star Trek: Lower Decks" will be sorely missed when it concludes for good at the end of its fifth season, as the adult animated series has managed to find the perfect balance between its crass humor and being a genuinely good "Star Trek" show. It's managed to be successful in large part because it's made by total "Star Trek" nerds, from super-nerdy (in a good way) creator Mike McMahan to star Tawny Newsome, who plays the rebellious lower decker Beckett Mariner and is a massive "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" superfan. Between them and the incredible writers and animators, they've made "Lower Decks" a beautiful tribute to everything there is to love about "Star Trek," and that includes lots of silly little deep cuts and Easter eggs.

One of the many fun things about watching "Lower Decks" is catching these references and feeling like you're in on the joke, but it's also pretty great when the references are so obscure that they send you on a research deep dive and you learn all new, great things about this expansive franchise. It's almost impossible to pick a favorite Easter egg from the series so far (although the season 3 reference to the idea that Deep Space Nine's Chief Engineer, Miles O'Brien, is the most important man in history is definitely up there), but season 5, episode 4 has given us a serious contender for the most obscure. In "A Farewell to Farms," there's a joke that requires not just knowledge of "Star Trek," but also of one of its most bizarre pieces of spin-off merchandise.

In "A Farewell to Farms," the series gives fans a taste of the Klingon-centric "Star Trek" some have wanted for years, and there's a ridiculously obscure reference sure to delight the most hardcore of Trekkies. During a brief interstitial sequence, two Klingon bikers on their home planet of Qo'noS have a bit of a near-miss and one raises his fist and swears at the other, "Experience bij!," to which the other replies, "YOU experience bij!" (That's pronounced sort of like smidge or ridge, for what it's worth; Klingon spelling is a whole thing.)

It's a tiny moment that's easy to miss, but it's also a hilarious reference to the lengthily-named 1993 VHS board game "Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR Board Game — A Klingon Challenge." "Lower Decks" already riffed on "A Klingon Challenge" once before in the season 3 episode "The Least Dangerous Game," in which the lower deckers played a board game called "Bat'leths & bIHnuchs" that had a video component hosted by the Klingon general Martok (J.G. Hetzler), but now they're actually quoting the game's most famous bit of dialogue. You see, in "A Klingon Challenge," a Klingon rebel named Kavok, played by Robert O'Reilly, commandeers the Enterprise when it's docked and the crew is on shore leave, and he spends the majority of the game taunting the players. His favorite taunt? "Experience bij!," of course.

In the game, Kavok essentially taunts and torments the player at every turn, and O'Reilly is clearly having a blast playing him. (He also played Klingon Chancellor Gowron on both "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine," if you're wondering why those wide, angry eyes look so familiar.) He frequently tells the player some version of "experience bij" to the point where there are entire YouTube compilations of him doing so and "experience bij" has become a kind of super-deep "Star Trek" in-joke. But what the heck does it mean to experience bij? According to the Klingon dictionary, "bij" means "punishment," so "experience bij" is sort of like saying "get punished!" It's a pretty basic curse, but works great within the context of a cranky Klingon telling off Starfleet, and now "Lower Decks" has made it an official part of the television canon.

Over its five seasons, "Lower Decks" has given us references to characters as random and obscure as "The Next Generation" detective Dixon Hill and even the "Original Series" villain Harry Mudd, but dropping a quick half-Klingon phrase from a VHS board game from the 1990s might be the best, deepest cut of them all.

New episodes of "Star Trek: Lower Decks" drop Thursdays on Paramount+.