Lower Decks Season 5 Homages Two Of The Best Star Trek Episodes Ever

When a franchise has been around for as long as "Star Trek" has, it's bound to have a handful (or two) of all-time episodes under its belt. Nearly 60 years is a long and storied history to pull from — not to mention an intimidating one — but "Lower Decks" has never once shied away from a challenge. In fact, the animated series has always seemed to embrace such high expectations and season 5 is well on its way to ending the show on the highest of notes. Its latest episode, amusingly titled "Fully Dilated," lives up to that mandate by paying homage to not one, but two of the best hours in all of the "Trek" canon.

The beginning of the episode puts our Starfleet misfits on a collision course with an anomaly that's as "Trek" as it gets: A version of the Enterprise-D from another reality (it's purple in that universe because, well, why the heck not) briefly crosses over into this one before returning home through a dimensional fissure in space-time. A misplaced piece of tech on a nearby planet, however, forces the Cerritos to beam an away team to the surface, hide them in plain sight among the pre-warp native population, and have them remove anything that would violate the Prime Directive policy of noninterference. In a classic twist on formula, though, the planet happens to undergo severe time dilation. In layperson's terms, that means a second on the Cerritos in orbit translates to a full week on the surface ... and, while played for laughs here, the effects can be downright existential.

If that sounds familiar, the franchise has waded in very similar waters before with two highly-rated episodes: "The Inner Light" from "The Next Generation" and "Blink of an Eye" from "Voyager."

How do you best remember "Blink of an Eye"? Perhaps it's as the "Voyager" episode that featured a forgotten guest appearance by future "Lost" star Daniel Dae Kim. For the hardcore Trekkies out there, though, it's (in)famous for dropping one of the wildest character details in all of "Voyager" — the fact that The Doctor (Robert Picardo), a holographic program, somehow managed to have a biological son. (Yeah, seriously, that happened.) More broadly, it's likely remembered by most as one of the more quietly moving hours of "Voyager" thanks to a storyline that used its time dilation gimmick to incredibly great effect. No wonder "Lower Decks" decided to go out of its way and give this a special shoutout early on in "Fully Dilated."

In a very similar setup, the "Voyager" episode begins when Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and her crew encounter a highly unusual planet that traps the starship in its gravity well. Because of time dilation, however, Voyager's appearance in orbit as a bright red dot and the "ground shakes" it causes on the surface have profound impacts on the primitive alien species below. For centuries, the indigenous population crafts mythology, civilization, and eventually scientific advancement based around the presence of their special visitors in orbit. As a nonbiological life form immune to any potential harmful effects of time dilation, The Doctor is sent down to collect intel and experiences three full years on the surface, making a family for himself and living a life he never could've dreamed of while on Voyager (though, alas, we never see any of this for ourselves).

The real highlight comes when the aliens finally invent technology to travel into orbit and send astronauts of their own (including one played by Kim) to visit Voyager. When his people begin aiming weapons at the Voyager, he's sent back to convince them that they mean no harm. Taken as a whole, the episode is as natural a reference as "Lower Decks" could possibly make — and a very worthy episode to go back and revisit if you haven't.

With all due respect to movies like "Interstellar" and "Lightyear," sci-fi was already making the most out of time dilation decades prior. Even before "Voyager" dabbled in these waters (er, make that ripples of space-time?), "The Next Generation" set the bar impossibly high with "The Inner Light." Known by reputation as the episode that even Captain Picard himself, Patrick Stewart, considers his all-time favorite, the premise involves Picard and the Enterprise encountering a primordial relic in space that turns out to be a probe. When it sends a beam of energy right at Picard and strikes him unconscious, his worried crew slowly realize that he's experiencing something much less harmful than they initially presume. Through some fancy mental projection, he's brought to the probe's planet of origin to live an entire lifetime as one of the aliens native to that world — despite only minutes passing for his unresponsive body back on the Enterprise.

"Lower Decks" once again makes a cheeky allusion to this brilliant episode of "The Next Generation," but the animated show clearly recognizes that it owes a great deal to the poignancy and emotions of what came before. The real kicker to "The Inner Light" comes from the fact that the planet Picard is now "living" on is doomed to be destroyed by a nearby supernova. Despite his best attempts to warn his fellow people, his concerns go ignored and he has little recourse but to continue living out his life with his new family. By the time everyone realizes their fate, it's far too late to do anything except send a probe into space containing the memories of this alien race ... the very same probe Picard finds a thousand years later.

Although they take extremely different tonal paths to get there, each of these "Trek" episodes reach similar enough destinations — and prove that the franchise is at its best when it gets existential.

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