Hi, everyone, Justen Jess, your Starfleet junior historian, and this week we are covering Ep. 4 of Season 3 for Star Trek: Lower Decks, this week, Room for Growth! Things are starting with absolute chaos in the lower decks of the Cerritos, where everyone is crammed in and an ancient mask of the D’Arsay has possessed Captain Freeman, and its power is turning the insides of the ship into a replica of its ancient temple.
After the credits, Freeman is no longer possessed, and the ship is being put back to normal by a tired and overworked crew. Of particular note is Commander Billups, who Doctor T’Ana medically describes as a “f*^%ing ball of stress.” Freeman has scheduled a theraputic mandatory vacation for the engineering time, a spa trip!
As Rutherford prepares for his trip, the gang talk about the upcoming room lottery, which is heavily weighted towards senior officers. As Rutherford grabs his things, he knocks against Tendi, and a green slime creature escapes from her beaker. Tendi overhears some Delta shift ensigns plotting to cheat the system to rig the lottery. When Tendi tells Mariner, she decides that they need to cheat too.
The engineering team beams over to the resort ship, the Dove, where they are given biometric wristbands and are given a tour of the activities. However, the engineers wander off and fix a door, and an Edosian named Toz, the head of the relaxation team, says they have a lot of work to do.
On the Cerritos, the gang works out an alternate route to get to the comptuers first, but it goes through the holodecks, where T’Ana is presently in a program. Sneaking in, they enter into a black and white 20th century bank where…oh, snap, Shaxs and T’Ana are gangsters holding up the bank! They get in a gunfight, and it’s revealed that this is…well, foreplay for the two of them, but they seem to be having some relationship issues. The gang takes the opportunity to sneak out of the holodeck.
Escaping into a swampy bay underneath hydroponics, where Tendi identifies a Tamarian defern root, which excretes hallucinogens that humans are subject to. Oxygen levels are depleting while Boimler and Mariner trip, and Tendi drags them back into the Jeffries tube. They take a “shortcut” into a low-gravity area of the ship, where Boimler starts goofing off. It turns out that this is the deflector dish, and once it starts spinning up, Boimler gets spun around. The gals make a teather with their clothes, reeling him back in.
The spa day on the Dove continues, where it turns out that the engineering crew is very bad at relaxing, creating schematics and building gadgets instead of sand gardening. They go to pedicures next, where it looks like everyone is getting relaxed, but as it turns out they just slipped cucumbers underneath their wristbands to fool the readings. Freeman rages that the crew doesn’t trust her, and her wristband flashes to critical. Toz asks if Freeman has been under the influence of any alien objects, and Freeman gets wheeled off to intensive treatment. The engineers theorize that they were causing Freeman stress, and that they need to take their treatment more seriously.
Boimler and the gang find the door to the terminal, but it only open for a few seconds every hour. As they wait, the Delta shift gang comes in from behind them. However, as time passes they start to talk about senior officers and gossip. As they talk about how the lower decks teams should stick together, the door opens. The Delta shift crew members kick them down, and run through the door before it closes.
Freeman’s spa treatment isn’t going great. Even the puppy treatment isn’t working. As Toz is about to summon Starfleet medical, the engineers come in with a new machine to help relieve stress. The doctors complain that they just continued to work, but Billups and Rutherford say that helping solve problems is their stress relief. They stick the Captain in the machine and she’s instantly cured. As they leave, Toz looks to her assistant and tells them to eject the machine to save their jobs.
Boimler finds a runoff from one of the alien aqueducts still on the ship, and they slide down to a ladder that will lead to the terminal. They find the computer, but when they get there, they realize that it’s not 4 rooms on Deck One, but instead one room on Deck Four. They realize that they don’t want to get split up, so they’ll leave the room for the Delta shift crew. Which, the Delta shift decides to share the room between the four of them, infuriating the gang as they realized they could have done that.