Well, Maybe Lower Decks' Ensigns Are Heroes After All

The opening of Star Trek: Lower Decks' third season has so far tackled the question of whether or not it's time to knock our heroic ensigns down a peg or two, to get them back to the hapless nobodies they started the series as lest the whole premise fall apart. But three episodes in, its messaging is getting a bit confused beneath its layers of Trek parody.'Mining the Mind's Mines' sees the Cerritos team up with a fellow California-class ship, the Carlsbad. The two are called in after all the actual interesting action has happened—a negotiation between a group of Federation scientists and the silica-based Scrubble society they've found on the planet Jengus IV, and their colonies of fantasy-revealing psychic rocks—in order to clear up the mess left behind, as the Cerritos and Carlsbad's captains look over the final details of peace between the Scrubbles and scientists.