Below Deck with Lower Decks: Head Games

Another day, another hole torn into the very fabric of the space-time continuum.

You know how tricky these things can be. One minute you're cruising along, minding your own business as you go about looking for strange new worlds to explore while seeking out new life and new civilizations when WHAM! Some other ship comes flying out of a subspace fissure and you find yourself looking through the viewscreen at…yourself, but your other self has a beard and muscles and just decides to start stabbing his bridge crew as punishment for their navigational error. Or, maybe you're trying to help save a planet from its sun going supernova, but you end up creating a temporal rift that sends you back 150 years just so you can create a whole splinter timeline featuring younger versions of you and your pals.

Thankfully, things aren't quite that bad for the Cerritos crew on this week's all-new episode of . All they have to deal with is repairing their third dimensional fissure in the last week, after finding out a purple-hued U.S.S. Enterprise apparently slipped through from the other side of this latest rift and into our universe. Things start to get complicated when Lieutenant Boimler detects a Starfleet power signature coming from a nearby planet, Dilmer III, and Captain Freeman concludes the purple Enterprise must have left behind a piece of technology from their universe. Uh-oh.

In the hopes of finding the reading's source before it's discovered by anyone from the planet's pre-warp society, Lieutenant Mariner leads T'Lyn and Tendi down to the planet, which exists in a "space-time differential" that causes a dilation of time. One second aboard the Cerritos translates to a week passing down on the planet surface. If this sounds familiar to you, it's because Captain Janeway and her crew encountered a similar world in the sixth-season episode "." After arriving on the surface, the away team soon finds the source of the Starfleet energy reading — the head of the purple Enterprise's second officer, Lieutenant Commander Data!

"Wait," I can hear someone saying. "This sounds kinda familiar, too…."

You're not wrong! Data's detached head is hardly a new thing. That dude's noggin comes away from his body so much he qualifies to be !

(Psst: Check out the animated episode "," and or the second-season Lower Decks episode "." Don't feel bad. Nobody expects you to remember all of this stuff. That’s what we’re for!)

Even without hands, feet, or a torso, Data's purple head quickly becomes something of a sounding board for Tendi. She's struggling with the idea she might not be up to the task of serving as the Cerritos' science officer, especially with T'Lyn having expressed interest after Captain Freeman announces a need to fill that position. Sure, it's a little weird taking advice from a disembodied head, but on Lower Decks? This is just a typical Thursday.

Of course Data's head detaching from his body shouldn't be controversial. He's an android, after all! The first time we see this sort of thing comes in "" from 's first season, when Data learns . Data along with an Enterprise away team find Lore, disassembled and in storage, in an underground vault on the planet Omicron Theta. They put him back together, and of course hijinks ensue.

Data's own severed head becomes quite the topic of conversation a few years later, when crews working in an underground cavern in San Francisco find artifacts dating back to the 19th Century. Included among the relics is…Data's head.

Wait, what?

Look, it happens in a time travel episode, all right? Specifically, TNG's fifth-season finale, "," and there's so much weirdness involved that of course it spills over into "" to kick off the sixth-season. Without going into too much expository insanity, let's just say that "paradox" barely starts to cover it.

(I'm pretty sure this is when the Department of Temporal Investigations started issuing antacid tablets as standard equipment to their field agents.)

Hang on, we're not quite done with those and their shenanigans. Don't forget that lovable rascal, B-4, introduced to us in the final TNG feature film, . When the Enterprise detects positronic energy signatures on the planet Kolarus III, Captain Picard along with Data and Worf go down to investigate. They find six positronic signatures corresponding to different components of B-4, an earlier version of Soong's android creations which eventually begat Data and Lore. Hauling everything back to the Enterprise, they put him back together, and of course ( :: checks earlier paragraph :: ) hijinks ensue.

But wait! There’s more!

Show of hands: Who out there is reading the current (as I write this) and comic series from IDW? If so, then you know that a detached Data's head also plays a key role in those series' intertwined storylines. Lore's there, too, and you should know by now from experience that nothing good tends to come out of these two brothers reconnecting in any form. That certainly holds true here, as Lore has nefarious plans for his brother. He separates Data's head from his body and (say it with me) hijinks ensue.

Meanwhile, back on Dilmer III, weeks are passing as Boimler works to repair the transporter console after he shorts it out by spilling a drink all over it. Smooth move, Boims. To find out if the Cerritos is successful in returning Data's head to its proper dimension or the away team dies of old age in the time it takes Boimler to find a sponge or some paper towels or something, you'll have to check out this week's episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks!