With the second season complete, Star Trek: Lower Decks continued to bring a lot of laughs, and some shocking moments, to fans of Star Trek. The continuing adventures of Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford, and the rest of the crew on the USS Cerritos during the second season not only went deeper into the characters of the show but helped expand the overall mythos of Gene Roddenberry's creation.
And just like the first season, Lower Decks Season 2 was filled with easter eggs for eagle-eyed fans with a deep knowledge of Star Trek lore. The series continues to delve deep into the history of Star Trek and pull at the little threads that make it all so special for the biggest fans.
10 A Little Disco Style
Star Trek Discovery was the first new Trek series in over a decade, and it kicked off the new run of shows that includes Lower Decks, Picard, and the upcoming Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Prodigy. And while the quality of Discovery has been hotly debated by Trek fans, one thing everyone agrees on is the "Disco" shirts the crew sometimes wear when not in uniform are pretty cool. Not wanting to be left out, Lower Decks has their own version of the Disco shirt with "Ritos" written across the chest, suggesting that many ships have their own casual wear line.
9 Armus Lives!
It's no secret that the early seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation were rough, with a lot of arguing behind the scenes about how the series should be handled, and a lot of complaints from fans of the original Star Trek over all the changes. One of the most shocking things in TNG's first season was the death of Tasha Yar, which came about when actor Denise Crosby asked to be written off the show.
Yar was killed by an alien being called Armus in a rather unexciting fashion, but as Lower Decks showed in “The Spy Humongous” Mariner finally gets revenge for Tasha by prank calling the tar monster and making fun of him.
8 DJ Okona Keeping The Beat
When Captain Freeman is denied access to the Starfleet Command Conference afterparty in "An Embarrassment Of Dooplers," she is doubly upset when she learns that the night's entertainment is none other than DJ Okona. Trekkers would know the now famous DJ as Thadiun Okona from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Outrageous Okona" where the character, played by Billy Campbell, is introduced as a freighter captain who drags the crew of the Enterprise into a feud between two planets. Clearly, something has happened to Okona since the last time he was seen since he now has an eyepatch.
7 Star Trek V Gets Some Love
While Star Trek fans will debate which of the thirteen movies are the worst, no one will rush out to defend Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. The film, which revealed that Spock had a previously discussed sibling - something Discovery would repeat - is almost universally hated by fans of the franchise.
But that hatred didn't stop Lower Decks from paying homage to Star Trek V in the episode "wej Duj" by having Tendi and Dr. T'Ana climbing a holodeck version of El Capitan, the very mountain that Captain Kirk is climbing at the beginning of the film. Adding to it, Boimler shows up wearing the same "Go Climb A Rock" shirt Kirk is wearing in the scene, and he's using the rocket boots Spock shows up in to speak to Kirk on the mountainside.
6 The Titan's Shuttles Know How To Swing
Season 2 of Lower Decks picks up with Boimler as a member of the USS Titan, the ship captained by none other than William Riker. As fans of TNG know, Riker is a real hepcat when it comes to jazz, and the Titan really shows his love for the music not only by having Riker ask the ship's computer to play "Night Bird," a song he has spent years trying to learn on his trombone, but by also showing that the shuttlecrafts are all named after famous jazz musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, the Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk.
5 Mugato Gets A Name Check
In one of the deepest of the deep cut easter eggs in Season 2 of Lower Decks, the fourth episode is titled "Mugato, Gumato". As most Trek fans know, the Mugato is a race of ape-like creatures with poisonous horns, but what many don't know is that the creatures weren't originally called Mugato.
As the story goes, the script for the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "A Private Little War" had the name for the creatures as "Gumato," but actor DeForest Kelley, who played Bones, couldn't get the name right so it was changed to Mugato. Even with the change, the pronunciation of Mugato is confused in the episode, with different actors saying it in different ways, a tradition that Lower Decks happily continues.
4 Sonya Gomez Makes Her Triumphant Return
A lot of TV shows have characters who show up for a few episodes and seem to be set up to become more important, only for them to disappear. Thanks to The West Wing, this has become known as "sending characters to Mandyville" - they leave the show and are never mentioned again.
A famous instance of this on Star Trek: The Next Generation was Sonya Gomez, who showed up in two episodes of the show's second season and was being set up as a love interest for Geordi La Forge before vanishing. Thanks to Lower Decks and the episode "First First Contact," we now know that Sonya is now the captain of the Archimedes.
3 The Nonexistent Rubber Ducky Room
Part of the story for "First First Contact" centered on Tendi believing she was going to be taken off the Cerritos and assigned to another ship. To say goodbye, Tendi and Rutherford spend the day visiting all the spots on the ship Tendi loves, including the warp core and her favorite Jefferies tube.
After that, the duo starts planning on ways to get to restricted areas of the ship, including the Rubber Ducky Room. The Rubber Ducky room became famous when it first appeared on a map of the Enterprise-D in Season 3 of TNG as a joke that no one expected fans to notice.
2 The Elusive Crimson Force Fields
First introduced in TNG, the Pakleds are a race of not very bright humanoids that make their way across the galaxy by commandeering the ships of other races. In the TNG episode "Samaritan Snare," the Pakleds are tricked into believing that every Federation ship has a special crimson force field that will protect it against their attacks when in actuality, Geordi disabled the torpedoes on their ship while they held him captive.
In "The Spy Humongous," a Pakled is brought aboard the Cerritos where he asks to see the crimson force field, which tells fans that all these years later, the Pakleds still believe the Federation has an impenetrable force field.
1 The Collection Of Kerner Hauze
In the second episode of the season, "Kayshon, His Eyes Open," the Cerritos is tasked with going through the massive collection of Kerner Hauze to deactivate or destroy any dangerous items the now deceased collector has in his ownership. As Mariner, Tendi, Rutherford, Jet Manhaver, and the new head of security Kayshon, go through the collection, fans of Star Trek are sure to see a huge number of easter eggs, including the paper mache head of Captain Picard from the TNG episode “The Pegasus,” a Terran Empire Flag, and even the skeletal remains of the giant Spock clone from the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode “The Infinite Vulcan.” And if that wasn't enough, keen viewers will even catch non-Trek easter eggs like the skeleton of E.T. and Marty McFly's self-lacing sneakers from Back to the Future Part II.