Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4, Episode 7 – "A Few Badgeys More"
Summary
- Star Trek: Lower Decks season 4, episode 7 brings back the hilarious and malevolent character Badgey seeking revenge.
- Lieutenant Rutherford experiments with adding ancient Starfleet technology, grapplers, to the USS Cerritos' shuttlecrafts, resulting in comedic mishaps.
- Grapplers, a touch-and-go technology in the era before tractor beams, have become a fun throwback and crossover joke in Strange New Worlds. Star Trek knows grapplers are cool.
Star Trek: Lower Decks season 4 brought back the funniest tech from Scott Bakula's Star Trek: Enterprise era. Lower Decks season 4, episode 7, "A Few Badgeys More," saw the return of the malevolent Badgey (Jack McBrayer), who was bent on revenge on his "father," Lieutenant Samanthan Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), and the USS Cerritos. But before the Lower Deckers learned of Badgey's return, Rutherford was busy experimenting with adding a very old and primitive Starfleet technology to one of the Cerritos' shuttlecrafts: grapplers.
Star Trek: Enterprise took place in the 22nd century, two hundred years before Star Trek: Lower Decks. But by virtue of being the first Starship Enterprise to explore the galaxy in what Lt. Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid) feels was "the golden age of exploration," Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) and the crew of the NX-01 Enterprise hold a legendary status. Incredibly, Archer's Enterprise survived dangerous encounters with the Suliban, the Xindi, and all manner of other hostile aliens with technology that was primitive by later Starfleet standards. Instead of shields, the NX-01 had polarized hull plating, it had phase cannons instead of phasers, and Enterprise had no tractor beam. Instead, it had grapplers.
