Headscratchers / Star Trek: Lower Decks S3E10 "The Stars at Night"

• Buenamigo is shown to be a lieutenant commander in Rutherford's flashback at the time of his accident. How did he go from that to vice admiral in less than a decade?
  • Based on what we've seen, Buenamigo has shown to be quite ruthless in efforts to bury anything that could expose his indiscretions and failures. And he's clearly not above manipulating people that trust him to give himself opportunities to advance. It's likely that the behavior on display with Buenamigo is not outside the ordinary; in an organization as trusting and idealistic as Starfleet can be, his scheming and cover-ups probably let him rise quickly through the ranks.
    • It could also be that the Dominion War left a lot of openings in Command.
    • As Vendome proves, sometimes all it takes is a bit of luck (and a lot of ambition) to get a meteoric rise through the ranks.
  • The Peter Principle has an innate caveat that sometimes promotions are handed out too early because of peoples ambitions over competence. In fact Buenamigo's motive for the Texas Class was because he wasn't satisfied with Vice Admiral and was hoping this would put him right in the upper echelon of all of Starfleet. Someone that ambitious and manipulative could very well advance by taking every opportunity and minimizing his stagnation in each rank. Given his age it's possible he felt it took too long for him to rise just to Lt. Commander and started a plan to accelerate the process.
  • It’s only three-to-four promotions, depending on Starfleet's senior rank structure, if he'd been Lt-Cmdr for a while, and was only recently promoted Vice-Admiral, then ten years isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to climb those ranks even without much shenanigans.
• A fleet made up entirely of all of the surviving California-class ships fits the plot of the episode given the premise of a competition between the California-class and the new Texas-class ships, but it does raise the question of why Mariner wouldn't just call together a fleet of every sort of Starfleet ship that was nearby.
  • The Cali-class ships are likely the only ones who didn't have anything more important to do. They get the grunt work of little importance, they can easily drop it and come running.
  • Also, with how Starfleet operates, it's likely that the Cali-class ships were the only ships in the sector.
  • Plus, Mariner and the Cerritos are famous amongst the Calis, and their crews had likely also found out that they were slated for replacement by the now-rogue Texas class. They were the most likely ships to jump at the call, with varying levels of It's Personal.
    • In other words, it's a matter of class consciousness (pun intented).
  • Also, as we see when they assemble, all the identical ships confuse the Aledo and its targeting reticle bounces between all of them because it can't prioritize one of them out of a crowd.
  • When the Aledo won the contest, the Admirals probably gave the recall order for the Cali-class ships to come to Douglas Station for decommissioning. When the distress signal from the station went out, they were likely already en route and simply changed course maximum warp to intercept the Cerritos with Mariner's guidance.
• Freeman ordered her entire crew to turn on one of their own. Given how gossipy the Cali-class ships are, and particularly since Mariner was interviewed speaking well about her crewmates, shouldn't the repercussions be more severe? That morale on the Cerritos didn't take an immediate dive, even before the Texas-class's introduction, seems odd.
  • It's possible that everything simply happened too quickly for the crew as a whole to fully process. Plus, the Second Contact race gave them something else to focus on. They're Starfleet. Even when they're upset, they know how to buckle down and do their jobs.
• Why didn't Section 31 step in and sabotage Buenamigo's project? They know the dangers of AIs, even if the rest of Starfleet doesn't. Or have they been that weakened by the Dominion War? Come to think of it, why didn't the Zhat Vash do anything?
  • The Texas class is a potential warship of great power and could operate with very little actual oversight, concentrating power in fewer hands than it is at preset, and Section 31 are not a benevolent force of guardians but a paranoid clique of power hungry madmen. In Short, Section 31 are more likely to sponsor such an initiative than they are to stop it.
    • In other words, Section 31 is rather the military–industrial complex than the safeguard against it.
  • Buenamigo's authorization code for giving the Aledo full autonomy is Alpha-3-1. It is likely he was a member of the group.
  • As for the Zhat Vash, much like Buenamigo, they needed a perfect disaster—an inexplicable rampage that could be chalked up to a general problem and that Starfleet was unable to adequately respond to. Buenamigo was about to hand Oh that perfect disaster—a bunch of Ax-Crazy ships committing genocide on second contact missions before Starfleet could respond to the crisis. But thanks to Rutherford realising what was about to happen, the rampage happened while all three ships were together and the situation could be responded to. Plus, because Rutherford knows that it was his crappy code that caused the emotional instability, the rampage wasn't inexplicable and couldn't be chalked up to a general problem. Because of this, the perfect disaster ended up being the Attack on Mars.
  • The incoming supernova threat didn't seem to have been discovered yet. So, the Zhat Vash could have been confident this was the perfect opportunity to initiate a war between the Federation and the Romulan Empire. An upstream sabotage would have been too much reasonable for such a zealot group.