The four ensigns are all out for a spacewalk, having just finished repairs to a satellite while the Cerritos holds station nearby. Before they return to the ship, they stop and share a quiet moment to admire the beauty of the cosmos. Unfortunately, this little delay has some rather severe consequences for them. The Cerritos warps away a moment later, having apparently forgotten about them in their haste to answer a distress call from the Bakersfield. Six hours later, half-frozen in their EV suits, they are finally rescued. The command staff blames them for not signing out their equipment as protocol requires, but Mariner is convinced it's because they see the lower decks as Beneath Notice. The Captain refuses to argue with her, being more concerned with the Starfleet drill administrator who is about to arrive onboard.
The instructor is Shari yn Yem, a Pandronian. She explains that the crew are about to be graded on their performance in a series of simulations based on previous situations encountered by Starfleet. A giant scoreboard hovers above a row of holopods where the evaluations will take place. And as an added twist, their seniorities are going to be reversed: for the duration of the tests, the lower decks will be making the command decisions while the bridge crew get to be ensigns again.
Mariner steps into her pod for her first test, based on "Mirror, Mirror", which challenges her to blend in as the captain of a Mirror Universe Starfleet ship until she can find a way back to her dimension. She decides to be more ambitious and see if she can infiltrate the regime, only to find that this test does not award extra credit. An Invisible Wall blocks Mariner and the program penalizes her for deviating from her objective. Disappointed, she continues on, and soon runs into Mirror Boimler. She gives the Terran salute, but with the wrong hand, blowing her cover. Her first test ends in failure.
Next up is Tendi, whose situation is based on "Ethics", requiring her to deal with a paraplegic Klingon's desire for an honorable death. She quickly realizes, as Mariner did, that these tests are strictly Railroaded, losing points first for refusing to help on Hippocratic grounds, and then again for offering a cleaner method than using his ritual dagger. In trying to grab it back from her, the Klingon accidentally falls off the biobed. Two surgeons rush over, shocked to find Tendi's patient still alive. They struggle to kill him, but are stymied by his robust physiology, and the lead physician declares him alive with defeated solemnity. Another test failed.
According to the scoreboard, most of the crew isn't faring much better. Mariner's next test is to survive in a 19th-century Wild West-style frontier town. The audience doesn't even get the opportunity to tell which Cowboy Episode this one is based on, because Mariner fails 30 seconds in when the horse she mounts bucks her off and tramples her to "death".
Rutherford's simulation is next, a recreation of The Wrath of Khan's climactic ending, requiring him to sacrifice himself to save the ship by entering the irradiated dilithium chamber to avert a warp core breach. But the handle of the chamber door is so hot he can't even touch it, and by the time he has removed his boots to use as makeshift gloves, the core has already breached. These simulations give an entirely new meaning to Nintendo Hard.
The only crewmember who is doing well is Boimler, whose evaluation is surprisingly open-ended compared to the rest, requiring him simply to "resist the Borg". He is placed inside a Borg cube, where he deftly evades the lumbering drones pursuing him, finds a crawlway leading to a sphere, and hijacks it to escape and complete the mission! The program gives him a score of 79%, which he is unsatisfied with. He decides to try for a better score despite the warning that, if at any point he fails, he's finished. Again and again, he finds new ways to improve his score, but refuses to settle for anything less than perfection.
Mariner's third test, based on "The Naked Time", places her on a duplicate of the Cerritos where her fellow crew have lost their sexual inhibitions. She braces herself as she enters the Mess, but it's not enough to prepare her for the tide of nudity that assaults her eyes. Within seconds, Mariner is fleeing for the airlock, begging for the simulation to fail her.
Despite their string of failures, the ensigns still briefly get to enjoy the luxuries of rank. Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford are commiserating over a buffet of fancy senior-grade replicator food, wondering why Boimler hasn't joined in. He's still in the game, as it turns out, continuing to refine his score. Despite adding the rescue of several Borg, destruction of the cube, and signaling Starfleet for backup to his achievements, he has still only achieved a score of 94%. Not good enough!
The tests have at least given the ensigns an appreciation for how difficult it is to be a leader. On that note, the bridge crew are themselves enjoying a reprieve from their responsibilities during their temporary reassignment, until they are summoned for their evaluation. Freeman, Ransom, Shaxs, and T'Ana all enter a holopod together for a "Klingon encounter". They find themselves in a cargo bay when, a moment later, a jolt to the ship sets off the wail of a Red Alert. The four stand ready to do their duty as a Commander sticks his head in. Instead of telling them what's going on, he tasks them with restacking all of the cargo containers that were disturbed by the impact. Suddenly, this whole switcheroo idea doesn't seem so fun anymore.
The final exam is about to take place. Shari explains that they will all now work together as a team in their new roles to hijack their ship from Spacedock and save Spock on the Genesis planet. Mariner takes the captain's chair and orders Freeman, at the helm, to take the ship out. A moment later, Shaxs stands up to work out some of his sore muscles from all the crate lifting, which reminds Mariner of seeing him naked during her last test. Freeman, who is feeling a bit piqued at having to take orders from her daughter, takes Mariner's loss of composure as an opening to taunt her over her poor performance in the holopods. The argument this provokes leads to the two of them fighting over the conn. The exercise ends in failure as the ship, bereft of its pilot, fatally collides with the hangar doors.
Shari: Actually, it is.
Mariner and Freeman sit at the bar together, both ashamed by the unprecedented catastrophe they managed to cause, but they are also coming to realize that they have developed a newfound empathy for each other. Mariner understands even better than before how hard it is to be a captain, and Freeman acknowledges that always being in the dark as a lowly ensign is no bed of roses, either. Then they notice that the rest of the crew, for all their failures in the evaluations, are happily socializing without regard to rank. That was the point of the whole exercise! They pay a visit to Shari to thank her for giving the Cerritos crew a much-needed opportunity to learn and bond together as a team.
Only they're wrong. Upon hearing this, Shari lets out a sinister cackle. Quite the opposite, she says. The crew's pitiful scores will guarantee that they never work together again. She has a far less noble motivation for choosing the Cerritos for these evaluations. She needed a crew incompetent enough to demonstrate to Starfleet that her job still has a purpose after all those before had passed without issue. She also casually admits that she rigged the drills for added insurance.
Except for the one where Mariner got trampled by a horse. That was entirely her fault.
But Mariner realizes they might still have a chance. Boimler, she sees, is still in his holopod trying to get a perfect score. Even if he does, it won't affect the average enough to save the crew, but it does buy them time to figure out how to stop Shari from submitting their rigged scores to Starfleet Command. Freeman calls Boimler, who was just about to finally claim his hard-earned perfect score, and orders him to stall for as long as possible.
The Captain has an idea in mind. She makes her way back to the bridge, enduring Shari's smug verbal abuse the whole way, and orders Tendi at Ops to scan for anything nearby that might be dangerous. Freeman realizes that, for all her knowledge of space exploration, Shari has no practical experience being on the frontier. She takes the Cerritos through a cavalcade of Starfish Aliens and Negative Space Wedgies, completely unphased, refusing to stop until Shari gives them a passing grade. They're not in any real danger, but the Pandronian doesn't know any better, and her confidence quickly degrades into anxiety with each new horror. As the ship tumbles violently through the shear of a temporal rift towards the maw of a black hole, Shari is reduced to a terrified wreck. She finally relents, and with a single command from the Captain, Rutherford brings the ship back under control, completely undamaged from its adventure.
Their job done, it's finally time to let Boimler out of his purgatory. In trying to keep his program going, the holographic Borg captured and (somehow) assimilated him, leaving him confused and exhausted as he topples out of the holopod into Shaxs' arms. He asks them if he got his perfect score. Tendi looks at his grade, 8%, and tells him that yes, he did get a perfect score.
Shari yn Yem may have had selfish intentions, but the crew has still grown from their experience. Freeman and the rest of the senior staff find the ensigns in the Mess and present them with a gift: a replicator that they have supplied with the the food recipes normally reserved for senior officers. If they're all going to face the same dangers together, then they deserve to all share the same benefits as well.
Tropes:
- 100% Completion: Boimler ends up in the toughest program where he faces the Borg, and his first try managed to get a 79%. Completely unaware that everyone else failed their drill within a few minutes, he retakes the test even after being told that getting a failing grade at any time will lock him out of further attempts. Each successful run only improves his score a few percentage points, even rescuing children and destroying the cube only get him 93%. The actual 100% success apparently involves him having to beat the Borg Queen in a chess game and teach her empathy, but he was forced to lose that score due to outside orders to keep the program running longer.
- Achievements in Ignorance: The training programs are designed for everyone to fail, but Boimler manages to get a passing 79% on his first try. Disappointed by the score, he spends the rest of the episode determinedly repeating the scenario until he works it up to 100%. Unfortunately, his score ends up being ruined when he's forced to stall for time on Freeman's orders.
- Affably Evil: Once she's been taught empathy, The Borg Queen seems genuinely concerned with the rough shape that Boimler's skin is in, once he clarifies that he is indeed a human.
- All for Nothing: Zigzagged. While Boimler did save the crew, he ultimately got an 8% score on his test after all his hard work to get a perfect score is torpedoed by Freeman and Mariner having him stall for time.
- Anachronism Stew: The mirror universe test takes place on a fictional ISS Cerritos, despite the real Terran Empire having collapsed generations ago. The uniform design is also right out of "Mirror Mirror", circa 2267, with the sole exception of substituting the modern color scheme (red for command, gold for security and engineering).
- Animals Hate Him: Mariner gets thrown off and trampled to death by a horse in one simulation, despite having two and a half years of horse riding as a child, and Shari reveals that she had nothing to do with that.
- Bare Midriffs Are Feminine: Female Imperial Starfleet personnel wear dress uniforms which expose their midriffs.
- The B Grade: Boimler, being the perfectionist that he is, isn't satisfied with his 79%. He keeps repeating his drill to achieve 100%. This turns out to be a blessing, as him still running the drill means that the final scores can't be submitted until he finishes.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Shari chose the Cerritos on purpose and rigged the drills to have them all fail and prove that her drills are still necessary.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Shari can split her body into three pieces (head, torso, and legs). They all bounce around the bridge like pinballs when Freeman demonstrates what a starship crisis is actually like.
- Brain Bleach: Mariner's reaction to "The Naked Time" scenario. She purposely chooses to fail her drill to stop seeing it.
- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: The various nearby dangers that Mariner locates are a Crystalline Entity, a Negative Space Wedgie, and Crystalline Entities interacting with said Negative Space Wedgie.
- Break the Motivational Speaker: To make Shari reverse her rigging and pass the crew, they torment her by getting up close to a Crystalline Entity and then a black hole.
- Brick Joke:
- A meta-example. The title, "I, Excretus", only makes sense at the end of the episode, when Boimler is converted into a Borg in the simulation and calls himself Excretus.
- The comm buoy abandonment in the cold open as well — it seems like just another day on the most dysfunctional ship in Starfleet, until Shari reveals that the incident made the ship stand out for her sabotage plan.
- Call-Back:
- The drill scenarios are based on missions from Starfleet history, so it's not surprising that their titles reference some of Captain Kirk's and Captain Picard's adventures.
- When we actually see the crew go through their drills, Mariner has to escape from the Mirror Universe and survive on a Wild West Planet, Tendi needs to grant an injured Klingon an honorable death, and Rutherford must manually prevent a warp core breach.
- Mariner's method of prematurely ending her "Naked Time" drill is to vent the airlock, which was how most of the crew of the infected ship in TNG died.
- Later, the joint exercise involves stealing the ship and going to Genesis to save Spock.
- Freeman orders to fly Cerritos towards a crystalline entity.
- Boimler encounters the Borg Queen during his drill. Her seductive comments about how he can almost pass for human are very similar to her temptation of Data.
- Shari agrees to give the crew passing grades after the crew threatens to fly the Cerritos into a black hole, much like how Janeway once got rid of some aliens experimenting on her crew by threatening to fly the Voyager into a pulsar.
- As a nice twist of the knife towards Shari, the fake "black hole feeding off a temporal rift" act is similar to what the Cerritos survives at the beginning of the Lower Decks title sequence. (Meaning, they got her with a reenactment after failing reenactments all day.)
- When presented with the new replicator, Boimler excitedly asks about the lobster mac and cheese, his favorite from the first season.
- At the end, after Boimler is saved from the Borg simulation, he echoes Picard's line to his brother Robert regarding his experience with the Borg.Boimler: They took everything that I was.
- The Cameo: Alice Krige, the OG Borg Queen, provides her voice for the holographic version in Boimler's simulation.
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Shari rigged all the tests so that everyone would fail. Despite that, Boimler still manages to get a passing grade, and is the only member of the crew who doesn't fail, at least until he's forced to. Meanwhile, several times crewmembers manage to genuinely screw up purely on their own faults, such as with Mariner and the horses.
- Continuity Nod:
- Shari is a Pandronian, the same species as Commander Ari bn Bem, and like him, tends to refer to herself as "This One" and has come aboard to run efficiency tests on the crew.
- The Jem'Hadar are mentioned to the senior staff during the drill where they're asked to stack crates.
- Even during the "Naked Time" simulation, Billups is still committed to keeping his virginity and doesn't engage in any sexual activities, though he's as naked as everyone else.
- Curse Cut Short: Mariner is about to curse when her line is cut off by the Sickbay doors closing.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Boimler being assimilated in the simulation causes him to act like a Borg until the crew opens the pod and ends the program. He's briefly traumatized before snapping out of it.
- Did Not Think This Through: Apparently, Shari thought that Starfleet wouldn't ask questions about how every single person on an entire starship failed, although she seems fairly confident that a California-class is so Beneath Notice that no one would question the failure.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Mariner is so desperate to escape the "Naked Time" drill that she has herself and the entire rest of the crew Thrown Out the Airlock.
- Epic Fail: While most of the tests are revealed to have been rigged, the crew's managing to crash the Cerritos into Spacedock's doors during the "rescue Spock from the Genesis Planet" simulation is purely the result of their own incompetence, as is Mariner's getting repeatedly trampled on by a horse in the Wild West simulation.
- Evil Laugh:
- Mariner lets one out when she hears that she's going into a mirror universe scenario.
- Shari lets out a long one when Mariner and Freeman suggest that the drills were a Secret Test of Character, revealing that, on the contrary, she set them up to fail on purpose.
- "Everybody Laughs" Ending: Everybody except Boimler anyway. At the end of the episode when he eagerly asks if the new replicator makes the lobster mac and cheese with the breaded top, Shaxs jokes that it sounds like the one thing the Borg left Boimler was his appetite. Everyone laughs at this, while Boimler sadly laments "they took everything that I was".
- Fan Disservice: As Mariner pans across the massive holographic orgy, we get such sights as Boimler spread eagle (with a generous Censor Box, thankfully), T'Ana crawling over Shaxs, and Ransom being whipped by Stevens. Then Shaxs, flexing in a Stupid Sexy Flanders pose, shouts, "Iiiiiiit's NAKED TIIIIME!" Really, the airlock is the only logical choice from there.
- Fanservice: Contrary to her horror at the nudity of her friends and the senior officers, Jennifer and Barnes going at it behind a table elicits a brief positive reaction from Mariner before she notices everyone else.
- Foreshadowing:
- Mariner fails her first test because she gives the Terran salute with her left hand, while the program's fictional mirror Mariner is right-handed. It is safe to assume that the holodeck wouldn't deviate from Mariner's template like this without being specifically directed to and, more to the point, the change is completely arbitrary and unfair as a test of ability, hinting at Shari's sabotage.
- While the simulations border on the absurd at times, Rutherford's simulation has him trying to prevent a core breach by sacrificing himself but conspicuously has his radiation suit missing the gloves needed to enter the chamber, hinting at how the tests are rigged. It's all but spelled out with the nigh-impossible container-stacking drill that the bridge crew get.
- Another hint that the tests are rigged is that failing a simulation locks you out, but if you get a passing score, you can try again. No one is supposed to pass, so you can keep trying until you fail.
- More subtly, Shari's lack of life-or-death experience shows when she says "This is a ship whose captain left four ensigns on a space walk to answer a distress call." She seems to not recognize that distress calls get priority— something that Mariner and Freeman pick up on and react to as she says it.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: Pausing when the pods are first introduced shows the last names of crew, and several episode names from the series. And then there's that shot with the full crew, waiting for the presentation to start...
- Funny Background Event: In the "Naked Time" simulation, while everyone else is having sex, Billups is just hanging out in the back readingnote .
- Furry Reminder: When the senior staff are bunking down for the night, Dr. T'ana climbs into Shaxs' bunk, sniffs him, and then curls up on top of him just like a cat.
- Gilligan Cut:
- When the lower deckers are left on a satellite in their space suits, Tendi suggests that they'll all have a laugh about it once the Cerritos returns. Six hours later, they're huddled together and shivering, which Tendi tries to pass off as laughing.
- From Mariner saying that the command crew must be realizing how tough they have it, to them just chilling in the bunk beds.
- Girl on Girl Is Hot: Although disturbed by the orgy going on in the "Naked Time" scenario, Mariner is briefly awed by two female crewmates (Barnes and Jennifer) making out.
- Grass is Greener: The crew swapping roles helps them both appreciate that the other side isn't as fun as it sometimes seems. Being a senior officer might come with a lot of perks, but the responsibilities are crushing. Being on the lower decks might seem easy and carefree, but it also means being constantly ordered around with no clue of what's going on.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: This is kind of a boozy episode, all things considered— not that they haven't earned it!
- As Mariner, Tendi, and Rutherford are eating in the captain's room, they've clearly replicated up several bottles of alcohol, a couple of which are open.
- The officers and Mariner hit the bar after failing the bridge drill (though this one quickly turns into a bonding moment).
- After stopping Shari and saving Boimler from simulated Borg assimilation, Mariner decides to drag Boimler away for drinks.
- Internal Homage: All of the simulations are based not just on past situations encountered by Starfleet crew, but situations that have appeared in past episodes of Star Trek.
- Jerkass Has a Point: While she's a complete Bitch in Sheep's Clothing and trying to cause the Cerritos to fail to preserve her own job, Shari has a very valid point that the commanders' carelessness in responding to the SOS (from a temporal distortion involving a repeating time loop — while the Bakersfield was in distress, based on the short periodicity of the time loop, she wasn't going anywhere for a while), and specifically her leaving four ensigns behind in deep space for several hours, could have had serious and lasting consequences.
- Just the Introduction to the Opposites: Tendi gets a simulation where she has to euthanize a paralyzed Klingon to give him an honorable death, and he wants it done violently with his knife. The other doctors admonish her trying to save his life, and mark his "Time of Life" after her failure.
- Killer Game Master: Shari acts like a downplayed version. Her simulations are heavily railroaded and immediately penalizing any and all attempts at Sequence Breaking, and rigged to fail the participant as quickly as possible.
- Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Shari's job is to train and evaluate Federation starship crews on how to do their jobs efficiently. However, all her training programs are simply copied from past adventures of other crews throughout Starfleet history: she's never actually served on a starship, and doesn't understand the need to adapt and overcome challenges herself. When Shari is exposed to actual danger by Captain Freeman (namely facing off against a Crystalline Entity and a Negative Space Wedgie), she completely panics.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Freeman and Mariner put Shari through the hell of a normal day of Starfleet adventures until she passes them. Shari also resigns at the end of the episode due to the traumatic experience, meaning that no lower-class ship will ever be put through that again.
- Last-Second Word Swap: Boimler, after being let out of his pod, complains that the Borg put implants on him. Before he can say where, Mariner interjects with "ear" and drags him off for drinks.
- Malicious Misnaming: Mariner calls the drill instructor "Shari Bing Bang" when warning Boimler about her Evil Plan to screw with the crew's scores.
- Mercy Kill: Tendi's simulation tests her with euthanizing a paralyzed Klingon. She fails because she can't do it violently enough for his liking.
- Mildly Military: The command triad of a real ship that left a team of crew members working on a buoy behind while it raced off to assist a ship in distress would be disciplined harshly, if not outright relieved of command. At worst, Freeman's callous disregard for her subordinates only serves to highlight that her ship is considered to be at the bottom of Starfleet's priorities.
- Motive Rant: Shari breaks into one when Mariner and Freeman confront her about supposedly running a secret team-building exercise.
- Naked People Are Funny: The "Naked Time" scene, which contains (simulations of) the entire crew of the Cerritos naked and in sexually provocative positions, is completely played for laughs (or maybe for horror — either way, it's definitely not supposed to be sexy).
- Never My Fault: Ransom claims that it's their own fault that the four were left behind because they didn't sign the boots out properly.
- Non-Malicious Monster: The Crystalline Entity potentially could have destroyed the ship, but in the end it was just minding its own business when the crew flew over and started messing with it.
- Not a Mask: Just before Boimler is about to be assimilated, the Borg Queen is impressed with how Boimler almost looks human until he reveals that he is human, which shocks the Queen. She tells him that he needs to drink more water because his skin is a mess.
- Not Me This Time: Shari ran out of time to program all her sabotaged simulations, meaning that when Mariner caused a horse to go irate and trample her, she did that purely through her own ineptitude.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: While we weren't looking, Boimler beat the Borg Queen at chess and taught her the concept of empathy.
- Pacifist Run: What Boimler ended up doing to get a perfect score by saving all the Borg babies, the adult drones, and teaching the Borg Queen empathy.
- The Perfectionist: Boimler is so annoyed that he can't get a perfect score, he keeps doing his event over and over. Ultimately, the program decides to outright cheat just so he can lose.
- Planet of Hats: The simulated Borg Queen insists on assimilating Bradward, even after finding out that he's just a puny human with a host of medical conditions and allergies, because assimilating people is "kind of our thing".
- Railroading: When doing the Mirror Universe test, Mariner decides to try to change the Terran Empire from the inside instead. When she tries to go off-mission, the program blocks her and deducts points, Mariner groaning that she can't think outside the box. During the Western simulation, simply not using the horses is considered the wrong action.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: After swapping places with the lower decks crew and eating what they eat, the senior officers end up giving them a replicator with better food programmed into it.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: When Freeman and Mariner confront Shari, they say that they know what she's up to. She was up to something, but not teaching the lesson in teamwork that they thought it was.
- Save the Villain: Boimler rescues ever-increasing numbers of adult and infant Borg as he strives for a perfect score.
- Secret Test of Character: What Captain Freeman and Ensign Mariner think that the drill was really about. They're wrong.
- Shout-Out:
- Mirror-Boimler howls at Mariner like a Pod Person when he realizes that she's not one of them.
- The title can be seen as a reference to I, Claudius, I, Robot, or even just the TNG episode "I, Borg".
- Smug Snake: Shari is so confident in her plan that she laughs and gloats to Mariner and Freeman's faces about her true motives when they come to her under the impression that she intended to strengthen the Cerritos crew's bonds. All this does is give them a heads-up to have Boimler stall for time while they blackmail her into passing them by taking her through various harrowing space phenomena, since it turns out that she never actually served on a starship. If she had just gone along with their presumption, her plan would have gone off without a hitch.
- Spanner in the Works: Boimler's obsessive need to get a 100% score on his Borg Encounter test program ends up derailing Shari's Evil Plan to deliberately flunk the Cerritos crew. She can't submit their failing grades until the tests are completed, and Boimler has been running his over and over again to get the best possible score, giving Freeman and Mariner a chance to turn the tables on Shari.
- Spotting the Thread: Mariner fails the Mirror Universe scenario because she salutes with the wrong hand.
- Stylistic Suck: Shari has four or five fingered hands in different shots... because the same error happened with Ari in "Bem".
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Rutherford's scenario involves opening up a superheated door barehanded to manually reset a warp core. He tries to power through the pain to turn the door handle, but repeatedly fails because his hands reflexively flinch away from the hot metal.
- Swapped Roles: The premise of the evaluation for the Cerritos, the Lower Deckers are assigned duties of the bridge crew officers, and the bridge crew are given Lower Deck duties. Both parties go in expecting everything to be easy for them, only to realize that both sides have it a little harder than they expected.
- Tempting Fate: The command staff initially find being ensigns easy. Then they're forced to stack crates in the middle of a crisis and change their tune.
- This Is Gonna Suck: Mariner's perfectly understandable reaction when she realizes what the "Naked Time" scenario is.Mariner: [absolutely horrified] Oh no, this is that disease that made everyone fight and have sex all over the place!
- Thrown Out the Airlock: Mariner deliberately spaces herself and the entire crew in "The Naked Time" scenario just to make the disturbing nudity stop.
- Title Drop: "It's NAKED TIIIME!"
- Took a Level in Badass: Boimler winning an Unwinnable Training Simulation suggests that he's becoming one hell of a Starfleet officer. Canonically speaking, this puts him somewhere on the level of James T. Kirk, though Kirk reprogrammed the scenario with a win condition that it did not normally have
- Uniqueness Decay: The original Crystalline Entity was the subject of two episodes and was implied to be unique, as far as the crew were aware. This episode has Mariner casually mention multiple of them while taking Shari on her scare trip.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The crew hanging out at the bar don't even bat an eye when the Cerritos encounters a crystalline entity. Even more so, they just keep going about their business once the ship escapes.
- Unwinnable Training Simulation: Shari deliberately set up her simulations this way. Not as a Secret Test of Character, but to make the crew of the Cerritos fail the tests so she can keep her consultant job.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Mariner curses out her mother and the rest of the bridge crew for leaving her and her friends stranded in space for six hours when they warped away to answer a distress call.
- The Worf Effect: Played for Laughs with the Borg, who are eventually defeated fairly by Boimler basically applying Save Scumming in his simulation. Then subverted when the simulated Borg become legitimately terrifying once he's forced to stall for time and he can't escape the simulation until the senior officers can rescue him.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Mariner and Freeman come to the conclusion Shari's drills were to teach them and everyone else a lesson about appreciating their respective experiences about lower decks vs. officers. Only for Shari to laugh maniacally and explain her real plan — to fail the whole ship so she can keep her job.
- Yank the Dog's Chain: Boimler actually manages to come out with a perfect score in the Borg Encounter simulation despite it being rigged to have him lose, only for Freeman to call and demand that he continue the simulation to stall for time, which causes his score to plummet when the program adapts to his stalling.
