What’s scarier than dangerous swarms of robots in the future? The answer is: tiny swarms of robots. In the latest episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks, a diminutive AI threat has been brought back into the fold, though these particular tiny robots may not be top of mind for every single Trek fan. Continuing its five-season tradition of super-deep cuts from the Trek Universe, “The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel” brings back the nanites in a big (small?) way. But this reappearance of the nanites is actually a bigger callback to a moment in which Star Trek: The Next Generation shifted gears forever.
Here’s why the nanite Easter egg in Lower Decks is significant, and why the episode they come from is wilder than you might remember.
Tiny, microscopic, spoilers ahead.
In her Captain’s log, Captain Freeman says the USS Cerritos has been sent to help out a massive cruise ship in space known as “The Duchess.” This cruise ship has apparently been overrun by a “nanite cluster” that has “infested the resort, consuming metal to self-replicate.” While Tendi jokingly calls this “pest control” a few moments later, Freeman notes “Starfleet has ordered us here to humanely capture and study the microscopic robots.”
While microscopic robots are a medical possibility in the actual, real world, in the Star Trek canon, these specific types of nanites originate in the 1989 episode “Evolution.” While that episode begins as a run-of-the-mill-the-Enterprise-is-broken story, by the middle, we learn that Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) accidentally caused a colony of microscopic nanites to be let out on the ship and evolve, hence the name of the episode. Because of this, the nanites are eating up mechanical resources in order to propagate and survive. This basic set-up is identical in the new episode of Lower Decks, which is the first time the TNG-era nanites have appeared since “Evolution.” (Though, Discovery Season 2 had some slightly different nanites in Season 2 in 2017).
In Lower Decks, it seems fairly well established that Starfleet knows what to do when a nanite infestation breaks out, but it also seems to suggest that the nanites from “Evolution” have migrated off of their newish home planet of Kavis Alpha IV, which is where the Enterprise relocated them back in 2366. Lower Decks Season 5 is taking place in roughly 2382, meaning Wesley’s nanites have had 16 years to migrate to strange, new worlds, and seek out various other sources of metal to consume.
Interestingly, while the Borg had been introduced in TNG Season 2, the nanites in “Evolution” seem to predict the behaviors of the Borg later in TNG Season 3. In 1989, “Evolution” began Season 3 of TNG September of 1989 — a season which would famously conclude in June 1990, with a cliffhanger in which Jean-Luc Picard is assimilated into a hive mind. But, weirdly, the nanites in “Evolution” also have a combined, hive-like intelligence, albeit one less overtly threatening. So with the introduction of nanites, TNG Season 3, weirdly revealed its own endgame.
At the time “Evolution” was also a subtle reboot episode — it was the first TNG episode to feature the redesigned uniforms for the crew with the higher collars, Dr. Crusher returned after a year-long absence, and the general vibe of the series began to resemble what we now think of as when the show got good. Even though it aired in 1989, “Evolution” scans as one of the TNG episodes from the 1990s because it seems more polished and sure of itself than the two preceding seasons. It’s also, interestingly, an episode that is doubly focused on characters who are undervalued or misunderstood. Wesley Crusher isn’t technically a Starfleet officer and is struggling in his mother’s shadow. Meanwhile, the nanites are, in retrospect, like a tiny version of other AI hiveminds in Trek canon, but taken a little less seriously because of their size.
And yet, true to Trek’s tendencies toward open-mindedness, Data, and Wesley figure out a way to communicate with the nanites, which allows them to become a full-blown recognized alien species within the galaxy, even if they were created artificially. The legacy of nanites beyond the 24th century is unknown right now, but what Lower Decks just suggested is that perhaps, the evolution we saw in “Evolution” was just the beginning.
