Like other series in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Lower Decks revolves around ingenuity, resourcefulness, and intelligence amidst the peril and adventure of exploring space. After all, Starfleet officers are some of the most elite minds in all the quadrants of the universe, and their missions often call upon them to go head to head with beings that put their mental capacities to the test.
Unlike other Trek shows, however, Lower Decks examines the interpersonal lives of some of the lesser-known crewmembers of a gargantuan Starfleet ship, showing that being smart doesn't always get you a post on the bridge, and being on the bridge doesn't always mean you're the smartest person wearing a comm badge.
10 Tendi
D'Vana Tendi didn't get a lot of time to get situated in her new position on the Cerritos before she was assisting T'ana with the rage virus Commander Ransom tracked in, suddenly finding herself pumping Commander Stevens' heart with her bare hands. But throwing herself into tough situations is just something Tendi does because she has the wits to know she'll succeed.
Who else but Tendi could use her skills as a geneticist to create "The Dog," an artificial canine she constructed out of inert carbon with the ability to shapeshift (as well as run 5% faster than a real dog) simply because she was curious. Other than Sam Rutherford, she's one of the brightest new recruits on the Cerritos.
9 Shaxs
With the Bajoran fighting spirit coursing through him, Security Chief Shaxs was hot-tempered -not unlike Commander Worf, another badass tactical officer- but he did have one thing several of his fellow commanding officers lacked -- emotional intelligence.
Whenever any member of the crew -like Rutherford- thought he was going to explode at them for making a choice he wouldn't make, he often surprised them by being understanding. And in the eleventh hour, when he saw that there were no other alternatives to saving his crew, he sacrificed himself before doing what he was always in favor of; detonating warp cores -- the enemies' or the Cerritos', it didn't particularly matter to him.
8 Ransom
Somehow Commander Jack Ransom managed to become the First Officer aboard the Cerritos, even though every away mission that he assured everyone would be "like a trip to Risa" suddenly devolved into complete chaos. His classic "Jack Ransom peace brokering" often turned out to be anything but peaceful, but like any resourceful commanding officer, he turned to his well-chosen team to find a solution.
Consider the second contact mission to the Galar system, when he managed to bring a rage virus back to the ship, or when he was supposed to lead a team of gift-giving emissaries to Gelrak V and it ended up with them all being imprisoned. His missions weren't always efficiently executed, but he wasn't above deferring to junior members of his team like Boimler and Mariner when things didn't go as planned, which is the mark of a smart leader.
7 T'ana
Like the EMH on Voyager, T'ana was a doctor deprived of a kindly bedside manner, but that didn't mean she didn't know her way around diseases, strange fungi, and the rage virus that Commander Ransom managed to bring back during a routine away mission.
It was the Cerritos' chief medical officer who correctly identified that the slime Brad Boimler was covered in after being ingested by a Galardonia spider-cow could neutralize Ransom's rage virus, a vital finding for the cure that would turn everyone normal again. She might not always be friendly, but she's always going to find a way to save lives.
6 Boimler
Brad Boimler might be a pretentious stickler for the rules, but the methodical way he goes about his work on the Cerritos proves that he's simply interested in being the best Starfleet officer he can be. Even before he's selected by Captain Riker to join him on the Titan, he'd proven what an intelligent crewman he could be.
When he created holograms of the crew of the Cerritos based on nothing but their psychological profiles and personal logs, they were not only eerily accurate but belied an active imagination and keen powers of observation (not all the crew was happy, but there were worst things that Boimler did). He earned a gold statue in the future for the "Boimler Effect" so he must have done something right.
5 Mariner
What Mariner lacks in book smarts she more than makes up for in street smarts, having been active in the field longer than most officers of her rank (and even some above it). She may eschew authority or personal advancement, but it's only because there are other things more important to her, like friendship.
It's a classic Mariner move to hijack Boimler's hologram program to make a grandiose movie delineating her own personal problems, but it doesn't mean the feat didn't take an intuitive, resourceful mind. Thinking on her feet is what she does best, especially when it comes to making sure Boimler doesn't get himself killed on inhospitable planets when escorting Klingon ambassadors because he doesn't know the native culture as well as she does.
4 Riker
One of the most anticipated cameos of Season 1 became a cast member in Season 2 -- Captain William Riker, now in command of his own ship the Titan, and Boimler's new superior officer. As Captain Picard's Number One, Riker had to exercise perhaps one of the deadliest battles of wits in Season 4 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, facing his former captain as the assimilated Locutus of Borg and managing to save the day.
Riker once again used his years of experience in The Chair to come to the Cerritos' aid in the Season 1 finale against an old enemy, outmaneuvering the Pakleds in the nick of time. It may have taken a long time for him to accept his own captaincy, but it's clear he was always right for the job.
3 Freeman
Sometimes, the smartest thing a commanding officer can do is step aside and let their crew "be a great crew," as Captain Carol Freeman did several times with her own. Whether it was acknowledging the benefits of "buffer time" as instructed by Boimler, or working to control a tractor beam breach between the Cerritos and the Merced with Mariner, she was a great captain for acknowledging the skills of others.
Like Captain Picard in his best moments, she often sought the strength in others and encouraged them to pursue goals that they didn't believe possible. In that way, she could build the trust of her crew, and return that trust to them, as she did in the Season 1 finale when she put her personal problems aside and let Mariner come up with the idea of a virus destroying the Pakled ship.
2 Rutherford
Even without his handy cybernetic implant, Sam Rutherford knows everything there is to know about the Cerritos because he reads ship schematics for fun. When he's not repairing different portions of the ship or reconfiguring star charts in astrometric, he's designing computer programs like Badgey in the holodeck.
When Mariner figured out that they could disable the Pakled ship with a computer virus in the Season 1 finale, Rutherford was the person Captain Freeman turned to. He ended up using Badgey, fully equipt with not one but three computer viruses to infect the Pakleds.
1 Q
The omnipotent trickster Q makes an appearance in Season 1 much to the delight of Star Trek: The Next Generation fans, who remember only too well the intellectual and temporal hoops he made Captain Picard and his crew jump through for purely arbitrary reasons. Existing outside of space and time, he's literally seen and done everything there is to do and has the omniscience that follows.
Beneath his chaotic jocularity, Q remains steadfastly interested in keeping the galaxy as it is rather than letting it be torn apart, but he always presents humanity with the opportunity to enact its own obliteration. Messing with the Cerritos crew, as always, is designed to teach them more about each other than about him.
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