Star Trek: Lower Decks: Mugato, Gumato

September 2, 2021 7:11 AM - Season 2, Episode 4

Everyone's favorite horny gorillas are back! Plus: is Mariner secretly an agent of [REDACTED, soon to have their own series]?

Memory Alpha likes to watch:

- Denobulans! Love that fright reflex.

- Kzinti Starfleet sighting.

- Super-impressed by that bartender's ability to conjure ominous shadows on his face, in an otherwise-brightly-lit lounge, at will.

- Also impressed by the commitment to inconsistent pronunciation of mongoto--motorboato--galorndon--you know what I mean. (From MA: "The title is a reference to the confused naming of the Mugato in TOS: "A Private Little War". The creature was named a "Gumato" in the script, but DeForest Kelley could not pronounce the word "Gumato", so it was changed to "Mugato" (which Kelley and William Shatner proceeded to pronounce "Mugatu")."

posted by Halloween Jack (13 comments total)

The Greatest Discovery folks pointed out last week that Doctor T'Ana doing cat things is extremely low-hanging comedy fruit and now I will notice every time the show does it.

Also the Gumato fucking scene was not great and I think I'm gonna have to have my kids skip this one.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:37 AM on September 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

With T'Ana's cat things, sure, it's low-hanging comedy fruit, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it isn't funny.
posted by SansPoint at 11:50 AM on September 2, 2021 [16 favorites]

Don't call my name, don't call my name, Mugato
Don't want your spit, don't want your thorns,
Just wanna beam myself up.
posted by StarkRoads at 3:11 PM on September 2, 2021

Yeah, I could have done without the mating scene (or, at least, dial it back JUST a little?).

I'm also annoyed that the thing that could have been a nice source of Easter eggs (T'Ana's list) is the one thing that DIDN'T have an apparent Easter egg.
posted by hanov3r at 3:30 PM on September 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

"I guess he just wants to watch" would have been fine, without him also jacking off his horn. We're a sex-positive household but I really don't feel like introducing my kids to this particular sexual dynamic via alien gorilla fucking.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:36 PM on September 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

I really enjoyed the subtlety of the wall sign gag in the lounge, which is basically the Starfleet emblem with an olive-skewered toothpick stuck in it. Also absolutely loved the commitment to the idea that Ferengi characters all still talk like they have big fake teeth in their mouths.

Definitely did feel like maybe the gorilla sex scene might have been a bit more Family Guy overall than I generally prefer, especially because it didn't really add that much comedically?

Oh also my drunk Shimoda for this week goes to Eugene Cordero as Rutherford, for his 100%-convinced-he'd-stumbled-on-the-brilliant-realization delivery of "Our skin!" (which I am still laughing about as I type this)
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:04 PM on September 2, 2021 [12 favorites]

I'm happy because I'm a Paul F Tompkins stan.
posted by Marticus at 6:24 PM on September 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

Speaking of low hanging comedy fruit, the unnecessary and predictable violence of the opening gag had me in total stitches, especially the "no hurry, you've got 10 minutes" close.
posted by mark k at 7:37 PM on September 2, 2021 [5 favorites]

I mean, I absolutely did LOL at the mugato porn, but at least half of it was laughter of incredulity—as in, "Huh! I thought this was CBS."

(Speaking of: in the shower just now, I finally came up with a convenient term for this era of Trek, to distinguish it from TOS-Trek, TOS-Film-Trek, Berman-Trek, and JJ-Trek: "Stream-Trek")

I wonder if they're going for a Norm's-wife thing with the bar manager being unseen. Or, the "manager" is a particularly snippy fork of the ship computer's AI. Hey, LOW: do a Black Mirror-esque story about taking orders from coldly disembodied AI.

Very good resolution to the conflict here; very Roddenberrian, I thought. I appreciate that Boimler was not overly shat-upon in this one—at times it has almost seemed like he was veering into O'Brien/Harry Must Suffer territory. (Not that it isn't funny in Boimler's case! It just shouldn't be his one thing.) But maybe I like this episode most because of the other shows it made me think of:
- the DS9 episode where we see Quark actually play with Ferengi action figures, energy whip included;
- and Other Space, the show that had the misfortune to be born to Yahoo! in its quixotic attempt to compete with Netflix, and the show that probably got Eugene Cordero this job. Something about that "Our skin!" line struck me as very Other Space; partly his intonation, and of course that distinctive voice. I miss that show, but LOW is, I think, a worthy successor.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 4:43 AM on September 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

Also, WRT anbo-jyutsu: StarkRoads called it a year ago.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:49 AM on September 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Was it just me that spotted the reference to Fellowship of the Ring (the movie)?
posted by zadcat at 4:53 PM on September 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Nope, I saw it... the space gorilla sniffing at our heroes holding in the tree roots... definitely a callback to the first time we see ringwraiths in LoTR.
posted by cosmologinaut at 1:18 AM on September 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Maybe a stretch, but prompted by the Mugato's similarity to the Nazgûl, I thought Boimler stopping short of falling down the steep slope, but ending up pushed off and falling with Rutherford due to his coming up behind (or possibly vice-versa, I'm not going to check) could be a reference to the bit just before the hobbits hide in the tree roots.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 3:17 AM on September 4, 2021 [5 favorites]