Star Trek: Lower Decks

[BRC]

I'm a bit forced to stick with it since my partner is into it, even though I still don't find it particularly funny. Mariner is still a know-it-all insubordinate slacker and Boimler still an overeager brown-noser who would have been kicked off any competent Starfleet vessel yonks ago, but they're lucky enough to be on the Cerritos where the bar is considerably lower since the bridge crew are somehow even worse. And we're starting to see the Lower Decks crew (particularly the two of them) get more and more "bridge duty" assignments because the reality is that's where the interesting stuff in Star Trek shows happens.

Re: Boimler

While he's the butt of a bunch of jokes, I don't think his reputation as an "incompetent Brown-noser" is super accurate.

Incompetent: He's not especially competent, especially not compared to Mariner, but situations where he's been out of his element have usually been Mariner's fault.

In the second episode, he would have been perfectly capable of doing the task to which he was assigned: Greeting a Klingon General and flying him to the planet. Mariner encouraging the general to get drunk is what escalated the situation and got the two of them navigating a minefield of alien cultures to which Boilmer was unfamiliar. In this week's episode, his snafu on the bridge was due to having not been there, which was Rutherford's fault. Otherwise, none of the episodes so far really contain much in the way of Boilmer being incompetent. He's the butt of the joke, sure, but it's pretty rare that he actually messes up.

Spoiler

Show

Episode 1: He's ordered to watch Mariner, and spots her doing some shady stuff. He spends a while getting gummed on by the giant spidercow, but that isn't really due to any mistakes or errors in judgement on his part. He tends to react pretty reasonably with the context he has.
Episode 2: Described above, and the best "Boilmer is Incompetent" episode. Mariner gets him into trouble here.
Episode 3: His "Screw-up" here is mentioning "Buffer Time" to the Captain, but really, the incompetence in this episode is on her for instituting the scheduling that causes the ship to break down. Boilmer actually thrives under those conditions, and in the end successfully argues the captain into scaling them back. Once again, he's the butt of the joke, but I wouldn't say he really makes any errors in execution or judgement.
Episode 4: Boilmer is barely in this one, he gets upset about Mariner's promotion, and I think spills some coffee on Ransom in an attempt to emulate Mariner's behavior.
Episode 5: Boilmer does nothing wrong here. He gets into some standard Wacky Sitcom Hijinks with his insecurities over his too-good-for-him Girlfriend, but none of it is really him being Bad At His Job.
Episode 6: Boilmer and Mariner are pretty much in lockstep on this one.
Episode 7: His only real "Mistake" here is volunteering for the transporter experiment. I guess you could argue his blind trust in the Clearly Shady Starfleet Guy, but even that turns out to have been justified.
Episode 8: Not his fault, he was out of the room at the time, and he got a much more specific (And hard to deflect) question than Mariner did.

TLDR, he should probably be the last pick for any away team, but as far as the countless little tasks that keep the ship running (90% of his job) he seems to be pretty good.

As for being a Brown Noser, he's enthralled with the romance of Starfleet (He's basically the Trekkie self-insert character), and especially with the idealized Senior Officers, which gets him made fun of by Mariner in a rehash of the Hawkeye-Burns dynamic from M.A.S.H, but unlike Frank Burns, we don't really see his infatuation cause many problems (except for the Buffer Time incident, which can't really be put on him). As early as the first episode he's showing that he's able to make his own judgements rather than being blindsided by obedience. He mostly just geeks out about being on the Bridge, and wants to get promoted someday. He gets CALLED a brown-noser by Mariner due to his earnest enthusiasm for Starfleet (as compared to Rutherford's Earnest Enthusiasm for Engineering, and Tendi's Earnest Enthusiasm for basically everything) but he doesn't really act like one, at least not beyond trusting and respecting his commanding officers.