Star Trek: Lower Decks – The 10 Worst Things Mariner Ever Did

Starfleet is generally filled with career-obsessed go-getters who want to climb the ranks and make big names for themselves. That’s why Beckett Mariner on Star Trek: Lower Decks has proven to be such a different character. She’s honestly great at all things Starfleet, a brilliant and capable crew member on the U.S.S. Cerritos.

The problem is that Mariner honestly doesn’t care about any of it. She likes the adventure of being in space, just not the rigmarole that comes with being in Starfleet. That’s led her to doing some pretty crazy and dangerous things over the years.

10 Boimler And The Spider Alien

On an away missions together, Boimler saw Mariner leaving the team behind in a suspicious fashion. Captain Freeman had secretly assigned him to watch Mariner and report back any time she did something that broke the rules. He followed her, thinking she was up to no good.

Instead, Mariner was bypassing protocol to help the people on the planet quicker. For his trouble, she left him to be a soothing toy for a giant alien spider to suck on for an extended period. Boimler was being an officious jerk but he didn’t deserve that.

9 Blowing Off Q

This one was more of a team effort, though still not a smart move. Mariner, Boimler, Rutherford, and Tendi all ended up tossed into an alien jail for no apparent reason. Then, those aliens dragged them into a courtroom and started making wild accusations.

As it turned out, the whole thing was a thank you party from an alien named Clar they had recently helped. Once the situation was cleared up, they left the party, running into and subsequently blowing Q off. Such a dismissive attitude towards a powerful being was the result of the other three directly taking their cues from Mariner.

8 Hiding Her Family

At first glance, Mariner seems like the kind of person who lives life out loud. She lays it all out there, letting all of her successes and failures flail in the breeze for all to see. Sometimes it’s because she doesn’t care enough to hide anything. Other times, it’s just because she’s drunk.

But Mariner did keep a massive secret for most of the first season, specifically that Captain Freeman was her mother. When that bombshell finally dropped, it disrupted life on board the Cerritos. This was something she should have been honest about. It would have allowed everyone to move forward sooner.

7 “Mentoring” Boimler

The best way to describe Boimler is that the stick up his butt has a stick up its butt. He’s dedicated to following the rules to almost a detrimental degree. Mariner is the exact opposite, flouting the rules at every opportunity. Again, this has a lot to do with her mother being her current captain.

Knowing that Boimler wants to be a captain someday and that being bold matters as much following the rules in Starfleet, Mariner volunteered to mentor Boimler. Most of her mentoring seemed to involve trying to convince Boimler to be a jerk, though he did get a promotion by the end of the season.

6 Pretended To Be Incompetent

When Captain Freeman was called away from the Cerritos, an old friend of Mariner’s was sent to take temporary command of the ship. She’s happy to see Captain Amina Ramsey but suddenly started acting incompetent around her. Mariner might not care about the rules but she’s also not bad at her job. In fact, the opposite was generally true.

It turned out that Mariner was worried that Ramsey would promote her out of the lower decks, something she desperately did not want. Mariner has done a lot of bad things but intentionally doing a terrible job could endanger her friends. It was a new level of selfishness.

5 Mocked Bad Pronunciation

Mariner’s bad attitude has proven to be the main reason her parents bounce her around between different ships. The problem is she’s good at the work, so kicking her out of Starfleet is difficult to justify. One of Captain Freeman’s plans was to promote her to a more officious position, one that would drive Mariner nuts and force her to quit.

It almost worked. But Mariner being Mariner, she found a way to get demoted back to the lower decks by openly mocking the way an admiral mispronounced the word “sensor.” It was part of her plan but it was also incredibly rude and mean.

4 Trusted A Ferengi

For the most part, Ferengi have earned a well-deserved reputation as greedy little trolls who would drop their own mothers in a well for a couple of strips of gold-pressed latinum. As such, most people have common sense not to trust them.

Apparently, that doesn’t include Mariner. When a Klingon friend of hers stole Mariner and Boimler’s shuttle, the duo was left stranded. A Ferengi offered to help them, which Mariner accepted against Boimler’s warnings. The Ferengi then tried to mug them, only to be stopped by Boimler.

3 Didn’t Believe In Boimler’s Girlfriend

Mariner’s unrelenting abuse of Boimler disguised as mentoring him is a hallmark of the series. The worst example of this was when Boimler’s girlfriend arrived on the Cerritos.

First, Mariner refused to believe anyone would want to date Boimler. When Barb turned out to be real, Mariner set out on a mission to prove something was forcing Barb to love Boimler. It turned out she was right and an alien parasite was to blame. But it was still cruel to basically state that Boimler was completely unlovable.

2 Vindicta Appears

With an important interview on the horizon, Boimler created a holodeck program using the crew’s private logs to create a practice scenario. That was already a dubious move. Mariner made things worse by taking over the program and making it all about her.

She basically went nuts, turning the program into a movie where she was a villain named Vindicta. Even her friends thought she went too far, though the whole exercise did help her have some profound personal realizations that did not change her in the least. The whole episode on the holodeck also revealed that Freeman was Mariner’s mother to Boimler. He was so stunned by the realization that he botched his interview.

1 Drunkenly Stabbed Boimler

The cold open of the first episode told fans everything they needed to know about both Boimler and Mariner. He caught her drunkenly trying to sneak a huge crate of contraband on the ship. Despite being incredibly drunk, Mariner tried to show Boimler her skills with a Klingon bat’leth.

Naturally, this resulted in Mariner stabbing Boimler through the leg with the bat’leth. Her lack of care with the deadly weapon and open hostility towards the rules demonstrated who she was, and would continue to be throughout the entire first season of the series.