Decrease Decks Affords A Goofy Riff On Apocalypse Now & John Milius

This text accommodates spoilers for the most recent episode of “Star Trek: Decrease Decks.”

“Star Trek: Decrease Decks” season 5, episode 3, “The Finest Unique Nanite Resort,” sees Lieutenant Boimler (Jack Quaid) assigned to a covert, doubtlessly harmful spy mission. He’s to affix Commander Ransom (Jerry O’Connell) and Lieutenant Commander Billups (Paul Scheer) on a mission to the Cosmic Duchess, an ultra-swanky, high-end resort-like cruise ship, floating gently by means of deep house. His project is to penetrate deep into the lodge to retrieve Admiral Milius (Toby Huss), a Starfleet officer who has gone AWOL due to “a contact of trip insanity.” The writers of “Decrease Decks” missed a possibility in not saying that he had been contaminated with Paradise Syndrome.

The Cosmic Duchess, nevertheless, is such an enormous ship that it incorporates synthetic recreations of each attainable vacation-ready biome. There is a tropical seashore biome, a snowboarding resort biome, and a water park biome. Boimler, Ransom, and Billups need to delved ever-deeper into the resort worlds and the center of darkness, hoping to seek out the Admiral’s path. They in the end discover him hiding out in a stone temple, surrounded by a cult of different rogue vacationers.

This “Decrease Decks” plotline is, after all, akin to the story of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam Conflict film “Apocalypse Now,” with an unmotivated Admiral standing in for the horrifying Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). “Apocalypse Now” was, in flip, based mostly on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella “Coronary heart of Darkness,” and all three of those tales contain an formidable errand boy trekking down a fraught tropical river to retrieve a high-ranking but extremely unstable determine, all whereas teetering on the point of catastrophe himself.

After all, since “Decrease Decks” is a comedy present, the “fraught tropical river” is, in truth, a Raging Waters-like river journey, whereas Boimler’s boat is simply an indigo-colored internal tube. Oh sure, and Admiral Milius is clearly named after John Milius, the legendary filmmaker who co-wrote “Apocalypse Now.”