Boimler and Levy don’t exactly bond, but, well … something happened. “You’re still a crackpot with dangerous beliefs,” Boimler says, “But I guess I’ve learned not to, uh … yell at you? I dunno.”
The characters on “Lower Decks” are always getting a raw deal, which is, of course, kind of the point. At the start of the series, the four main characters were ensigns, the lowest officer rank in Starfleet, and were most often assigned the grossest, most menial tasks on the U.S.S. Cerritos. The ensigns didn’t have quarters, having to sleep on not-at-all-private bunks in a hallway. They had to clean waste out of the holodecks, scrape hull panels, and generally do basic maintenance while the senior officers got to go on away missions.
Not that those away missions are always interesting; the Cerritos is a largely ignored starship usually assigned to dull follow-up missions and escort tasks. The central joke of “Lower Decks” is that even in the utopian future of “Star Trek,” there are still crap jobs that wear down your soul. One can work their way all the way up to captain, but you can still command a crappy ship.
Throughout “Lower Decks,” the main characters have had to deal with bad bosses and jerkwad co-workers. In the episode “Terminal Provocations,” it was revealed that the beta shift workers are locked in rivalry with the delta shift workers. Throughout the series, Mariner (Tawny Newsome) butts heads with the smug and handsome Commander Ransom (Jerry O’Connell). In the most recent season, the visiting Vulcan T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz) finds the Cerritos’ lower-ranking officers to be immensely irritating.