Sometimes everything just comes together — a dull script, routine design, a generic score, perfunctory direction, an uncharismatic leading man and a guest star’s strange and flaccid performance. Meanwhile, on Star Trek: Voyager, Tom screams at his long-suffering girlfriend after falling in love with a car or something.

This week, we witness the ascension of Star Trek: Lower Decks, as it finishes its run on television and becomes a show fuelled by interdimensionality itself — decoupling its superpositions and spriralling off into an infinite number of unseen quantum possibilities. It’s funny and heartwarming and visually arresting, of course, and we can’t imagine what life would be like without it. Engage the core!

This week, Tendi and T’Lyn learn the usual Star Trek lesson about co-operation and competition, Boimler and Rutherford learn that Starfleet uniforms are less absorbent than is sometimes necessary, and Mariner learns that the real Inner Light experience comes from the friends (and murderers) we meet along the way. And Data shows up too, is just as delightful and wise as we always expect him to be.

A series of urgent production catastrophes this week, as we arrive at Paramount Studios with no set, no lines for our female guest star, and a script with no story and no plot. Can these omnipotent bum-headed aliens help us out?

This week, Jean Simmons strides imperiously onto the Enterprise bridge, accompanied by her executive assistant, her scary stenographer, her daddy issues, and a terrifying sense of self-righteous rage. Unmissable.

It’s the second last episode of the Xindi arc, which can only mean one thing: a big, dumb spectacle in which we’re all trying to prevent a bunch of lizards wearing slinkies from hurling a massive lethal wiffle ball into planet Earth. Fortunately, Connor, Jolene and Billingsley are here with some acting for us to enjoy as well.

This week, Worf and Jadzia celebrate the triumphant 150th episode of Untitled Star Trek Project by setting a date for their wedding, holding one fun party and one excruciating one, punching a future mother-in-law in the face, calling off the wedding, calling it back on again, and having sex with that handsome young lieutenant from the USS Sutherland. Or was that last one just us?

This week, Joe and Nathan are woken from 380 years of cryosleep to discover that the world has changed forever: the ship’s captain isn’t friendly and welcoming like Captain Stubing, some of their ports of call have been scooped in their entirety off the surface of the planet, and those people in that scary green cruise ship over there look very unfriendly indeed.

Two B-plots on Star Trek: Voyager this week, each one more forgettable than the other. In the A B-plot, Tuvok is unreasonably mean to four obnoxious misfits, while the B B-plot is somehow about cheese.

The whole of Discovery Series 2 has been leading to this: a baffling and possibly ill-advised decision to catapult the show 930 years into the future. (Spoiler: it turns out better than we could have dared to imagine.) On the way though, we get to experience breathtaking CGI, some vertiginous camerawork, and more heartfelt and prolonged emotion than the entire history of the franchise to date.