He’s spending time with his friends like Billups, but he does jump down the throat of any cadet who asks because they are (justifiably) confused. And it’s clear Shaxs is dealing with it on a so-so level. They throw around a few referential theories (transporter pattern buffer accident, restored katra, mirror universe switcheroo, Borg rebuilding, etc.) but Rutherford spends a lot of the episode painfully curious and haunted by how this might’ve happened. However, since this is Lower Decks, the Rutherford and Boimlers of the world have no clue how Shaxs came back. They did replace his position, after all. In other Trek series, since the main bridge crew are the main characters, the episode would normally focus on the wild way he came back or him adjusting to the circumstances of the several months he missed. Several months after his death, he suddenly appears on the ship again. Initially, Rutherford would have been the one trapped there, but Shax took his place. When Shaxs died in the season 1 finale, he stayed behind on a Pakled ship to make sure it self-destructed. Let’s explain Shaxs particular circumstances a little more in-depth. RELATED: Star Trek Timeline Explained, Including Two Kirks, Two Different Prequels, and the Return of Picard And let’s be honest, considering how often this happens, Starfleet really needs to offer better mental health care for all the weird stuff their officers go through. This started with Spock sacrificing himself for the ship in The Wrath of Khan, only to come back because of an insane mind-meld and a planet growing him a new body in The Search for Spock. The semi-joke plot is in reference to the thousands of bridge crew experiences across the Star Trek franchise where characters valiantly risk their lives, sacrifice themselves or randomly die, only to come back later in the episode. And now that Shaxs is back, it’s driving him crazy, not knowing how that ever happened, despite the fact that his friends are brushing the whole thing off. This disturbs Rutherford because the security officer sacrificed his life to save him. The main bridge crew often shows up in episodes, but what’s complicated about Shaxs is that he died heroically in last year’s season finale. However, one of the episode’s subplots is about their commanding security officer, Shaxs, suddenly showing back up like nothing ever happened.
This season, the third episode of Lower Decks’ focused a lot on Mariner and Tendi finally having a girls trip (and it going just as poorly as one might expect).