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Transcript
I'm John Billingsley, and you are listening to the greatest generation, John Billingsley.
You know him.
Here's to the finest crew in Starlink.
When it comes to my crew, you won't get any argument from me.
This is a parody.
Paramount owns the sun.
Welcome to the Greatest Generation.
It's a Star Trek podcast by a couple of guys just a little bit embarrassed about having a Star Trek podcast.
Ben Harrison.
I'm Adam Pranica.
How are you doing today, Adam?
I'm feeling good.
You look good.
I'm doing that thing where
I got back into afternoon coffee and now I'm, I then got off afternoon coffee for the last three days.
And today I was like, fuck it, I need the afternoon coffee again.
Like
for many months, I was like, just the morning, and that's it.
And then you get what you get when you record in the afternoon, like whatever version of me shows up to record.
And today I was like, fuck, no, double espresso to the dome.
Let's get it done.
Let's be productive.
Afternoon espresso martini.
Why fight it?
The birdie needs the caffeine, if you're me at this point.
The birdie wants what it wants.
I don't usually go for one in the afternoon more because it would be very inconvenient to my lifestyle.
than anything else.
Okay, what exactly does that mean?
Well, there was a long time where somebody gave my wife a Nespresso machine and the entire coffee situation one of those nipple coffee makers.
Is a nipple coffee.
And it was just like, I don't think anybody intended anything by this, but it was
a torpedo right at the heart of like one of the the key support structures of our marriage, which is that my wife gets up, she puts on a pot of water, she fills up a pot of coffee, like a does a pour over, she serves herself some, and then she puts that pot in the fridge right next to the one from yesterday, which is now cold.
And I go for the cold one and pour that one over ice.
It's a system.
And then the one from this morning replaces that one tomorrow, and so on.
And this Nespresso machine shows up, and she's like, well, I'll just make myself the nespresso's because I like like those just as good as the pour overs.
I prefer nipple coffee.
And I do not like it at all.
I think it tastes like shit.
And so I'm not going to nipple coffee myself like every day and then put that in the fridge and wait for a shitty coffee tomorrow.
So I went to a system where I was buying the like Growler of Cold Brew.
for a while.
Oh, yeah, that's a fun system.
Yeah, which like I didn't have any problem with that.
But then...
The thing with Growler of Cold Brew
is you can pour pretty heavy with that.
Like I'll just grab a beer glass and fill it up with cold brew.
That's not the right dose.
No.
That's the wrong dose.
No, your butt is going to be mad at you if you do that.
I mean, my teeth are going to be mad at me when I fucking grind them to powder.
Yeah.
In that era, in the Growler of Cold Brew era, there was a afternoon coffee lifestyle that was developing for me because it was like, oh, who gives a shit?
There's enough in the fridge.
Because before it was like, there's enough in the fridge for tomorrow morning and no more.
So if I have some in the afternoon, then I also have to brew some more coffee for tomorrow at some point.
You just can't depend on anyone anymore, Ben.
Well, here's the thing.
There were group chats and an article was circulated about how nipple coffee might have heavy metals in it.
Like the aluminum packet that it comes comes in might not be pure aluminum.
There might be other shit in there.
And whether this is real science or a scare tactic, it worked.
And we're back to the original system of the pour over.
So was this AI slop?
Did you go and create this article for a fake online news org and like make it look very official?
I wouldn't put this past you, Ben.
You can be very constructive.
I can.
I wish I could take credit.
That's the kind of conniving I would love to be capable of.
There's conniving, Ben, again.
This happened organically.
So we're back to the original system.
But what that means is, you know, too much trouble for afternoon coffee.
But you could.
I could.
I would have to grind more beans.
I would have to heat up a kettle.
Those sound like things you have to do, and that is too much.
There's so many more tasks involved, you know, now that we're out of Growler of Cold Brew era.
I think it's probably for the best, right?
Like, I don't need that afternoon cup of coffee, do I?
All of this is to say that I am afternoon coffee, Adam, and you are not afternoon coffee, Ben, for the purposes of this record.
For the purposes of this record, let's see if the FODs can tell the difference.
Let's see if they can tell the difference.
I don't think they can,
yeah, man.
let's fucking do it all right let's get into the episode it is season three episode 16 doctors
orders got free speech and guitar
where is everyone ben we get uh we get long luxurious camera moves over departments of the ship that we're usually used to seeing uh full of people.
Is the mess a department?
I'm gonna call it that for the purposes of this montage.
We're seeing all sorts of places, all of them deserted, and also some spooky music.
Yeah, this is good stuff.
Like your classic haunted house, empty ship open
until
cute puppy comes down the hallway.
Orthos, and we can come back here.
Chased by flocks.
This is why when you see lost dog signs on lampposts, you'll often see in big bold letters, do not chase.
Because a lost scared animal is not going to just sit there while you run to catch it.
It's naturally going to run away from you, and that's what Flox is doing.
That's what Flox doesn't understand here.
Dog skittish.
I don't know if Porthos is lost per se, but...
Porthos is not well trained, I'll tell you that much.
Not responding to commands.
No, Porthos making a lot of poopies in the hallway that Flox doesn't know about about picking up.
I'm guessing, you know.
I bet dog walking in the future, once a little bit more technology is possible,
has got to be great.
There's not a leash.
There's probably a force field type thing that's probably like shields.
Like shields keep the dog within five meters or however much of a size that is.
You're like Paul Atreides and you've got a little thingy on your belt that you click on.
Totally.
You do have an electronic frontier.
How great would that be?
That'd be good.
Because I was thinking about like dog pooping in the hallway.
That's no good because you're like picking it up.
You're never going to get all of it with the little plastic bag that comes out of the dispenser on the handle of your leash.
But you've got a phaser.
You could phaser the turd on vape mode.
No must, no fuss.
What is a pile of dog shit but a pile of mashed potatoes on the Enterprise A in Star Trek VI?
What is dog shit but target practice?
Yeah.
Finally, Porthos is scratching at a door and is allowed to go inside.
And that is where Captain Archer is laying in his bed with a clip show device attached to his forehead.
And Porthos.
It's like a clip show bindy, right?
It's like right in the middle.
I feel like you never see this.
They're always on the temple, but these are right in the front.
Much like Archer being awake and having an IV tapped and not flinching or betraying it at all.
Like, this is a version of that for the actor where Bakula himself has to remain perfectly still while a porthos licks his entire face and inside his mouth.
Amazing restraint.
This is why you bring an intimacy coordinator onto the set, so that when
an actor is like, you know, expressing what their comfort level is with a dog putting their tongue inside the the actor's mouth you know you can negotiate that stuff what's difficult is that you can never tell when a beagle is wearing a mirkin
they're kind of wearing one all the time huh yeah
after the theme we catch up with dr flox and he's in that state of loneliness where he's talking out loud to the dog doesn't take much for me to do that i I would say
maybe an hour after my wife leaves for work and I'm doing my morning business, talking to the dog all the time.
Yeah,
I like this.
I mean,
it becomes a letter to Dr.
Lucas.
Like, this is an epistolary episode where Flox is describing his experience to another person, not to a personal log or anything.
But
it is like dictated, not read.
So
it's also for Porthos' benefit, right?
Hey, Ben, for the FODs who don't know what mean,
I absolutely know what it means, just to be clear, but like, could you maybe define epistolary for the FODs out there?
Isn't that like
the epistle is when you read the letter in church, and an epistolary novel is one that's like, it's letters back and forth between characters.
Okay.
I mean, yes, that's what it is, because I also know what that means.
Yeah, yeah.
Epistle, a letter, especially a formal one.
Mm-hmm.
Aren't all letters formal these days?
They do feel that way, right?
Like if you're writing a letter to somebody, that's like almost like suing them at this point.
Like, you better have your ducks in a row before you send a fucking letter to my house.
I wrote a thank you card to a friend for doing me a kindness and I got an extreme amount of, not flack, but but kind of the like, fuck you, flack.
Like, this is too, that's, that's too nice.
All right.
Just back the fuck off.
You don't have to fucking write me a thank you letter for a thing I did.
Like, chill the fuck out.
Yeah.
I mean, I do feel like we are in a low amount of expectation surrounding thank you letters era.
Yeah.
And I'm, I wonder if, if your experience means we're moving into a suspicion surrounding thank you.
Because I, I get a thank you letter.
I'm like, that's so nice.
Like, who does that that anymore?
Like, what a sweet gesture.
Sure.
Didn't need it, but I really appreciate it.
Tell you what, Ben, you're one of one.
Not a lot of that out there in the world.
I mean, and like when we, you know, got like baby gifts, we like made an effort to write them.
And by we, I mean my wife.
That is different, though.
When you do an occasion where that is expected, like birthdays, holidays, baby stuff, like there is a reasonable expectation of a thank you gift.
When it's just random thank you, Whoa.
Yeah.
Hey, man.
Play your roll.
It's not like that between us.
Hey, man, everything okay?
You clearly have a lot of time on your hands to write a thank you and go to the post office and mail it.
I'm really worried about Adam.
I think he might be suicidal.
He's like getting his affairs in order.
He's sending out thank you gifts for recent gestures.
Why did he include a picture of himself and also like a secondary note that was like, this one would look good on an easel next to my coffin.
Why is that my responsibility?
Well,
Porthos wants to eat a leech.
Mm-hmm.
Don't tell the captain.
If you like went out of town, left Ripley with
a boarding situation or a house sitter, you came back and found out Ripley ate leech while you were gone.
How would you feel about that?
I mean, I would hope hope the leech passed harmlessly through her birdie.
Yeah.
More than anything.
The description is that this is going to clean Porthos out, which seems good, right?
It does.
I mean, what you want if you're Captain Archer is to wake up to a perfectly healthy dog that is uninjured and not sick at all.
Sure.
But Dr.
Flox has a sort of cavalier attitude about dog care where he's like, yeah, this dog is begging for something he can't understand.
Why don't we give it a try?
Ben, question for you.
Just gonna put you on the spot.
What is more troubling to look at?
Denobulin feet or Talaxian feet?
Easily denobulin feet for me.
I thought so too.
When you see Dr.
Flox's feet in this scene, they rocketed straight up to...
Is first position on Mount Rushmore the Washington side?
That's the left side, right?
So that's number one.
Is that number one?
Yeah, I guess so.
So that would mean denobulin feet, leftmost foot on Mount Footmore.
Who do we got on there?
What do we got?
Like Andrew Jackson on there?
Oh, yeah.
It's a fucking horror show.
Like,
I feel like maybe we need to stop using Mount Rushmore as these are four good things
if Andrew Jackson's on there.
We got Washington, Jackson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln, right?
Yeah, but the horseback Roosevelt, not wheelchair Roosevelt.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wish he was wearing the hat on the mountain.
That would be fun.
Give us that hat.
It would be a tricky cantilever maneuver with carved stone, but I think it would be, it would have been worth it, you know.
What if they were all wearing hats?
Like you go to the end and Lincoln's got like the tallest part of the stove pipe.
Yeah.
He's in position four, but he's the tallest one because of that hat.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So Washington was a wig-era guy, not a hat-era guy.
No, but he wore the tri-cornered hat, right, when he was crossing the river.
Somebody's got to take that fucking thing out, right?
It's got Andrew Jack.
There's nobody worse than Andrew Jackson.
Like, very few presidents worse.
You never saw Andrew Jackson wearing a hat.
Like, like, what is his hat of note?
He seems to be the outlier there for that reason and that reason only.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Knock him off the fucking mountain, knock him off the twamp.
I have a stamp.
I put other faces on my, on my 20s.
Oh, sure.
You're you're a Tubman stamp person.
That doesn't surprise me.
Yeah, I got the Tubman stamp.
I'm throwing Tubs in the titty bar, you know.
If we change the words,
then it's fair use all day long.
We go back to the, you know, the how we got into this situation description in the letter.
And we're in a McLaughlin group
about how the entrepreneur is coming up on a transdimensional disturbance.
And this is right dead center on their path to the Zindi colony that they think the weapon might be getting developed at.
And it would take two weeks to go around this thing, but they can go through it.
This is just more space queso, right?
I think so, yeah.
I think
it probably
isn't quite as infected looking as the last one that they found.
There seems to be, there's some discussion about this too, right?
When it's new,
it's less coagulated.
It's more misty and foggy, and that's the condition of this space queso.
It hasn't tightened up the way you want a cheese product to.
It's like the queso before you fundito it, you know?
And so they could get through it, but it would mess up everybody's brains if they did that.
So Flox has a plan to kind of turn off everybody's neocortex.
This will dampen the neurological activity, much like shutting off the main computer in an ion storm.
Dr.
Flox is like, fortunately, we only have to give a half dose to Reed.
That was unjustified.
I don't need to do that to Reed.
Reed did nothing wrong this episode.
I mean, he's a creepy jerk.
He's not a moron.
He's bad at shooting weapons.
That doesn't make him an idiot.
Right, right.
It's a real, like, you know, Oprah revealing, you know, everybody reach under your chair.
You get a coma, you get a coma, you get a coma, everybody gets a coma.
There was a
Reddit thread recently, not in our Reddit, which is, which is great and positive.
I don't know what section of Reddit this was, but it was like, hey, Adam, just blink SOS if you don't think our Reddit is great and positive.
The question was, if you've been in a coma, what was that like?
Do you just blink and then you blink again and you wake up?
Or like, do you feel your coma?
Yeah.
And almost to a person, everyone was like, nope, felt nothing.
Like the idea that your family comes in and talks to you and strokes your hair and whatever, and that's supposed to do something for you.
Across the board, the people who have been in comas were like, yeah, man, like I was out for two weeks.
I was out for six months.
Didn't matter how much time had passed.
It was like, I got into the car accident and then I woke up.
And it was like someone held up a newspaper i'd like to do it at some point you know
it's not an experience everybody gets and if it's not painful absolutely sign me up you know if the drink is gross that might be a barrier for me like all you gotta do is drink this liter of uh of liquid and then you're in a coma for a week yeah
yeah i don't know what was that uh
oh project hail mary the andrew andy weir novel one of the premises of this is that the main character wakes up after having been in a coma for a really long time on a spaceship, and he can't really remember why he's on the spaceship.
And like other crew members did not survive their very long comas.
And so that's like the first problem he has to solve among many.
Do you think if that were to happen to you, like say you go to sleep tonight, and then you wake up and you're on a spaceship?
How long do you pretend that that's exactly where you know yourself to be?
And you like kind of fake your way through like everything being fine while inside you're like, I don't know where I am and I don't know what this stuff does.
I'm just trying to like go with the flow here.
I gotta say, I think I would hang on for days and days.
Because if you're on a spaceship, you gotta assume there's like a camera in there and like somebody back in mission control's got their eyes on you.
So you want to be cool, right?
You want to, you don't want them to worry.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I'm faking it so long.
Boy, Adams had a really bad week on the space station like he's kind of not doing much
doesn't seem like he really like knows what his assignment is do you think we should call him is is he taking time off i mean i don't remember receiving a time off request from adam
They also discuss how fast they're going to go through this because it would be two weeks to go around this dimensional disturbance, but only four days to go right through the center of it.
But Trip wants to do that at impulse because it's the strange energies at work might have an effect on the warp engines.
So part of the problem is like Flox is the only person immune.
So he's going to need to get a little tutorial on flying from Mayweather and a little tutorial on keeping the engines working from Trip.
God, they just...
They fucking do Anthony Montgomery so dirty once again.
Like, here's Dr.
Flox getting lessons from folks.
The Mayweather lesson is the only one where you can't hear dialogue.
Let's just do that in like a kind of a little montage element where we don't have to pay Anthony Montgomery his full week's rate.
Also,
like this, this comparison is so easy.
There's like the moment where you see Dr.
Flox steering the ship.
There's a little bit of a banger and he's like, oh, I got it now.
Like, like, this is what you do.
And then Smash Cut to Trip Tucker going, you will will fucking kill us if you don't do this right and i don't trust you at all yeah here's an idea don't touch anything don't touch anything dr flouks you'll kill us
i got these controls rigged up so that they only activate if four nipples are touching on the four little pads down here you're never gonna let that go are you i'm like a long-haul trucker who's done a lot of improvised technology where like i'm tying belt buckles onto steering wheels between gas pedals and a shifter so I can piss in a jug.
There's a lot of piss in the jug technology on Enterprise and you'd never understand it.
The moment where Trip like takes Dr.
Flox by the shoulders and is like, if there is a problem with the engine, you wake me up because it is better that I die so that we can do our mission than you like let the entire ship explode because you don't know what the fuck you're doing with this thing.
What do you think their EV suits are made of that prevents them from being used in this situation?
Like, it seems like you put Trip Tucker in an EV suit and, oh, I just broke the episode.
Sorry.
Oh, it's all in pieces on the ground now.
He'd have to have like three feet of lead shielding around the helmet part
to really protect himself.
And his, you know, my neck is not quite strong enough to do that for four days.
He's like Juggernaut from the X-Men.
Yeah, yeah.
We should say, episode directed by Roxanne Dawson and written by friend of the show, Chris Black.
How about that?
So Flox is there to put Archer to sleep.
And
Archer wants to say something to Flox.
And Flox is like, no, man, no, I can't fucking listen to that shit from you two.
I've gotten this from every goddamn crew member that I have put under.
I don't need to hear it from you as well.
And Archer's like, no, man, what I'm trying to say is, you got this.
You got this, Fox.
What Archer's trying to say is, you got
to make sure I don't piss myself in the coma.
Like, look, here's my drawer full of dry underwear.
I'm wearing a very easy to take off onesie.
There's a bunch of towels I'm just going to leave next to the bed.
Do not let me stay wet, Dr.
Fox.
Do not.
It's like a coach addressing the team before the game that determines whether they go to state.
You know, like, make sure when you go out there and you face the other team, I don't piss myself.
Look, Dr.
Flox, I can only tell you, I am fairly certain I took a four-day dump 20 minutes ago, like
complete evacuation.
We're going to have to trust that nothing's moving through there.
Yeah.
And I've got faith of the far heart.
Legally, it's just a virtue.
We're back to the letter, back to the present, and everything is going good on their journey through.
They're like two days in, but Flox hears a little bump in the night.
Like, I forget where he is at this part of the episode, but like there's
a couple of times where he's like trying to write his letter to his doctor friend and hears something on the ship and can't determine what caused that noise.
He's doing a lot of hollering.
Hey, what's that noise?
No response.
And we learn at this point we're about halfway through the journey.
Yeah.
You would think he'd be very scared of whatever might be causing that, but it is revealed in the next scene that he is not because
he is walking around the ship in the buff.
Everything but his feet are uncovered, which I appreciated.
Like, we did get one nasty Tootsie shot at the beginning of this, but every other time the camera shows his feet, which is quite a bit more than normal, I would say, he's wearing slippers.
So I guess they didn't want to do the toenail loaf over and over again.
That was one of the things that John Billingsley talked about with respect to this episode was that, like, normally it's an amount of time to make me the alien.
And for this episode, I had to do 16-hour days, both because I was the episode's primary character with all the dialogue, and also you saw Olamai Bertie.
You don't see the parts that are being Austin powers in this scene, which I thought was very funny, like covering up his parts with things in the room.
That's really great.
I did like that the iPad was extra big.
That feels like Roxanne Dawson with a sense of humor, you know?
Like, let's make it fun and weird.
Yeah.
You also notice that Dr.
Flox has a pretty significant lumbar Lordosis thing.
Either that or he's just a bad bee.
I don't know.
Did notice that, Adam.
I like that Flox observes the tradition of movie night even though everybody else is asleep.
But that gets interrupted by some more bonks, and he goes into the shuttle bay to see what it is.
Porthos has no chill.
Porthos runs right past Flox after whatever is making this noise.
Were you shocked that a beagle of all breeds does not bark at the thunder or whatever?
Like, all of these noises are happening on the ship.
The worst Porthos does is just run.
Again, like, the most science fictional thing about this show is Porthos's restraint surrounding using his voice.
I mean, probably the leech attached itself to the cords, and
nothing's going to happen there.
I like that head cannon.
Yeah.
If that's true, like let's let's get some of those leeches.
The leeches love the vocal cords.
Get right up in there.
So yeah, it was just like some steam and a chain and Tepal shows up
not to Flox's surprise.
And I was like, oh yeah, I'll put something in the maintenance log so that they could fix that.
And we come to realize that they've both been awake for the past couple of days doing various stuff around the ship.
And it's like a little hard to square with the letter Flox was writing earlier.
Like, why did he have to learn the engine and the flying?
I guess just because there's two of them and like two is one and one is none.
Yeah, I think that's it exactly.
Must be something like that.
Anyways, he's like, what have you been up to?
Like, the movie's not over.
I just pressed pause.
Do you want to come check out the last half?
And she's like, more of a first half of the movie kind of person.
And I was like, yeah, that's why I really identify with TePaul in this show.
I like that they have an arrangement to just kind of leave each other alone for four days.
Yeah.
We're all there is, but let's just stay on opposite sides of the ship.
Yeah.
He's like, dinner later?
And she's like, nah.
The desperation in his voice and in this invitation is the thing that tips her over into accepting.
I don't think she had any intention of doing that, but man, he's thirsty.
for companionship.
He's thirsty as F.
So later he's in engineering and he hears more bumps and actually sees something moving up on that upper catwalk area.
And he radios to Paul to be like, what the fuck are you doing up there at engineering and not answering me?
And she's like, I'm on the bridge, man.
I don't know what you're talking about.
So suspicions are raised.
Something or someone is on the ship.
And Flox is having a weird experience with this.
There is a technique that
I think is noticeable starting now, but is present throughout the episode before it, which is like, you only ever see Dr.
Flox's perspective.
Like, ordinarily on a Star Trek episode, we would have cut to the bridge for TePal to receive this message and respond.
But we are with Dr.
Flox the entire way.
Yeah.
The next scene is their dinner date.
Flox has made denobulin pho.
I mean, the chef, we've heard, is like the best in Starfleet, but that doesn't mean the chef has skills outside of human cuisine, right?
And so they're kind of talking shit about what chef has done with regards to Plo Meek and the noodle soup that Flox enjoys.
One of the biggest giveaways about what's happening here is that DePaul does not eat a single bite of the food.
She doesn't touch it.
Dr.
Flox is doing all the talking and all the eating in this scene.
Yeah.
And his spit bucket is filling up from take to take, and hers stays empty.
Yeah.
Pretty good deal for Jolene.
Yeah.
So he confesses that he was distinctly of the impression that there was somebody in engineering with him.
And, you know, like there's some, some, like, you know, what do you, what about if you were just imagining it, like, what with the
solitude of it all?
And they're talking about how TePaul, as a Vulcan, loves this shit.
And how Phoxas of Denobulin hates this shit.
He wants to be around people.
He wants to be in a Denobulin city that is jam-packed, cheek by jowl with other denobulans.
She's been on vacation.
She loves it.
Yeah.
She's fine to eat in her room, clearly.
Yeah.
Well, time to go back to the rounds, which is basically checking for wetness.
How are we feeling today?
Weird that
not only is Archer is dry, but there's kind of a bang happening outside of the window to Archer's quarters.
Kind of shadowy figure out there too to go along with it.
Ugh, that's no good.
So he's got to fucking bring this to Tepal again.
That's an energy to a lot of this.
The whole like, fuck, again.
Like, she already doesn't believe me.
Yeah.
She already thinks I'm going a little crazy.
I've got to report this.
I also just really loved the choice of the jump scare here because it's like him looking at a window and we can see the window and tell the jump scare.
And all we see from the jump scare is a shadow washing over him as he's like, you know, we're seeing it from the perspective of the window now.
So whatever he saw is up to us to, you know, fill in the blanks with our imagination.
And that is like, like, we're kind of put in TePaul's position of being like, what did you see?
And he like, can't really describe it, you know?
Yeah.
Tepal, when told of this, basically pats him on the top of the head and tells the doctor he should go get some rest.
But he doesn't do that.
He still has rounds to do.
And as we experience those with him, we see an insectoid Zindi looming over Hoshi Sato's bed.
And Dr.
Flux does one of those get away from her takes and then runs away.
Yeah, poor Hoshi, devoured by the insect Zindi at this moment.
Dr.
Flox could have done more in this moment, I think, as the insect Zindi looms over Sato.
Did he lock himself in the airlock?
He did.
Yeah.
That is not where I would, pardon the pun, bug out to in a scenario like that.
If I'm an insect Zindi and I'm searching for Dr.
Flox, I might just proactively open the airlocks.
You know, like one less thing to worry about.
Like clearly no one's going to hide in there.
Right, right.
Legally it's just a virtual.
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Friends of DeSoto, we survived Star Trek Las Vegas 2025.
All seven days of it.
And boy, oh boy, do we have thoughts.
So many thoughts that we just had to record a very special bonus episode about our experiences with me and Ben, but also producer Wendy and our social media concigliary Bill.
You'll get an honest review of things.
all the gossip, the stuff that worked, the stuff that didn't, and some big takeaways as we plan for next year.
So if you want to know what STLV was really like, the bonus feed is how you find it.
By the way, this bonus episode, like all of our monthly bonus episodes, are available to everyone who supports the shows at maximumfund.org slash join.
It's easy to do, so go to maximumfund.org slash join to get our special episode about STLV 2025 and all the great episodes that we put out every month.
You know, we've been doing My Brother My Brother Me for 15 years.
And
maybe you stopped listening for a while.
Maybe you never listened.
And you're probably assuming three white guys talking for 15 years.
I know where this has ended up.
But no.
No, you would be wrong.
We're as shocked as you are that we have not fallen into some sort of horrific scandal or just turned into a big crypto thing.
Yeah.
You don't even really know how crypto works.
The only NFTs I'm into are naughty, funny things, which is what we talk about on My Brother, My Brother, and me.
We serve it up every Monday for you if you're listening.
And if not, we just leave it out back and goes rotten.
So check it out on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're over 70 episodes into our show.
Let's learn everything.
So let's do a quick progress check.
Have we learned about quantum physics?
Yes, episode 59.
We haven't learned about the history of gossip yet, have we?
Yes, we have.
Same episode, actually.
Have we talked to Tom Scott about his love of roller coasters?
Episode 64.
So, how close are we to learning everything?
Bad news.
We still haven't learned everything yet.
Oh, we're ruined!
No, no, no, it's good news as well.
There is still a lot to learn.
Woo!
I'm Dr.
Ella Hubber.
I'm regular Tom Lum.
I'm Caroline Roper, and on Let's Learn Everything, we learn about science and a bit of everything else too.
And although we haven't learned everything yet, I've got a pretty good feeling about this next episode.
Join us every other Thursday on Maximum Fun.
You will never take the
When the coast is clear, he reports this to a still extremely skeptical TePaul.
And he's like, why are you not helping me?
Like, there's fucking...
Why wouldn't there be Zindi aboard?
Like, we're going to stop their evil plan.
Like, help me fucking find them.
So they're like, get some weapons and they get some flashlights and they're, they're going to go deck by deck.
Well, I think a crucial detail about this is that Flox is the only one with a weapon or a flashlight.
She's just kind of there as an NPC.
It's like a reveal after they've been searching for a bit that she's just walking alongside him with her hands at her side.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He is so paranoid that he almost shoots Porthos in the face.
Almost got him.
Would have been a real cranky captain at the end of this adventure if that had gone down.
This is the moment that TePaul's patience runs out.
She gets in his face about his behavior, how he isn't with it enough to even make sure Porthos is going to survive this journey, let alone survive the walks that he has to give him.
Like, you got to, when you're a dog sitter, make sure the front door is shut after you return home with the dog, right?
That's like job number one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you simply forgot.
I've been distracted.
They're really at each other's throats.
She says something interesting here that I don't remember being a detail about denobulence, Ben.
When denobulins are stressed, they hallucinate and they kind of like it.
Is that a thing about denobulence?
Yeah, it was.
I feel like this episode comes right out of an episode where Hoshi was having hallucinations.
Right.
He says that to comfort her.
Right.
Maybe it was the telepathic trickster alien that they encountered.
It's real, don't fight the psychedelic energy that he's giving here.
So it could just be a stress response, and he doesn't like that coming from TePaul.
He's like, you're not Dinobulin.
You can't talk about our reactions to things like that.
And so he huffs off and he gets a hail from Hoshi and goes to her quarters.
And she's not in her bed.
Fuck.
She should be in bed.
It is clear that this shower is too damn hot.
The amount of steam coming out of here
is really intense.
Well, you know, you might interpret that as steam unless you're listening to the soundtrack of the episode and you hear the steel drum and then you realize, hmm, oh, she is getting fucking blazed, bro.
Yeah, blazed could be a way to describe what her skin looks like.
She appears to have been transformed into the monster from behind the dumpster in Mahollan Drive.
I hope that I never see that face ever outside of a dream.
He did this.
What?
This reveal is terrifying.
Maybe the most terrifying moment of this episode for me.
It's a real nightmare shower.
That's how you know the water's too hot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then she's not there and she's back in bed.
And there's no steam in the shower.
So it's like, what the hell?
What are we dealing with?
And Flox at this point is forced to admit that there's a distinct possibility that he's imagining things.
Ben, for the second time in, I don't know, three or four episodes, I got to ask you.
Did you think at this point Dr.
Flox was being my name is Berashed?
I started to get simulation vibes here again for some reason.
Yeah.
I didn't go there.
I had started to wonder how much of his reality was real anymore.
And he's like heading to Six Bay and runs into Archer.
Archer like comes off the elevator and it's like, hey, man, like, you don't look so good.
He's got that disappointed dad energy of like, hey, you know, I loaned you my car because I thought I could trust you.
And now I see you're going all sorts of places where you didn't tell me you were going to go.
And there's like a bunch of shit in the passenger seat that you didn't clean up.
Did like almost $300 worth of body damage.
Yeah.
You know, like scraping a bollard going through the drive-through at a fast food restaurant.
I'm going to guess, based on context clues, that a bollard is a tall cylinder pipe-like thing that keeps you from driving into the microphone.
Yeah,
that's what I'm talking about.
Yes!
Woo!
The ones you see in London often made out of Napoleonic cannons that they seized from Napoleon's armies.
How about that?
Yeah.
Wonderful.
Fun little detail about London.
Anyways, he should have neuro scanned himself.
Right.
You know, he was like, he was so focused on whether the crew was okay.
You know, it's like dad putting a bunch of sunscreen on his kids at the beach and then going ahead and getting his own sunburn.
You know, put the mask on yourself before putting the mask on someone else.
Yeah.
He's getting disruptions too.
Not as severe as would be happening if he was a human, but it is affecting him.
And he's like, Tapaul, okay, I gotta put a clip show, Bindi, on myself.
You've got this.
There's six more hours.
Like,
you just gotta kind of walk around and make sure that the crew haven't pissed themselves.
And she's like, no, no, no, no, no.
I refuse.
Did you see me earlier?
I nearly lost my temper.
I love this take.
This is so much fun when you think you're out of danger.
They only have like four hours left to transit.
Like, this seems like a reasonable amount of time to do an emergency thing.
Dr.
Flox puts himself down.
She takes over.
Like, you think on paper, there's nothing wrong with that plan.
Right.
TePaul kicks this plan in the nuts.
It's been three and three-quarters of the four days.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Can he not sleep the last six hours?
No.
Yeah.
paul i'm asking for your help i can't why not the final boss is to paul's irritability yeah yeah so she too is affected and she's like we got to do it we got to do this together we got to like knuckle knuckle under and go through
you know like archer gave him the pre-game speech and to paul gives him the the halftime speech you know like archer trusted you to keep archer from pissing himself if archer thinks that you have what it takes to keep him from pissing himself, I know that you have what it takes to keep him from pissing himself.
In four hours, the entire crew is going to be dry.
I know that.
I bet on it.
So they show up on the bridge and they're like, huh, weird.
I kind of thought we'd be through by now.
It's like the timer goes off on the oven, like you think your dinner's done.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
They put a toothpick into the middle of the nebula and it comes out and there's still like little wet chunks of nebula stuck to the toothpick.
Fuck!
Fuck!
I have guests!
God damn it!
Yeah, and for some reason, the cake is getting bigger and bigger in the oven.
That's also a problem here.
Yeah, yeah, it's like one of those things where like the edges of the nebula are burning and the middle of the nebula is still a soupy mess that is expanding.
Total nightmare.
There's still so much anomaly.
Like 10 more weeks of anomaly, they discover.
What do you make of this time?
Because like I think this is very intentional.
Four days of misery seems endurable
depending on the misery.
Like that's 10 weeks compared to four days feels like a death sentence in a really magical way for this story.
Yeah, because he's like so close to losing his marbles entirely already.
So like they're only one percent of the way across, and they have 99% left.
It's just like, fuck
going to warp feels like the only alternative they have.
And if you remember, Trip Tucker gently suggested that they don't even try to do that
in this thing.
And if they really need to wake him up and let him sacrifice his own life to get them out of this thing, I'd rather die than you try to take this ship to Warp.
I won't cease or
In engineering, TePaula is really falling apart.
She is
like too scared to help, but like in, I thought that this was such an interesting choice by, like, it felt like both a choice by Jolene Blaylock and by Roxanne Dasa, and that the kind of scared she would be was kind of silly scared.
Yeah.
That's a good call.
There's a really interesting composition here from the top of the warp core angle down at them that looks like the tv guide shot with kirk and spock sure sure like that kind of lighting that kind of composition they got uh they got a lot of god shots in this episode and it is the blind leading the blind like neither of them are warp engineers and they don't really know what they're doing so They have to like read the assembly instructions on starting the warp core.
And like, you know, the first thing on there is the little guy calling the phone number to IKEA customer support, you know, and they're like, well, we can't use that.
Like, that's not available to us.
Can you find the little hex wrench?
You know, what if you were putting together a Billy bookcase and all of a sudden, like, an angry Swedish ghost comes out of the wall and starts screaming at you about how you're doing it wrong?
That's basically what the ghost of Trip Tucker is doing to Dr.
Flox here as he tries to turn the engines on.
He's like, horsky, borsky, borsky borg, borgyborg.
Sounds sweetish.
We are the borgyborg.
Borgyborg is Borgy.
So Flox overcomes the self-confidence undermining ghost of Trip Tucker, and they start to form a warp field, but there's like bangers, and we cut to the exterior, and we see that the cells are like flickering on and off, which really,
you know, just ugh, I hate seeing that.
Like, I want them all the way on or all the way off.
I don't like them flickering.
Pretty great shot.
DePaul, not helpful, like in a totally like goofy state of panic.
There is the suggestion of like, what about if we wake up Trip?
Like, he will survive for like a few minutes and maybe could help
And the math of that being like, potentially, this saves like 8 billion lives.
Like, doesn't that seem like maybe worth it?
Like, sacrifice one trip for all humans everywhere?
And Fox is like, no, man.
Tipal is like, we already have the footage, the funeral footage.
I mean, we could just throw to that at the end of this episode.
He's in a torpedo casing and everything.
Fox flouts this recommendation, figures out some technical shit.
I have to say, by the way, that I loved how scary the technical mumbo jumbo in this was.
Oh, unless you're within two parsecs of a graphometric disturbance, do this, this, and this.
Like going to warp for the first time in Star Trek history sounds genuinely, technically terrifying.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
If you get to do it yourself.
Yeah.
But they get it up to warp two with some bumps along the way, and then they are out.
What a great moment that was.
Like, a ton of bangers on the way, a lot of sparks shooting.
Really feels like it might not happen, but getting to warp two feels great.
Like, when the ship finally smooths out.
Yeah.
Great moment.
Great moment for two really scared people.
And like.
I think that like Billingsley's enthusiasm and
Jolie Laylock like playing TePaul as a TePaul that that is not totally in control of her emotional expression.
Like, it really sells it.
Like, they're both so relieved and excited that that happened.
This is like when the raft finally gets over the tide in that Tom Hanks volleyball movie.
You know, like, it feels great.
Great success.
Bumps that spike.
So the clip show device comes off of Archer's forehead, and, you know, Fox is like bedside mandering the shit out of Archer here.
Very much underplaying how exciting the last four days have been.
Archer's like, I looked at my underwear, Doctor, like it's the same underwear I wore in the beginning.
Like, did I really not piss or shit at all for four days?
It seems weird, Doctor, that you were giving me the SpongeBass I requested, but then putting the underpants back on me.
Can you imagine what the sewer system is like on Enterprise as soon as the crew wakes up after four days?
Like how overtaxed it is?
Can you imagine the bangers happening on Enterprise during this wake-up?
It's like a municipal sewer system during halftime at the Super Bowl.
It's just completely overwhelmed at this moment.
Yeah, it's intense.
Flox has woken up trip and he like, you know, pats him on the back.
And then Flox and TePaul catch up.
And
we get to Paul's quarters where Flox is dropping her off.
And
the door opens, and the reveal is that she
was also asleep this whole time.
You can tell this is a Berman and Braggad joint because we angle in on Dr.
Flox, and he's like, hmm, I could have imagined TePaul naked the whole time.
If I could redo my hallucination, I would.
Your Dr.
Fox is 1,000% better than mine.
He finishes his letter and decides not to leave out all the parts where he was totally out of his mind when he was writing it,
which is like, man, I have a friend who was recently in the hospital.
Like, he got like incredibly serious food poisoning and was very close to death and was like texting me about it in real time.
And then like a couple days later, he was like, hey, man, I don't know if if you knew this, but I almost died.
And I was like, yeah, I knew.
I've been in communication with you the whole time.
And he like didn't remember any of that stuff.
I was wondering how much of his letter Flox remembered even.
Knowing what I know about you, is there a chance that that was you?
Did you doctor's orders yourself?
I wish.
I wish.
I would much rather have been the friend in the hospital.
You know, that feels like the right arrangement for me.
That is really insightful.
That you would rather be the sufferer than the person told about the suffering.
Oh, yeah.
Anytime.
I love suffering.
New five-star review on Greatest Gen
by B.
Harrison.
I love suffering.
Five stars.
What more needs to be said?
Well, Flox and TePaula got to have lunch.
She tells him about how badly he fucked up the warp engines doing all the stuff he did.
It's like a parasocial lunch, right?
Like he has spent a bunch of time with her that she has not spent with him.
You hear from off-camera, the chef that we've never met before, going,
who fucking used the kitchen and didn't clean up after themselves?
What the fuck?
An absolutely unbelievable amount of kosher salt got used,
given nobody was awake for the past four days.
What the hell is going on here?
Did you like this episode, Adam?
I can't pay.
Couldn't blade.
Got no cake.
Tempting fate.
I love a true blue bottle episode like this.
Yeah.
Big fun.
I additionally love an episode that centers Dr.
Flox as its primary character.
That was big fun because of
my enthusiastic interest in John Billingsley as an actor.
Like, I like seeing all the different flavors of that guy
and what he brings to it.
The darkness of this episode is in one place.
And I just don't know if...
Do you ever tell Trip how close you were to waking him up?
Because there are, I think there are three moments in this episode where they're like, shouldn't we wake up Trip?
And knowing that that's all a fantasy, it gets very close to Dr.
Flox in a crazy state waking up Trip for reasons that maybe he shouldn't, gets him killed, and then what?
Yeah.
Like, but this episode isn't that dark.
And I think the ending is what underscores the vibe of this thing.
Like, this is never going to go there, even though that's the truth of it.
The truth is that Trip almost died many times.
I think that it's really interesting that the tone stuff almost all rests on Jolene Blaylock's shoulders.
Yes.
Yeah.
Because
you're right.
Like this episode never gets that dark.
And I think it is because of the way she plays her TePal hallucination the entire way through as being scared, but not in a bone-chilling, blood-curdling way, but in a like goofy, like, what's going to happen next?
Kind of way.
I mean, that episode of TNG seems like it might be the comp, right?
When no one can get REM sleep and everyone's having waking nightmares and stuff.
Yeah.
There's an evolution of makeup in that episode, too.
Like, as time goes on, the bags under the eyes, the voice changes and stuff.
With TePaul, it's all performance, right?
They don't make her look much different.
They shoot her differently.
Yeah.
to pay this off, but I think that's a big part of it too, right?
Yeah.
And I wonder what this episode is like if they do go dark.
Do we like it as much?
I don't know.
I like the episode as it is, but you know, like, you could scare me a little bit more.
I'd be fine with that.
Yeah.
Spook me.
Well, if you want to see if there's anything terrifying in the priority one inbox, Adam,
Priority One message from Starfleet coming in on secured channels.
Need a supplemental income.
Supplemental income.
Supplemental.
Supplemental.
Yeah, it's extra.
But the interest alone could be enough to buy this ship.
This one's of a promotional nature.
BNA, you recently enjoyed a P1 from Reid, so I thought you'd love a P1 from any character, not Reid.
Your podcast makes me feel seen, which as you'll know from Vanishing Point is a bit of a problem for me.
I also had a problem with Tarquin,
who just wasn't sibilant enough to be a recurring pervert on your show.
Recently watched Plan 9 from Outer Space on Movie Night, and the aliens called their universal translator the Dictal Roboterry.
First mention is about 43 minutes in and worth a listen.
Hmm.
Diktal Roboterry.
Dictal Roboterry.
Wow.
That was a promotional P1.
The call to action is possible drop.
Forgive the arrogance, but consider it does have the word dick in it.
Oops.
Gotta go.
Travis and I are busy barely being on the show.
Recurring pervert is
an alliterative flourish that I really enjoy.
I don't think I've ever heard or read those two words together in that way.
Oh, really?
It's my vocal, you know, I used to do red leather, yellow leather, but now I do recurring pervert.
Recurring pervert.
Recurring.
That's perfect for you, Ben.
Yeah.
Got a priority one message here of a personal nature.
Ben, you want to hear it?
It's short and sweet.
It's from Heidi.
It's to Carl.
Yeah.
Here's that message.
Happy birthday from she.
Who is your wife?
All right.
Happy birthday, Carl.
Carl.
Happy birthday.
If this was a Walking Dead birthday, would it be happy birthday, Coral?
I don't know.
Coral!
Happy birthday!
Cool!
Cool!
Is that a thing from Walking Dead?
Yeah,
the way they yell Carl's name, Carl the little boy from that show.
He gets a lot of Yarl
in his name when people are yelling it.
Cool!
I never saw that one.
Dietro says to Mothra, since we embarked on our own greatest trek of parenthood, I've gotten a new perspective on Deep Space Nine through the eyes of the boys.
The boy?
Ben and Adam, I may not get all your obscure 90s references, but at least now I can smile and nod when you start talking about the Borg's Queen.
Love you.
Sure, you can, Dietro.
Yeah.
Yep.
Would you describe your own parenthood experience a greatest trek?
It's pretty great, man.
You know?
God, the way you have to say that, knowing that your kids may one day listen to this show.
Like, it's a hostage situation when I ask a question that way.
It's not.
I genuinely love it, but it's fucking hard.
Like, there's, there's.
Hey, Jerome and the other one?
You're driving my friend crazy.
Stop it.
Stop it now.
Well, baby girl's crawling, sitting up now.
She's going to walk in like, in like months.
It's crazy.
Sounds like a problem.
Yeah.
Sounds like a real problem.
She's keeping us on our toes.
I'll tell you what.
Yeah.
Well, if you've got a priority one message, you can go to maximumfund.org/slash jumbotron, where you can wish someone a happy birthday, or wish another person a happy birthday, or,
I don't know, wish a third person a happy birthday.
All kinds of messages go a long way in supporting the production of our show.
They really mean a lot.
Hey, Adam.
Tap in.
Did you find yourself a drunk Shimoda?
Incredible.
Drunk Shimoda.
It's hard not to pick Dr.
Flox.
I kind of want to do a chaos pick that isn't him.
But like, there's so much he does this episode that...
Can I pitch you on one?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
Here's my pitch.
I wasn't quite sure which direction I was going to go, but I think Linda Park might have the funniest role on this because she had to get in tons of loaf.
And like most of the rest of the cast, like, didn't even have to be there that week, you know?
Like, this was a seven-day shoot.
And Jolene Blaylock and John Billingsley were the only two actors that were there there the entire time.
What I want to say about this scene is, can you think of another character who got into more makeup for less screen time than Linda Park in this episode?
I think she's on screen for three seconds.
She was clearly in a makeup chair for six hours?
Easily.
Does this show like Linda Park?
That's a question I have thinking about that ratio.
I don't love that.
She got ratioed, didn't she?
She sure
Wow.
Yeah, I can co-sign that.
Does that mean we're both on Linda Park as the drug demon?
Okay.
Let's become Linda Park co-signers.
All right.
Faith of the fart.
All right, we got to talk about next week's episode, Adam.
It's season three, episode 17.
Hatchery.
Archer goes to extreme lengths to save an abandoned nest of Zindi insectoid eggs ready to hatch.
Extreme lengths, or does he go to extreme measures?
All right.
Well, you said it, Ben, and that means I'm vetoing the next episode and we are watching extreme measures instead.
How about you?
You can't do that.
That's not one of the things.
It's not one of the things, no.
But what is one of the things is our game of buttholes, Will of the Riker quantum leap.
Where we could hit anything at any time, Adam.
And I'm headed there now to roll this hundred-sided dice.
You're required to learn as you play.
Roll.
Keep us out of trouble, Ben.
Yeah, we're currently on square 67,
and
anything is possible.
Ooh, Adam.
I narrowly kept us out of bro-related trouble.
I rolled a 30.
Tula!
Did I win?
Hardly.
Jumped us up to square 97.
Oh.
Right past that brown zone square on 96.
It would be weird to get that kind of repetition from the past few squares.
I know, I know.
Thank goodness.
Yeah, I mean, I would have vetoed it.
I would have done that for the FODs.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know.
And we would have watched Extreme Measures instead of Quantum Leap.
We would have been the only people to ever re-watch Extreme Measures.
Yeah.
We We got to thank a bunch of people.
The biggest group of people and the ones we appreciate the biggest are the FODs who go to maximumfund.org slash join and become members of this program, keeping it alive, perpetuating it off into the future.
Huge for us.
We talk about you all the time.
Financially supporting the show keeps it going.
It does.
And it's cheap.
Got to thank Wendy Pretty, our producer, editor, who tightens this thing up, makes it sound great, and gets it to you on time every week.
If you appreciate seeing this show up in your feed on Monday mornings, the primary person you have to thank is Wendy Privy.
She does an amazing job.
As we build the show, she is the screaming Swedish ghost that
makes the show better.
I gotta thank Bill Tilley, our Zindi wartime concigliary, and Rob Adler, with whom he co-runs the Greatest Trek social media account.
Please also follow our newsletter, Greatest Newsletter, going to goch.biz slash mail, or you can just sign up at greatesttrech.com.
Yeah, go there.
That's got everything.
That's got a link to podshop.biz.
That's got a link to the feed for our other amazing show, Greatest Trek, and our other amazing show, Wholesome, that we do with Adam Ragusia, who made the theme song for this show.
Sure did.
What an experience.
Gotta thank
Dark Materia for the original Picard song and with that we will be back at you next time with another great episode of Star Trek Enterprise
and episode of the Graze Generation Enterprise where Adam and Ben are doing sick medical experiments on hobos.
Finally.
Finally get to use my medical utensils.
Or those like sent in for a code 47 like a friend of DeSoto was like, hey, if you guys ever want to do a deeply unethical medical testing, these are for you.
For years I've been building a collection of vintage medical supplies.
So
can't wait to put them to good use.
Nothing has ever surprised me less.
Captain, John Lu Picard of the U.S.,
Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.
