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Transcript
Here's to the finest crew in starving.
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.
I'm Adam Pranica.
I'm Ben Harrison.
I ate like a pound of grapes today.
Wow.
Where are grapes on your summer fruit hierarchy?
I used to think
peach
or
plum was the tops.
Both grapefruits.
But man, I got some of those farmer's market grapes.
Yeah.
Fucking killer.
Because they're crunchy.
Yeah, yeah.
Here's the thing.
Like, I'm never going to get off of Mount Peach more as far as summer fruit.
Like, I think
peach is the the best, but I will acknowledge that most peaches are not very good.
Like, it is just a fruit where when it is bussing, it busts so hard.
You know?
I think you have to logically take some points away from grapes because there is no such thing as a grape pie.
You can't make a pie out of a grape, can you?
Is it too juicy?
Is that the problem?
The scientists have never even tried.
Yeah.
Could you imagine making a grape pie, pulling it out of the oven, thinking you've cooled it off, and what you've made is lava boba.
Yeah.
You're cutting into a big slice of grape pie, and it just kills you.
It would kill you.
I prefer to thicken my pie fillers with tapioca.
A lot of people use like cornstarch or something.
Fuck that, tapioca is the thickener of choice in my house.
You use a thickening-enhancing drug on these pies?
I recently got these, maybe they're like Bob's Redmill or something, but they're like tapioca that are like big boys, you know?
It's not like the instant tapioca that's like maybe the texture of like kosher salt or something like that.
This is like pearls of tapioca that are, you know, like ball-bearing size.
I don't know, man.
That doesn't sound like that would mix nice.
I'm scheming now on grapes and giant balls of tapioca pie.
It could be one of those pies where you cook the crust and then you make your fruity filling.
Yeah, you would have to, I think.
And it's just cold.
Oh, oh,
it's a cold gret pie.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Would it be good with ice cream?
Nobody's ever made like a like a grape compote even to put on ice cream.
No one's ever made grape ice cream.
Like, what is going on in the world?
What happened to us this episode?
We're just coming up with shit.
Like Adam Ragusia wishes he could fucking come up with food innovations like this.
He's just sitting over there like thinking about like ways to sharpen knives and like ways to season your cutting board or whatever.
We're fucking innovating over here.
I'm not going to add to any of the voices that he may or may not be listening to with regards to his work or his videos.
Though I am pretty curious about grape dessert and why it doesn't exist.
Grape popsicle exists.
That's the only grape confection there is, isn't there?
There'sn't even grape sherbet.
No, they don't do it.
Why don't they do it?
What color grape are you working with today?
Red grape?
Green grape?
Today it was green.
I go for all kinds of colors, though.
Yeah.
A seedless variety?
Yeah, fuck those seeds i'm not messing with seeds i haven't seen a seeded grape in years like you're gonna find a grape bush growing in in my digestive tract yeah from eating a seed forget that not me
not going out like that yeah yeah i i lost a buddy to a watermelon seed uh years ago and uh it's it's just sad you know
Fun memorial, though.
Like, do you serve the watermelon
at the funeral?
Oh, yeah.
We're serving Adam wine at your funeral.
Oh, I hope so.
Because of the thing that kills me?
Yeah.
The vine that grows from your belly, we will let the grapes ripen.
I hope everyone who goes to my funeral feels free to make fun of the stupid thing that killed me.
You know, like, don't hold back on that.
If I die because I ate a seed and it grew in me and killed me from the inside out, make fun of and serve the thing.
I'm fine with that.
Yeah, you know, if I'm abducted by
some aliens that are working out of a shady warehouse in a semi-abandoned part of town,
roast me for that, you know, like
the aliens finally got him.
Oh, man.
Just hope I'm invited, Ben.
Be good times.
Yeah.
Do you want to get into the episode?
Yeah, another one of that kind of Star Trek episodes on deck today.
Ben,
let's go back in time.
Not too long ago for you and me, but way, way back in the past for the crew of Enterprise in season three, episode 11.
It's called Carpenter Street.
Got free speech and guitar
Knifecock Guy is walking around the mean streets of Detroit.
He's like leaving his car and going home to his shitty apartment, finding a unrefrigerated piece of pizza to munch on.
Ben, you called him Knifecock Guy, and I just want to say
when you call Leland Orser that,
you may inadvertently be hurting someone that we both really care about, which is our producer, Wendy.
Oh, no.
I don't want her to go watch seven
and like harvest clips from that movie for our dark comedy.
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
He had a gun in my mouth.
I don't want to put her through that if she doesn't want to go through that.
Wendy, you don't have to do that.
He made me do it.
Listen, Wendy, take it from us.
If you want to harvest the clips, harvest the clips.
If you don't want to, forget I ever called him knife cock guy or and forget that I'm going to continue to call him knife cock guy.
Yeah, Wendy, I mean, you're gonna get fucking fired if you don't do it, so choose correctly.
The fucking gun was in my throat.
Oh, well, I was, I thought you were heading in one direction, you're heading in a really different direction.
I swerved, I'm swerving all over the road.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, so he gets a phone call.
Got to stop eating his potentially rotten pizza to talk on the phone to this guy who
wants to know if he's made his selection.
Ben, we cannot gloss over this.
Like, we took our little diversion for Knife Cott Guy.
Yeah.
When he gets into his apartment.
Bad apartment.
Right.
There's a feeling you have after a job that you hate where you reach into the fridge and you grab a beer and you don't take a sip of that beer.
You drink half the beer in one gulp.
This is what Loomis is doing here.
He grabs that beer and fucking pounds it and for whatever reason leaves leftover pizza on the bathroom sink.
Is this suggesting a sort of tub time that he enjoys involving the food?
Yeah, he was like, he was like in there eating, soaking in his tub, toaster oven on the edge, and he's kind of thinking about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It would be so easy.
He decided against it today.
So he tells the guy on the phone, like, yeah, I'm going to do it.
And the guy says,
you know, like,
you got to take it easy with the sedative.
You almost killed the last one.
And we see who's talking on the other end of this phone.
So this guy
with the absolute heap of a car
who has enjoyed a toilet meal a time or two in his bombed-out apartment, he's the guy.
that a Zindi has trusted with some very important work.
So I think the dun, dun, dun before
the theme song is more for the Zindi than it is for the random dude.
Because I'm now on the Zindi side, like, what's going to happen?
You've made a terrible hire, Zindi.
Yeah.
How are you going to get out of this one?
But like, this guy's walking around in like shiny purple rubber uniform.
He's got hair that's made out of tendrils because he's a reptiloid.
You think the Loomises are disposable to him?
Is that what you're saying?
No, I think that there's a ton of cultural signifiers that are very meaningful to us.
Like, oh, he takes his pizza into his bathroom.
This is an indication about what kind of man it is that might be illegible to a Zindi.
You know, like,
he sees this and is like, this must be how most people live.
Most people take their pizza in the bathroom.
A capable member of this species probably drinks beer like that when he gets home from work.
I just think if you're the Zindi,
you gotta choose better.
You gotta wait to choose.
Maybe that's the message I'm trying to get.
Like, you arrive in Detroit in 2004.
Maybe scout it out a little bit.
But it seems like they thought about the need before anything else, the desire for a distribution of blood types and a person with access to those over any other concern.
Did you
maybe I should have saved this for later, but did you detect anything in this episode that indicated why Detroit would be where this is happening?
Other than like for a while, Detroit was a punchline in media.
Yeah, like that it was like scary and
semi-fucked up.
But it's interesting, like, in this piece of media, that is not really part of the story.
It's not really what they're doing with it.
Anyways.
We get our opening theme, and when we come back, we're still with Knifecock Guy, and he goes and solicits the services of a sex worker.
Not this sex worker that came up to his car, the other one.
You looking for a date, honey?
Maybe with your friend.
You don't know what you're missing.
The delicacy with which you have to have this interaction.
And I'm not saying this from personal experience.
I'm just saying that, like, when you roll up on some sex workers and one of them does the nice thing, coming up to your car, to be like, no, not you, the other one.
but isn't that kind of like the nature of the like the transactional nature of being a John is like I mean like in in your old west whorehouse you go in and the madam like brings all the girls out and you pick one right you want what you want I guess I think it's actually just a great signifier of how much control sex knife guy, what did you call him?
Knife cock guy.
Knife cock guy might have.
Yeah.
Maybe this is why the Cindy picked him.
They're like, this guy has a little, a little bit of initiative here.
You think he's shopping for sex here.
He's not.
He's shopping for blood.
He's shopping for blood.
And this is
sort of hinted at when this sex worker that gets into his car is like, oh, I remember you from the clinic this morning.
You brought me an apple juice.
She knows she can trust him.
Yeah.
You got any more of that apple juice?
John?
Lelandorster's like, yeah, I'll take you to some apple juice.
Yeah.
A very dark thought entered my head when he said the thing about her blood type being O-negative.
And I realized, like, oh, this guy is getting blood.
Is this just like peak post-9-11?
We're at war all over the place all of a sudden.
And I was like, that is about when I think the army started having people put like the Velcro thing on their uniform that says what their blood type is before going into a combat zone.
Oh, interesting.
And I was like, man, like, that would have been
a much harder episode to write in a way that was like tasteful and not crazy.
But like, what if they'd set this like blood-gathering Zindi ploy
in a war zone
where it's like easy to see who has what blood type?
That would make a lot of sense.
It's like just like maybe more apt than Detroit, right?
Do you know your blood type?
Couldn't tell you.
Yeah.
It seems to be kind of a secret.
Like I remember asking my doctor on several occasions, maybe even several doctors.
Yeah.
They're like, yeah, we know what that is.
They know.
We don't.
And I'm like, why wouldn't you tell me?
What's wrong?
I also didn't know before this episode that there were eight different blood types.
I thought it was just like A, B, and O.
Oh, man.
See, this is what happens when you go to Terminator 2 high school.
I know.
Like, I feel like I could be told my blood type and it would fly out of my brain that instant.
It would be like meeting a new person and being told what their name is.
Like, I can't hang on to information like that.
I don't even know what medications I take.
Yeah, I would never forget that.
I think I would hold very tightly to what my blood type is, given its difficulty in getting it
as a piece of knowledge, you know?
Yeah.
Anyways, he's got an ether rag in a jar.
If that's drugs, I am not interested.
The sex worker is not into etherplay, it turns out.
This is non-consensual ethering.
Yeah.
And presumably non-consensual hypodermic needling, but we don't know.
Yeah.
He pulls into like a gated lot where he's got to announce himself on
a speaker box.
He hauls this lady out of his car.
He becomes an over-the-shoulder sex worker holder and takes her inside.
Where her body joins a bunch of others.
Yeah.
There's like other beds in here.
There's kind of some like horror hospital vibes in here.
I mean, once the sex worker joins them, you could say horror hospital
also.
The contrast between like clean, quote-unquote, modern medical equipment in this, you know, abandoned warehouse environment.
Yeah.
It's striking here.
Because like there's great care that Loomis takes in like the sterility of the equipment and like tapping a good IV and stuff.
Like he's a trained medical technician.
Yeah.
And so, like, the care he takes with all that stuff is very apparent for the dilapidated building that it's taking place in.
There's like some Eli Roth energy to what's going on.
Sure.
And, yeah, there's nobody, no conscious people there.
He just does this work and then goes over, and there is a briefcase with a bunch of banded-up hundos in it.
And
we've seen this reveal a hundred times in TV and movies.
When this briefcase opens up and it's like, what, four stacks in like a corner of the suitcase, I'm thinking this is a really disappointing amount of cash that he leaves with.
Like, why even use the suitcase?
Yeah, it's a lot of money, but the suitcase heavily implies that there's going to be like $400,000 in here.
And there is not.
I mean, when you're looking at Loomis, you're like, a plastic grocery bag is fine, probably.
It's kind of like more plausible that he would have that, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
If we change the words,
then it's fair use all day long.
We cut to space and the entrepreneur and Archer is like in the galley on the late night giving cheese to his dog.
Good boy.
The sandwich bar is always open.
late at night in the galley when you when you have access to the kitchen the way Archer does yeah
Daniels shows up
and it sort of seemed like archer was like a little bit expecting him
with the way he tears into him immediately like oh you he's kind of locked and loaded for this moment he really is about time you showed up
our mission's changed quite a bit since the last time i saw you but i suppose you're aware of it i am do you know we're in a place where people turn inside out all the time Do you know that you're in a position to prevent that from happening?
Have you any idea how many times our first officer has been on the verge of madness so far in the last few weeks?
Yeah.
I love how there's no courtesy.
There's no, hey, let me, I'm going to make this sandwich and then we can go talk out at a table.
They launch into it.
Yeah.
And there's like a transactional nature to this scene because like Archer thinks Daniels owes him.
answers to these questions, but the trouble is Daniels doesn't have anything to tell him.
No intel.
And this is the weird part about time travel.
Like this detail that he says really surprised me when I heard it.
He's like, look, man, I'm from so far in the future.
When you change the timeline, what is that, upstream or downstream, whatever part of the stream is before my part of the stream, it takes time
for those changes to meet up with me.
It doesn't just happen all at once.
And I thought that was such an interesting detail.
Yeah, like Temporal Mechanics 201 is blowing my fucking mind right now.
Yeah, time travel.
So yeah, the ripples haven't rippled to the 30th century yet.
Daniels grabs Archer's sandwich and like demonstrates with the sandwich.
He's like take a huge bite like like if I ate your sandwich right right here like and then I shit it into a river
and you live downriver
that shit's gonna take time
to float down there at you.
You don't want to drink that water is what I'm saying.
Why does your Daniels eating a sandwich sound like Buffalo Bill?
Because all of my impressions sound like Buffalo Bill.
Would I eat your sandwich?
I'd eat your sandwich so fucking hard.
So the ripples haven't rippled to the 30th century, so no intel can be offered.
But he's got something he needs to talk to Archer about.
And this is a smash cut to Archer visiting Tepaul in her quarters.
Berman and Braga have not missed another another opportunity to get TePaul in her sleepy time outfit so that Archer can tell her about how they have a mission in the morning to go to 2004 to catch Zindi who are incurring in Detroit.
How many times have you fallen asleep with a book next to the pillow, Ben?
I bet all the time.
Every single night.
Yeah.
Do you ever read a book and then fall asleep while reading and then the book bonks you in the face?
I i don't think i've ever bonked i definitely have the kind of that like as i'm falling asleep i go like
like that thing you know where you're like oh i'm falling oh no i'm not falling like that happens to be like three four times a week i want to say but i've never i've never fallen asleep and bonked with a book yeah
i've bonked but i've never felt uh the terror the terror fall that you're describing wow
to paul has a lot of questions this is kind of like anytime like if i
you know, like, I think like a little bit more often than her, I'm the one that takes our son to like medical appointments or whatever.
And she'll have a bunch of questions for me about what the doctor said when I get back.
And I'll, I'll just have like failed to ask as many follow-up questions as she would.
And it like drives her crazy.
She's like, so, you know, like, how long until we hear from the blood test people?
And I'll be like, I don't know.
They didn't tell me.
She's like, you didn't ask?
Like, I don't know.
Like, I assume like a couple of days.
Like, how long does a blood test take?
And it drives her fucking nuts.
And this is kind of the tone of the conversation that DePaul is having with Archer because he's like, Yeah, so I got told by a guy you've never met that we're going to do some time traveling.
And she's like, How does it work?
And what does he mean by this?
And like, how do you know that he thinks, you know, this is real?
And like, if Daniels is the time traveler he claims to be, why doesn't he find out for himself?
Archer is like, I don't know.
I didn't ask a lot of questions.
Also, could you get your fucking dog out of my apartment, please?
Fucking asshole who's like rocketing piss into a corner.
Well, he's probably rocketing something liquid, but it's not piss.
Just had a bunch of cheese at him.
Yeah.
It's not good for all of Porthos.
Archer's a monster.
Anyway, Archer needs a partner.
Tepal is that partner.
And they leave tomorrow morning for 2004.
And we cut right into tomorrow morning archer's dressed for the past this is not a sightseeing mission it's not like we're uh just supposed to take pictures we're we're taking all the the best weapons technology has to offer like we got to meet up with daniels in the command center and archer's like telling trip all the shit he's going to have to do while archer and t'paul are gone he shows off his temporal tags which is what he's told to stick to things that don't belong in 2004.
That's going to be part of the mission.
And as he's describing these these things, they meet up with TePaul, who looks like steampunk San Diego as she rounds the corner.
Here's what I wondered about what TePaul's life has been like for the past eight hours.
She's gone from the convention center to the gas lamp district
to the harbor where she ate a Cartonita Esperito.
I don't know.
If you had eight hours to figure out everything you needed to know about getting into costume and hair appropriate for 2004 Detroit,
are you just watching Eight Mile over and over again?
Like, what's the media that you crush over and over again to get the vibe?
I was looking up movies from the early 2000s set in Detroit.
There aren't that many, but Eight Mile was like one of the bigs.
Is true romance?
That's 90s, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Different time.
Yeah.
Uh, out of sight.
That's 2000s, right?
They went to Detroit in that.
Yeah, I guess so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is she dressed like J-Lo in Out of Sight?
Is that what she did?
No.
She
combed her hair forward and down a little bit on the sides.
And she's wearing a big duster and she's ready to go.
She's ready to go.
And they step through the door into
not
the command center, but the mean streets of Detroit.
Do you think that because of Scott Bakula's involvement in this show, they take great pains not to show a performative time travel experience for him?
The way Quantum Leap, you know,
made famous in such a visual way.
Like, you don't want a bunch of smoke.
You don't want a bunch of lights.
You don't want a bunch of wind.
You just want a door to open.
And on the other side, they're going to be in 2004 Detroit.
This was, I thought, very elegantly done.
And yeah, like I think you probably want to spend as little time on the actual time travel as possible if you're making a baccula show.
Yeah.
The
Detroit skyline being obviously just the LA skyline was another reason I wondered why the fuck they chose to set this in Detroit.
I read that
the truck that they steal may have been exactly the same truck that they stole on Voyager
during their time travel episode to Los Angeles.
No kidding.
Just because it was like one of the picture cars that they had available at Paramount.
Yeah, maybe so, right?
I mean, let's just admit it, Adam.
That's a stealable ass truck.
I guess so.
I mean, anything's a stealable ass anything when you've got the little scanner device that Archer's got.
Yeah.
You can unlock cars.
You can turn off their security systems.
You can turn on the radio.
Very loud.
Very loud.
The guy reading the monster truck ad did not put his whole chest into that.
I think this is a great observation by you.
This is such a minor part, but if you don't get it right, it kind of clangs you out of it.
It's like a little too performative, which is weird to say about a disc jockey.
A monster truck ad, yeah.
But yeah, something doesn't feel right about it.
Is it just that Sunday, Sunday, Sunday is like a fucked-out joke?
And so, like, he's being failed by the material when he steps to the booth to record this.
I think what happened in the 80s when Rockin' Ricky Rialto came on the scene.
No one's done it better.
No one's done it better before or since.
Hey, gang, you're rolling with Rockin' Ricky Rialto, the voice of Kingston Falls USA.
That guy did it.
Yeah.
He's the best movie/slash TV disc jockey there's ever been.
And they had to go to the great expense of setting this episode in the present so they couldn't afford getting
Ricky Rialto to record this.
Cheapest episode of Star Trek Enterprise.
The showrunner for Picard Season 2, like this is their favorite episode of Star Trek of all time.
This is amazing.
You don't have to pay like hardly any of the cast.
You get like three guys in rubber suits and two little like glowing doohickeys, and that's the whole prop budget.
It's amazing.
It doesn't even have to make any sense.
We don't have to pay the knife cock guy to rent his knife cock.
He left it at home.
You can't have that on network television.
Can someone be really sad?
Like, like deeply sad?
Can that be one of the characters?
I mean, that's the spin I would like to put on this.
I believe the technical term is for shit.
Legally, it's just a fur jump.
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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 planned 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!
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I'm Caroline Roper, and on Let's Learn Everything, we learn about science and a bit of everything else too.
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You will never take the greatest kid alive.
Bam would rather die.
Rather die.
So they start driving around and Tepal has got her scanner working on a three kilometer radius and they have a search grid of 80 kilometers that they're going to search to see if they can find, I guess, Zindi life signs.
Yeah.
Do you wish we saw the screen?
of this thing?
Like, there's a lot of gesturing with it.
There's a lot of looking at it, but there's no like.
Yeah.
there's no information
There is a tricorder screen in this episode, but it is not here.
Yeah, I love TePaul's idea
for all the capabilities of this handheld device that they have they're still gonna resort to search grid as their way to look for Zindi like
Not too useful is this thing.
Yeah, they need to get gas, so they use the tricorder to like hack an ATM and rob the bank, which I thought was fun.
Why don't we see the gas scene?
I wanted to see two future people try to work a pump.
Right, like, how would they, like, this is probably early enough that you still have to go inside and ask the guy to turn on pump three?
There is a good three minutes of totally baffling shit that you could show just having to do with the gas station.
They wouldn't know that you have to go in to use the pump, right?
Like, they would just be like, what the fuck is this?
Like, what do you do?
How much could a fill-up cost?
cost like four five hundred dollars like they just stick all of their cash on the on the counter
yeah like put this all
yeah
fill her up on pump three
like did you bring a tanker like you don't think about how like how in over your head you'd be in a past context with just going in and be like i I don't know how to fill up the gas in a car.
Everybody in the convenience mart would just be like, what?
this has to have happened before you work in a in a gas station convenience store long enough yeah someone's going to walk in and go i've never done this before can you show me and then the guy right next to you to that guy is like excuse me i was just asking this man how much he's ever lost on a coin flip i didn't put nothing up yes you did who taught you how to pump gas I'm I'm just now recognizing I don't think anyone ever taught me I think I had to figure it out I think you kind of like observe your parents throughout your childhood and
then by the time you're piloting your own vehicle, you have like seen it done by example.
What a thing.
I bet like a kid, you know, like a 17-year-old kid now doesn't know that that's a that's one of the options.
It's like you can go in and like give your card to a person and tell them which pump to turn on.
Like they they probably think it is an entirely ATM based interaction.
Sure.
You know?
Yeah, and then wait till they get to Oregon.
Someone's like coming out to your car, opening up a little door to the
to the to where the gas goes.
You're like, what the fuck are you doing, man?
Getting their peace out of the glove compartment.
Like, who the fuck is this guy?
Yeah, you go to a full serve if you're not expecting it.
You're going to have a pretty bad day.
Speaking of people having a bad day, Knifecock guy goes into an apartment building and meets a guy named Lawrence, explains that he's from the blood bank and they
have some reason that Lawrence needs to go back down to the blood bank.
They're going to pay him $25 for his trouble.
Lawrence, you know, opens the door a little wider and reveals that he uses a wheelchair for mobility.
And he's like complaining that he doesn't want to miss Conan because it's like very late at night.
I like that little detail.
I've got some questions about this dude.
Lawrence or Knifecock guy?
Lawrence.
I think he's expectedly incredulous about this story.
Yeah.
Needing to sign the papers.
Getting the $25.
That's attractive.
Getting a ride there at 11 at night.
The 25 bucks thing was such an interesting number to me because
it's not like a huge pile of money, you know?
like but there are people who give plasma for money yeah it's it feels plausible but the the dialogue is specifically about they're sending your blood out for blood tests so yeah
i kind of feel like we're being pitched lawrence as a person who is also maybe on the margins of society in the in a similar way to the sex workers but like
I don't know.
I felt like we were in the 70s or something.
Like 25 bucks feels like the number for the 70s, but it should be like 100 bucks now or something like that.
I think this episode is intentionally confusing in that way.
The the fucking jalopy that Loomis drives,
the shabbiness of every apartment we're in and and the folks who live there being straight out of the 70s, like costumed like the 70s.
Right.
I think you're right about that.
Like when the jalopi wagon drives on the Detroit city streets at night, you can see modern vehicles passing back and forth.
Even the Blue Dodge Ram that Archer Archer and TePaul have, like, that's a modern vehicle for its day, but you rarely see it.
It's
so weird.
Yeah.
Archer and TePaul pick something up on their tricorner, presumably only a kilometer or two into their 80-kilometer grid.
How fortunate.
It's three Zindi biosigns.
So phaser's set to kill.
start walking around the exterior of this brick building, getting the lay of the land.
They're in a, you know, like an old industrial part of the city.
Loomis gets buzzed inside and inside the facility, he asks where his suitcase is.
Hey,
you keep giving me suitcases only partially filled with cash.
Here's another part.
I'm speaking as Loomis.
Here's another part about this situation I don't really get.
It's like, I have five suitcases at home for the five bodies I've brought you, this being the sixth.
Should I be bringing those suitcases back?
Because that would seem to like save you the errand of getting these suitcases.
And so, like, silhouetted up in the doorway so that Loomis can't see his face is the Zindi that he's talking to.
And the Zindi is like, oh, yes, I actually wish we had had this conversation earlier because we decided because the suitcase budget for our operation here was getting really out of control, we would just do a lump payment at the end, all in one suitcase.
And if you had been bringing them back the entire time, we could have just kept paying you the same amount each time.
That makes so much more sense than what we did.
In the interest of full disclosure, we do not have a final suitcase.
So, if we could maybe put it in a bag of some kind, that would be better for us.
Maybe the next one or two times you come in, you could bring some of the suitcases back and we could, you know, make up for lost time that way.
What's his job?
His job is is suitcases
so yeah the the final three payments are gonna be in one lump sum that is being doubled and he's like hey man like the cops are starting to like sniff around and because all of the victims of this crime that i'm doing with you came through my clinic, they're going to start to, they're going to start to put the pieces together.
And the guy in the doorway is like, okay, maybe I overstated how much we've been spending on briefcases.
You can have twice as much money.
Now that we're not on the hook for buying suitcases, there is more money for you in the budget.
They didn't want me to tell you this, but their briefcases are $10,000 each.
Those are like Hermes bespoke briefcases.
They're incredibly valuable.
We don't know two things about this culture:
what makes a good hiring candidate for a job like this, and the value of suitcases?
You could literally name any amount of money and we would pay it.
You remember when Archer and DePaul were buying gas?
It's kind of like that, but for us and with suitcases.
Archer and DePaul follow Knifecock Guy home, and, you know, he goes back into his apartment.
We see even more of it and what a dump it is.
Just wait till you see the pool.
Anytime you jump on a bed and it bounces like that,
buddy, I think you're better off having a mattress on the floor.
Yeah, I mean, is it any wonder that this guy, when he chooses to have intercourse, goes out to sex clubs with his knife cock?
He told me to fuck her.
You want those to be away games, for sure.
Yeah, like nobody's going to be happy about it if this is what you bring them home to.
The last thing this guy is expecting, other than a maid service or whatever, is Archer.
Yeah, I mean, the people.
Archer is the second to last thing he's expecting.
The last thing he's expecting is a Zindi guy going, you know what?
Actually, we did figure out how valuable the briefcases are relative to other things in your society, and I am going to need those back.
It's kind of a problem, and so I'm going to lose my job unless you
give me the briefcases.
You'd really help me out here if you could go get those suitcases and bring them to me.
I know this isn't your job.
And I feel really bad putting this on you.
Yeah, this is the last thing I wanted, and obviously, the second to last thing you wanted.
What the hell is going on?
Well, that's what we're trying to figure out.
So once the Zindi guy leaves, Archer appears on the other side of the door, and he can tell from his side, like in the hallway, that Loomis is trying to escape.
And down the fire escape he goes.
A couple of kicks to the door.
And Archer's in there and he's chasing him down.
But once he gets to the bottom, to the street level, Tipal's there.
And she neck pinches him to the ground.
Great little Vulcan neck pinch moment.
And he wakes up, tied to a chair back in his apartment, getting questioned by Archer cop and T'Paul cop.
This is Dark Archer all over again.
It's fully Dark Archer.
I love the untie him.
That's better.
And sucker punch him.
And then tie him back up moment.
That was so fucking funny to me.
I didn't feel right doing that with you tied up.
There's an SNL sketch for that too, where they're like gangsters
beat a guy to death.
He flatlines.
They shock him.
They wake him up.
They hit him again like over and over is the thing.
I love this.
Yeah.
Big fun.
I love Japal's question.
Like, where's the logic in doing legitimate medical research in this way?
Because
knife cut guy is like, oh, yeah, like, I'm pretty sure that this guy's just doing like a medical study.
He could be a terrorist.
I had considered that.
This is one of those moments where you're like, Loomis, say less.
Because what he says is some real bullshit.
about experimental vaccine research.
Yeah.
Like he tells a number of stories before finally landing on that.
He's like, look, there's what I thought was real medicine being practiced in that factory.
And
the thing that made me feel this way were the really nice suitcases that my payment came in.
Like, I got to tell you, I was expecting a fucking grocery bag of cash.
Not the case.
These guys are classy.
You know what this reeks of?
Is like pharma industry money, you know, like kind of like a despicable amount of money being tossed around here.
So, like, could you blame me?
I could flip one of these suitcases on the secondary market, pay my rent for the entire year.
Do you know how much sex with sex workers I could have?
Sell in all of the suitcases?
I could build a knife and put it on the tip of my cock with that kind of money.
I could be driving any car.
In one individual, we've managed to find the worst qualities of this era.
It's good faith
to believe
I
It's evident that the bosses are gathering a collection, a collection of people with the full spectrum of blood types.
And there are only two that remain.
Yeah.
Fortunately, Archer has one of those missing blood types, and he's got an idea.
Why don't you make me your B negative?
Yeah.
So on the road and Loomis is hoopty,
they travel, but God, all this savage beating tied to a chair, it's giving a guy an appetite.
Really is.
Wouldn't you love to get burgers together, guys?
That'd be nice, wouldn't it?
You won't shut up about it.
Cops have to eat, don't they?
What was this sequence for?
Why was it in the episode?
What about the plot did it drive?
Honestly, I would rather have the gas station scene.
Yeah.
Gas station scene is so much more interesting.
Like, there's no actual interaction in the burger sequence because, you know, you can't get any fish out of water comedy out of it.
Archer has one of the most atrocious burger orders I've ever heard.
A hamburger, ketchup only.
And TePaul does not make any fucking sense.
She's told the Fiesta salad is vegetarian.
And when the service worker on the intercom's like, yeah, we could put bacon on it for you.
Say no bacon, TePaul.
What are you fucking doing?
God.
You gotta eat.
like the topal gets beef on her and his grossed out about it thing is like okay we know she's a vegetarian like you know what i would love to see them both grossed out by gasoline oh it's on my hands yeah oh i just smelled it is this a drink oh i feel good
like give me some of that yeah a very strange little little moment like Could have been the big Lubowski scene, you know, where it's revealed that they got in-and-out burger after they beat up the car.
Those are good burgers, Walter.
Shut the fuck up, Donnie.
Just imagine Tipal eating a Fiesta salad.
She's like, why are there crisped tortilla strips on my lettuce?
Why is the bowl for this salad made of a fried tortilla?
Like, it is an enormous punch bowl-sized taco salad that she gets from a fast food restaurant.
Tell me, that isn't more funny than this that is so much better that is such a strong punch-up god nothing for me thank you sure
quite
anyways knifecock guy drops archer off at the sleeping blood type people place
i really like that archer gets wheeled in on the wheelchair from the previous guy i was like what an innovation he should have abducted the wheelchair guy as the first guy Two parts of this episode strain credulity and two only been.
When Loomis actually taps the IV into Archer.
I was like, oh, I was not expecting that.
Like, I thought it would be like laid on the forearm and taped over.
So, like, that's for real.
And then later on, when the Zindi puts the needle in his neck and he just takes it, I don't know, man.
I don't know anyone who could sit still for that.
That's nuts.
Yeah.
The backstory for Archer is like, I actually don't feel needles going in ever.
I never have.
Well, Archer's done into blood play.
And so, like, he's just used to this in a way that it's very hard to be otherwise.
It creeps me out.
Yeah.
Zindy guy up in the shadows tells Knifecock guy that he wants the last sample person by tomorrow night.
Seems like their timeline is compressed for reasons that we don't know.
He like whispers to Archer, like, look, they're on a pretty specific schedule.
with the lab techs and the drawing, the syringes and so forth.
But also like, if if you see one of them leave for any amount of time, they're leaving to go get a new suitcase.
It's kind of a thing that they do.
Like they go suitcase shopping kind of a lot.
They don't buy them all at once.
They buy them one at a time.
It's so weird.
And they're like too big for what they're using them for.
Like it honestly makes me feel bad to pick up my cash in these giant suitcases.
Like it's really overkill.
And honestly, what is more conspicuous in an abandoned factory in Detroit, a guy leaving it with a grocery bag or with a suitcase.
The suitcase kind of gives me away, don't you think?
It's so weird.
Like, I had them in my car, but they took up the entire trunk.
And I drive a wagon.
And so I moved them into my apartment, but I don't have that much storage in my apartment.
You know, I have like one closet.
It's crazy.
I actually got my bed up off the floor.
Like, I made a bed frame out of all these suitcases.
So that's good.
Archer's like, okay, cool.
Thanks.
Thanks for telling me.
It's like a three-minute conversation.
So knife guy goes back out to the car.
And now Topal has a gun on him.
Like, suddenly, she's got the strap pointed at him and says, like, step on it, and I'll tell you where to go.
I love the reality of this scene because when Loomis takes a look at this ray gun and he's like, what the fuck is that, idiot?
A dumb toy?
Yeah.
It's great because it looks ridiculous.
It does look super silly.
So she has to convince him it's real.
And
the Zindi get to work, put a little alcohol prep pad on Archer's neck before drawing blood right from the jugular.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
After they leave, Archer pops up with his gun and starts to go a Zindi hunting.
I was surprised that this wasn't just a room-to-room situation for Archer.
Like, we go from him popping off the bed, yanking his IV, to like him up in the rafters.
You never see how that happens.
They had to have that whole thing where they ordered bad-sounding hamburgers and we didn't get the gas station scene or the scene of Archer deciding that rafters was the best place for him to go as he searched this building.
I think it's pretty clear that the studio notes from Ben and Adam are get rid of the burger scene.
Replace with literally anything else.
More ketchup.
And a little bit more explication surrounding the suitcases.
Yeah, yeah.
The Raptors give him a good vantage point to see what's going on in that next room.
And what's going on is a bioreactor churning away on some sort of
viral agent.
Yeah.
Archer talks to TePaul about this on the radio.
And he's like, yeah, I was like thinking about blowing it up, but like, what if that spreads whatever's inside of it everywhere?
If it's like a viral thing, that would be bad.
TePaul's like, well, you just use the maximum setting on the phaser, like the hottest setting.
Yeah.
set it to vape.
Yeah.
What she suggests is there might be a temporal beacon that one of these guys has so that they can get home and maybe you should look for that and destroy it.
Yeah.
While she's having this conversation, knifecock guy is in the car and he gets himself armed while Tepal is not looking.
With a knife.
With a totally separate knife than the one.
on his cock.
Not the one on his strap-on.
It's a different knife.
Right.
Archer identifies the temporal beacon using his tricroder.
We actually see the scan on the screen and he bullseyes it after a couple of shots, but gets in a great big gunfight with the Zindies.
And one of them
takes the core out of the bioreactor and makes a run for it.
This guy escapes to the street.
Archer does a good job taking out a few of the henches, but the main guy, the boss guy, he gets away and he makes her the alley.
And the alley is where Archer tells TePaul, hey, that's where he's headed.
So maybe drive the fucking jalapi out there
and pull up short, all right?
Yeah, they go cut him off, and Tepal is like waiting for this Indy to come out of the dark alley, and out of some, I guess, like a sense of loyalty in that he didn't get his last two payments, so he's like still hoping for money from this guy, loyalty.
Knifecock knifecock guy like beeps the horde and warns this indie that tapal is going to shoot him so she doesn't bullseye him but she does bullseye knifecock guy he gets stunned i mean there's a moment where he sees what his indie looks like before getting shot and that is very surprising to him because
yeah that was a big moment So it seems like he's just going to cut his losses and deploy the rest of the virus because they like get up to the roof and there's like a big fan going, and it looks like he's going to pour the virus into the fan so it blows everywhere.
Archer makes like a flanking maneuver and jumps between buildings and catches this dude before he's able to release the virus into 2004.
Boss Cindy is a total badass, I thought.
Yeah, we won't allow you to destroy us.
Your species is doomed.
Like the act of getting shot and then still going for the virus in order to release it, I thought was a boss move.
Did you know this was Jeffrey Dean Morgan who played boss Zindy?
No.
This is a role that he talked about possibly making him quit acting.
Wow.
He fucking hated this.
He hated the act of becoming Zindi.
It was claustrophobic and weird.
He was just a grinder of an actor at this time in his career.
And he was like, yeah, this fucking sucks.
This was almost it for me.
But he stuck with it.
Well, he gets wasted.
Archer narrowly averts disaster.
Suddenly, we are just back in the present.
Archer and Tepal come out of the command center.
And for Trip, no time has passed at all.
They were not gone for very long.
Like in contact.
But it's in reaction and not dialogue, which is what I like about this.
Yeah.
It's done.
Sir?
Like, he's confused in a way that conveys that, but he never says, but y'all, y'all just went in that room.
Why are y'all coming out right now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really well done.
Yeah.
And he is amazed to see all of the Zindi corpses and other crap that TePaul and Archer brought back by tagging it with those aforementioned tags.
Including just like a bag bag of to-go burgers that TePaul brought back.
Because you know, she's down with burgers now.
Yeah.
She loves the burger meat.
She's been changed.
Yeah.
Back in Detroit, the fuzz catch up with Knifecock Guy.
We get to see his hilarious end as a deluded maniac who thinks that there are lizard people and ray guns.
Yeah, he's got a future on the receiving end of an ice pick.
You like this episode, Ben?
I can't pay.
Couldn't for late.
Got no case.
Tempting fate.
I thought this episode was a ton of fun.
Not a very highbrow episode.
No big ideas in it.
No reason for it to have been set in Detroit.
No reason for the burger scene.
No reason for the briefcase to carry that amount of money.
No reason to have the little coda.
Like, I don't need to find out what happened to that guy.
I don't care.
That's a great point.
We don't give a shit about Loomis.
Why give us this moment?
Because it's fun and funny, I guess, right?
Like, that's why.
Yeah.
He's a lizard people guy.
Yeah.
So
he gets to rant his anti-Semitic conspiracy theory into the credits.
Yeah,
I thought this was a hoot.
Sarge, come check it out.
Check out what's in the trunk of his car.
Is that six leather suitcases?
Call for backup.
He's a Samsonite smuggler.
Do you know why I pulled you over, sir?
It's the six suitcases I saw in your rear window.
Light, fun Star Trek episode.
Very silly.
How about you?
Yeah, I mean, that's really it, right?
If you came to this episode expecting
hard Star Trek
in any way, I mean, this isn't for you.
This is a clown show.
But Star Trek as a thing makes a clown show every once in a while, and that's what this is.
I do.
It was fun and funny.
As a Halloween fan, I did enjoy all the references to Halloween, the film series, with, you know, Carpenter and Loomis.
And the car Loomis drives,
very much like the car the shape drives.
Is it the car that they had in the episode of voyager where janeway was hanging out in the bookstore with the with the precocious kid that i don't know but i think that's a great pull i love the idea that star trek has a fleet of four automobiles total
one of them is the garbage truck from star trek 4 yeah there's this wagon Jillian's pickup truck from Star Trek 4 and then this other one other pickup truck.
That's all they got.
Yeah.
It's great.
Well, let's see what's parked over in the Priority One Message inbox, Ben.
Why don't we?
Priority one message from Starfleet coming in on secured channel.
Need a supplemental income.
Supplemental income.
Supplemental.
Supplemental.
Yeah, it's extra.
But the interest alone could be enough to buy this ship.
Starting with a personal message from longtime viewer, first-time caller Caden, and it's to Ben and Adam.
Ben, Adam, thank you for everything.
I found this pod as a teen, and now it follows me into the beginning of my research as a PhD paleontologist.
Whoa.
Embarrassing tidbit.
Faith of the heart played at my Eagle Scout ceremony.
And hearing the new S3 intro snapped me out of a serious depression spiral.
So lots of love.
And shout out to the trek hole.
Wow.
So, there's the message from Caden.
Wow.
That's rough.
That's a rough choice by the Eagle Scouts, I gotta say.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, Life as a Highway is a better choice than that, right?
Was it a choice by the Eagle Scouts, or was it a choice by Caden?
Did Caden get to pick the song they walked down the aisle to or whatever?
I don't know how
Caden, fus up,
if this is your fault, okay?
Man, it's gonna be Dr.
Caden telling us Ian Freeze or whatever.
You know, like, Caden is a very modern name now.
Yeah.
Like, we're gonna start getting Dr.
Caden's.
Dr.
Caden is on the horizon if it isn't already here.
Yeah.
Our next priority one message is from Captain Lesoto and Chris Shimoda, and it's two Ben and Adam, inspired by a recent wholesome episode about online communities and the wonderful friends we have through this pod.
Thank you for this pod that has brought together FODs from all over, creating lifelong friendships and life-changing moments.
Incredible FODs have led to Chris performing on stage with Trek stars, fireworks cruises, game nights, group trips, fanfest, tiki drinks, and local hangs with cherished people we never would have met without TGG.
See you at STLV.
Wow.
Absolutely.
See you there.
See you there, Captain Liz Soto and Chris Shimoda.
What a nice thing to hear.
The community around this show is really amazing and something that Adam and I marvel at all the time because it wasn't really something we ever made any personal effort to cultivate.
It just kind of happened.
That's what makes it better.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is such a special thing.
Yeah.
Well, if you've got a prior-to-one message that you would like us to read, either a commercial message about a work thing or a personal message about a friend thing, take it to maximumphone.org slash jumbotron.
We'll read it.
We'll talk about it.
We'll process it.
We'll put it in a suitcase for our FOD listeners out there.
And they're a great way to support the production of our show.
Yeah, but if you want to do a suitcase with $5,000 in it, we'll take that.
Hey, Ben.
What's that, Adam?
Did you find yourself a drunk Shimoda this episode?
Drunk Shimoda!
Yeah, I got to give it to Knifecock Guy.
I feel like he's having the most fun in this episode.
Just one last Knifecock guy reference out of you.
The observation that he is like the worst of, you know, he's like greedy and corrupt and has no like moral compass or whatever is
such a brutal like I feel like when you're when you're creating a character and you read somebody else saying that about them, it's got to be a fun thing to take and run with it.
And I thought,
you know, Leland Orser's a great that guy does a great job with this.
Yeah.
How about you?
I think I'm going to make mine Damron, who is the leader of the Zindi.
Damron, back at it again with the Zindu bio weapon.
Here's another aspect to this whole suitcase thing I didn't think about.
The Zindi are not shopping for the suitcases.
Therefore, there was a conversation between Damron and Loomis that went like,
you know, we need something to put the cash in.
And we were thinking something like one suitcase per delivery.
So if you could both bring the body and a suitcase.
Bring a receipt when you buy the suitcase and
we'll reimburse you for it.
Obviously, that's not an expense you need to bear.
You're going to bill us as a 1099 employee, are you not?
Hold on, I'm getting a call from my business manager because we've been trying to figure out if state compliance regulations mean we need to get workmen's comp insurance or not.
What I'm trying to say is, Damron needed to do a lot of work that we don't see on screen.
Yeah.
Crazy work.
Like, minutiae.
In many ways, like, having a three-quarters effective bioweapon by the end of this, like, he was, he, he was at the tail end of their work, yeah.
And it seems like it was a miracle that they even got that far,
given the help that they hired to do it, yeah, yeah, yeah, Damron for sure.
Wow, great call, faith of the fart, all right, Adam, we got to start talking about next week's episode.
It's season three, episode 12 of Enterprise.
It's called Chosen Realm: Religious Zealots hijack Enterprise to use it as a weapon against the enemies of their
Oh, that sounds great.
I love that.
Yeah.
Blow them out the airlocks.
Well, Space Jihad never hurt anyone.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
I psyched about this.
Let's see how we will be doing it, Adam.
Wouldn't it be great if we experienced this episode recap in some hilarious way, given its subject matter?
It could happen.
For that, I'm going to go to gock.biz/slash game, where we keep the game of buttholes.
The will of the Riker Quantum Leap.
You know where we are right now, Ben?
Square two.
Oh, yeah, we're deep down on the bottom row.
Not for long, though.
I'm going to roll this die, and it could take us anywhere.
You ready?
Let's do it.
You're required to learn as you play.
Roll.
Ben, I so wanted it to be like a breadstick power hour or
something ridiculous.
No, it's a regular old episode.
Tula!
Did I win?
Hardly.
I landed us on square eight, not far away from where we were.
Okay, so we're still on that bottom row.
Weird.
I rolled a six with a hundred-sided die.
Crazy.
But keep rolling these low numbers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, looking forward to a regular old episode next week.
And looking forward to talking about some of the great people who make it their business to bring you this show every week.
Of course, I'm talking about friends of DeSoto who support by going to maximumfund.org slash join.
Talking about Wendy Pretty, our amazing producer as of this recording, gallivanting across Europe and
North Africa, and yet keeping the episodes coming out on time and on spec.
Amazing.
Yeah, that's dedication.
It's why we love her.
It's why she's such a huge part of what we do here.
Got to thank Rob Adler, our social media director and the editor-in-chief of the greatest newsletter, our monthly email.
Sign up for that at gosh.biz slash mail.
Buy something at podshop.biz.
Yeah, buying stuff at podshop.biz supports the show.
We really put a lot of thought into all the stuff we have over there.
Good stuff.
Check it out.
Good stuff.
I got to thank Bill Tilley, our Zindi wartime concigliary,
and Adam Ragusia, who made our parody theme music.
Of course,
Dark Materia, who made the original Picard song, which you hear under our voices right now.
With that, we will be back at you next week with another great episode of Star Trek Enterprise and an episode of the Greatest Generation Enterprise that sees Ben and Adam fighting over a sectarian divide.
Finally.
make it like itself,
make it so
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