The Rick Berman Hat Trick (ENT S2E10)

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 song.

Welcome to the Greatest Generation.

It's a Star Trek podcast by a couple of guys who are just a little bit embarrassed about having a Star Trek podcast.

I'm Ben Harrison.

I'm Adam Pranica.

Transporter accident episode today, Adam.

First transporter accident in the

canonical history.

Yeah, pretty great.

But before that, Ben, I've got an improvised code 47

because I received a package from our friend Jonathan Heffler.

No kidding.

Who reached out to me and said that I've got something for you guys and I'd like you to open it on the show.

Wow.

How do I get that to you?

And I said, well, don't send it to Ben's post office.

Send it to me.

And I'll do it.

So, here, speaking of firsts, is the first time for a long time I'm going to be opening up a package on the show.

And I'll tell you what it is.

Let's hope it's not a transporter accident.

Let's hope it came in one piece, whatever it is.

Captain, I'm sorry to disturb you.

I'm receiving a code 47.

Verify.

It is code 47, sir.

Stark lead emergency frequency.

Captain's eyes only.

I don't use a letter opener.

I use scissors open wide.

TM.

Oh, it always makes me so nervous when I watch you and my wife open a package.

Never had an accident doing that.

Wow.

Oh, look at this.

We've got little packing peanuts in there.

Just a wonderful addition to any keyboard.

Yeah.

Gotta have those.

Oh, this is nice.

I've got a letter here from Jonathan Heffler, and it's on that premium paper.

It feels so good.

Can we hear a wobble of that paper on the mic?

That's nice.

Jonathan says, Dear Ben and Adam, for the next episode of This Old Enterprise, regards, Jonathan.

What we have here

is what looks like an original edition.

of the Starfleet Technical Manual.

Wow.

I have never seen one this old.

Damn.

Look at it.

It's so old.

It seems as though there's a bookmark in here.

So I'm going to see if maybe this constitutes a direction

of some kind that Jonathan would like us to go in.

Calling his shot, as it were.

And what he's called my attention to, and yours,

is

the layout of Starfleet headquarters.

And

I will show you that.

I'm curious, before you show it to me, can you like look at the copyright page and tell me when this book came out?

Is this pre-TNG?

1975.

Hmm.

Amazing.

You weren't even a twinkle in your daddy's eye when this book came out.

So here's a picture of Fleet Headquarters, and what I'll do is I'll scan this and make it available to those who follow us on the socials.

But here is that.

That looks very much like a diagram of the reproductive organs of a lady.

And what has bookmarked this section is a screen grab of one of our very own shows with the title, More Labial Than Jahu.

So that was a really fun walk to that punchline made possible by friend of the show Jonathan Heffler.

A book that I will treasure.

A book that is just impossibly old.

What a thing.

This season, we are revisiting one of our favorite projects, the headquarters

of the United Federation of Planets Starfleet.

Now, many people don't realize that Starfleet, in fact, predates the Federation, which is part of why it is such a specifically Homo sapien design when it comes to replicating female reproductive organs.

Many people have accused Starfleet of being a Homo sapiens-only club as a result of this design.

We're here to change that.

This is where they add like a second staircase

to appease the Klingons.

Pretty great.

Hey, thanks, Jonathan, for sending us such a treasure.

Yeah.

I can't wait to see what other reproductive organ-related or designed

parts of Starfleet there are.

I mean, there are so many pages in this book, I imagine half of them are just like that.

I mean, it's a very horny, it's a horny franchise, one must admit.

This is a fairly horny episode in some ways, Ben.

What do you say we get into Star Trek Enterprise Season 2, Episode 10?

Vanishing Point.

We begin in a cave, and there's a Hoshi and a Trip Tucker there, and they're looking over some hieroglyphics.

She's doing the non-translating, and he's doing the picture-taking and record-keeping.

I really liked the push into the Indiana Jones ruins that they're in at the opening of this episode, because it kind of feels like we start outside and find them inside.

And yeah, they're scanning hieroglyphs, they're exploring what appears to be a long-abandoned place that no aliens presently live in or protect.

Unlike Indiana Jones, this is not a place with a bunch of traps or spookiness.

The danger of being here is outside and it's bearing down on them.

Archer calls in to say that a storm is headed their way and they're going to have to leave in the next few minutes if they want to avoid being stranded.

And being stranded isn't even an option once we learn more about this storm and the storm that's kind of nudging it to go faster.

They had five minutes when he called down, and then we cut up to the ship and we learned that there's a second, more perfect storm coming in hot right behind that first one.

And yeah, it closes the window way quicker than they thought they had.

They're going to have to leave the cave, pass the boy and the big dumb ducks and however the rest of that monologue goes.

Yeah.

You know what?

You're goddamn sword, O Captain.

What a movie, The Perfect Storm.

Loved it.

I haven't seen it since I saw it in theaters, but yeah,

I remember thinking it was great.

But do I remember which parts of it were The Perfect Storm and which things were from the shipping news?

Not so clear.

Oh, I don't think I ever saw that one.

Anyways, yeah, so too late.

And they get on the communicator with Archer again, and he's explaining, like, shuttle is no longer an option it won't survive going up you're we're talking emergency beam out now and hoshi is is in the bargaining stage of learning she's going to have to use the transporter she's like what about polarizing the hull plating and just riding it out in the shuttle and he's like this thing is going to tear that shuttle apart yeah polarizing the shuttle would be to like cover it in kites and keys.

It's not what you want to do with a storm like this.

At that point, it's like more a debate about who's going to go first.

Is it going to be Trip or Hoshi?

Neither of them has done this before, but Reed has done it a couple of times and says it's no big deal.

But she makes Trip go first.

He beams up, and then she beams up.

And, you know, she's got a little bit of like defeated samurai hair when she materializes on the transporter pad, but she doesn't look any worse for wear.

Bunch is made later on in the episode of like

who went first here and who should have gone first here.

Are you a go-first

as a person, especially when you're nervous to do a thing?

I often find that if I'm especially nervous, I do want to be first.

I don't want to be watching the thing that I'm nervous about.

Well, in my experience, it's always better if you can get the lady first.

You know.

Stand a better chance of getting her at all at that point.

I mean, that's clearly not what Tripp does here.

He takes care of himself.

Yeah.

So she heads back to her quarters and is, you know, a little like,

what a close scrape.

And she's, you know, doing some washing up.

These must be dirt marks from spelunking, not from being in a storm, right?

You don't get dirt on your face from storm.

I mean,

a storm could whip up all the dirt and debris and

smush it against your face.

It could be from anything.

I guess so.

Yeah.

That's fair.

Is this what the remains of the day is about?

We're talking about movies I haven't seen and that you definitely have.

Yeah, it's mostly about people like doing kind of evening toilet, like cleansing washes, missilar water, et cetera, to remove the various toxins and environmental detritus off of their

skin.

That'd be a great name for a facial product, you know?

Remains of the day.

Get at me, Noxima or Neutrogena companies.

I've got ideas.

Adam did put remains of the day, just those words on a piece of paper in an envelope and mailed it to himself.

So you can't do it without

his say-so.

That's right.

So Archer comes to Colin while Hoshi's doing her routine and just out of the kindness of his heart, gives her the rest of her shift off.

But in just being around Hoshi for the time that we have, she's kind of in too much of a daze to be at work anyway.

Like, nice by Archer, but okay, like, is that the sort of Hoshi you want on your bridge anyway?

She was talking a big game about heading back to her shift, and he disabuses her of that and then is like, yeah, well, anyways, you'll go back down tomorrow to get the other shuttle pod.

And it becomes clear that she is

really shaken up.

There's no upside to returning to the pod in her mind.

Where do you go when you're shaken up, Ben?

Back out in public to the mess hall is what we're made to believe.

I guess you got to eat.

That's what Hoshi's there to do.

Trip and Mayweather and Reed are already there.

They're already eating.

They're already sitting together and laughing their asses off when Hoshi rolls up.

And this is a moment that makes us believe that Trip is fine, was fine, will always be fine with being transported.

He's great.

I asked if they'd look at the pattern buffer for a prior version of my body that doesn't have nipples all over it.

This is the first time I've used the machine, so they didn't have one.

Hoshi does not feel fine.

No.

Clearly.

It was very unsettling.

Didn't you find it unsettling?

Yeah, it's, I mean, like, I really...

I feel two ways about this, because, like, I'm very much a like suffer-in-silence person.

If I'm like mad about something, the last thing I want to do is like bring it up to everyone and talk about it.

What's wrong with Ben this time?

But I know that there are people that like need to process stuff that way.

But also, Hoshi, you picked like people who were having a nice time and just went and dumped a bucket of ice water on their nice time.

Yeah, the Debbie Downer tuba needs to be

playing here for sure.

I don't know.

I just don't feel right.

We learn a little bit about the legend of Cyrus Ramsey.

What a guy.

He was a man who was lost in a transporter test.

This test was like not super long distance.

It was like 100 yards, however long that is.

He was transported, but never materialized on the other side.

Is there a system of weights and measures that you feel like you've got a pretty good grasp on, or is yards also...

Yeah, I don't really know.

Unclear.

Yeah, he's become a bit of a ghost story, this Cyrus Ramsey.

Like, if you're going on,

like, a survival training mission,

the unrematerialized particles of Cyrus Ramsey will haunt your campsite or whatever.

And, you know, they kind of make some light of Hoshi being a real Cyrus Ramsey type.

So upset is Hoshi in this scene that when the discussion turns toward picking up that shuttle that was left on the surface after the fact, Maybe Mayweather will be the guy that goes along on that mission.

Maybe Hoshi can just sit this one out.

Is Hoshi a trained pilot?

Because that's like part of the point that Trip makes is like, I need another person who can pilot when we go down there.

Yeah, I see nothing wrong with this plan, honestly.

Makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

Anyways, she goes to Six Bay and it's empty.

And she's like poking around looking for flocks.

And he shows up behind her, having seemingly come out of a

nook that she just recently cleared.

So, you know, you got to look at the doors and corners, Hoshi.

Like, you got to really clear the rooms before you holler that out.

There's a musical cue that we get a bunch in the first half of this episode, and I think we get it in this scene to cement the creepy feeling we're supposed to have.

Well,

and since ordinarily, you walk into a six-bay.

Oh, oh, where's Dr.

Flox?

I don't know.

Oh yeah, there's Dr.

Flox.

And it's fine.

Yeah.

But that's absent this music cue.

You get the music cue and all of a sudden, uh-oh.

It's not fine, actually.

Yeah.

I think Archer and Trip and now Flox have made the mistake of thinking she was scared of the storm.

Like, like, oh, were you like hiding under the bed because there was lightning like a puppy?

And she's like, no, I went through the matter recombining

matter stream of a transporter.

I'm fucking terrified.

So he's like scanning her, seeing if anything's wrong with her molecules.

Doesn't correct her on they're not really your molecules.

Your body is just using them for now, but you know, they will go back into the universe and be part of entropy later.

He scans her and he says she's fine.

You're no Cyrus Ramsey.

But that doesn't scan how she feels.

She doesn't feel right, and there's not a lot that Dr.

Flox can do besides prescribe a good night of sleep.

Maybe after that, she will feel a little better.

She doesn't want his sedatives.

He doesn't really like cotton much to the idea that one of her freckles moved.

I have a mole.

Well, it looks lovely where it is now.

But she goes to bed, sons sedative, and is nonetheless woken up at 1100 hours by DePaul with an emergency.

And this really starts to feel like, you know, anxiety dream, like showing up to school without your math homework kind of vibes because she's like super late to her shift.

Tucker and Mayweather have gone down to the surface and been taken hostage by aliens that didn't show up on previous scans.

She is so far behind what's going on.

The captain is clearly like super annoyed that she's late, but it's too urgent to resolve the hostage crisis for him to like lay into her about that.

It's just a fucking mess.

You described a lot about the scene that creates a feeling of not being settled and maybe feelings of paranoia or dream logic or whatever.

But the thing that stuck out the most to me that drove me totally crazy is: are we supposed to believe that it takes three hours for you to get called if you're doing a no-call no show on your bridge shift three hours to Paul Waits before ringing Hoshi to see what the fuck yeah what

that didn't make sense to me at all well yeah I mean I think that like logic has broken down in key ways starting now but also you can like sort of head candidate is like oh yeah you know they knew she was really upset after the the storm that she looked at from a distance.

She must have been real scared of that storm.

Let's take it easy on Hoshi.

Yeah, I don't get any of that energy from the scene.

It is weird.

It's weird.

If I were 30 minutes late to a recording, I would expect a call after 10 minutes.

Three hours.

I think I'd probably give you half an hour.

Yeah.

You're generally permissive.

Probably two.

Too permissive.

So they get a call on Travis's communicator, and we've got some cranky captors doing a ransom call in an alien language, and Hoshi is

just blowing it when it comes to figuring out how to translate this thing.

And you blow it!

The universal translator not working.

She tries to freeball it, and the pressure is just mounting from everyone on the bridge, like, crack this code, communicate with these guys.

And ultimately, she breaks under pressure like she is drenched in flopsweat she gets dismissed by the captain I'm sorry I'm

sorry you blew it and she heads back to her quarters in shame imagine being replaced by crewman Baird brutal I mean I fucking can't wait but Hoshi is really really hurt by this Baird of all people seems to be like the final twist of the knife.

I love Archer's take here in that he can't even look at her.

Like, that's the depth of his disappointment.

Like,

oof.

I mean, not that I give one single shit about how Archer feels about anyone, but like,

that's notable.

That's not a thing that he would do ordinarily.

Yeah, yeah.

So she goes to wash the flop sweat off in her shower.

And this is where we get the first like disappearing hoshi effect.

Like she initially sees it in the bathroom mirror, and then she sees the shower water going through her hands.

I thought this was really well done, this effect.

Like, I don't quite know how you, like, did they, like, get hands against a green screen and then, like, make, like, multiple layers of, like, shower effect?

It was good.

It's either that or you cast someone who can be invisible.

Does Linda Park have that on the back of her headshot?

This is a scene where we get a second look at the shower playset.

It's been given a lot of screen time lately, and by shower playset, I'm not only talking about Hoshi with her top off.

Kind of a moment where you suspect something spooky is happening.

We get that music again, too.

Spooky music.

Speaking of characters who love getting topless, Hoshi comes up to Tepal in the lunchroom and sort of seems like tapal is like icing her out initially anyone sitting here or maybe she's just engrossed in whatever novel she's reading subcommander

ensign would you like to join me hoshi is like you know trying to find a a shoulder to lean on a little bit here and Tapal informs her that, yeah, like the hostage situation was actually resolved while you were showering.

I'm surprised you didn't know that.

And also, crewman Baird now has your job.

You don't have a job anymore because you're so bad at it.

How long was this shower?

How much hot water do you think they have on Enterprise?

I mean, yeah, in the Navy, you're supposed to take like really, really brief showers, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, a lot of questions.

Yeah.

This moment.

Bair made her look so dumb.

Like, apparently she left the bridge and he just cracked the code that instant.

If Baird's the hot hot hand, I think you got to do the heat check of just maybe keeping him at that station for a while.

I don't fault this decision at all.

What's notable about this, in addition to everything else, is that Archer could not even summon the courage to have a face-to-face

to tell her that she didn't have to report to the bridge anymore as part of her duties.

Like, he laid this off on to Paul, which,

wow, impressive delegation there by Archer.

Love that.

I mean, once you see how this version of Archer handles any sort of confrontation, I think you get it.

Yeah.

Well, also, like, if you have a Vulcan as your first officer, you want them to do all the firing, right?

Because, like, they don't care that

it doesn't burden them at all emotionally.

They'll never leave you open to something actionable in the eyes of HR.

That'll be a perfect firing.

Everything is going to be totally buttoned up.

And yeah, so

she's out in the hallway now and Hoshi wants to use the elevator, but it like won't come when she calls.

So she has to sneak on board.

And it sounded almost like CPR talk that she was hearing.

There's like a little auditory hallucination where she hears people

encouraging her to come through.

She goes to Six Bay.

She wants to know if Flox can see her based on this experience she just had in the elevator.

Flox can.

As a construction, you need the ghostly voices part of this episode, right?

You really, really do.

I don't think it works without.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's that and the thing of not getting a call when you haven't shown up for your shift for three hours.

And getting Hoshi topless.

So those three things.

We got the ghostly voices,

the three-hour late call checkup, and then topless hoshi.

Yeah, I think that's called the Rick Berman hat trick.

And they nailed it.

They fucking nailed it.

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The Flop House is a podcast where we watch a bad movie and then we talk about it.

Guys, how does E.T.

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Uh, well, he's not that regular, but I mean, as he's gotten older, he has two cloakers, one under each arm.

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And you will never take the greatest gin alive.

Ben would rather die.

Flock's cancere.

He doesn't buy the thing about the buttons being unresponsive.

He's like, you know, this is all in your head.

You just need to rub some dirt on it and get get your head right and get back in the game she goes down to the gym on board the ship and trip is actually using the space camp device to work out

you're upside down that's it what kind of workout is this is it like swimming where like you when you use your whole body to stabilize itself that's the ultimate whole body workout it's like all core your entire body is interacting with a form of a shake weight, I guess.

Yeah.

In order to remain stable.

It seemed like he was kind of like, like it wasn't like motorized, right?

He was like doing the motions himself.

You used to Space Camp G-Force machine in college, right?

You were on the team.

Yeah.

Well, I wasn't on the team.

I just had one in my dorm room and my roommate hated me.

Yeah.

When you hear that thing from the other side of the door, you'd maybe just go study in the library at that point.

Yeah, hat tip to the

construction crew who puts this thing together.

I've got to believe if you don't have that exactly right, if you don't have things torqued correctly

across the instrument, you could probably really hurt yourself.

Oh, yeah, it seems like the sort of thing that could slice off a hand and not even, like, not even lose any energy to it.

It would just like

take fingers off.

It seems maybe like, honestly, like outside of that poisonous fish that was kept in Picard's office, maybe this is the most dangerous prop that's ever been on Star Trek.

What the fuck are they doing?

No hard feelings coming from Trip Tucker on having been taken hostage.

That's totally fine.

Didn't even tie us up.

They're having a very funny conversation because he is rotating in three dimensions and she is doing like three reps at a time on various weightlifting machines and then like stopping and moving on to another machine.

There's a gym device that came out, I want to say last year that's like the mirror style gym.

You stick it to your wall.

Oh, yeah.

And what the computer does is it's variable weights.

So it changes the amount of drag per pump.

That's it.

Get it.

And I mean, if you're going to be generous about

the number of reps that Hoshi's getting here, maybe this is just the ultimate expression of that.

Like, maybe three is all you need.

Yeah, she's, she's doing like 150-pound curls.

Yeah.

Three times is good.

That's fucking amazing.

So, you know, she's telling him about how she's been upset since the thing and her own personal Cyrus Ramsey experience.

And he's like, you know, maybe you need to take some sedatives.

And

she says, men are all alike.

They're, I guess, all pro-sedative.

Have you found this in your travels?

You know men.

I haven't, and I don't know what she's talking about.

It would have been great if they were in his sports bottle, though, and like he was doing them and passed them to her.

Oh, yeah.

I'll wait and see.

A night sleep will do you a world of good.

You got to be careful when somebody offers you pills

in a gym locker room, though, right?

It's such a weird interaction between them.

Again, like, by the end, we understand that these are just Hoshi's projections of people and what her feelings are about them and like Trip is understandably just a real chill dude who suggests like the least invasive kind of reaction to how Hoshi's feeling and like good for Trip Tucker to just be like look Hosh can I call you ho can I call you Hosh because we're such close friends

take a couple of these pills get yourself a good night's sleep I would say we're cloch broche, but that's not really appropriate, is it?

I like this idea of Trip Tucker as a person.

I would have liked to meet that Trip Tucker.

How did he get out of the space camp device?

Because he leaves.

Yeah, we don't see that.

We don't get the three to four minutes of him slowly unbuckling and clicking and the rings like

so slowly tilting back into their resting position

before he can safely get out.

And the like six crew people that have to come like hold it steady.

For some reason, this episode skips over that.

He leaves and she tries to leave, but the buttons won't respond.

And now her hand is like passing through solid objects.

But like not all solid objects?

Because wouldn't she be able to leave the room?

Because she passes her hand through like free weights, right?

Yes.

But can't leave.

When we cut to later,

she has been sleeping on the floor when

Tapal and Trip Tucker walk in.

Neither of them can see or hear her.

And it's like a dream.

Being able to hear what people are saying about you, I thought for sure this would be the angle that this episode took.

A very similar angle to the TNG episode that Jordi and Ro were in.

Right.

You know?

Like, so much of that runtime was spent understanding, especially for Roe's part, like that she does not have to feel like everyone hates her all the time.

Like, I thought for sure this would be where the episode starts to maybe tell us a little bit about Hoshi and how she feels about things and how other people feel about Hoshi.

Hey, that never happens.

No attending your own funeral moment for Hoshi.

And they're just wondering where she is.

And later, we get Archer and TePaul questioning Flox about, like, you know, I mean, like, Trip was the last person to see her.

And then Flox is talking about how, you know, he scanned her.

And there actually was something wrong with their scans that he didn't notice the first time.

And maybe if he, as a physician, had just listened when a female patient was telling him something was wrong, we wouldn't be in this pickle.

I really love the blocking of this scene that is so familiar to like a Dick Wolf style.

Dr.

Flox has to stop mopping and then he like puts his arm up on some

on some crates to answer the detective's questions.

Because even like Archer and TePaul being the investigators here are sort of arranged in that kind of way that's very familiar to someone who watches that kind of TV.

I also just like the camera move revealing that Hoshi is there in the room listening because you do not see her in the in the initial composition of the shot.

I love how small she makes herself in this moment.

I think it's not just that she's there in the background.

It's that she's kind of shrunk.

She's shrunken in

like actually in the scene, but also it's a choice that suggests how she has to be feeling in proportion to everyone and everything else.

Totally.

So next thing to investigate is the transporter itself.

And

Tripp goes through the computer and sees that there's, in fact, something wrong with it.

The

secondary phase coils are out of alignment.

And he gets a real survivor's guilt trip going at this moment.

Like,

man, it should have been me.

I should have gotten the lady first.

Save mine for the end.

You know, everybody's like, oh, come on, Trip, don't do that to yourself.

That's fine.

He's like really convinced that he's the one that should be missing.

Pretty great or awful moment for Dr.

Flox to pop in to be like, yeah, we're going to need a microscope to see what's left of her body at this point.

Like, she was probably reduced into kind of a fine mist that, I mean, potentially we could pick up using our tricorders or whatever, but I don't know.

I think that Scott Bakula, like when Flox comes in to say, like, we need to recalibrate our scans for residue, we get a single on Scott Bakula processing bad news.

And I think, like, horrible news react is one of Scott Bakula's greatest gears as an actor.

I absolutely agree.

And I want to also point out that I'd like to see most actors say the word residue in an emotional way, the way Scott Bakula does, because that is not easy.

And that should be a fucking laugh line.

But it isn't.

Bakula acts as ass off in this scene.

And

that one-word example is what I would point to.

Hey,

can you just say residue in like maybe the most emotional way you can?

That fucking sucks.

I'm going to take another run at it.

Okay.

Residue.

Let's hear what you got.

Residue.

This gym sock is full of residue.

So we get the single brass instrument of a captain coming to terms with the death of an officer who was a great disappointment to him the day before.

I'll be in my ready room.

And elsewhere in some tubes, Dr.

Flox and Trip Tucker are bent over at the waist.

This is the sort of tube that they're in.

They can't stand straight up.

They're in there scanning for the remains that Hoshi has maybe left behind.

I like how Enterprise has like extreme versions of Jeffries tubes.

Like we see in all other Star Treks tubes where you have to crawl on hands and knees.

But in Enterprise, it's like you can either shimmy like delicately through if you're a Hoshi-sized person, or it's a lot bigger than a Jeffries tube, but you still can't stand straight up.

This is a bad design.

I'd rather be crawling than bent over at the waist walking through this thing.

This is dumb.

It's a killer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they find, you know, some goo.

Hoshi is hearing like alien voices,

but Flox and Trip are not hearing that.

And

Flox leaves and Trip has another just like beat the shit out of himself, Sesh, as he speaks to the goo as his dearly departed crewmate.

I mean, this is like the moment, right?

Like the, this is the

him sort of eulogizing, but he kind of makes it about himself.

What could I have been thinking leaving you down there?

I was the ranking officer.

I would have made it more about why

Dr.

Flocks is putting them remains in a paper envelope.

It was just about a quarter-sized puddle of goo.

Let's get this straight.

What we're talking about here is the recommended amount of shampoo in terms of the goo.

And he's putting it in paper?

Is this because he comes from a culture that doesn't use single-use plastic items?

How do you even send that home to a loved one?

He's mad at Hoshi, Tripp, that she didn't listen to him.

Why did no one listen to Hoshi, Trip?

Why are you not reflecting on that?

She was walking around telling everyone she didn't feel right.

She felt like her molecules were fucked up.

She felt like her beauty marks were moving around on her face.

Yeah.

I mean, they could only do what they could do with the information they had.

That's what happened.

And ignore the information she was offering.

So, Hoshi hears more alien languages and she goes around a corner and finds a couple of guys cramming wooden shoes into every corner of the ship hence the word sabotage fortunately they also can't see her but she realizes that the the ship is in desperate straits these must be the aliens that were taken hostages down on the planet or whatever right yeah and they're blue total shocker i love seeing the tubes yeah the tubes I think, are the best part to me.

It's not just that they're attaching what looks like little explosive devices to walls.

It's that they're all chained together.

Yeah.

All willy-nilly.

They're having like a LAN party for bombs.

And she goes up to the clarinet closet and is trying to get Archer's attention.

Even though she's invisible and inaudible, she wants him to know about these bombists.

And because she is there, she observes Captain Archer getting her dad on FaceTime so that he can break the bad news about her untimely demise.

And

man, Archer is so bad at the, like, for as good as he is at receiving bad news, he is so bad at delivering bad news.

I can understand being Star Truck by Fuck Bokai,

but

Archer is the absolute absolute worst at conveying this message.

And

that you would get this guy on screen and go on and on about what a transporter is.

When are you going to say that she's dead?

What the fuck?

Archer, you are so bad.

So bad at this.

It was infuriating.

It was really brutal.

I mean, all fuck Bokai can do is be like, yeah, I guess I'm going to try to process whatever it is you just said.

I'm sorry, Captain.

You are not making any sense.

Are you driving at something in particular or...

Jesus.

Only one episode for Keoni Young on this show.

I would have loved to get Hoshi's dad back.

More jobs for Fuck Bokai.

That's what I say.

I'm going to canonically believe that Hoshi's dad is Fuck Bokai forevermore.

So instead of the episode pivoting into Fuck Bokai and maybe like more of his his background and his family situation, it would have been nice.

Hoshi is working on sending an SOS using some lights on the ceiling in Archer's ready room.

And it is so important that she is stretched out so far that her tank top clings ever tighter to her body during.

She's like insinuating her fingers into

the bulkhead and is able to cause a light to blink.

And so she's trying to do an SOS, and Archer notices it and correctly interprets it as an SOS and calls TePaul in.

SOS.

And Tabal is like, I don't know about this Morse code shit.

It's probably nothing, Archer.

Don't pay any attention to that.

She totally talks about caring about this.

SOS.

SOS.

It's a call for help.

But also, you're the captain, and if you care about something, you can choose to care about it all the way.

He's such a fucking dullard.

He's so incurious that he's like, meh, all right.

The bombers are still at work setting up all of their bombs.

One of them goes into the engine room using what I believe is our first canonical example of hexagonal luggage in Star Trek.

And

he's putting a bomb up on the top of the warp core.

And Hoshi, like, goes back to that room that she found them in and

interestingly comes up with a way to throw wooden shoes into their wooden shoes.

Yeah.

It's pretty great.

Her relationship to the aliens and the alien devices is so interesting in that like she can hear and see them.

They can't hear and see her.

She can sort of interact with their devices though in a useful way.

They get frustrated and like...

you know, yell at each other in alien a bit.

And then it seemed like they kind of beamed in a transporter pad and then each beamed out on it.

Yeah.

And then they were going to just leave that behind, right?

I guess if your end goal is to destroy the ship, you don't need any of that stuff anyway.

Yeah.

That stuff isn't evidence.

She beams out too.

She hops onto their transporter pad after they're gone and rematerializes on the entrepreneur, like right where she materialized the first time.

And what she finds out is that Tripp and Reed have been standing there, not experiencing the same passage of time that she has.

She just came up from the surface.

And this was just a little, they were like resolving a little glitch.

And for like a couple of seconds, you know, her matter stream didn't come together and she was in the pattern buffer.

And

this was just a weird waking nightmare that she had because she was in like a limbo transporter state.

it's wild to think about like for eight seconds she was completely separated on an atomic level yeah and yet there were enough atoms to produce a dream or a memory that she could maneuver within she confabulated cyrus ramsey cyrus who

yeah that was like the first thing i was i started wondering about as the reveal was done in this episode and i was so glad that they addressed it.

Like nobody has heard of Cyrus Ramsey.

Pretty amazing.

Finally, in Six Bay, Dr.

Flux gives Hoshi a clean bill of health.

The same clean bill of health that she got in her imagination.

So that can't make her feel too good at this point.

Not reassuring.

She says, you know, the obligatory, I'm not going to be doing that transporter nonsense anytime soon.

Shuttle's for me from here on in.

Nothing bad ever happened to anyone in a shuttle on Star Trek.

Freeze frame roll credits.

Did you like this episode, Adam?

It had such potential, like as a spooky story, as a story that teaches us something about Hoshi

or her relationship to other people.

I mean, as an expression of her imagination, her hallucination does does tell us a little bit about how she sees other people, especially Archer, who is depicted as

even worse in her imagination than he is in real life, and yet totally plausible in how shitty he is as a person, as a captain.

Like, there was nothing about his behavior that made me feel like, oh, well, he sticks out in a weird way.

Like, no, totally plausible.

I mean, as a Hoshi in Jim clothes episode, also, like, a great expression of that as a design to an Enterprise episode.

I just wish that, like, it was a little more toothsome in the ways that we tend to prefer episodes be about Mayweather.

When Mayweather is tortured by his circumstances, we learn nothing about Mayweather before, during, or after.

And at the end of this episode, I feel a little bit similarly in that, cool, it's good to learn about how she feels about other people.

But, like, all all the stuff that Trip Tucker expressed, hallucination Trip Tucker, I should say, expressed in the Turbo Lift was just a product of Hoshi's own imagination.

We aren't really learning about how other people feel about her in any constructive way.

So, or how she feels about herself.

Like, the only character trait that is really expressed over and over again is, I'm nervous about the Transporter.

You know,

when she sees

Fuckbookai on screen, that was, I thought, an opportunity to feel something deeply for her circumstances through her.

Like, that seems like the ultimate moment to be like, oh, fuck, they're telling my parents, this is real, this might be permanent.

I love Hoshi for like always staying on mission and trying to figure out her circumstances.

Yeah.

But like, I think it's also okay to recognize how profoundly emotional a moment like that might be.

And maybe because fuck Bokai was also unemotional during, that would have made it clang a little bit if she was the only one falling apart.

But I guess in general, I would have wanted to feel more

during this app than I did.

Than just like, let's figure out the mystery.

This should have been mystery and emotion, and it was just mystery to me.

What about you?

Yeah, like if they'd established that her relationship with her father was really strained and then he was like

really torn up and she saw that you know like that could have like pushed her character in a direction of feeling like she needed to reconnect and and you know repair something like that's just one of a million directions they could have gone in i think that i just found myself feeling very betrayed by the deus hex machina of oh it was all just in your imagination and i mean like To this episode's credit, I think it's about, you know, an important topic, women like getting ignored by people that when they're saying something is wrong.

That happens over and over again.

And it's, I think, thematically an interesting thing to explore in an episode, but that we just get the carpet pulled out from under us at the end.

And it's like, oh, yeah, it was meaningless.

Like, none of the people that were ignoring her were real people.

That was just like solipsistic.

projections from within her mind in the two seconds once her matter stream started to rematerialize.

It just like it winds up being a bunch of sturm and drang signifying nothing.

That's the quote, right?

Sure is.

Let's see what kind of either sturm or drang is in our priority one messages.

Let's do it.

Priority one message from Starfleet coming in on secured channel.

Need a supplemental income.

Supplemental income.

Supplemental.

Supplemental income.

Yeah, it's extra.

But the interest alone could be enough to buy this ship.

Adam, we have a promotional message today.

It goes like this.

Everyone knows when William Hartnell retired from Doctor Who, the BBC put a new, different actor in the role, setting a precedent that allowed the show to continue for decades.

What my theory presupposes is maybe that works for podcast co-hosts?

That's right.

The Doctor's Watcher, the classic Doctor Who podcast about every single episode of Doctor Who, just started on the second Doctor and has a new co-host.

Listen to Kyle, aka Cage23 on Discord, tell his brother Ryan all about Doctor Who.

And imagine having the sort of show where you change co-hosts every time you get a new character.

Oh man.

That's something that I wouldn't like, but I think you probably would.

That's the dream right there.

How many Doctor Who's were there ever?

Like 16?

I think it's like how many stations are there in the Tokyo subway?

It's sort of an uncountable number.

I mean, just as there are uncountable number of episodes in the Doctor Who oeuvre.

The Doctor Whovre.

Yeah.

If you will.

If we'd been smart,

we would have done a Doctor Who show because then you never run out.

Instead, we've got finite resource that is Star Trek.

I can't get purchase on Doctor Who as a thing.

I've tried watching it in a number of spots, seeing if it takes.

It's not taking.

It's never took.

I don't think it's for me.

I've never seen a single frame of it.

Yeah.

I don't even know really what it's about.

I think

there's like a police phone booth in it.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I love that people really like it.

Maybe I still haven't found the right entry point after trying eight or nine times.

Maybe I should just give up.

I mean, there's always new doctors, so you know, if one doesn't work, just wait a little while.

Maybe I just haven't found my doctor.

Yeah.

Well, if you'd like to get something in the priority one inbox, we'd sure appreciate it.

MaximumFun.org/slash jumbotron is where you go to set one up.

Hey, Ben.

Ooh, what's that, Adam?

Did you find yourself a drunk Shimoda?

Incredible.

Drunk Shimoda!

I didn't, Adam.

This episode, I am not nominating a drunk Shimoda.

I am nominating a Jim Shimoda.

and my Jim Shimoda is Trip Tucker for finally

being somebody who has the balls has the courage to get on

the space camp device and use it and he's having a great time doing it that's got to be a thrill for any actor to get in that thing yeah yeah that's my Q ⁇ A question at any future convention that that actor attends I want to know more about that pretty great yeah indeed how about you did you have a drunk drunk Shimoda or Jim Shimoda?

If I ever go to Garrett Wong's house and see that thing there,

I will not be surprised either.

No, that's probably why he lives in Vegas, you know?

Just have a lot more space for his collection, including really large format items like that.

He was stating the obvious again.

Unfortunately, one of the legs is broken off and it doesn't stand upright anymore.

Yeah.

As many of these props are, they're a little battle damaged.

Yeah.

Then my drunk Shimoda is going to be hallucination Captain Archer, a man almost indistinguishable to me from the real thing.

I love the idea that she goes to work every day and this is what she thinks of him.

Holy moly.

Like, show me the...

insides of every other bridge crewman and what they think of Archer also.

Give me two episodes like that every season and I'll be happy.

I love that idea.

Maybe we will get it.

Maybe.

Maybe that will just be in my head.

Faith of the fart.

Well, Adam, let me put something in your head about next week's episode.

It's season two, episode 11, Precious Cargo.

Trip boards an alien cargo vessel to help repair a stasis pod which holds a beautiful woman in suspended animation.

When the woman accidentally wakes up, She reveals she's not a passenger, but a prisoner.

Hey, Trip's ready for romance again.

He's been on the sidelines for a

dozen episodes.

And now I'm back.

Ready for love.

Ready for love and all of the above.

Guest starring, beautiful woman, Padma Lakshmi, this episode.

How about that?

Yeah.

That's great.

Good for Padma.

Do you want to find out how we will be recording this episode with me?

If you do, head to goch.biz slash game where we keep the game of buttholes,

the will of the riker, quantum leap.

I'm going to roll this hundred-sided die, which is currently on square 83.

Could take us anywhere on the board.

You're required to learn as you play.

Roll.

Oh,

shit, dog.

I landed on a Naomi Wildman Square.

This is the second time in a very rapid turnaround, I feel like, where each host must make a piece of artwork representing the episode and share it with the other.

And we have to post pictures of our artwork.

The Naomi Wildman Square has been on the board for

a hundred episodes?

More, probably.

And now we've hit it twice in the span of...

I don't know, like less than 10.

That's incredible.

Yeah, it's especially interesting to hit it randomly because we were having a meeting this morning where Rob was like, yeah, like people really liked the artwork thing that you guys posted when you hit that Naomi Wildman Square.

You should do that again.

Well, I'm going to have to get more Gatorade and drinking straws for the next episode.

Wow.

Well, that will be next week's episode of The Greatest Generation.

Thank you to everyone who supports the ongoing production of this show with a membership at maximumfund.org slash join.

Really, really appreciate y'all.

We also appreciate Wendy Pretty, our producer and editor, and the aforementioned Rob Adler, who runs the At Greatest Trek social media accounts, along with Bill Tilley, our temporal Cold Wartime consiguier.

Hey, this music you're hearing right now,

it's by Dark Materia,

one of the greats, one of the all-time greats, but our theme interstitial music, built, constructed, and auto-tuned by the great Adam Ragusia.

He does great work, and we're working with him on another show.

It's called Wholesome.

Check that out if you want to listen to another roughly 45 minutes of me and Ben and Adam Ragusia talking about the stuff that makes us happy in our lives.

Yeah, it's been a very gratifying project and I think the episodes are really good.

It's true.

Well with that, we will be back at you next time with another great episode of Star Trek Enterprise and an episode of the Greatest Generation Enterprise that is probably going to have to try to fight its way back in last chance kitchen.

That is a cooking show reference.

Yeah, isn't that the one that Padmalakshmi's on?

I don't know.

Competition cooking show?

I don't fucking know.

Bye-bye.

Make it so.

Make it so.

You wonder why Star Wars is so much more popular.

It's like so much more in the cultural imagination when there's no fucking sex at all in Star Wars.

Like,

the sexiest it gets is that time that guy kisses his sister.

Pretty sexy stuff.

I guess so.

Yeah, I guess that is what all porn websites are now.

Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows, supported directly by you.