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Here's to the finest crew in Starring.
When it comes to my crew, you won't get any argument from me.
This is a parody.
Paramount wants 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.
You ever think about what future you might be doing on the 30th of December?
Hmm.
Man, this is the 30th of December that this episode comes out?
Yeah.
We're doing a lot of work right now to give people a peek behind the pod.
We're trying.
Lordy, we're trying to give
us and the folks who we work with a little bit of a holiday break.
So
we're recording extra episodes to try to build that runway, and it's a great amount of work for everyone involved.
Not just us, but everyone who helps make these shows.
Yeah, you know, there's a pipeline and you pack it with the various gristle and
leavings that we use to make the sausage.
Yeah.
And you try and pack it in faster so that, you know, you can get some extra sausage out the other end.
It's not always easy.
Yeah, we're like that I Love Lucy episode where the episodes keep coming on the conveyor belt and where
we're stuffing jokes in and stuffing jokes in our mouths.
And it's just a mess.
I was listening to another podcast, and they were mentioning that they were like four months ahead on records.
And I was just like, holy shit.
Is that aspirational in your mind?
It would be kind of amazing to be that far out.
I mean, we could just be like, okay, we're going to take the quarter off on recording.
How about new?
I don't see what you said ever happening, even if we had the longest runway of episodes in the can.
Like, I don't think the work ever stops.
I mean, that's partly just your disposition, though.
Like, you don't, you, like, refuse to accept an idea of a world in which the work ever stops.
So even when there isn't that much to do, you will find a way to white knuckle it and get yourself all worked up.
You really know me, Ben.
You do.
Nothing you say is wrong.
But also,
The like recording the show part of this job is the part that I like the most.
I know, and I would never want to quit that.
Part of the reason for having a team, as we now do, is that we get to kind of focus on the parts that we're actually good at and leave the parts that we suck at and make us feel bad to much more talented people.
I've been having a bad day, man.
Oh, but I've been looking forward to getting on the mic all day for hours.
It's already working.
I am so glad that this show can be here for you in a time like this.
What do you do when you're feeling bad?
Give me the Benjamin R.
Harrison self-soothe tips.
I thought you were about to say self-suck.
And that is one thing.
I mean, that's why you got the rowing machine.
You want to get yourself back into foldable shape, right?
Rowing machine is one of them.
You know, like a workout is a.
That's part of my angst, man.
I'm more than four weeks without
as prescribed for my doctor, and I feel all caged up.
I feel real bad.
That'll do it.
Yeah, I've found that like increasing the amount of protein in my diet is helpful
for mood stabilization.
So you're saying a bunch of Halloween candy and
alcohol and not working out.
You think these have had a detrimental effect on my mentals?
Everybody's body is different, and everybody's body reacts to stimuli in their own subjective way.
So I'm not saying that what works for me will necessarily work for you.
Yeah, don't take advice of any kind from Star Trek podcasters or podcasters in general.
That's crazy.
That's something that I would accept as axiomatic, Adam.
Yeah.
Speaking of your future self, what about your past self?
What about a pre-nuclear self?
What do you think that guy is up to?
Think about that guy all the time.
How innocent those days were.
Hmm.
Yeah.
It must have been nice.
Yeah.
Do you want to talk about some past people?
Spend some time in that rarefied pre-nuclear air?
You know, thinking about how difficult and how great the struggle must have been for past people is making present me feel a little better by comparison.
I'm feeling better already, Ben.
Let's get in there and talk about Enterprise Season 2, Episode 8:
The Communicator.
So a shuttle returns to the Entrepreneur and Hoshi and Archer and Reed get off and they are loaded up with loaf.
And it's not surgical, like specifically.
This is peel-off latex loaf.
They're talking about how tired they are from the mission and that much is obvious.
They've developed six pack abs on their foreheads almost as if like
squinting was the workout.
Have you ever seen a fully developed forehead like with musculature?
That's what this looks like.
Yeah, like real pain and gain energy in the forehead area.
Yeah.
That's it.
Get it.
I went to ice hockey summer camp one year in the Okanagan in Canada to try and get better at ice hockey.
And I remember one of my counselors yelling at everybody in my bunk that we needed to be doing more sit-ups and we should have six little raviolis on our bellies.
And that was the way he described six packs.
And I've never been able to think of them as anything but raviolis ever since then.
So these guys have real ravioli head.
Why was Coach Luigi always talking about
crunching the raviola?
Counselor Boyardee was, he was a real hard ass.
Hey, coach, I understand it's cold out here, but why is the Gatorade bucket filled with a minestrone?
It's getting clogged in the spigot.
You're like hitting the button harder and harder, but nothing's coming out.
We win the big tournament at the end of camp, and he's scalded when we dump it on his head.
Yeah.
Yeah, you just stand in a big melted spot in the middle of the ice
in a in a pool of rapidly cooling minestrone.
Just getting pelted by those rinds of parmesan that you throw in there.
Delicious.
Oh man.
I made a bean soup last night.
You can really elevate most soups with a bunch of grated cheese on top.
Sure.
I thought the soup I made was fine, but God, you put you put the grated parmes on there.
Yeah, yeah, that'll do it.
You get that umami going.
It's all you need.
Um
it was real good.
Do you do the like spent rind of parm in the in the broth as it simmers or or in your in your like pasta sauces as they simmer?
You know, I do save those, but I save those in a cut bag.
I've got a cut bag of vegetable and cheese rind in a gallon size Ziploc in my freezer.
And then I have a cut bag of bones.
Yeah.
That's bones in my freezer that I use for making stock and I make stock every couple of months out of both of those bags Yeah, in the biggest pot that I've got and then I reduce all that down into the little
silicone cocktail ice cube trays and I got those ready to go and that's what I put in my sauces.
So I'm not using the
the raw materials Ben like you're asking right I'm using the
the constructed demi gloss that I've made out of all that stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, speaking of demigloss, they do not need to smear themselves when they get to the decon chamber.
I love a little slide-open window like this.
Anytime there's a club that people are trying to get into in a movie or something like that, and a window slides open, I am delighted.
Welcome home.
Flox pokes his head in and says, Hey, you guys,
you're good to go.
You don't need to decontaminate at all.
When you're in the decon chamber and you don't do that, it's sort of Chekhov's lube, isn't it?
Like, I love this part of Star Trek, and I've talked about it with respect to ships, like the maintenance of ships, the busy work of ships, whatever.
But this is like the post-mission moment where you got to do all the admin work.
You got to take off your loaf and your costume and like do the accounting of all the stuff.
Maybe you lube yourself up with the decontamination gel.
I like seeing all this stuff.
This is just a part of living in a Star Trek world.
It's a ton of fun.
And yeah, there's uniforms hanging up in there.
And they're going to get out of their civilian garb.
And as they're doing this, a moment that is very familiar to me and I'm sure something you've never personally experienced happens to Malcolm Reed where he's like patting all his pockets and he's like, ah, fuck.
Ah, fuck.
Something's missing.
Why am I made to feel bad when you say something like that?
You're the one that should feel bad.
I i do feel bad
you should feel worse i lost something adam i lost something okay
you don't think i feel bad about that
it's just annoying that it never happens to you re didn't do the idiot check before leaving the planet and uh left a communicator he thinks
down there during the mission oh man the like twist of the knife of showing the scene where he's looking in like the garbage where he definitely didn't throw his communicator and Hoshi's like crawling around looking under the seats in the shuttle pod and stuff.
Ugh, you just your your your guts drop.
There's something about as you describe looking in the place that obviously it isn't whatever the object is that you've lost like digging through the garbage when you know it's not in the garbage is like a form of masochism that like i deserve this i deserve to dig in fucking trash because i'm a trash person who forgets things like you know it's not in the garbage and yet you do it i'm not saying you i'm saying the person who loses stuff like we no one deserves that i was cooking chicken burgers last night and i'd uh i'd put my my panko and my milk in a bowl and that was uh getting ready softening up and then i was like i need an egg as a binder for this ground chicken meat sure you do and my wife had just mentioned that she went out for a fresh doze of eggs because now that we have a toddler, we just go through eggs so fucking fast.
I can't believe it.
Darone is just drinking them Rocky Balboa style.
Yeah.
I don't know why you mess around with the omelets, Ben.
Just crack them into his
little sippy cup.
Into the sippy cup full of
Miller High Life that he drinks every morning.
Yeah.
No, so I look in the fridge, no eggs, don't see them in the place in the fridge where eggs go, and I'm like, shit, well, she definitely, like, took the car and went somewhere.
So they must have just like gotten left in the car, went to look in the car, looked every conceivable inch of the car over that I could, not in the car.
And I'm like, damn, maybe she went out for eggs and like did that thing where you like pick up some cheese and a bottle of wine and you forget the thing that you went to the grocery store for.
Were you thinking at all that she may have your dad with seafood leftovers,
those eggs?
Like, because you don't want to leave eggs in the car for days.
You do not.
I couldn't turn them up, came back in.
I was like, I guess I'm cooking these chicken burgers without eggs as a binder.
And I was trying to like strategize what else.
I was like, okay, well, like, I'm, I'm already like, a lot of things are in the mix.
I'll figure this out.
And I went to like get my veg ready, like all my bib lettuce and my tomatoes cut up and everything.
Damn, this sounds really nice as a midweek meal.
Yeah, and then I went into the fridge for something else.
Eggs were there, just on a different shelf on the opposite side than they ever are.
I had done an extensive search and rescue operation for these fucking eggs, and they were right in the fridge the whole time.
I think your wife's fucking with you.
This is what gaslighting is originally, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You don't deserve that as the primary meal maker in your household?
There's a place for eggs.
There is a place for eggs.
Eggs always in the same place.
Yeah.
Eggs and keys.
Always in the same place.
That's the rule.
Yeah.
You just feel terrible for Reed.
And they get up to the bridge, and Hoch is like...
I would pull that back a little bit.
As much suffering as it seems as though Reed is going through, Reed is not a likable character for me to have a greater amount of empathy for during a moment like this.
I'm just, I identify with the man as a lover of pineapple and of losing shit occasionally.
Yeah.
Yeah, but you hit the target in a lot of ways that he just does not.
They go up to the bridge and Toshi is like, okay, I can probably scan for this thing and figure out where we left it.
And initially, she's got a two-kilometer box for them to look in, which is a pretty big search radius, not something that they are super excited to try and
return to the surface and look within.
I just want to hop in here and say that Hoshi doesn't have a two kilometer box.
She has geolocated the possible places where the communicator could be to an area that size.
Right.
And she's not bragging.
about size.
Right.
I think if you were to read the transcript of this episode, that might be confusing.
I just want to clear that up for the episode readers at home.
War is brewing on the surface of this planet.
It's discussed that they, you know, like saw a political rally and there's a lot of propaganda afoot.
And it's a bit of a touchy situation to go back into,
but they are going to have to go back down.
And eventually they figure out like, okay, it's...
It's like, here's like a few blocks that is within.
And Reed recognizes the part of town that they're looking at as a place where they went to a tavern.
So that seems like a good place to start.
Trips like a tavern?
I could go on this mission.
I describe myself as a bloodhound, mostly for the number of nipples that you'll find on my person.
Rose and Rose.
You're never going to let that go, are you?
Trips shut down here.
He wants to go, but cannot.
So in the shuttle down, it's Archer and Reed.
Do you think that a Klingon that really enjoys drinking is called a blood wine hound?
Yes.
Yes, I do.
This is also very familiar to me.
Reed on the way down and like, dad hasn't said anything yet.
And Reid is like, come on, just punish me, man.
Like, tell me what kind of time I'm going to be serving in detention or whatever.
Adam and Ben riding the elevator back up to their hotel rooms after a show.
Like, I guess our flight is at 10.
And if you can make contact with the venue before we have to go to the airport, like, I guess that's the plan at this point.
I can't believe I walked out of there without my backpack that has the iPad and the laptop that our show runs off of in it.
Adam is like, I can't believe that either, Ben.
In the shuttle down, I mean, it's clear how bad Reed feels, but it's also clear to what extent archer will go to be a cool boss in a moment like this yeah archer is not atoming here archer is doing what he can to make it seem as though there will not be punishment at all for this transgression it's going to be fine we're going to we're going to make this right and uh you know the natural consequences we have to go back down and duck under the cloud cover before these fighter jets shoot us out of the sky yeah and uh that'll be okay but we've done that already.
Yeah.
Successfully.
This is the briar patch for us.
Hey, Reed, try not to fucking lose the shuttle while we're off doing our search.
See, these are balls that I would kick the entire episode if I were Archer.
You make sure that the lowjack was active before we departed, Reid?
They go back into this bar, and much like the Cheesecake Factory, their table is ready.
What did you make of how uncomfortable it was when they walked in?
I clocked immediately that it was quiet.
Quiet in the bar.
No din and no music, either diegetic or non-diegetic.
There's just like nothing going on in there in a way that creeped me out.
There's a table seated right in the middle of the restaurant full of soldiers, and
that feels portentious.
They all kind of get the hairy eyeball from these soldiers and they go sit in the booth and Reed tries to be slick when he like goes under the table in the booth, which is such a hard thing to do.
I know you've never had to do this, Adam, but when you lose something in a restaurant booth, it's hard because the table is affixed to the floor and the chairs are affixed to the floor.
So there's no way to like pull stuff away so you can look under.
If my jacket slides off of the booth seat onto the floor, like I kind of want to leave it forever at that point.
The idea of crawling around under this thing the way Reed does kind of nauseated me.
Because it is so hard to look for something under there, you imagine as you are doing that, how hard it must be to clean under there also.
And sometimes you see things that you cannot unsee when you're looking for your wallet under the booth.
There's no way it's not sticky down there.
Yeah, it's bad.
And the communicator is not there.
A server comes over and is asking them what they want.
And they're like, dude, you haven't even dropped menus on the table yet.
What are you fucking talking about?
Yeah, the question of still or sparkling is proffered.
And yeah, like, yeah, water first.
Please.
Please.
I'm parched.
Maybe a breadbasket.
It's not too much trouble.
The server isn't...
totally suspicious, but he is a little weird.
Yeah.
Even before he goes and signals the uniformed folks sitting around their table, something just feels a little off about this guy's performance.
And I thought it was kind of magical for that reason.
I don't know how you direct whatever this performance is, but he seems to be doing regular server stuff.
But something's not right about this interaction.
And when he goes and flags the uniform officers at that table, nothing is surprising about that interaction at all.
New.
So Reed is like sneakily trying to look at his tricorder down by his side, and he locates the communicator, and it's like down a hallway.
And
man, such bad OPSEC to send both of them down the hallway to look for it, you know?
Like Archer's got to hang out at the table while Reed goes down there and like, you know, does the ginger back of the knuckle on the bathroom door.
Is anybody in there?
You got to be sure
when there's a beaded curtain,
what's going to be on the other side right because beaded curtain can mean a lot of things beaded curtain can mean barrier or beaded curtain can be code for come on in if you're looking for something specific yeah there
there's an implied sexiness behind a beaded curtain i think
every time right yeah there is no non-sexual connotation of a beaded curtain is there
i'm really struggling to think of one uh
yeah well the lady that bakes the chocolate chip cookies in the matrix she was a fucking freak right
what a pull
here
wow
take a cookie oh man yeah
you think she's just uh sitting on those cookies to flatten them out before baking is that what's going on back there yeah i think when i was in high school i thought like having a lava lamp and a beaded curtain would make me more interesting.
And I went to like urban outfitters and got one of each.
But my bedroom door was just a normal door.
So for a while, there was a thing where you would have to open the door and then go through the beaded curtain and then reach back through the beaded curtain to close the door.
I would say it didn't work, you know?
Would you occasionally like close the door and the beads would get stuck in the door?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Oh, my god.
How long did you live that way?
Too long.
Let's just admit it that it was too long.
I will also admit that I had a lava lamp in my freshman dorm room, as everyone I knew did.
Yeah, you had to go down to the Ave and go to the head shop that had the posters and the lava lamps.
It's a rite of passage.
It was a law at the time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I bet Zoomers aren't doing that bullshit.
Right.
Never fucked with the beaded curtain, though.
That is
great detail.
That's fun.
They're down this hallway.
There's two people in the room, as revealed by Malcolm's scanner.
You can also just tell because that little occupied...
thing is visible on the door lock.
Yeah.
So they like are heading back to their booth and it turns into a great big bar fight with all of these soldiers.
What do you make of Reed punching first?
I love that for him.
I was very embarrassed for him though that he got his ass kicked.
Like he is he is like KO'd on the floor by the time the three guys subdue Archer.
And I'm like, come on, Reed, you gotta, you're the fucking tactics guy.
You gotta, you gotta take at least a couple of dudes out before the fight is over.
I hung out with folks like this in college once, and then I would stop hanging out with these people.
Oh, like guys who go to bars looking for trouble to get into?
Yeah, that is not what I'm going to a bar for.
I never, I maybe it's just because of my like my height.
I, I never felt like I was like
at much risk in those crowds.
But yeah, they got, you know, like, especially if you're like, hey, like, I'm going to hang out with these new guys.
You You want to come to like a buddy?
And then they, then
folks in bars see you across the bar and they're like, that guy, that guy's been through enough.
Yeah, I don't think anybody has ever misread me as guy who can fight.
That's not what I'm trying to imply.
I'm just,
you know, I'm rangy, you know.
Yeah, I believe it.
I think the promise of me in any fight is that it would just be ugly.
Yeah, yeah.
And bad.
I bet you scrap nasty.
That's, I think that's just it.
It would be bad for everyone involved.
No one would feel good about it.
They'd be like, Adam, that thing where you grab a guy and drag him along the bar so that his face smashes into every Stein and bottle along the way, that's only for movies.
You can't do that move in real life.
That's an unsanctioned move.
Yeah, movie moves are not for real fights, that's for sure.
So at the end of this fight, these military guys drag them into that back room they were trying to get into.
And this has gone from bad to worse because now the locals don't just have one communicator.
They have a phase pistol.
They have a couple of communicators.
They have a couple of tricorders.
They have multiplied the scale of this contamination many times.
And when all of their tech is put on the table like so much dope,
it's pretty clear that they're lying when they say they don't know anything about this stuff.
You know, like the sheer quantity of the tech makes this pretty far-fetched.
And the assumption in the room seems pretty fair, right?
Archer and Reed are spies.
How could they not be?
There's an alliance that these guys are very concerned about.
And they're like, you know what?
You're probably from them.
You've got these weird gadgets that we don't know what they are.
This weird gun that we don't know what it is.
You're going to the complex.
And an unmistakable music cube drops
i love it so much it's it's so weird that they just respawn in this specific spot yeah and wait there's a proximity mine here what the fuck
on enterprise it is clear that something has gone wrong with the mission and Tepal blows in a call to Archer, but no one answers.
No one answers in a very specific way.
A way that conveys that the channel is open and there's like some room tone
happening.
Like you never get room tone in Star Trek depicted in this way.
But here it is.
And as soon as they realize that like the channel's open, TePaul's like, nope, kill it.
And Hoshi has found the signal.
for where Reed and Archer are, but it is super far away from where they started.
And actually, Ben, I have no idea how far away this is.
It's in a unit of measurement I've never been able to figure out, but it seems like a place that would be difficult to walk to.
Yeah.
There has been some discussion of how much walking they've been doing due to, I guess, parking pretty far outside of town when they take their shuttlecraft down.
And that is underlined with a great big underline in the next scene as we start on a close-up of Reed's foot as he rubs it in pain.
I love how Reed tin mans the word Epsom salt.
I wonder if the god would bring us some Epsom salt.
Tin man.
He does that a couple of times in this episode.
You want to put a little hop in your step on any given day?
Just tin man something weird like that.
Is this a British guy thing?
Great question.
I really think it's a Star Trek thing.
It happens all the time.
Yeah.
So an idea comes up here because they're now in jail like this this this mission to rescue a communicator could not be going worse and they're like what about
just saying
what we really are
they'll let us go right we could give them a tour of the ship they would love that the truth
really
i don't know man No one would believe them is the conclusion they draw.
Like, their story is crazy.
So, finally, as they're discussing this, they're taken to a room to meet Ghosis, and it's clearly an interrogation room because of how that light is hanging over the table, right?
Indeed.
General Ghosis is played by a guy named Francis Guinen.
Can you imagine
going to work on Star Trek with a last name like that?
Why didn't they cast him as that alien barkeep?
I don't know.
Yeah, that would have been much more appropriate.
Yeah.
They blew it.
Like, Dennis Cochran is definitely showing up at the same casting calls as Francis Guynan.
Like, they're, Dennis Cochran is a Francis Guynan type, and vice versa.
Dennis Cochran sounds like the first draft of Zephyr Cochran.
Dennis Cochran?
That doesn't...
That's not going to work.
I can't see that name in the historical literature for Starfleet.
We got to punch that up.
He heard TePaul's hail.
He was the person on the other end of the line when she risked calling down to the surface.
And he's like, what is this thing?
Who is this T-Paul?
How far away is she?
What are the capabilities of this device?
This is an interrogation that gets punchy pretty quickly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because the Alliance.
are the enemies of Ghosis and his troops.
And when Archer and Reed don't answer the questions to their satisfaction, I love how Archer is the only one for the longest time who gets punched in the face.
It does not seem fair.
He does get punched in the face an awful lot in general, though, right?
Like, I would say, like, every third or fourth mission, Archer can rely on
taking one to the kisser.
Yeah.
These punches to the face continue as they are talked about their possible plans to assassinate Chancellor Culture.
And as the punches rain down on them, their six-pack foreheads start to split open, revealing that they've got smooth brows underneath.
This is like when you get filler injections to make it look like you're more muscular than you actually are, and then they start to decay.
You know, in my advanced age, I'm starting to understand fillers and all that shit.
Not enough for me to ever get them, but I get it.
Yeah, I get it.
Red blood?
There is a lot about Reed and Archer that just do not make any sense to these troops, but maybe it'll make sense to their doctor.
And a doctor is where they're taken for a full examination.
And Ben, what no one says, but that I know you and I know, is that this exam is going to be nude, right?
It's going to be nude and it's going to be probing.
Because when any doctor has a chance to give an exam to an alien,
it's going everywhere, right?
Yeah, you're going to want to see everything.
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Friends of DeSoto, we survived Star Trek Las Vegas 2025.
All seven days of it.
And boy, oh boy, do we have thoughts?
So many thoughts that we just had to record a very special bonus episode about our experiences with me and Ben, but also producer Wendy and our social media concigliary Bill.
You'll get an honest review of things.
all the gossip, the stuff that worked, the stuff that didn't, and some big takeaways as we plan for next year.
So if you want to know what STLV was really like, the bonus feed is how you find it.
By the way, this bonus episode, like all of our monthly bonus episodes, are available to everyone who supports the shows at maximumfund.org slash join.
It's easy to do, so go to maximumfund.org slash join to get our special episode about STLV 2025 and all the great episodes that we put out every month.
You know, we've been doing My Brother, My Brother Me for 15 years.
And
maybe you stopped listening for a while, maybe you never listened.
And you're probably assuming three white guys talking for 15 years, I know where this has ended up.
But no.
No, you would be wrong.
We're as shocked as you are that we have not fallen into some sort of horrific scandal or just turned into a big crypto thing.
Yeah, you don't even really know how crypto works.
the only nfts i'm into are naughty funny things which is what we talk about on my brother my brother and me
we serve it up every monday for you if you're listening and if not we just leave it out back and goes rotten so check it out on maximum fun or wherever you get your podcasts
all right we're over 70 episodes into our show let's learn everything so let's do a quick progress check Have we learned about quantum physics?
Yes, episode 59.
We haven't learned about the history of gossip yet, have we?
Yes, we have.
Same episode, actually.
Have we talked to Tom Scott about his love of roller coasters?
Episode 64.
So, how close are we to learning everything?
Bad news.
We still haven't learned everything yet.
Oh, we're ruined!
No, no, no, it's good news as well.
There is still a lot to learn.
Woo!
I'm Dr.
Ella Hubber.
I'm regular Tom Lum.
I'm Caroline Roper, and on Let's Learn Everything, we learn about science and a bit of everything else too.
And although we haven't learned everything yet, I've got a pretty good feeling about this next episode.
Join us every other Thursday on Maximum Fun.
And you will never take the greatest gym alive.
Ben would rather die.
Meanwhile, back up on the ship, Hoshi has located where this nudity is going to be taking place.
She's got overhead photography of the complex.
And
Trip wants to do a raid.
He's like very excited about getting another raid in.
And Tepal points out that like every time they send something to the surface, they risk leaving more shit behind.
And this will contaminate this pre-warp society and potentially really fuck shit up.
And Trip has a great idea.
He's like, you know, we have that cell ship from the Sulaban still aboard.
It has a cloaking device.
We can go there invisibly.
What a reminder to me and everyone else that they still have this thing.
Yeah, a a set that they never showed before, but they show now.
And this was really cool, I thought.
The full-size cell ship he and Mayweather hang out in.
They're trying to get the cloaking device working.
Tripp was confident when he pitched this idea to DePaul that he was on the verge of having everything ready to go with this ship.
And she gave it the okay.
And turns out he was kind of fibbing on that.
He's kind of reversed scottied this, right?
Which isn't just a sexual position anymore.
Right.
He's overestimated how quickly it will take to fix it up.
A reverse scotty is when you say, I'm coming, I'm coming, but you actually come a lot faster.
But you already came.
Yeah.
That position will break your dick.
Wait a second.
You're claiming that you're coming, but you have pulled out and nothing is burbling out.
What do you mean?
And you've also hit your head
on a low ceiling.
And also you're carrying your bloody nephew in your arms.
Yeah, that's all part of it.
Sick shit are you into, man?
Yeah, that's the reverse Scotty.
Trip is trying to boop some buttons, turn on this cloaking device when he gets blown back and is horrified to see that he cannot see, I can't see the nipples on my arms or my arm.
This effect was so much better than I expected.
You know, sometimes you can do the whole like Lieutenant Dan
no legs thing and it just seems a little off.
I thought this was super on.
They did a great job with it and I think part of what helps it is that there's like some glowy fuzzy effect around the barrier.
So they're not trying to sell that there's like a wrap of fabric around this or anything.
It's like it's disappearing into phased space.
Mayweather, I'm gonna need to take a break.
I gotta go, I gotta go do the super stranger.
Maybe I'll combine it with going for the record.
So in Six Bay, Dr.
Flox examines Trip Tucker and everything feels okay and normal.
That's the big takeaway here.
His right arm is just cloaked and it's going to return to normal eventually.
It's not the kind of cloak that Jordan Ensign Rowe had where you could accidentally go through a wall, though.
What's interesting about this moment is Dr.
Flox is like, look, I'm going to give you a glove and maybe you could switch uniforms so that you could see yourself.
But at no point is the case ever made for like the need for proprioception as an engineer or just as a human being.
Like,
how difficult do you think it would be if your arms were just cloaked or your arms and legs were cloaked and still there?
He can still feel it.
So
I guess with the glove on, he can, he's got enough information.
But yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, he's definitely entered a no-glove, no love phase of the episode.
I just wanted, give me a few more scenes.
Like, I know this is a serious episode, a dangerous episode, but like, let's go to the mess hall and have Trip do bits on people.
Like, I want to see, like, a spoon of lime jello, like, being held to his mouth for him to eat.
Just floating in air.
That's great.
The trick isn't to bend the spoon, it's to realize that there is no spoon.
How long ago has it been since you've seen The Matrix?
It seems very front of mind.
Years and years.
God, that scene is so weird.
Then you'll see this is not the spoon that bends.
It is only yourself.
That little kid is speaking backwards, right?
Like, he's phonetically talking backwards, and then they play it so that it sounds like it's forwards.
Wow.
I mean, I always thought that.
I haven't seen it in years and years, but I like that take.
I wonder if that's true.
There's something about his pronunciation of all the words that just seems so
forced and thoughtful
that it just sounds like someone speaking backwards that's then played forwards.
Yeah.
Down at the base, the soldiers led by General Gosis test out this hand phaser that they've recovered from Archer and Reed.
And when they see its destructive power, it fucking spooks them.
They are doing the math on if the guys that we're fighting have guns like this, like how the fuck could we possibly beat them?
Yeah.
And then Dr.
Temek shows up.
Dr.
Temek played by Brian Reddy.
A delightful that guy to see.
Of Seinfeld, of Oh, Brother, where art thou?
Jag.
That's where I know him.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
He has got some internal anatomy scans of Archer and Reed that look like they probably got cancer from getting scanned the way
he did this.
I love his medical conclusion.
These two guys right here are deformed.
They're even more abnormal on the inside.
So we get more interrogation, and now General Ghosis is starting to talk about them as though they may, in fact, be little green men.
Like if your Ufos were kind of onto you as that.
And Archer is like still trying to be tight-lipped.
Like he and Reed are really trying as much as they can not to say anything that they don't absolutely have to say to these guys.
And I loved that the generals like show like you're aliens, but like you're you're here because you're aliens that are friends with the alliance and you care very deeply about the geopolitics of my world and want to like, you know, help the bad guys or whatever.
Would you ever consider if your ghost is
punching an alien with what he knows to be superior technology and like a weird body makeup?
This seems to be asking for trouble in the worst way.
Yeah.
Like, this general must want to get the rectal probing of his life once the rest of the aliens come and fire in the sky this guy.
Maybe that's what he's into, General Ghosis, you know?
God, I just, I don't know if I would hit them anymore after knowing this.
He seems like a man uniquely ill-equipped to be making first contact.
Yeah.
Hey, Ghosis, is this your idea of Oobie-Doobie?
So Archer starts spinning a yarn about how, like, okay, yes, we're with the Alliance, and we're just a surveillance team.
We have these special planes that are undetectable by your radar.
And Reed is like, yeah, yeah, and we're genetically enhanced super soldiers.
And that's why our birdies are so weird and made out of toxic elements.
And these are all prototypes.
You got the only ones, so you don't need to worry about this being a mass-produced threat that your regular soldiers are going to meet on the battlefield with the Alliance.
This description has a terrible consequence, and that is, it makes clear that if Ghosis
decides to execute these prisoners, that ends the problem there.
Right.
Oh, no.
I loved Dr.
Temek being like, this is a plausible explanation.
We should believe these guys.
Yeah.
Yeah, and if they're dead, it makes it easier for the doctor to cut them open and study their guts.
Gonna get an alien autopsy out of this.
This is great.
Yeah.
So Hoshi has tapped the phones and picks up a transmission from the general to some politician giving an update on what's going on with these
surveillance team that they've captured.
And Tepaul realizes like it is it is getting urgent.
So she heads down and tells Tripp and Mayweather like Cloak or not, it's go time.
We don't have much time left before the captain and Reed get hung.
And like, we would really like to get the captain back.
Unfortunately, yeah, that's what they're obligated to do.
Over in the shuttle bay, Trip and Mayweather continue to work, and Mayweather jokes about what Trip could do with that cloaked hand.
Some of it innocent.
Be useful in a poker match.
Other ideas, he swears, are also innocent.
It might be helpful in movie night if you bring a date.
I could poke it up through the bottom of the popcorn bucket.
Yeah, but what's the status of the ship?
It seems like they've been working on it for a while.
That's what TePaul wants to know when she walks in.
Big surprise.
Their deadline is now two hours because of this
death by hanging.
Yeah.
Trip says that they're going to go ahead and launch with or without the cloak functioning.
We get a pretty long scene in the holding cell where Archer and Reed are kind of talking things over as they await execution.
This was when we learn that this is not just a pre-warp society, but a pre-nuclear fission society.
And they're talking about the lie that they have pulled and if it's going to be enough to
stop contamination from wrecking the natural evolution of these people.
Like Archer is still pretty sure that opening the kimono and admitting that they're aliens is a bad idea.
But the upshot is, like, they're hopeless, you know?
Like, there's not really anything they can do at this point.
It doesn't really seem to them that there's a plausible way for the ship to rescue them.
And even if they were to escape, they got these smooth foreheads.
Yeah.
How far are they going to get with those?
I loved the way this scene was lit because
it's very like
Cinema Studies 101 to have the character that's in the bad mood in the shadow, but Reed is in such a beautiful fucking shadow.
He starts the scene in the shadow and then kind of comes out into the light to talk to Archer.
And by the end of the scene, has receded back into it.
And it is just so beautifully flat.
Like, you can barely make him out in it.
And I just,
I thought it looked great.
James Cottner is the director of this episode.
He also did Carbon Creek.
All right.
Which I think is another notably remote set episode.
Totally.
Totally.
So our cell ship launches and it cloaks.
The cloak works.
I was surprised by this.
Like, no mention was made of successfully figuring this out, but we see it demonstrated en route.
Yeah.
Seems pretty crowded in there.
It's kind of a one-man ship that they've loaded three people into.
Yeah.
And as they are descending, the guards come to get the prisoners ready for their execution.
And this is the scene where we learn that they're not just pre-warped, they're not just pre-nuclear fission, they're also pre-handcuff as a society.
They just do this with ropes?
Really?
Yeah.
What have you guys invented?
Jesus.
This compound play set has their hanging area.
And in one last little jab, Archer's like, hey, try not to lose the rope around your neck.
Once they get this thing on you, Reed.
So the cloak fails on the cellship, and we get a brief little moment where they're getting chased by fighter jets, and then they get the cloak back, and
meanwhile, the nooses are going around Archer and Reed's necks.
What do you think of this moment?
Because we get the single brass instrument of wondering if you'll be one of those people who gets decapitated during a hanging.
But when these things are like put around the actors, there's got to be something instinctually very bad feeling about that that has got to take
some effort to control.
I think that would be very uncomfortable.
Totally.
Like they're on a platform.
Yeah.
Like if you
and we saw it, that it's actually rigged to drop, you know?
Yeah.
So like if you...
If you fainted or
took a step backwards in a way you weren't intending, like that could be an onset accident.
Maybe the rope goes up and then just out of frame, it's only connected by like dental floss.
You know?
Hope so.
There's a little bit of business the lieutenant character that's noosing them up does where he like puts the noose on the back of their neck and then moves the knot over to the side on each one.
And I was like, what is like, why?
But like, that's so interesting.
I bet there's a reason for that, you know?
I think that's to encourage decapitation.
Right.
Because once you hit the bottom of the rope and it's tension, the tension twists the rope.
Yeah.
And it breaks your neck.
To pop that head right off.
Like a kling on at a soccer game.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But these guys don't know about that.
You may not understand that reference, but your kids are going to love it.
Rescue comes in hot.
Cloaked ship, kind of like helicopter hovering in the courtyard, and a bunch of Starfleets jump out and start phasering guys and there's a great big firefight.
They realize like, oh, like, okay, we're rescuing us, but we also have to get all that gear back.
So Archer has to make a break for the gear and he goes back into the complex to get it.
I love the coverage of this scene because it's Archer quickly dodging back through the interior of the facility in a number of these rooms where we've already been.
Like the sequence is just bang bang bang of him going in getting the stuff and getting back out again I thought the the pacing of this was really well done because you can't stay out in the courtyard shooting all of this phaser V firearm stuff forever you got to break it up how did you feel about the phasers in this scene because It looked to me like almost every time someone shot one, the beam was coming out at a weird, incorrect angle.
Yeah, I think that's hard to do.
It's hard to make look right.
I think the best in the business is Bill Tilly.
When he makes a card that has two images, that beam crosses the middle in just the right spot.
He does.
Star Trek, get at him.
Yeah.
He should be supervising all of your special effects at post.
I know there wasn't a lot of time to prep the Sullibon cellship.
for stealth and for this mission and so forth but i think they could have done the mission with far less bloodshed if they just made an example out of Gosen or one of the others with their future tech.
Just one of them gets shot on gore on the gore setting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One of them gets the remic treatment
and then the rest of them have to set their weapons down.
Because as it is, like everybody but the general basically gets stunned and he gets to watch with his jaw on the floor as the escapees like jump through a window that is hovering in midair and then disappears and they escape.
Yeah.
Pretty fun to see Ghosis left there, you know, as the, as the shuttle whooshes away.
Yeah.
He's just slackjawed, wondering what the fuck.
This is a nice little bit of turnaround in the next moment where Archer now thinks he has left something behind and it is Reed that finds it.
Yeah.
Delightful.
I bet that makes Reed feel better.
So finally in the ready room, Tepal tells Archer, after a period of time, that
there's an uninhabited planet nearby worthy of exploration.
And boy, that sounds nice after a couple of missions like the ones that they've had.
Yeah.
And he's grateful to Tepal for fixing up the stealth ship and using it to rescue them.
At great risk to herself.
Yeah.
You know?
He's glad that she...
took that risk and they talk about how even though they got all of the stuff that they went down there to recover, even without leaving examples of their technology behind, they've probably done a lot of damage to this society by giving them the idea that their enemies have an insanely advanced super soldier and weapons program that they need to be concerned about.
This is how arms races happened.
Archer's pretty sad about that.
And TePaul's like, hey, don't feel that bad.
At least you are willing to die to try to staunch the bleeding on this screw-up.
Yeah, so doesn't that make you feel better?
Amazing, right?
That's not where the episode ends, though.
The episode ends in Six Bay, because we got to figure out what happened to Trip Tucker's cloaked arm.
It seems like it's getting back to normal, right?
Yeah.
Normal, except for the hole in his hand, which he can see right through.
Is this a cloakca?
Hmm.
You know, like sometimes when you just get a paper cut or something, like, like not a real deep or painful wound, but like just something superficial, you just can't stop fidgeting with it.
Yeah.
I feel like if you had a hole in your hand you could see through, you would just never stop touching it or pressing it or rubbing it or whatever.
You'd be like going around like this with your hands over your eyes, like, ha ha ha, I can see all of you.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, you'd, you'd Guillermo del Toro
yourself.
Yeah.
Then, like, the next diplomatic encounter they have, Archer's like, that's our chief engineer.
He's recently discovered object permanence.
Did you like this episode, Ben?
I like this episode a lot.
I thought it was a real interesting little jaunt.
And
yeah, it's like, like, I think that without having the words prime directive, an interesting, another interesting treatment by Enterprise of that idea and them kind of grappling with what their newfound position as possessors of very advanced technology means for the other people they might encounter in the galaxy.
And I thought it was a really exciting little ride through that series of ideas.
How about you?
I really liked it too.
My big takeaway from it is that it sure did feel expensive to make, didn't it?
It did, yeah.
It wasn't just the compound set.
It was all the little rooms in the compound.
It was how well everything was lit.
Beautifully lit.
It really had a polish and a richness scene to scene that you could feel.
Totally.
I was really impressed by it.
I think it made the episode much better to feel like it had this kind of money thrown at it.
So yeah, uh, great job to production, is what I'll say.
Well, do you want to see if there's anything great in the priority one inbox, Adam?
There always is, Ben.
Priority one message from Starfleet coming in on Secure Channel.
Need a supplemental income.
Supplemental income.
Supplemental.
Supplemental.
Yeah, it's extra.
But the interest alone could be enough to buy this ship.
All right, this one is of a promotional nature and it goes like this.
Are you a veteran?
Are you a college student in Texas?
Do you have thoughts about those things?
I want to talk to you.
I'm also a vet and in school and I'm trying to finish my doctoral project.
I'm researching the experiences of student veterans like us.
By sharing your insights, you could help improve support services and resources on campuses nationwide.
Participation is confidential and only takes an hour.
For more information, email campusproject at pm.me.
Hey, this sounds great.
Yeah, I'm all about this.
And it sounds like very confidential if they're using ProtonMail to get their participants.
I didn't get that reference.
That's funny.
Yeah, I'm all about getting the resources for veteran students or otherwise once they're back home.
So this sounds like a great opportunity.
Yeah.
Why not participate?
Especially if it's confidential.
I know that we've got lots of former service people in our audience, so I hope folks will reach out.
Yeah, good stuff.
Ben, we've got a priority one message here from Matt in Seattle.
It's to Tom in Seattle.
Here's that message.
Happy birthday to my best friend slash roommate slash lover slash partner.
All right.
That sounds like a sequence, right?
Yeah, that's the order.
When we first lived together, I know my Star Trek fanaticism came down on you like a bird.
A bird?
Yes, a large black bird flying towards you, shrieking.
Will I keep having these flashbacks?
A series of disjointed images in my mind.
I was frightened.
I felt fear.
I must rejoin the collective.
Hypnocock regression.
Flashbacks.
Flashbacks?
I am Gorg.
You were Gorg.
Somehow it never phased you, and that makes me the luckiest Trekie on earth.
I love you, too.
Wow.
That's so sweet.
So it sounds like Tom and Matt are both listeners, but Tom has been tolerating Matt's Trek fandom.
Yeah, potentially, but if Tom ever wants to enjoy this sweet sweet and thoughtful message from Matt,
he better have kept on board
as a listener, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, I sure hope you did the right thing, Tom, by sticking with our stupid show.
Matt, I'm glad you requested that particular drop.
That is one of my favorite bits of business that Wendy has made for the show.
Really fun.
If you'd like to get a priority one message on the show, head to maximumfund.org slash jumbotron and set one up today.
Hey, Ben.
What's that, Adam?
I know you found yourself a drunk Shimoda.
Drunk Shimoda!
I'm going to give it to Dr.
Tamek.
Just the like, oh yeah, we're genetically engineered super soldiers and him going like, hmm, yeah, that does sound like what they probably are.
Seems very plausible in the moment.
That made me laugh.
Mine's going to be Reed for doing the classic Reed thing.
As soon as it appears as though they will be executed, Reed in his cell is like, what do you think TePaul is going to do with our Barities
and with the stack of love letters that I keep in my quarters labeled send to my lovers in case of my death?
Like, it just takes no effort at all to tip him over into the gloom of, I guess, what Reed's personality is.
You know?
This is just Reed being Reed.
I don't know, man.
If I'm Archer, how much of this do you put up with?
I mean, you're in jail.
There's not really.
It's not like you can go anywhere.
Yeah, he's stuck.
He starts raking his metal cup against the bars.
Like, Jailer, I need to go to the bathroom.
There does seem to be a bunch of scenes where folks are stuck with Reed when he's doing this.
Everyone gets a turn.
faith of the fart speaking of turns ben it's our turn to talk about what the next episode is going to be of enterprise and how we're going to experience the review of it yeah that's true uh the next episode is season two episode nine singularity
while enterprise is surveying a black hole in a trinary star system the stellar phenomenon causes strange effects on the crew doesn't that sound like an episode where we should have strange effects dictated to us by the game of buttholes?
That sounds only fair.
I think so too.
Gaks.biz/slash game is where you can chart our progress.
Indeed.
And I'm headed there right now to roll the hundred-sided die.
Currently, we are on square 14.
We could go anywhere.
You're required to learn as you play.
Roll.
Ooh, we came very close to a square Adam.
We jumped right past looking at each other during onto square 67.
Tula!
Did I win?
Hardly.
That's a regular old episode for us.
Also close to the decontamination chamber episode where we would be forced to record while only wearing underwear.
Yeah, yeah.
And this being a December 30th episode, I guess I'm also glad that we didn't land on a power hour episode or something.
So close to New Year's, right?
Yeah, yeah, we might want to be cleaning up our acts in the new year.
Yeah, seems like it.
Well, thanks to everyone who gave this episode a listen.
If you liked it, consider leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcasting app you prefer.
Or leave like a comment if that's the thing.
Yeah.
Whatever it is helps.
Sure does.
Speaking of helps.
Takes a village to make this show.
A complex, if you will.
Shout out to our great producer, Wendy Britty.
The uh,
I'm trying to think of a James Bond bad guy character that she could be.
Who's the one that throws his hat?
Oh, uh, Oddjob?
Is that Oddjob?
That Wendy would be Oddjob, too, huh?
Because she throws her hat?
As a producer that does so much.
Yeah, yeah.
Hard to get headshots on job because he's he's a shorter character than the than the others in the game rob adler uh also steps in to produce some shows sometimes but mostly he's our social media manager along with bill tilley keep things on the rails in all the places yeah follow at greatest trek on all the accounts uh repost a post if you if you see it and like it yeah that helps too
we've got to thank adam ragusia who made our parody of dion warren's original theme for star Trek Enterprise, and Dark Materia, who made the original Picard song.
And with that, we will be back at you next week with another great episode of Star Trek Enterprise.
An episode of the Greatest Generation Enterprise, or I guess, like maybe that's the one where we roll a weird square because the
singularity is having a weird effect on us.
See, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's no weird effects in this episode.
The regular one.
Right.
Yeah.
Happy New Year.
Woo!
Make it so.
Captain, Jon Lu Picard of the U.S.
Captain Jonathan Picard of the U.S.
Make it so
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