Duraflame Money (ENT S2E1)

Here's to the finest crew in Starlink.

When it comes to my crew, you won't get any argument from me.

This is a parody.

Paramount owns the sun.

Welcome to the Greatest Generation.

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

I'm Adam Prianica.

I'm Ben Harrison.

Adam, how would you describe your skills of an artiste?

Bad?

Here's what I'll say.

Like, I grew up building models.

I grew up, you know, making the little diorama thing.

I grew up as someone who enjoyed, like, drawing with colored pencils and stuff.

But I don't think any of those areas of interest equal artistic quality.

skill.

Like, my parents and my

friends didn't see these things and go

that guy should go go to a special school

not in the art school way i should say what about you ben well i did go to art school i mean i went to the the art school at nyu for college but and what is your favorite curse word ben

what is the curse word that you would tell to god were you to meet them at the pearly gates that's the new school

which is right up the block but um you know like i i i think like you grew up you know like drawing my own comics and um for a long time my friends and i loved making our own trading cards uh like marvel trading cards were really popular when i was a kid yeah did you ever get uh the wizard magazine isn't that the one that came with with marvel trading cards or comic book trading cards i i think i knew of it as like a this was the thing that you would look up like

what the fair market value of your trading cards was.

It was like the blue book for trading cards.

Is that roughly what Wizard Magazine is?

See, I don't want to get this wrong because comic book folks are fucking savage.

Yeah.

The atomic wedgies we would be in for if we got something like that wrong.

I mean, I just kind of remember it being...

A magazine about comic books, but I don't remember it being like a Beckett baseball card magazine that gave you like a listing of values.

That at least wasn't the reason that I bought it.

I remember it almost being a form of comic in its own right.

Yeah.

Like this is me.

This is my comics.

This is my wizard magazine, which is a comic in its own right.

That's how I would introduce us when we go meet other nerd friends.

So I didn't really read any Marvel comics.

So the characters on the trading cards, which I intensely wanted because everybody else wanted them.

So I like, I had the binder with the like, you know, the three ring pages, and you would put the individual cards and get them all organized and everything.

I mean, the organization was the most fun.

But the characters were totally outside of context for me.

So making up my own characters and making up trading cards for them was just as much fun.

So I would draw on like, I would get a little like buck slip and draw like a character on the front and then flip it over and come up with snats on the back.

for them.

And I attempted to sell these on a number of occasions.

Like instead of having like a lemonade stand, I would like go up to the playground at the school near my house and like see if like the older boys would buy trading card packets from me.

A car full of teenagers drives by, throws a bag of trash

at the foot of your comic book card stand.

A single tear goes down your face.

I'm like, trash man, that's a pretty good idea for a character.

Amazing.

I admire your interest in monetizing your nerdery.

Yeah, from an early age.

Yeah.

You always had that interest.

But yeah, I never took like visual arts classes in college.

Like, I think it's interesting because we're both creative people.

We do something creative for a living.

But I think the most drawing I've done recently is we put the Chateau Shimoda wine label design on a t-shirt in podshop.biz.

And what we had for the like three-inch square sticker that has gone on bottles of wine at our various wine shows around the country didn't scale up right.

So I had to like draw a new vineyard from scratch.

How about that?

I didn't know you did that.

You never told me.

It was just like

while we're watching Real Housewives, I would be on the iPad, like, you know, drawing rows of vines

kind of a thing.

It was no big deal, but I chose to draw for my art project today because we drilled a Naomi Wildman Square.

We sure did.

For the very first time, we hit this special square.

This square required us to create a piece of art that was representative of the episode.

I felt distinctly rusty getting out the marker pens and the crayons and the blackwing pencil.

trying to create something that looked like anything.

Ben, why don't you come up to the front of the class and show the other students what you've made?

Okay, so I got my Bristol art pad.

Did you have that already, or did you go and buy things special for this?

I did have it already, but it is the first use case of it.

Amazing.

I had recently gotten some markers and pencils with the idea that, like, maybe I should be

doing some drawing around town.

Here's my picture.

Wow.

Wow.

You're much better at drawing than I expected you to be.

So the picture, hold it up again, is Silic in the scene where he's

trying to communicate with the ghostly figure from Out of Time that he usually talks to.

And he can't quite get him in the booth.

And instead of him in the booth, there is a giant middle finger flipping him off.

Just incredible.

Simpson's yellow is the color of the finger.

Yeah.

And Silic looks pretty good in the red pajamas and the greenish skin.

I was going for the yellowy hologram, like when Archer is communicating to him from the future and stuff.

But it did kind of come out Simpson's yellow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I think for first time back at it, after a long time away from visual arts, I'm pretty pleased with how that came out.

It's like getting back on the on the rowing machine.

You know, it's like, man, I haven't done this since I was 17.

Let's see if I'm still any good at it.

Nope.

Rowing's such a weird comparison because like good at it is also a weird description of that activity.

More technique in rowing than I think a lot of people give it credit for.

But yeah, I'm also just weaker and have less stamina.

And, you know, analogously,

I think that drawing is something that you

probably get worse at if you don't practice.

Like so many things.

Yeah.

What did you do for your piece of artwork?

You warned me ahead of time that glue was drying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I hope it's dry because I've got it in clamps right now.

I'm going to take these clamps off and cross my fingers when I hold this thing up to the camera.

I I thought about doing a like a diorama was my original plan with the concept that I had, but I only have like epoxy and like stuff for gluing up things around the house.

Like I didn't have any like Elmer on hand.

I have all kinds of adhesives in my house, but my problem was I don't have a color printer.

Because I was going to like print out scenes for a diorama and like, you know, put them in the box so that there's a foreground and background effect.

would have been great.

I mean, just hearing the description.

That's a fantastic idea.

Yeah.

I mean, I always knew you had a lot of adhesives around the house because every time I go over there and I try to open a magazine, like,

can't wedge it open to save my life.

Can't do it.

No.

What I do have is a bunch of trash

at my house.

So what I did is I made a model

of the Starship Enterprise NX01.

Wow.

And it's just out of frame.

I'm going to to take it out of its clamps and I'm going to hold it up and I'm going to fucking pray that this thing doesn't fall apart in my hands.

Is this a spiritual sequel to the whale probe model you took on tour a couple of years ago?

It might be.

Okay, what I've got is

that.

Wow.

Oh, man.

So, what Adam has

done is glued two like paper plates, like party paper plates with a jazzy design on them together in kind of a clamshell pattern.

He's made the superstructure of the ship out of some corrugated cardboard and disposable spoons.

And then the warp nacelles appear to be a pair of Gatorade bottles with blue straws glued alongside to simulate the plasma fence.

That's right.

Which is very clever because the orange top of those Gatorade bottles, the Bassard collector and the front of...

God, I feel like such a fucking nerd that I know this terminology.

You know all of it.

Yeah.

Don't forget the spoons, Ben.

Yeah, I noted the spoons.

The spoons are good.

Oh, and they're also on the underside.

Uh-huh.

Tremendous.

Then I've got a length of cardboard that I've kind of sandwiched together, also glued.

The one thing I couldn't quite pull off is the angle of the nacelles.

Yeah.

The gravity of the bottles just pulls them down in a way that I couldn't account for.

Yeah, you need some metal within that cardboard to hold the shape or something like that.

We got some drippy glue here.

Tacky glue, the brand of glue that I used.

Okay.

It's not quite setting up all the way, but there it is.

It's a thing of beauty, Adam.

I filled up these nacelles.

Like, Like I lit some matches and I blew the smoke into the nacelles.

I was wondering.

But you can't really see it because like what I wanted to make was like a version of the ship that was doing that trick.

Yeah.

You know, the busted warp core trick.

But

it doesn't really read.

I mean, they do look steamed up inside.

I think that that's the effect.

There's some condensation and some steam in there.

I like it.

I am so delighted by your art project.

And I'm delighted by yours.

You should, you know what, Ben?

You should put that on your refrigerator.

Kick some of Darone's fucking shitty art off of there above.

Take back some of that real estate.

He can barely draw a circle, you know, upon request.

So he doesn't really have much to offer in the visual arts department.

Not like his dad.

Art school, not in his future.

Well, Adam, this was a momentous square to hit for a momentous episode.

We're breaking into season two of Star Trek Enterprise.

This is season two, episode one,

Shockwave, part two.

We were hanging on a cliff at the end of the last episode, Ben.

And when we come back to this season, we do not hear Major Barrett's voice giving us the last time on.

It's Scott Bakula.

What do you think of that choice?

There's so much that connects this series to its forebears.

I think this was a mistake.

I think it should have been Majel.

I mean, it hasn't been Majel for a long time.

But...

I guess, yeah, she's not the voice of the computer, huh?

Yeah, and I guess what I'm trying to say is, like,

anyone but Bakula might have been a more interesting choice.

But I guess...

I guess in talking it out, like, he's the one that's out of time.

I guess maybe I would have preferred Crewman Daniels to be a

human-adjacent or fantastic kind of

representation of the last time on,

you know?

Sort of a computer man.

Tim Mapp.

In his own right.

Yeah.

He's a very emotional guy.

So.

It's hard for me to picture like the way he would take it if he was given that voiceover.

But yeah, we're reminded of the cliff we've been hanging on.

But also, like, I feel like when we actually cut into the action, the cliff is not nearly so tall as we were led to believe.

I think so too.

Yeah.

Because DePaul is still on FaceTime trying to persuade Silic that Archer left the ship.

Like, you can come over and check yourself.

And that's what he agrees to do instead of just destroy them, which seems like he should be perfectly happy to do.

The Enterprise at this point is living out one of Ben's fantasies, being surrounded on all sides by balls.

There are 30 armed vessels surrounding us.

And it's interesting

that Silic doesn't just blow the ship away.

Yeah.

It seems at every point of both the last episode and this one, that is what he wants to do.

Very much so, but he doesn't.

He boards them.

They're talking about like having security meet these soldiers.

and TePaul is like, no, we must be super duper chill because they are capable of blowing us away at any moment.

And we need to treat that seriously.

You can really tell these are past people because Jane Way would have already set auto-destruct at this point.

It's my favorite way of relaxing.

Is there an auto-destruct on this version of Enterprise?

Wow, great question.

This is the use case.

We have been through an entire season of Star Trek and that hasn't come up.

That accounts for the emptiness I felt at the end of the first season.

Just like something's missing.

I can't put my nipples on it.

I've got a auto-destruct shaped hole in my heart.

Speaking of Trip, he does not want to just let these people come over.

Being boarded seems like the worst possible outcome.

Really does.

In this instance.

Back to the 31st century.

Archer and Daniels are walking around this wasteland, this ruined city that they were like way high up.

And I was appreciative that they cut out the middle episode that was just them going down like 80 flights of stairs together.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They could not quite build the abandoned stairwell set that was required for a moment like that.

We learned that time travel is very complicated.

It's not just some dumb HG Wells mechanics.

There's no way for you to understand.

Try me.

But Daniels is like kind of constantly trying to dissuade Archer from asking too many questions about how any of this stuff is working.

They're on the ground now and Daniels notices that there is a monument missing in this part of town.

It's right near the library and it commemorates a certain federation.

You know, Archer doesn't get to know what is a federation of, but it means that like some key stuff didn't happen in this timeline.

Because this city has been fucked up for a long ass time.

Things are so messed up in this city that this observation doesn't really stick out maybe like it could, I thought.

Like, oh yeah, the timeline has been ruined due to the choices that have been made.

But like, yeah, the statue's gone too.

That sucks.

I bet a lot of things are different.

Right.

Like, how can you tell that it was never built?

And

not just that shit got destroyed here.

Yeah.

Like, it's not that there's a different ruined monument that says not for the Federation on it.

The library seems like a great place to go in a circumstance like this.

That's the decision that they make.

Let's go there and see if we can learn about what other historical events have changed in this timeline.

And once they get inside, they find a matte painting of a giant room filled with bookshelves.

And Daniels is like, paper books!

Must be a very unusual smell to Daniels.

Yeah.

The dust budget on this episode.

Through the roof.

Absolutely.

Gotta cut over to Enterprise and find that Sullaban are just all over the ship.

They're scanning for Archer, they're hitting buttons, they're doing whatever they want.

It feels gross.

It feels gross as paper books in a library.

Yeah, it's bad.

You don't like to see it.

They're tossing the ship.

They get their computer discs back, which is like the whole fucking thing that they spent the entire last episode stealing from the Sulaban.

Right back in the Sulaban's hands.

Silic is finally satisfied that Archer has time traveled because they have some readings from the turbo lift that indicate that there's like temporal shenanigans afoot in there.

So he's like, I guess gonna like be super cool to the crew of the Entrepreneur and not murder all of them.

But he is taking their ship.

Yeah, that part isn't to be negotiated.

And so

the Enterprise gets underway.

surrounded by all these balls.

And with the crew shoved into their quarters, it seems like the ship is going to be run by the Sulaban from here.

It's like a shelter-in-place kind of a thing.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Admiral Forrest is in big trouble with the Vulcans.

They are big mad about the entrepreneur having been ordered home and no call, no showing.

Yeah.

This will get you fired from your average service job.

It's a bad look.

And Suval is kind of like riding for that.

He's like, this is totally unacceptable.

Like they were supposed to drop Flox and Tepal off with that Vulcan ship and they were supposed to be here.

Now you haven't heard from them.

They're three days overdue.

We had them on long-range scanners surrounded by other ships.

What's that about?

This would have made me so mad, this whole live omission thing, because Sauval has known the whole time that something's up with Enterprise because it's covered with balls.

And that is the reason why it wasn't able to meet up with the Vulcan ship on schedule.

Why did Soval not mention this?

It really irritates Forrest for good reason.

He's like, if you knew how much Archer loves being surrounded by balls, you would understand the choices he's making.

It seems like...

Soval doesn't really want to do this, but does anyway, like ordering that Vulcan ship to go and find Enterprise, like not just to wait for Enterprise to come to it.

Yeah, like it kind of feels like whatever that Vulcan ship was up to was more important to them than decommissioning the human space exploration program.

Yeah.

The outcome is at least a Vulcan ship will be involved in this incident, you know, regardless of the reason that it's there.

It seems like they'll be able to help in some way.

I did like the comedy in this episode.

This scene ends with a laugh-out-loud line from Admiral Forrest, and he says, Archer Archer knows what he's doing.

Yeah.

Does he really?

Woof.

There you go.

Enterprise has been taken back to some kind of Sullibon base, and inside Silic and his hench argue about why the shadowy figure that they serve won't show up and give them further instructions.

They can't just make their own choices.

They got to answer to this guy.

Where's the boss?

This was kind of part of the inspiration for my picture of the middle finger flipping off Silic.

I don't necessarily want this to be representational of that man or of Archer.

Like, I want the viewer of this piece to be able to bring, you know, whatever that is to

the picture.

But I feel like Silic's relationship to the the shadowy man in the light column is very much one of like someone who is in an abusive relationship like he does not want to piss off the shadowy man because he knows that that will be bad for him so he like really wants to run everything by the shadowy man yeah it's a real pain in the ass for the people who work with the shadowy man when he just uh refuses to contact them in an intense situation.

Like, what are the Suliban supposed to do?

It's weird.

It's weird.

It's like, we're supposed to read your mind, but, you know, you don't need to know what we're up to.

Yeah.

Somehow.

One interesting data point about this moment is that Silicon the Hench feel a little bit differently.

Silic is positive that these temporal signatures that they found mean that the mission isn't a failure.

But the hench is like, you fucked up, Silic.

We're going down for this.

I don't know why you're trying to reach the shadowy man so hard.

It'll probably take more mutant powers away from you if you tell him about how bad you fucked up.

Yeah, so

they're on different sides of this particular issue.

Over in that wreckage of a library, Archer and Daniels are looking for evidence of the Federation, and they can't seem to find anything.

And it's becoming clear that if Jonathan Archer doesn't exist in the past, if he's been plucked away the way that he has,

the Federation doesn't happen.

Yeah.

That's how instrumental Jonathan Archer is.

I don't get it.

There's nothing really past the Warp 5 program that lines up with the history that Daniels knows about.

So, you know, they like wander around this library.

Like, Archer really should be supervised in here because there are lots of books that he shouldn't know about.

The Romulan Star Empire.

What's that?

Maybe you shouldn't be reading that.

It's mostly played for comedy that Daniels is just like, no, no, no, no, no.

Don't look at that book.

Oh, Robert McKee's story?

Slap.

Save the cat?

I'm interested.

Daniels believes that the only way to restore the timeline that he's familiar with is to get Archer back to his timeline.

Yeah, because like Daniels was trying to save Archer and therefore the timeline by pulling him into the 31st century, but by pulling Archer out of the past,

that was the thing that completely ruined history.

So that explains why Silic was so dead set on getting Archer specifically and not even destroying the Entrepreneur or whatever.

Everything has been fucked up on this planet, but using Archer's communicator and scanner, it seems like they are a few

random pieces of hardware away from creating a piece of gear that might help them out in this moment.

And that's kind kind of where this scene ends.

Archer, go get me this list of things.

And so he goes.

It's interesting because, like, the bad guys in the temporal cold war are 300 years earlier in the timeline than Daniels, and they don't have the ability to actually travel in time, but they can send information around in time.

And so Daniels is going to fight them on that turf.

Like, he's going to modify the technology that Archer has to send information.

Back on the Suleban base, Tepal is being interrogated, and she's got some kind of device around her neck, pumping her full of truth-telling drugs.

And

that's the only thing interesting visually about this scene.

There's absolutely nothing going on in the lower portion of the frame that caught my eye whatsoever.

Nothing heaving and trying to burst out of very thin fabric.

Yeah, the Sulabanian pentothal was too distracting for you.

Yeah.

But it's interesting in this scene, like Tepal's truth is that time travel is impossible.

So she's not, even when she's pumped full of these drugs, like her answers serve to mislead in an interesting way.

She is a non-believer in what everyone else in the temporal cold war knows to be true.

And yeah, it's very frustrating for Silic.

Meanwhile, back in the future, Daniels is disassembling all of Archer's gadgets and, I guess, rewiring them with like pieces of copper that Archer has found on like a soup ladle.

Have you ever seen a spoon like this covered in metal?

It seemed like the handle was like wrapped with copper wire, which is a terrible place to put copper because that's going to make your hands stinky.

Yeah, I

think they needed to come up with a different idea of where they got the copper TBH.

Yeah, but like, you look at a city like this and you know that junkies will have ripped all the wire out of the walls, you know.

Over in Reed's quarters, he gets a call from a speaker on the wall.

It's Trip Tucker who has hotwired his doorbell to use as a communicator.

I thought this was going to be Daniels and Archer on the communicator, but it was Trip, actually.

Sure was.

The good news is that he's figured out a way to talk to people using their doorbells.

The bad news is that this is the only thing he's able to do about their situation.

I mean, Reed hasn't been doing nothing.

If you'll notice, he's put on some bright lipstick with this time

alone.

You should always look your best, even though you're by yourself.

You know what I mean?

I never noticed this.

My TV does not represent their lips being hot pink or whatever you're saying they are.

There is something about Dominic Keating's character specifically that seems to be wearing the most lipstick on this show.

It is a lot.

He is very kissable.

And this composition is so close to his face because he's leaned right up into the doorbell.

Yeah.

A lot of people are leaned up into the doorbell a little later on, but JePaul winds up kind of tossed back into her quarters and she's still super drugged up.

Archer has finally, with Daniel's help, figured out a way to communicate with the past.

And this disembodied hologram head of Archer's appears in TePaul's room.

You're on the ceiling.

Why aren't you on a monitor?

There's no technology where I am.

I thought this scene was really well done.

Like the TePaul not seeming to be in a headspace of knowing whether or not what she's experiencing is real, and

probably also sort of at the the mercy of the drugs in terms of like being forced to answer questions, honestly.

Yeah, her reacts here are great because you can see her slowly becoming more with it.

But there's never a moment in the scene where she's 100% with it.

He needs her to shape up and go to Daniel's quarters and get a thing.

There was a little bit of a moment in a previous episode where Tepal had to say, like, hey, Archer, I know you've, like, we've known each other a long time now.

Have I ever asked you a favor?

And this sort of feels like Archer caching that chip when he's like, I just need you to trust me on this.

I know you don't believe in time travel, but I need you to make this happen.

Right.

So she gets onto the doorbell communication system with the rest of the crew and this.

Jailbreak society starts talking through how they're going to get out because they can't just open the doors from the inside.

That's something that the Sulaban appear appear to have thought of.

But there are channels and passages through the ship that if your body was little enough, you might be able to wriggle through.

And that's how Hoshi Sato gets nominated to be the jailbreaker.

Come out to the coast.

We'll get together.

Have a few laughs.

You can't not see the die-hard similarities.

happening here, right?

But because Hoshi's involved, I would call it try-hard.

That's what they could have named the episode as she wriggles her way through all these tiny areas of the ship, making her way finally to the area above Dr.

Flox's quarters.

Yeah,

it's like a Jeffrey's tube, but way shittier.

Like, they didn't clear as much of the equipment out of it.

So, yeah, it seems like real cramped quarters.

She reaches a hand down through, like, the ceiling cat is watching you masturbate hole.

He passes her, I guess, some hypo sprays that he's manufactured.

She then keeps wriggling to a channel that she can get out of to get to Reed's quarters.

And, oh, wouldn't you know it?

Rick Berman had something to do with this episode, Adam.

Yeah, because the episode's written by two 12-year-old boys.

We need to get what should be a heroic figure topless as soon as possible.

Yeah, she jumps out of this hole, but a hook grabs her top, and like an 80s,

like ski comedy

rips her top off.

The one person you don't want seeing you like this is Malcolm Reed, right?

Yeah, he seems like the most lecherous character in the main cast.

That's the worst part.

I mean, shit happens when you're wriggling around the vent system, but...

Yeah, that's that's not how you want to be found or who you want to find you.

Do you think I feel like Trip is as bad?

But maybe he understands better now that he's covered in superfluous nipples.

You're never going to let that go, are you?

I don't get creep show vibes from Trip Tucker at all, the way I do from Reed.

No, but he's just, he's very horny, you know.

Anyways, some Sulaban guards stumble upon Tepal in the hallway.

She appears to be still suffering from the after effects of the Sulabanium pentathal.

That's just a bruise.

She's being used as bait to distract them so that they can be knocked out.

They drag those bodies to Reed's room where Hoshi's job is to watch them there.

Kind of a shitty job, like she had a hero turn.

You lose your top one time, and you get stuck watching the bodies.

That sucks.

They never take you seriously after that.

Yeah.

Faith of the fart.

ZipRecruiter doesn't want us to mention any of their competitors in this ad.

But to me, that almost goes without saying because ZipRecruiter is in a class all its own.

ZipRecruiter's latest tools and features speed up finding the right people for your roles so you save valuable time.

And now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com slash scarves.

And trying it out is a great idea.

You should do that.

When over 320,000 new resumes are added to ZipRecruiter monthly, it means you can reach more potential hires and fill roles sooner.

Use ZipRecruiter and save time hiring.

Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.

And if you go to ziprecruiter.com slash scarves right now, you can try it for free.

Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash scarves.

ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.

If you're enjoying Greatest Generation and Greatest Trek, but you haven't dipped into our other hit program, Wholesome, you're only getting part of what we do.

That's because on Wholesome, me and Ben and Adam Ragusia talk about all kinds of things that make us happy.

With each episode being hosted by one of us, where we share what we're enjoying at the moment and have a conversation about all the little ways it makes our lives better.

With topics about movies, neighbors, ice cream, mid-TV.

It's a weekly dose of good vibes every Wednesday, and you can get it at patreon.com slash wholesome underscore pod.

So listen to wholesome.

Maybe it'll inspire you to share something that you think is wholesome with your friends.

Every Wednesday at patreon.com slash wholesome underscore pod.

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 Law.

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 gather down.

So that leaves Reed, Tripp, and TePal back out in the corridors, skulking around, avoiding the patrols.

And Reed breaks into crewman Daniels' quarters and reaches into a locker.

This is a fun shot, right?

Yeah.

The idea being that, like, this locker is impossibly long.

Like, you could throw a hot dog down this locker's hallway and not hit the end of it.

It's crazy.

He pulls out a device from it, a device...

that's similar to all the other weird shit that they found in Crewman Daniels' quarters.

And he doesn't get very far.

Once he gets outside, he's found.

And then Silic interrogates him.

And

I mean, Reed tells the truth when he says, I don't know what this thing is.

I don't know what anything in Crewman Daniels' quarters is.

All I know is Archer wanted me to grab this thing and destroy it or something.

Whatever I was trying to do was to keep it away from you.

I really like this because it,

like, I wish, I wit, I sort of wish we'd gotten to see what Archer told to Paul about this thing because it does feel like Reed is like giving Silic exactly the kind of information that will make him intensely curious and want to turn this thing on, which appears to be what Daniels ultimately wants to have happen.

Yeah.

So he tells Silic that they were worried that he was going to use it to contact someone.

Silic immediately assumes that that's Shadowy Man.

And meanwhile, the rest of the the gang do a raid on engineering and take out all of the suleabon guards in there

this evidently is a sort of place where you can discharge weapons freely this is an absolute firefight in here a really great and exciting scene i thought yeah like we had that scene in an episode a few weeks ago where they were like pushing the engine as hard as they possibly could and little like wisps of flame were coming out of grates in the warp core.

This is what that should have looked like.

The amount of sparks and explosions that they do in this scene is so exciting.

Well, this is season two, episode one budget.

Yeah, whereas the episode you're talking about was toward the end of season one.

Right.

And they just had like Dura Flame money

for the effects.

Yeah, that's it exactly.

Silic on the Sullibon base studies the mystery device that he took from Reed when he gets a call blown in from the Sulaban on the Enterprise telling him that there's a warp core breach in

process.

And I love how interested Silic is in delegating the task of dealing with whatever that is.

Like

he doesn't have time for that.

He's like, stop bothering me with it.

Just tow the ship away.

And the guy is like, are you going to tell the tractor beam guys?

And he's like, no, you do it.

I'm doing something else.

Yeah, I'll only slow you down.

That's such a great managerial line, also.

Oh, yeah.

No, it seems like you got things handled.

I'll only slow you down.

You'll be fine.

Good luck.

So, yeah, the core breach is in progress.

The Sulaban ships start dragging the entrepreneur away from the Sulaban hive so that it's not going to blow up the rest of their little cell ships.

All of the Suliban soldiers, crucially, evacuate.

And it's looking really explode-y

when

the

cell ships kind of drop it and head back to base.

And then the explosions suddenly stop, and the entrepreneur goes to warp.

Great job by Trip Tucker, like selling this.

He really sold the shit out of it.

The effects make this look dire, like these nacelles are definitely going to blow big, but they don't.

Silic finally gets his column of light going after messing with this gadget, and he thinks he's talking to his shadowy man.

And then the shadowy man, like, jump kicks him in the chest.

And it turns out that was Archer, and he's now back in his present.

Time travel is confusing for me, Ben.

Does this moment suggest that it's always been Archer as the shadowy man?

I don't think so.

Yeah.

It can't be.

Yeah.

But it could be.

I don't know, maybe.

That'd be fucked up.

Like, Mirror Universe, Archer.

Because didn't we hear that it's like the guys from Voyager with the triangle full of hair that are one of the parties in the Temporal Cold War?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, you know, they're a big part of it.

Yeah.

Archer is pissed in this scene.

Holy moly.

Yeah.

Like, holding a phaser up to Silic's face, angry.

Talking about blowing his fucking head off and shit.

Yeah.

He wants those ships that are chasing Enterprise to be called off because, like, once Enterprise went to warp, it's not like it's going to be able to escape.

Sullibon are chasing after it.

So he wants the chasing ships to

stop.

And he also wants those data discs back.

That's the only way he can get out of jail with the Vulcans and the Starfleet Command people that are so mad at him back at home.

So we see the entrepreneur getting absolutely rocked, once again, surrounded by balls.

And this time it is an open firefight.

And they actually get a couple of good shots in.

Like they take out one or two of the cell ships and they're like rushing again to get into the warm embrace of the Vulcan ship, which is presumably much better armed than they are.

This felt to me like the most action-packed ship-to-ship combat scene we've gotten on the series, the entire series.

Yeah.

It's really well done.

It was really wild, but they don't have the vulcan ship on the sensors it's looking pretty dire and then suddenly the attacks just subside and i loved the way all of the moments on the bridge after

the attack subside had like smoke kind of like hanging in the air it just it looks so great that the bridge wasn't like super fucked up but you could tell it had just been through something One of the balls out in space is a little unusual.

It's different from the others.

And that's something you're going to have to check out.

And the reason it's so different is because that's the one that Archer's on board.

They hear from Archer.

He's back.

Great news.

I feel like I've been away for a thousand years.

It's not just Archer, though.

He's got silicon there, too.

Yeah, not standard Starfleet procedure to take hostages, but he's bent the rules once again.

From what I understand, there aren't many standard procedures anyway.

It's true.

To break.

We cut to, I guess, a few days later, and they're like presenting all their evidence, and they're docked with the Vulcan ship and on FaceTime with the High Command.

And Soval and the rest of like the diplomatic Vulcans back on Earth.

So Val is satisfied that they did not, in fact, murder all those thousands of people in the colony.

I really thought that with time travel, they were going to like un-murder those people.

No way.

They did not.

They stay dead.

Yeah.

Which means Archer's still going to have to make those phone calls.

All 3,000 of them.

That's what season two two is, is just episode after episode of him making hundreds of phone calls.

This moment's interesting because

it's an opportunity for the Enterprise crew to defend their actions and get an extension, basically, on the project.

And when Saval

isn't trying to hear that at all, Trip just goes off script, like tearing into him in a very satisfying way.

Are you pathetic?

That's enough, Commander.

He's doing that thing where he knows he's getting fired.

So, like, this is why you have security escort people out of the building.

It's for stuff that Trip Tucker does in scenes like this.

Right.

He is this far from Edward Norton and fight clubbing himself by kicking his own ass all over the bridge.

What sucks about this moment is how fucking feckless Admiral Forrest is because as soon as Trip does this, he basically grabs Ambassador Saval's boot and like sticks it in his mouth

entirely.

I thought this was maybe the worst Admiral Forrest scene of the series.

I fucking hated it.

And I hated him for it.

It's not great.

But what it does instrumentally, though, is it forces Tepal and Archer to be the ones to defend themselves instead.

of Admiral Forrest.

And I guess that's, there's a utility there by him being so useless in this moment.

What's weird about what Archer says though, like Archer, Archer can't stop speaking in metaphor.

So he's like, you know,

you know, we're a lot like

animals.

It reminds me of what I like to do on holiday, which is watch animals give birth.

But really, maybe the comparison is more like human development, because human space exploration is a lot like that, isn't it?

We're going to go out into the night looking for action.

When we find something we like, we're liable to clumsily mount some planets.

Maybe we'll shoot our ropes into some nebulas.

Your analogy is very colorful, Captain, but I question whether it addresses the consequences of your actions.

Trip is gonna grow some extra nipples.

You remember that trip, don't you?

And Trip's like, oh, I don't want to talk about that, cat.

Sometimes the ropes shoot back.

Remember when we visited Planet Come?

We like see scenes from season one in this moment.

Like that's that's big fun.

Aliens are getting pregnant.

We're making them pregnant, which means the babies are going to come out weird.

And I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me.

And that's what being...

human's all about.

Shooting your ropes out into space and seeing what happens.

To find out what happens.

What?

When humans stop being polite with alien species and start getting real, what you get is the real Star Trek, Enterprise.

It's a speech that goes into a lot of places.

Yeah.

But ultimately, Tepal hears this and is like, this isn't enough.

This is not convincing.

I'm going to have to step in here to help emphasize Archer's point.

And Tepal does that great TePaul thing where she is not going to be 100% positive in her description of what's going on here.

She's like, look, there's been a lot of bad, and I could show you the video of all that bad.

Ropes have gone into some really crazy places.

That temple?

Mm-hmm.

That wasn't great.

Yeah, but there have been some good things too.

Like when they uncovered that secret base.

That was interesting, right?

You like that?

Yeah.

And then kind of generally sticks up for the humans.

And Ambassador Saval doesn't want to hear this so fucking hard.

He just turns and leaves the room.

Feeling like kind of an emotional reaction when he walks out in that huff.

Yeah.

Maybe it's just the way his robes fly around when he pivots on his heel to leave.

It's unclear about whether or not this entire moment has been persuasive.

And we get like the single brass instrument of TePaul saving Archer's ass once again, which kind of like teases the idea that this whole thing worked in my mind.

Yeah.

Archer pays her a visit in her quarters after hours, and she's wearing her like mid-riffy, silkiest, silkiest, sheerst pajamas.

And he's immediately like feeling a little bit guilty about it.

Like, ooh, I think somebody saw me come in here.

They're going to get the wrong idea.

It is always ab day for TePaul, right?

Like when you go to the ab crunch machine on the ship's gym, like always occupied.

Yeah.

Very intense belly button on TePaul, too.

I'm not going to be a judge of belly buttons.

I'm not judging it.

I'm just saying it's, it's remarkable and it's out all the time in this episode.

It's funny that TePaul is so put together when Archer walks in wearing the dumpiest gray sweatpants you've ever seen on an episode of Star Trek.

Like these are store-brand sub-champion level dump truck sweats.

Yeah, no, these are Kirkland sweats.

Yeah.

And he tells her that he believes the humans' right to explore space has been extended.

And it was to Paul that made the argument irrefutable.

So thanks for that one, TePaul.

Did you like this episode of Star Trek colon Enterprise?

I am glad that we get to keep exploring space with this crew.

I mean, it would be a very interesting place to stop a series.

Season two, episode one, series finale.

Did not see that coming.

What it does is, like, instead of ending the series, it ends once and for all any sort of affection I would have for Admiral Forrest.

That guy fucking sucks.

That entire scene with him and Soval,

not forgivable in my mind.

Like, Soval's always going to Soval, but Forrest has got to say something.

He's got to at least try.

That he doesn't.

Oof.

Hard to know how he's ever going to earn my trust or respect back after that.

Yeah, I couldn't tell if that was because like he needed to like maintain some veneer of dispassion so that when he then made the case to the command council later, it would,

you know, seem honestly derived or something.

But like, it's not even clear that Forrest is on the command council.

Right.

Like, what does Saval have on you, Forrest?

Does he have like,

you know, pictures of you cheating on your wife or something?

Yeah, I don't know.

That scene stuck out to me so much that it kind of shades how I feel about the episode in general, even though I think generally I like the episode and I'm satisfied with how the cliffhanger concluded.

I too.

I think this is a much less annoying version of time travel than we usually get in Star Trek.

You know what's so interesting about the resolution to the time travel story story is that we don't get Archer bouncing through a portal and the reverse shot of Daniels being like, I did it again.

Yeah.

Like, or like the cityscape around him being like magically rebuilt.

Right.

In some way, like.

We never check back in with him.

Don't we need resolution with Daniels in this episode?

Well, what I really love about the way Daniels is depicted in this episode is he has seemed sort of all-powerful and all-knowing in previous interactions with him, and but he's not, he's not.

He's he's screwed up big time.

Like, he describes pulling Archer into the future as like the greatest error in the history of time travel in this episode, and it's his fucking fault.

Time travel just seems like a thing you can't make a mistake doing.

Like, as much as the stock has crashed with General Forrest, like, so too is it as it crashed with Daniels.

Like, what the fuck is that guy's deal?

Yeah, I don't know.

You better believe I'm going through his quarters, going to that giant locker, taking out whatever I can find.

I want to go into the endless locker that is our P1 inbox, though, Adam.

See what's in there.

It really is.

I reached my arm into it, and it just kept going and going.

Priority one message from Starfleet coming in on secured channels.

Need a supplemental income.

Supplemental income.

Supplemental.

Supplemental.

Yeah, it's extra.

The interest alone could be enough to buy this ship.

Then we got a priority win message here of a promotional nature.

That message goes like this.

My friends are FODs in Salt Lake and they do incredible work.

Outer Darkness Tattoo Parlor in Salt Lake City.

If you could give us the Jim Jaw song as well as an O'Brien drop.

Miles be Jim Jaw, miles be quick.

Miles go under the Jim Jaw stick.

Huggins around the Jim jucklock nila wants that gym juk hock

i am chief miles edward o'brien this is fucking spectacular

wow we recently went on a space camp adventure where i was the captain and it was highly difficult please give a thank you to the crew of the odyssey as they deserve it and tell cat and alex i love them from colton so here's the thing the outer darkness Tattoo Parlor in Salt Lake City is a place that you should visit.

Yeah.

If you need a tattoo, you can find it at 423 West 800

South in Salt Lake City.

Just, but like, who fucking uses an address anymore to find anything?

Outer Darkness Tattoo Parlor is what you got to enter into your map application, and that's how you find it.

What is going on in Salt Lake City?

This is like the kind of address you see in a city in Europe: 423W800SA300.

What is that?

Yeah, I don't get it.

It sounds like Colton might be the one to make something indelible on your birdie.

How fun would that be to get ink from an FOD?

You're an FOD.

They're an FOD.

They're tatting you up.

You can talk about the show.

Try not to giggle.

while they're, you know, doing a sensitive little bit of drawing on your skin.

No chance of that.

I think I might put the show on to ensure steady hands.

There you go.

Our next priority one message is from Nick, and it's to Bridge.

Bridge, you're my drunk Shimoda.

I posted on Mastodon that I was having a shitty day, and your first response was to ship two cases of tea from England to California.

So my response is this priority one message.

You rule.

Thanks for being a true friend of DeSoto and of me.

And now, please play the Road Drop.

good job bridge for seeing the uh the fod bat signal yeah and taking action that rules how you do it i bet that tea was good they don't around in england i'm sure there's shitty tea everywhere you think i know

Finally, Ben, we've got a message from an employee of WGBH Boston.

Whoa.

I can't read those letters without hearing the sound, right?

No, impossible.

Outlining the letters.

It's a total classic.

One of the S-tier logos.

Yeah.

It's almost as amazing as, what's the production company that we made fun of for an entire episode?

Stephen J.

Canal.

Holy shit, I just pulled that out of the air.

That's wild.

Yeah.

Hey, I'm going to put you on the spot, Ben.

Better logo, Stephen J.

Cannell or WGBH?

It's an impossible question to answer.

Yeah, like, that's like picking between my children, you know?

Obviously, Darone is better.

Well, we should maybe put a poll.

Into the socials.

Let the FODs deal with it.

Yeah.

Anyway,

this employee's message goes like this.

Today I suffered through the experience of having to sit in a real-person professional meeting about this old house and somehow not get to do any bits about it.

I managed it, if only just, and figured I'd throw you some scarves for making my professional life just a little more embarrassing.

Keep up the great work, guys.

Man, I do not think I would be able to

survive that meeting.

without doing any bits.

That's...

You are made of tougher stuff, an employee of WGBH Boston.

When you work at WGBH, do all the phones ring with that sound from the logo screen?

Are the cubicles all like handmade, beautiful pieces of woodwork by norm?

God, imagine what that office is like.

So much cool stuff, I bet.

We gotta go back and do a show in Boston and then maybe do a studio tour.

They have like a they have a performance venue at WGBH, I think.

Didn't the Flophouse just do a show there?

I don't know.

We don't need to do a wine show every time we go to Boston.

I'm sorry, Ben.

We do.

I really do.

Yeah.

Contractually, we must do a wine show.

Okay.

Well, if you would like to see us return to Boston or just would like to hear some of your words coming out of our mouth, go to maximumfun.org/slash jumbotron and get yourself a P1 today.

Hey, Ben.

What's that, Adam?

Did you find yourself a Stephen J.

Connell?

What are you doing taking your top off, Hoshi, you silly goose?

Wow.

Blaming Hoshi?

Yeah.

Yikes, Ben.

She just loves dumping him out.

Clearly.

Oh, I hate what they did to Hoshi this episode.

Not just for the boob scene, but like, she should have have been the McLean.

Like, for once in this entire series.

Like, give her the A story, make her instrumental in the success of the mission.

It would have been so cool.

No, Hoshi, babysit these fucking comatose Sulaban.

That's what you get to do.

You get humiliated and then a bad, boring job.

What a bummer.

Yeah.

So, thumbs down to that, but it's her fault.

Wow.

Oh, is this going to be what season two is like?

Yeah.

Ben switches lanes on his entire personality.

That's exciting.

Yeah,

it's the car swerving toward the off-ramp of extremely bad takes about Star Trek Enterprise.

Yeah, I love that.

What was up with that hench this episode?

Yeah.

Yeah, that one guy.

I kept thinking that he was going to die because he's kind of popping off a lot.

Kind of has a lot of his own ideas about things in a way that like Silic is running the show if it's not Ghostly Man.

Yeah.

Similarly, Commander Williams back at Starfleet HQ was kind of popping off a lot in a way where I was like, this guy is done for in some way.

I just haven't figured it out yet.

Yeah.

They've really felt like two sides of one coin.

I mean, all those guys back in San Francisco, like lantern jaw, classic, like, military-industrial complex types.

But this hench, I don't know.

I didn't think he was long for the world.

Very surprised he lived through this episode.

With how much he was popping off in a situation like this, with how Silic treated him in that very dismissive way.

Go ahead and deal with the Warp Core breach, guy.

Leave me to deal with this.

That's what makes him my drunk Shimoda.

Wow.

Faith of the fart.

It's time to start thinking about our next episode, though, Adam.

Why don't you head to goch.biz slash game?

Well, I tell you about season two, episode two,

Carbon Creek.

After Archer and Trip become curious about a visit TePaul made to a Pennsylvania mining town called Carbon Creek, she tells the two a tale about a Vulcan ship that crash-landed in 1957.

I think it's 1958.

Wow, how about that?

Bring it up.

Story time with TePaul.

Storytime with TePaul.

Probably completely absent any embellishments, Ben.

Ooh.

And Cusack, the third Cusack sibling

in this upcoming episode, Adam.

About that.

Let's see if the way we experience the next episode has any embellishments.

With that, I will go to the game of buttholes,

the Will of the Riker Quantum Leap.

Yeah.

Where I will roll a hundred-sided die that will tell tell us how we will experience the next episode.

Here's that roll.

Okay.

You're required to learn as you play.

Roll.

Ben, we have bounced down to square 34.

Tula!

Did I win?

Hardly.

It is on the threshold of an his eyes uncovered episode, but not quite there.

That means story time with Tepal is going to be a regular old episode.

Fantastic.

Also, fantastic are all the friends of DeSoto who support this program on an ongoing basis.

We really appreciate your support.

Maximumfund.org slash join.

If you would like to join those people, get monthly bonus episodes, get discounted access to our streaming shows and our eternal gratitude.

We are also very grateful for Wendy Pretty who produces and edits this show and all of the crap coming out of the Uxbridge Shimoda Corporation.

Got to thank Bill Tilley, our temporal cold wartime consigliary,

and Rob Adler, our social media director.

Follow at Greatest Trek on all the platforms.

Follow those accounts if you want to see the pictures of our art projects.

We're going to have those posted today.

If you're listening to this episode, they're going to be up there.

So check them out.

Go check the Insta or the, you know, the Blue Sky or whatever.

Whatever your social media thing is, we'll probably put them up there.

Vote on which one you like the best, for sure.

And also vote on whether or not WGBH or Stephen J.

Connell has the better logo and music treatment.

Yeah, what's fucked up is that it's one poll.

Yeah.

So like...

Yeah, you have to choose one out of four answers.

Is Ben's art and WGBH

logo the best or is Adam's art and Stephen J.

Connell the best?

Oh, I thought you meant it was a four-answer multiple choice question

Where you only answer one time.

I mean, I think we're all gonna lose to WGBH if if I'm a betting man.

I don't know.

I kind of like the underdog spirit of the Stephen J.

Connell.

All right.

Thanks to Admiral Gusia for helping us make the parody of Dion Warren's original Enterprise theme and Dark Materia for the use of Card Song.

Sign up for our mailing list.

It's a lot of fun.

We put a lot of work into it, and I think it is totally worth being signed up for.

With that, we will be back at you next week with another great episode of Star Trek Enterprise and an episode of the Greatest Generation Enterprise where we are putting on beanies to hide what's going on with our ears.

And our hair.

Sure.

Do you like wearing a beanie in winter?

You just wake up, put a beanie on, get out of the house.

You don't have to put yourself together.

You're wearing a beanie.

Oh, you go inside and your head starts sweating and then you're fucked.

I don't get head sweat with beanies.

Ice cold head.

You and 90% of the extremely mediocre but very hot white guys in LA

cut strays from all the way over there.

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