A Thousand Bottles of Baby Oil (ENT S1E23)
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Transcript
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 wants the sun.
Welcome to The Greatest Generation.
It's a Star Trek podcast by a couple of guys just a little bit embarrassed about having a Star Trek podcast.
I'm Adam Pranica.
I'm Ben Harrison.
Those watching along might have noticed what I've just noticed.
It looks like we got a different angle from you today.
Moved my camera once again.
How about that?
I keep moving it around.
You're keeping the door behind you.
That's good podcast feng shui, right?
Like the door exactly behind your head.
I'm doing the same thing, see?
Door behind me.
That way, if somebody walks in, they can easily catch you podcasting.
Right.
Or in my case, I can look at the camera feed and notice whether or not Ripley is having extremely bad diarrhea on her guest room bed.
Oh, bud.
What is it about dogs and diarrhea?
They love it.
They're so furry.
That's the worst part.
Yeah.
I mean, the diarrhea is the worst part, but diarrhea on fur, a very close second, I'd say.
Yeah, it's...
It's like getting gum in your hair, you know?
Stinky, stinky gum.
You're just fresh back from a Europe trip after our London live show?
Yeah, I stuck around a little bit afterward and went and had noodles with my wife for a week.
It was great.
That's beautiful.
Big fun.
I imagine you're just cross-eyed with jet lag right now.
I feel weird.
I won't say weird, but good.
Just weird.
Just weird.
We'll see, like,
seasoned pilot, you know, doesn't even have to think when they operate the controls.
Maybe that's like me doing the pod with you.
Like, how naturally is this going to come?
Let's find out together.
You got so many little miniature liquor bottles in you, but you still know to turn the plane upside down in a situation like this.
Yeah, I'm talking to you, and I'm reaching behind into the galley to fix up my OJ.
Adam, we have a bunch of packages here.
What do you say?
We open some stuff sent in by friends with DeSoto.
That sounds really nice.
Captain, I'm sorry to disturb you.
I'm receiving a code 47.
Verify.
It is code 47, sir.
Start lead emergency frequency.
Captain's eyes only.
Okay, first thing I've got here,
and I should say we're doing this also on our YouTube channel if you're just listening.
So give that a subscribe.
But first thing I've got here is from our buddy Sarus Varavar out of Oakland, California.
Hasn't Carouse done enough for us already?
He's just the best.
What I feel especially bad about is that I picked this item up from the post office several weeks ago and I didn't even look at it.
I didn't realize Caroose had sent something in.
I should have sent him a text to say thanks again.
Nah.
You just leave him.
Sweat bit.
Wondering.
Yeah.
I would say that we have like a Slack channel on
the Uxbridge Shimoda corporate Slack for keeping track of stuff being sent and part of how we vet items.
And I'd say that about half the posts are Bill saying, you're going to be getting something from this person.
Uh-huh.
And then the other half are Bill going, hey, this person asked if you ever got the thing that they sent, because it's been kind of a long time.
Yeah.
People want to know.
They want to know.
That's why we do the segment.
It means a lot to folks.
Carus has wrapped this in a shopping bag from a popular grocery retailer here in California.
Like a school book for an elementary school kid?
I never had to do that.
You never wrapped your books?
Didn't.
Wow.
That was the law in my school.
Did your school provide the books?
Because
and you're wrapping it to keep it nice for the next person?
Exactly.
Yeah.
So I had to buy my books, so
who gives a shit?
So like
How I Play Tennis by Rod Laver would like you just own that book and then you'd have to sell it back to the
school library.
Yeah, school bookstore will buy it back for a tenth of what you paid for it.
What a racket that is.
Incredible.
I'm not seeing a note anywhere.
But you're pretty sure it's from Sarus, yeah?
It said Sarouse on the outside, and I believe it.
You don't think it's anyone impersonating Sarus?
If they are, they've gone to the extent of putting Sarus's real address in Oakland, which is in the same zip code that I grew up in.
It occurs to me that that's not what they call themselves anymore.
It's tribute Sarus's
is what they'd be.
What Sarus has sent is some more treasures from Star Trek past.
We have some ASCII art printed out on a dot matrix printer that I think is supposed to be Captain Picard.
And maybe that's supposed to be...
is that Spock?
Does that read a Spock to you?
Just imagine the nerd that waited
for that printer cartridge to go back and forth.
Oh man, this is amazing.
Somebody named Steve Quinn has forwarded these in some, I don't know if this is...
email, like a very early form of email, or some sort of like internal comm system at like a university.
But there's also a list of episode names and titles for Deep Space Nine.
I guess this is the first season of Deep Space Nine, I'm guessing.
It's got the date it aired,
the star date, the show title, and a brief synopsis for first season episodes of DS9 on this Dot Matrix printout.
Is Cerus just going dumpster diving at
colleges who don't get the benefit of great funding.
Like colleges that don't have the funding for laser printers, even?
It does kind of seem that way, doesn't it?
Yeah.
We also have a 1994 Star Trek calendar, TOS calendar, to be specific.
Ben, you probably know this off the top of your head.
When does the 1994 calendar come back to work again
as a modern calendar?
Does that ever happen or am I just making that up?
My best friend grown up, still one of my best buds, Michael Hoffman's father is a mathematician and I have a
memory of going over to their house and like having dinner with their family one time when I was a kid and idly wondering about that.
Like do the dates like wind up lining up on the on the right months the right way again?
Like can you reuse calendars just with shifting the date forward?
It seems like a great question.
His dad,
actual mathematician, just like whipped out a notebook and like worked it out, worked out the algorithm that you would need to apply to figure this out, like from first principles.
And it was the most boring dinner conversation I've ever had.
You know, idly asking that question backfired in a big way that night.
What a terrible middle you were at the time.
So did you get the answer or not?
Yeah, but I don't remember what it was.
Oh, God.
Great story.
31 years.
I don't know.
Okay.
Oh man, I didn't know that there was an aged Scotty episode.
We gotta watch that.
How about that guy?
The deadly years.
You know what you should do is you should hang this calendar up behind you.
Like under your little hat rack back there?
Oh sure.
Really throw some people off.
This calendar includes the birth dates of cast members and Gene Roddenberry and then some key Jewish and Christian holidays.
Oh, and like Independence Day and Labor Day, it looks like.
The bigs.
Yeah.
How do you celebrate Gene Roddenberry's birthday in your home, Ben?
We observe it by fasting.
Oh.
I don't think he ever did that.
And then the last thing in this package is more of these
sheets for...
Somebody sent in this binder of
Star Trek trivia.
Some great episodes in here.
Got all good things.
Doomsday Machine from TOS.
City on the Edge of Forever from TOS.
That's one we've watched.
Sure is.
The Inner Light.
Look at that.
Speaking of aged characters.
That's not the picture I would have gone with for that episode.
I mean, I would have gone with the one where Picard's playing the flute, but it's some other strange guy's hands working the holes.
That's the one.
Here's one for the D, and this one is a...
Alright.
Damn.
Save that one for later.
I think I will.
Uh, thank you, Ceruse.
Thank you for sending more stuff in.
The Bible was plenty.
I mean, just writing an article about us was plenty.
I mean, the Bible is more than we deserve, really.
Yeah, fine.
This next one came from Lightning Source.
Just a commercial shipping label.
It doesn't come from a person.
And I looked up Lightning Source, and it seems to be a print-on-demand book publisher.
Oh.
I'm guessing this is
somebody's own book or something like that.
They sent it to the right person.
Oh, it's the 90 prettiest county courthouses in Texas and the 10 ugliest.
Hey, that's a follow-up to a commercial P1 we got a while ago.
That's great.
Oh man,
what a delight.
Beautiful photography in here.
Damn, is that the center fold?
These are all quite pretty.
I haven't gotten to the ugly ones yet, I suppose.
Ooh.
Check out the backside on that courthouse.
This is great.
Kevin Miller, the author and photographer of the 90 Prettiest County Courthouses in Texas and the 10 Ugliest, sent this in.
Deeply appreciated.
I want to visit all of them.
I want to use the bathrooms in every one of them.
I want to jurisdiction shop
an intellectual property case in just the right county courthouse in Texas.
Got to find the right one.
I move for a change of venue, Adam.
It's fairly unorthodox, but I'll allow it.
I want my corn pwn country attorney to feel right at home in the venue.
That's why I'm making this motion before the court.
Yeah, comfort's a priority.
This last one is from Josh H.
out of Rochester, New Hampshire.
There's a Rochester, New Hampshire, in addition to Rochester, New York.
That must be confusing.
And it's an N blank state.
Like, I bet mail gets mixed up all the time.
What a mess.
I open it up from the right side because the note is right here on top.
Dear Ben and Adam, or Adam and Ben, I can't decide.
Longtime listener, first time sending a code 47.
Please find and close some awesome Star Trek items my great aunt and uncle shared with me.
Please share the items to the best of your ability so you can both enjoy everything here.
The jacket belonged to my great uncle, uncle, and when I visited him this past spring, he gave me the jacket to pass on to another trekker.
She who is my prodigy is too big to fit into it, so she who is my wife and I thought Darone would be perfect to inherit the jacket.
Thank you both for the years of entertainment with both pods.
We are looking forward to hearing your views on the rest of season one of Enterprise and are really loving Hot Cylon Summer.
Josh and Christian from New Hampshire and Transmission.
All right.
This is this is goodie box is what we've got here.
All right.
Oh, shuttlecraft to enterprise.
Shuttlecraft Enterprise.
Spock here.
Happy holidays.
Live long and prosper.
That's what that button says.
I hit it a thousand times as a kid.
A Truttle Pod Galileo Hallmark Keepsake Christmas ornament.
Wow, Adam.
One of the best.
I'm surprised that another one of these exists.
We have have the marshmallow dispenser from Star Trek V
with
seems like maybe working mechanism inside.
Look at that mechanism.
Wow, I was looking around the studio for mine.
I think I don't think it's on display in my studio museum.
That's a shame.
That's a damn shame, Adam.
You know what happened to it been?
We took it out on tour.
It famously broke.
It really got fucked up, yeah.
It was filled with marshmallow weavings.
And I put it in my studio, and the ants got to it.
Oh, no.
Ants all over.
And I think I put it outside for the ants to leave.
I just carried it away.
They were like, this thing's worth like 60 bucks on eBay, man.
This is my house now.
And now it's in a bush.
Oh, man, another Hallmark keepsake ornament, Adam, this time of the Enterprise-D.
i'm gonna come over and scoop up all those christmas ornaments man yeah we are not a uh a a christmas tree household so these these are are yours for the taken
some star trek magazines here
oh yeah perfect for the top of a toilet tank
in any home imagine being the photographer that took that picture hold up that that one again You see that picture of the cast everywhere.
It's one of the best pictures.
You know, if you're the photographer, you got it with that.
We recently had a little photo sesh with a friend of DeSoto who actually does those types of photos.
And he did the analogous one for when they got them all back together for season three of Star Trek Picard, Spoiler Alert, and gave us each print of that photo.
And I covet it.
Amazing.
To have a print of that photo?
Amazing.
Yeah, shout out to Denny Denn, friend of the show,
Who's just extremely talented.
Also would love to have this print of this one, the Picard and Riker with Gene on the bridge.
That picture is on the cover of both of these magazines.
Look at that.
Yeah.
Uncredited.
Yeah, who knows?
Who knows who took that picture?
Dr.
Star Trek knows.
He sure does.
That guy knows everything.
What have we here?
Why, it's a commemorative plate with the Starship Enterprise D on it.
I've never seen this particular commemorative plate before.
It's not one of the
like weird sort of
uncanny valley paintings of the cast, you know, like
where
especially Troy and Beverly look super strange.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think Data looks particularly great on those plates either.
He doesn't.
For the audio-only FODs, that plate was the size of a coaster or like like a tea
tea coaster or something.
Is that what are we talking about here?
It's a porcelain mini plate with easel.
I would guess, yeah, like three inches in diameter.
Yeah.
That's the size of all of them should be.
That's, yeah.
Reliably at the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, there's one table in the merch hall that is like pretty focused on the commemorative plates.
And it is amazing how many of those got made over the years.
Like, when I think about like how hard it is to make money as a consumer packaged goods company or just, like, a company that, like, you know, we sell like one or two t-shirts every day on PodShowf.biz.
If we're lucky.
If we're fucking lucky, right.
Like, a company made plates that you can't even eat off of Star Trek shit and made...
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of variations on what that plate could be.
And like they still are collectible for some reason.
the work of someone who toils within the star trek economy yeah is great effort but i think about the guy who schleps those plates from convention to convention oh of all the things of all the things to schlep those plates like having to put the like little slip of foam rubber in between each plate as you load them back into the like rubber-made tubs that you put in the back of your van to go to the next convention.
Alright, spool up the Sarah McLaughlin style background music as I begin what I'm about to say here.
FODs,
you've gone to Star Trek conventions before and you've seen them.
The person behind the banquet table covered in the black duve,
piled high with collectible plates.
Plates like this need your help.
Now more than ever.
Don't just walk by these tables and chuckle to your friend about what a pain in the asses have got to be to schlep from convention to convention.
Buy a plate.
Take it off of this person's hand.
Make it less of a job for them.
They need your help now more than ever.
FODs, at the next convention you go to, I'm asking you, I'm begging you.
Buy a terrible porcelain plate.
Operators are standing by at 1-800-555 plate.
If you can't make it to a Star Trek convention, I've been told operators are standing by at 206-984-4.
If you just call that number, you can request whatever plate you want
and leave your billing and shipping information after the beep.
For the cost of just five or six cups of coffee a day for a year, you too
can make sure a plate with wharf on it has a loving home
have you not made a terrible purchase lately
the terriblest could happen to you today
you want to do an episode ben uh let me just uh show this one last item oh there it is oh that is child size sick ass Starship Enterprise Original Edition bomber jacket, like schematic bomber jacket.
And it's got like cuffs.
Look at those cuffs.
Yeah.
Look at that.
Oh, man.
That is too small for a Benjamin R.
Harrison.
Is it big enough for a Darone?
I think Derone will grow into this.
It's a size 14.
I don't know what size 14 means, but.
Ben, you're going to have a incredible decision to make.
When Darone, finally old enough to dress himself for school,
puts that thing on for the first time in the morning.
Are you going to jump on the social grenade that
that represents?
A social grenade that could ruin his reputation forever were he to wear it to school.
The amount of
shame that I carry through the world with me that I could save him from.
Spool up that Sarah McLaughlin musical one.
No, no, no.
We don't have to.
But for the cost of a pair of scissors,
you could destroy this thing before it has a chance to hurt your son.
What do you think?
Don't let it hurt anyone else.
Something I'm gonna have to give some consideration to.
I think I have like at least a year or two before he fits into that.
So, uh, all right, that's fair.
A lot of time to thank.
Thank you, Josh and Kristen, and Kevin Miller, and Sarus Faravar for all of the great stuff you sent in today.
Adam, what do you say we get into the episode we came to talk about?
Can't wait, Ben.
It's Star Trek Enterprise Season 1, episode 23.
Appropriately, Michael Jordan's 23.
Because I think we've got one of the greatest guest stars here in this episode.
It's called Fallen Hero.
The opening of this episode, again, in the captain's mess, has Archer and Trip kind of like choking down food because of
something that has just been uttered.
And it turns out what the topic of conversation
at the highest table on the ship is that the humans are not fucking often enough to stay sane,
according to TePaul.
She has a very specific reason for bringing this up.
Efficiency has fallen behind in her mind.
And maybe the humans among the crew would do better if they roped a little bit more or got it knocked out a little bit more often, as it were.
I was trying to remember what is and isn't a secret about Ponfar because she seems pretty open with the I fuck once every seven years thing with them.
Yeah.
I don't know if that's just because she in particular is forward or if that, like, if that aspect of it isn't part of what Vulcans are so weird about.
We do not discuss it.
I think if you and I were in this scene, there'd be very little to talk about because she'd talk about the once every seven years pon fire thing.
You and I would be like, Yeah, same.
Once every seven years.
That often?
Wow.
We're fine.
That's a hell of a dry spell.
She has gone ahead and spent some bonvoy points on behalf of the crew and set up a shore leave on a planet called Risa.
This should be a fun episode.
Cannot wait to go to Risa.
Basically, like a sexual Jurassic park.
Captain Archer, my dear Triptaka, welcome to Sexual Jurassic Park.
We're gonna make a fortune with this place.
Push in on a mined chunk of amber coming out of a cave, and there's like a pineapple rope
shooting into the middle of it.
You can't see it because amber and pineapple ropes
don't look completely dissimilar.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Once they're fossilized.
But when the guy that played Escobedo in Clear and Present Danger has all the miners show their helmet lights on it and he says, quelindores,
you can just make it out.
Why does this cave smell like the cum plant?
It's fucking gross.
This is resolved pretty quickly, and they start heading there.
Archer expresses a desire pretty early on to not go on the vacation and stay back and do nerdy shit like looking over documents or whatever.
And TePaul is not having any of this.
She and Trip kind of bully Archer out of it.
A trip that has decided that it's casual star date day
on the bridge.
Hey, it's not vacation time yet, Trip Tucker.
Yeah.
Save that for
the shuttle pod down.
Like, you're not even in orbit yet.
Think about this with me.
Okay.
This predates a moment where there are clothing printers on a starship.
Sure.
Because the first time we saw one of those is on Discovery.
Sure.
Many, many years after this.
Yeah, I don't think they have matter replicators on this Enterprise.
So Trip Tucker,
we both recently had to do this when we went to Europe for our tour show.
Trip Tucker chose.
to pack a Hawaiian shirt on this mission, not knowing if he'd ever get a chance to wear this.
I like the optimism of that move, you know?
He's gonna be the only one with one of these shirts, right?
No one else would have thought to do this.
Well, I took notice.
Yeah, how could you not?
I mean, TePaul absolutely clobbers his nuts over this shirt, though.
If you're wearing that to impress the women on Ryza, you may as well stay on board.
She noticed.
Yeah.
It's not working for her.
The captain gets a priority communique from Admiral Forrest and goes into the clarinet storage room to take this FaceTime.
You know things are getting exciting when you see Admiral Forrest on screen.
Yeah.
Did he have a new jacket?
His jacket looked like new and crispy.
God,
what a hunk.
You know shit is about to go buck wild if we get an Admiral Forrest on the screen.
Yep.
Uber mission.
This is going to be a crazy episode.
And because it involves a Vulcan, that's all you get to know.
Yeah.
Well, this may come as a shock to you, John, but the Vulcans aren't talking.
Imagine that.
There wasn't a moment that I felt like they really processed the vacation being canceled.
And I couldn't tell if that was because the vacation kind of kept getting delayed, like when you are told that your flight is going to be 15 minutes minutes late departing, and then they keep adding 15 minutes to that?
I wish we got that moment, Ben.
I don't prefer the sort of criticism that's like, missed opportunity to blank, but keeping Trip Tucker in this shirt for the rest of the episode would have been great.
Yeah, that would have been solid.
Keep him in the shirt.
Keep him thinking that, like, once this next thing gets resolved, we're dropping her off and we're off to Ryza.
Don't change.
So in Hoshi's cabin, we learn that that's where this person's going to be staying.
Her name's Valar.
Yeah.
And Tepal is the one to break this news.
We skip over the news-breaking part straight into the Hoshi getting her shit and getting the fuck out part.
And with how hard Hoshi worked to even get this cabin, I expected her to put up a little more of a fight.
Didn't you?
Like, the stars are going the right way.
She's going to have to go to a cabin with maybe even no stars at all, and that sucks.
Yeah, where is she going to be?
Like, down in the belly of the ship where there's no light?
How could you not make them roommates either?
Yeah, that would have been fun.
Kind of a,
you know, Tilly and Michael Burnham situation, a little odd couple.
I mean, they probably couldn't have Trip Tucker as as the roommate because of the frequent pregnancy scares that occur when he's involved in a mission, right?
You're never gonna let that go, are you?
Yeah, indeed.
Anybody uh that's ever slept next to a pregnant person also knows they're just getting up multiple times a night to go pee.
Can be a little bit disruptive, you know?
I bet.
So they're off their path toward Raisa and on their way to the Masorite homeworld where this ambassador is going to be.
They arrive to pick up the ambassador and they're like, hey, so like, yeah, we heard we're picking up this ambassador.
We'll get a shuttle down there pretty soon.
Should be no problem.
And the niceties are cut short.
They're on FaceTime with like some Masorite official.
And he's like, nope, she's already on her way to you.
She's being expelled for criminal conduct.
We don't want anything to do with her.
These Masorites have a very poly walnuts from the Sopranos kind of look to their hair, I thought.
Yeah.
What is going on here?
That's all we got to do to make an alien anymore?
anymore i tell you what tone
when i heard the term masoret i kind of thought about my buddy has mazaro and his caramel barge
wondering if uh these guys ever hang out there you don't have to come down to here we'll bring her to you
So yeah, we are meeting this ambassador very, very quickly.
And this is the Bouvelar, of course, played by the great Fianna LaFlynn again.
Or did we find out that it was pronounced like Fenula or something?
Oh, God.
Somebody probably corrected us at some point.
Oh, no.
Oh, isn't that just the worst by us two?
To endure a correction and then forget the correction?
Hey, Don, you forgot the correction.
It's a nice pronunciation of an Irish name that you got there.
Wouldn't be ashamed if something happened to her.
Did you get the sense that Villard drove herself up to the station, given what we learn about and what proximity to danger she is or whatever?
And that at this point, maybe
they're trying to obscure the idea that she's being chased and this is kind of an escape, but no one wants to tell anyone anything about that at this moment in time.
If she did drive herself, that sort of implies that she brought a cool craft that they could have mentioned.
And
they tell me.
Yeah.
Anyways, she seems really neat.
She like comes aboard shaking hands and being personable in a way that
Starfleet officers who have only interacted with a certain type of Vulcan are not expecting.
Old Lady Vulcan sticking out her hand to do a handshake is as surprising as like you or I doing a four-step handshake greeting situation.
Sure.
You know, like, wow.
All right.
Cool.
She is so fucking chill.
So much chiller than they could have ever imagined she would be.
What'd you make of this?
Like, she holds her hand up almost at head height.
Yeah.
I mean, she's not that much shorter than Scott Bakula or whatever.
I think it emphasizes how unusual the moment is, and it makes it really like more delightful that she does it like that.
They are expecting her to be, like, I think we've sort of been primed by TePaul expressing what it's going to be like to have a very important Vulcan aboard to everyone.
Like, don't, don't plan on her being super social and out in these streets.
Like, she's not going to be coming around the mess hall and hanging with people.
She's going to, like, probably be meditating the whole time.
And it's about like minimizing how stinky that experience is for her for the rest of the next three days.
But I wanted to show her my nipples.
Strangers get a kick out of them.
If Trip had still been wearing the Hawaiian shirt and he had done the high arm handshake, it would have been about showing those nips, right?
Can you imagine what a hit Trip Tucker would be on the surface of Ryza wearing a Hawaiian shirt, arms full of nipples?
I'd dump them out just by wearing short sleeves.
Don't make me the server in beach volleyball.
Ouch.
Honestly, don't make me the bump setter either.
I'm only good for spikes.
No nipples on the palm of my hands.
She wants to thank Hoshi for inconveniencing herself.
That is also a thing that comes as a surprise.
Yeah.
Consideration for other people.
A big surprise where the Vulcans are concerned.
And look at this.
She comes to dinner.
She comes to the captain's table and,
you know, is being super cool.
She is putting it away, too.
Wow.
When you see a veteran actor make a choice like this,
you got to respect it, right?
Yeah, she's eating a claire's like the scene at the end of Van Wilder.
Like she's
going two-handed.
Oh, yeah.
Our buddy John Hodgman, right here on the Max Fun Network, who we've done some bonus episodes and stuff with, has a story in one of his books about being kind of new to acting and being in a scene where he's like, his character is eating cheese doodles and he thought it would be funny to eat like a lot of cheese doodles in the first take and then realized that that meant for the rest of the day they'd be shooting coverage where he's eating shit tons of cheese doodles.
You know?
Like Fenula Flanagan and/or Fianula Flanagan, a seasoned pro at this point.
So this choice by her is
a powerful one, I think.
You
puffy or a crunchy?
Cheese doodler?
Oh, man.
I think I'm crunchy.
I think I like the crunch.
I like the crunchy, but I tell you one thing: I love these guys.
The pops?
Oh, yeah.
The biggins.
Yeah.
Yeah, those are good.
Those are good.
Yeah.
Back when you used to be able to get them.
I'm just trying to stay away from anything puffy these days.
Good luck.
You know, it's funny you say that, Ben.
I just was able to buy a thousand bottles of baby oil very inexpensively on the on the used market.
It's not the obvious topping for a bucket of cheese balls, but it's actually pretty good.
I mean, if you're speed eating them, it is
so when we learn that Valar
is not just your standard run-of-the-mill diplomat, she's also got a record.
Things like abuse of her position and criminal misconduct, it seems like this is going to be less of an Uber mission and more like con air.
Right?
She just wants to bring a bunny back to the Vulcan High Command.
Yeah, incredible, right?
Yeah.
So, and it's like there's sort of a need to know thing.
Like they're like, what did you do?
Like, did you piss off the Masorites or are you like getting away with something?
And she won't tell them whether, like, she won't even admit whether she thinks she's guilty of these crimes or not.
Falcons are terrible middles.
They don't keep the conversation ball in the air for shit.
Yeah.
Dinner ends in kind of a weird energy, and Tepal takes the ambassador back to her quarters.
The ambassador is kind of like, do you want to like do some Vulcans only hangs?
Being that we are the only two of our people here aboard?
And Tepal is not really open to or available for this type of experience.
I think because the last time she had Vulcan on Vulcan hangs, she had Vulcan hands all over her face.
So there's a trust issue.
Yeah, in a very surprising and shocking way.
Much in the way that the Masorites have started to wonder if they can trust the Vulcans, Tepal has as well.
Indeed.
Jian is, in fact, disappointed with one of her heroes, and she goes and talks to Archer about this in the hallway.
And he's like, Yeah, it seems like this is really bumming you out, this mission, and you weren't even going down to Rhiza to fuck.
Like, the disappointment should be less for you, not more.
It seems like Velar is such a rare case.
This constellation of like her weird social behavior and that she's got a rap sheet.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
Yeah, and it's bumming TePaul out.
Yeah.
TePaul met Velar long, long ago.
Is she more disappointed at the rap sheet or that she wasn't remembered when they met when she was a schoolchild?
Yeah, unclear.
A couple of ways, probably.
Yeah.
I mean, they both survived a diplomatic conference in Star Trek a long time ago.
So it's like, it should bond them, you know.
Hard to do.
Yeah.
But instead, yeah, it seemed to go unremarked on.
So this is a like slight variation on Never Meet Your Heroes.
It's never meet your heroes for a second time and have them kind of like not seem to really remember you.
I was bracing myself for another heroic water polo story here because this is the angle Archer tends to take in conversations like these.
You know, one time I met,
you know, like name of horse polo horse.
He bit my hand when I tried to feed him an apple.
It sucked.
So this conversation is interrupted by a message calling Archer to the bridge.
And on the bridge, we see they're being chased by another ship.
And on FaceTime, there's a Manzanite there.
Manzerite?
Something like that.
Manzonite sounds like a stone you put in a ring when you don't want to buy a diamond, you know?
Manzonite.
Maybe she won't notice.
No, I mean, she'll notice, all right.
She'll notice when she tries to get it insured.
Yeah.
Manzonite.
Don't ever get it insured.
Yeah, they're like, hey, we kind of jumped the gun on giving up that perp, and the magistrate has a lot more questions for her.
So if you could just hand her back over, we will take her back to our homeworld.
And Archer kind of stalls.
He's like, I'm not in a position to just give this person up.
I've got to go ask Admiral Forrest.
And you can tell that that is like not a believable bluff, like just based on the other captain's reaction.
We get several scenes between this captain and Archer having conversations about the situation.
And I wish they were all a little more like this.
Because
this Manzanite captain's bluffing a little bit.
He's like, yeah, you know, I'm just a freighter ship captain out here.
Palace Intrigue doesn't float my boat at all.
I'm just out here pushing tin or whatever.
And Archer does the same thing.
Like, yeah, I'm just out here on a Warp V starship taking orders from extreme sexual icons, Admiral Forrest.
You know, I'm just taking orders myself.
Like, I wish there was more
gamesmanship.
This is the only game there is in the entire episode between them.
More all shucks.
I'm just a lowly captain in this here Starfleet.
Yeah.
This turns into a shooting fight really quickly.
And
this other ship is jamming their broadcasts.
And wouldn't you know it, the torpedoes that the Entrepreneur has do not have any effect on the shields that this ship has.
Why are they even shooting them anymore?
Get rid of the weight and just like put that much less strain on your engines, right?
You know what would really have an effect?
Like venting all of their waste material out the back of Enterprise.
Get this guy back on screen and he's like, oh,
oh, it's awful.
While the humans have solved most of the social ills, they still have a terrible food waste problem in the 22nd century.
It's pretty good for shit.
Yuck.
We also learned that we can't fire phasers at warp.
So
Reed is like still working on that, but they have to drop to impulse to successfully defend themselves.
What would you say you do here, Reed?
Given these two details.
If I were Reed, I might just go to engineering and make myself busy there.
Not much to do shooting the weapons.
No.
Don't got to have webs.
No.
That is not the key.
No.
But he does, he knocks out the other ship's propulsion.
And while the ship is still shooting at them, it can't pursue.
So they go back to warp and Archer goes down and confronts the ambassador again.
Faith of the fart.
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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 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 next episode.
Join us every other Thursday on Maximum Fun.
And you will never take the greatest gym alive.
Ben would rather die.
In Valar's quarters, I have no answers for you.
Sounds a lot like the Vulcan version of a lie, right?
Right, like I'm not going to tell you the truth, but I'm just not going to tell you anything.
Yeah, I mean, this is familiar in a like Star Trek VI context when a Vulcan character in that movie famously sort of lied but kind of didn't.
It was like that kind of semantic thing happening here.
A lie?
Yeah, it's like a this is all going on way above your pay grade.
Like you were kind of talking shit to that other captain like decisions needed to be made by people more powerful than you, but that wasn't in fact totally untrue.
Like the diplomatic concerns here are more than you can probably manage.
And
Archer kind of calls her bluff.
He like
radio zipped to Mayweather like as they're talking and is like, all right, turn it around.
We're dropping her back off with the Manzonites.
Masonites?
Masons?
I've never had an altercation with a rideshare driver that I can recall.
I think I'm a pretty good passenger.
But what if on the table at any point, if you weren't locked down, that driver's going to turn it around and drop you off where he picked you up?
I bet behavior would be a lot better
if that were one of the options.
A lot more people would have a perfect five stars on their actions.
I think so, too.
Yeah.
That's the threat here.
So, yeah, like...
She is pretty upset about this, but not a lot she can do.
And it still doesn't persuade her.
Like, you know, Archer still doesn't know what the charges are against her.
So, he's like, you know, like, whatever, you know, I'm gonna take you back and drop you off.
I'm not gonna get everybody over here killed over you.
I don't know you.
I don't know her, right?
Especially because death is not on the line for Valar at this point in Archer's mind.
Like, Trip was trying to get his dick sucked on the beach right now.
Like,
work my arm nipples.
Don't ignore them.
If you could line your fingers up, you can pinch and tweak a lot of nipples all at once.
It takes a little practice, but you can do it.
Cut to Archer and Admiral Forrest doing a FaceTime where Archer is showing more emotion than I think maybe he ever has on this show in this scene because he is super frustrated about being in the dark again.
Admiral Forrest is like, look, he's eating the sandwich and like wiping his fingers with tissue paper.
He's like, look.
I think I'll give you any napkins in this place.
My hands are tied just like you.
I'm going to go talk to Admiral Saval
and see if I can't get more information.
Yeah.
But not super helpful.
Like,
unclear if Admiral Forrest knows more than he's letting on or if he's just as in the dark as Archer.
Great point by you, Ben, because in an episode where you're just getting...
blocked at every turn at getting any information at all about what's actually going on here, there's a limit to this, right?
In a Star Trek episode, you're like 20 minutes in and you're like,
Am I ever going to know what's actually happening here?
Are we going to just end this episode with just it being like, why did we even watch any of that?
There's that angle, but because the Vulcans are involved, you're also feeling like, okay, who else is keeping information for me that is vital to my understanding of the situation?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we got a little scene.
I love the scene with Trip and Reed just like walking down a hallway.
And Trip is
like, Reed, you got into this for shooting.
Right?
Like,
you do what you do because you're about that life.
Yeah.
And Reed going, yeah, I love the violence of it all.
I need something to do on this shit, Commander.
Fair enough.
Also, not to be missed is the conversation about the six-fingered folks on Risa.
An even number of fingers would suggest if nipple tweaking was what you're into,
a sixth finger would be vital.
Because then that's three nipples per hand.
The happy ending to the massages provided on Raisa?
Much happier now that I have this body modification.
So in the mess hall, Hoshi and Valar are having a chat, and it looks like they're hitting it off.
pretty fast and that's because Valar is getting absolutely hammered on passion fruit iced tea.
If you aren't used to having any beverage that isn't water,
this is going to knock you on your ass, right?
A lot of caffeine in the passion fruit iced tea on Entrepreneur.
You want to take that again?
Sorry.
How are you, the tired one?
I tell you about my neighbor's alarm clock.
That's like...
My neighbor has this insane alarm clock for people that can't get up in the morning.
And they've been sleeping with their window open and this alarm goes off at like 5 a.m.
and they don't turn it off.
They won't turn it off till like 8 a.m.
What?
It wakes me and my wife up every morning now.
It goes off for three hours straight?
For three hours and it is so loud that it is coming out of their window through the wall of my house and waking us up.
How long has this been going on?
Apparently it happened when I was in London, but then like it's happened twice in a row now.
And I like actually went over and knocked on the door this morning and they didn't answer like the the tv was on super loud i could hear that blasting through the door ben you got to make contact with these neighbors i know i know i went and like yelled through the the open window to see if i could raise them that way but there's a tree trunk right by that window that has a beehive in it and there were like bees swarming around my head so i couldn't stand there
it was really insane it was i had a very insane morning i mean from their perspective, they're looking out the window, seeing a tree yell at them
in that weird liminal waking, sleeping state.
That's very confusing, I bet.
Yeah.
So, anyways, Tapal comes in and tries to get Valar to spill the iced tea about what's going on back at the Masorites.
Hey, you think that's going to happen?
No.
Valar's a tough nut to crack.
Yeah.
But we do learn that she has a memory, like a steel trap.
She does remember TePaul from way back in the day.
Yeah.
She remembers the specific instance that TePaul came up and asked her some question that was impudent and, you know, the question of a young upstart who thinks they know everything about how the world works, but it caused her to re-evaluate something.
Was impudent part of the dialogue?
Because I wrote down that exact word, too.
Oh, man, I think it might have been.
Your questions about my negotiating tactics were quite presumptuous coming from one so young.
I apologize if I acted inappropriately.
That's too weird of a coincidence.
What do you think of this sequence?
Like, as soon as it's to Paul V.
Valar, it's soap opera-style...
singles back and forth and the and the camera's just pushing in on both of them.
Yeah.
It's intense.
I liked it.
This is a one and only episode director on this one.
That's why I brought it up.
This guy.
Patrick Norris.
Yeah.
Who looks like still directs TV from time to time?
Yeah.
What's a good Patrick Norris joke?
Remember?
Remember those?
Oh, yeah.
Like
when Patrick Norris calls action,
the whole world begins their scene.
Yeah.
When he says print that one, they print the entire reel of film.
What's underneath Patrick Norris's beard?
I don't know what.
A director's chair.
Yeah.
He doesn't not look like he could be related to Chuck Norris.
It's weird, right?
Yeah.
Whoa, he directed Nash Bridges episodes.
Pretty fun.
Fun stuff.
Hey, you directed Friday Night Lights episodes.
Isn't that your favorite show?
One of my favorite shows.
Cool stuff.
So the scene ends with Volar being willing to confide something important.
And again, we don't get to stick around to hear it.
How long is this episode going to jerk us around?
I don't know, man.
We've got to watch these commercials so these people can sell us these things.
So over in Archer's Quarters, TePaul interrupts Porthos' time
to tell him about the conversation that she had with Valar.
And Tepaul tells Archer that the charges against her were bullshit and they're just fabrications to distract her from the real mission, which
is classified.
TePaul is not going to share what she learned, but she is going to cash a chit.
She's going to ask Archer for a favor for the first time ever, and he is willing to grant it on those terms.
Whatever this secret mission is, Archer determines he is going to help with.
So I guess they turn the ship around again,
and now suddenly there's three Maserite ships chasing them and shooting at them.
And I guess they caught up.
with the Enterprise just because the Enterprise spent so much time backtracking toward their land.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I thought it was funny that Archer wasn't on the bridge during this attack.
Like, we're on the bridge and then he arrives there after.
Yeah.
That's fun.
What were you doing?
Give them a heads up before they're in weapons range.
Archer needs all of his Porthos time, not just some of it.
Yeah, Porthos had diarrhea right in the middle of the guest bed in Archer's quarters, and
he spent a lot of time cleaning up before he could attend to the attack on his shift.
Centerpiece seen in the episode is the warp speed measuring contest that Enterprise has against these Mansorite ships.
They punch it all the way to warp five.
Yeah.
We've been told that this is a warp five ship, but turns out that is an on-paper warp five.
Your mileage may vary.
It's kind of like how the internet service provider told me that I was getting gigabit internet, but it never quite gets there, you know.
There's a moment here where top speed isn't warp five, though, and and they're pushing it to the limit.
And Velar, you know, Velar's felt the bangers in Hoshi's quarters.
Nothing falls off the wall in Hoshi's quarters when the bangers go off, though.
So it's just the rumble that gets to her.
She gets to the bridge and she's like, hey, what's up?
And once she sees in what kind of danger the ship is, this compels Velar to talk to Archer.
And in his ready room, she once again tells him that he's he's on a need-to-know basis and she doesn't need to tell him anything.
Like,
in the very same scene, she finally comes out and says it.
The Manzanites are criminals.
And her job was to go undercover to root out their organized crime.
Crimes that I can't describe to you in any way.
She's like the cue of Manzanite society, right?
Like there's like sickos in the deep state of the Manzanite government that the like the good people in the Manzanite government contracted with the Vulcans to have her investigate but now the sickos are after her
I think so much depends on what exactly these crimes are for this episode to be interesting
and this moment
this moment wants you to believe that this is good enough because I feel like Archer in this scene feels like I do
You kept this as the secret?
These crimes are barely barely interesting enough for a Star Trek episode.
That's why your character is here.
To make them more interesting.
Have the Manzanites be the proprietors of a comet ping pong or something.
Like, have it be horrific, but also, like, you know, the kind of accusation you can't just make without like really good evidence.
Just like boring ass corruption doesn't feel like it would be, it would warrant all of this, right?
Bad.
What if it were salacious?
Ooh.
You know what i'm saying yeah like yeah make it dirty right like why did she come aboard with an evidence locker with 1000 tubes of of baby oil in it
who needs that much baby oil the way valar is weird should be associated with these crimes somehow right right but it's just that she's weird Just that she's weird and she like knows too much and like the bad guys in the Masorite government want to take her out before she can like jacques them.
So there's all this brinksmanship surrounding getting it up to Warp 5.
And then, you know,
I thought that they did like a pretty good job with building the tension in this scene.
But when the campfire breaks out in engineering, I was like, no, that can't be what the warp five engine looks like when you push it past its like specced limit.
Like, it can't just be like.
It's barrels and mesh.
And we're like pushing sometimes smoke out of that mesh and sometimes just a little bit of flame.
Crackle.
Little flickers of
flame.
Like, no, it's got to be explosive.
It's got to be sparks.
This is Star Trek.
Give me explosions or sparks.
Give me girders.
Yeah, no girders.
Yeah.
So they're trying to close the distance between the entrepreneur and this Vulcan ship that they're going to meet up with.
And there are eight minutes left, best case scenario, if the Vulcans even received the message that they tried to send through the scattering field.
But then they get hit and they drop to impulse.
And now it's 10 minutes before they'll meet up with the Vulcans, best case scenario, because they're not at warp anymore.
Which means the pressure is on Archer to have a conversation with the captain of another ship that lasts...
as long as 10 minutes.
A man who has never had a conversation with any captain of any ship for longer than 10 seconds.
And this is who you're asking to stretch the taffy?
Yeah.
These scenes are pretty fun to me, though.
Yeah.
So Valar gets sent to Six Bay.
Six Bay.
I'll explain later.
They're told to like prepare to be boarded and
they go receive the boarding party.
But the boarding party is not like guys with guns hustling into the ship and locking it down.
I was like, why wouldn't it be?
Wouldn't it be like rifles and like SWAT gear kind of energy?
Just because you've disabled a ship doesn't mean you've disabled the people inside.
Yeah.
You're exactly right about this.
They sent three people.
Enterprise is full of crew people and phasers.
Just stun those three people and be like, hmm?
What?
You're hailing again?
No, your captain's over here.
He's doing stuff.
Yeah.
No, he's too busy to talk to you right now.
You can buy 10 minutes easy doing that.
The Sharad
is putting Valar in Six Bay in a dermal regeneration chamber.
Yeah.
And so the boarding party goes to Six Bay.
They talk to Dr.
Flox.
Dr.
Flox defends his patient and goes, We can't yank her out of there.
She's getting new skin.
New skin because she was fucked up during your attack on our ship.
Yeah, you blew up our shuttle bay and the deck that she was on.
This is all your fault.
You want her back?
You blew her up.
You blew her up
so they shoot the MRI machine over Flox's complaints and then the Vulcans show up and what do you think of these henches I love the henches doing the dirty work here yeah good henches pretty good henches yeah the Vulcan ship is uh is enormous compared to the rest of them and it starts licking shots and disabling all the masarite ships i love a long ship don't you?
Yeah.
Check out this long king.
I love the way that Vulcan captain kind of flexes some muscle, like that unspoken yes anding going on between him and Archer.
Like, you look like you need some help, Archer.
I think he has especially vertical eyebrows, too, for a Vulcan.
Yeah.
Uncommonly vertical.
This is enough for Archer to convince the Masorite captain and his henches to drop their weapons and surrender.
I guess they're going to get in a bunch of legal trouble for crimes.
But from what we've heard about the crimes and so forth, at every level of their corrupt government are these criminals.
So is the idea to just bring these folks back to be tried for their many crimes?
By the same system that has been corrupted by people that are on the take from these folks.
Was this episode written by Neil Breen?
Was this a first draft that he then expanded into the feature film Fateful Findings?
I've hacked into the most secret government and corporate secrets.
I mean, I don't know about any of that,
but it does seem like this needs a second draft.
Yeah.
Turns out they didn't shoot Volar in the MRI machine.
All they did was destroy a multi-million dollar piece of highly sensitive medical equipment.
Is that why Dr.
Flux yells no the way that he does?
Incredible no by Dr.
Flux.
No!
It's barely in this episode, we really steals the show.
Amazing.
Yeah.
And Velar like reveals herself at the door of Six Bay and kind of gloats.
She says her goodbyes and sort of acknowledges a cool friendship that she notices budding between Archer and TePaul.
And then
a little moment of like respect nucks between her and TePaul before she departs.
And that's our episode.
Adam, did you like this episode of Star Trek Enterprise?
I kind of want to double down on my observation just then.
Like this is a good, this is a fine idea for an episode, but it just needs more polish.
Like make the crimes more criminal.
Make Velar even more interesting.
She was so close to being all the way there as a character.
Yeah.
And I think it's a really important moment when Valar calls Tepal and Archer friends or whatever.
But my mind goes back to that scene where TePaul
asks Archer for the favor.
Please and thank you.
And he gives like the smallest nod.
Did you notice like the take is like,
we just did it.
I'm not sure if our cameras could pick it up.
No, the resolution is not quite there.
That was a significant moment for them, but I don't know if at the time...
Like that moment's only important in retrospect because up until that moment, we've had 23 episodes of DePaul absolutely crushing Archer's nuts any chance she gets.
Why would he do her a favor?
The only reason he would is because a writer might think that we're projecting a friendship onto them that doesn't exist yet.
You know, I think that's where my head is.
Like, I think they kind of skipped ahead into a relationship that isn't actually at that level.
Like, they ate gruel with their faces together.
And I guess that's what bonded them.
I don't know.
I guess, in conclusion, I just wanted more detail.
It's the detail that makes things interesting.
This is just too generalized in terms of character and story.
What about you?
I think when you like build this much tension into what the mystery is going to be, it just doesn't work for the reveal to be
tax evasion right
yeah like uh you know maybe you can use it to put a violent criminal that you couldn't otherwise convict behind bars but uh it's not a sexy storytelling move I mean, this is there are Miriam episodes at The Wire that go just like this.
Like, it's not worth bringing them in for something this bullshit.
Let's wait until we got them for something good yeah and it's not worth shooting this episode until you have something good yeah but i think that when you're in the 26 episodes a season era of television like you do have these kinds of episodes sometimes where it's like oh this is like three quarters of an idea but we got to shoot something this week Sometimes buttered noodles are the meal.
Sometimes it's a full-on feast.
Sometimes it's popcorn for dinner.
Yeah.
That's all you got.
Yeah, sometimes that gets the job done.
Mm-hmm.
Well, do you want to see if there's something in the P1 inbox that gets the job done today, Adam?
Popcorn for P1s.
Priority one message from Starfleet coming in on secured channel.
Need a supplemental income.
Supplemental income.
Supplemental.
Supplemental.
Yeah, it's extra.
But the interest alone could be enough to buy this ship.
Ben, we got a priority one message here of a promotional nature.
Okay.
Here's that message.
Do you watch Star Trek VI and think, sure,
the Federation president looks awesome with his cool-ass streams of white facial hair, but how did he get elected?
What is his political party?
Will he get a second term?
In each episode of The Fake President's Podcast,
Two political consultants turned TV producers look at fictional presidents from pop culture to see just how much fiction there really is.
Wow.
From Kevin Klein and Dave to Harrison Ford and Air Force One to even Charlie Sheen and Machete Kills, fake president
is the podcast that drills down into all of these.
Wow.
What a concept.
I thought all the ideas for podcasts were taken.
I did too.
This is a great idea.
It is such a good idea.
The elevator pitchability of it is so perfect.
Yeah.
God, I'm jealous of this idea.
And it seems like there are so many fake presidents.
I mean, just within the work of Morgan Freeman alone.
Oh, yeah, they probably have like a Morgan Freeman season of their show.
Yeah, that's like
Morgan Freeman February or something.
Yeah, like how did President Camacho get elected?
This is a great concept.
Fake Presidents Podcast is the name of it.
I'm going to assume that you can get it wherever you can get any other podcast.
Yeah.
And in this election year, what a great time to lighten the mood
by thinking about fun fake presidents from movies and TV.
I love it.
Adam, I just had a great idea for a podcast.
I was wondering if you'd be interested in starting with me.
I'm calling it Fake Vice Presidents.
We'll start with Glenn Close from
I like it.
They try to do 25th Amendment and make her president because they think Harrison Ford is compromised.
Her character need in the movie is not amassing any more power around herself.
We could talk about Christian Bale as Dick Cheney and vice.
Actually, how would that work?
in your pitch?
Because that's a real vice president in a movie.
But he's also kind of a fake president.
Amazing.
And I think that could be done.
Interesting.
Well, that's a great concept for a podcast.
The call to action is just look for fake presidents in a podcast app.
Wow.
What a thing.
Adam, our next P1 here is from Your Nibble, and it's to Nibble.
And it goes like this.
Happy anniversary to the man who made me keep trying therapists until I found one who gets my embarrassing DS9 references.
I am so glad that we, like the 90s Trek Industrial Complex, decided we had more story to tell after our seventh season.
Here's to new adventures, new cast members, and maybe even new paint on the set.
I love you, Nibs.
I bet Star Trek fans really get the seven-year-old, huh?
Yeah, it's brutal.
Hey, what a nice message that was.
And it reminds me that Nibs sounds a lot like Nibs.
Like the count on my arms.
Ben, final message here from a listener to the hosts.
Hey, that's us.
Buckle up, Ben.
Longtime listener, first time caller.
I'm throwing some cheddar away for the Marin on episode 299 of the show The Canar 3 Meeting Room.
That was the title of it.
I won't spoil the laugh for FODs who haven't listened to it before, but the turn and and the drop had me rolling for several long minutes.
Thanks for all the pod.
I don't remember what we talked about on that episode.
That was
hundreds of episodes ago.
Yeah, it's been a while.
But thank you, O listener, for that very kind message.
I love a message that wants to talk about an episode and it's a fun, funny thing.
Yeah.
Very cool.
Thanks to everyone who got a P1 on today's app.
And if you'd like to be like them and get your own P1 on a future app, go to maximumfun.org/slash Jembotron and set it up today.
I saw something on the Reddit today that there's like a conspiracy theory that we used to charge 50 for a personal and 100 for a commercial message.
Uh-huh.
That has never been the case.
That is a Berenstein Bears take.
That never happened.
We would never charge 50 bucks for something.
Never, ever.
Now, have we increased prices at all in any way across the entire network over the eight or nine years we've been doing the show?
No, no, we've never kept up with inflation on what the entry-level maximum fund membership is.
We haven't kept up with inflation on what P1s cost.
We haven't really kept up with inflation on what ads cost.
In fact, that's kind of gone the other direction.
None of these choices are up to us to make, but you can make the choice of getting a priority one message for the low-low cost of $100 or $200 by going to maximumfund.org slash jumbotron.
Do it right now.
Hey, Ben.
What's that, Adam?
Did you find yourself a drunk Shimoda this episode?
Drunk Shimoda!
Gotta give it to Fanula, Fionula, or similar.
Ankylosaur.
She's great.
She's definitely having a lot of fun in this episode.
I always love seeing her and stuff.
Also, she's still working.
She has three credits on her IMDb in 2024.
Fuck yeah.
She's in these streets.
She is much like Malcolm Reed about that life.
Fucking Fionula Flanagan.
Doing it.
Yeah.
She rules.
I think I'm going to make mine the Vulcan captain.
His eyebrows were conspicuous.
I just couldn't take my eyes off of him.
Makes me wonder if there's like a social hierarchy.
Oh.
Like, is there a beauty standard there to the angle of the eyebrows?
I'd like to know more.
Or it's like, you know, rich people have tall beds we've talked about.
Do rich Vulcans have tall eyebrows?
I mean, on our true crime podcast, Tall Beds,
You and I will uncover the truth of whether or not wealthy people have extremely tall beds for some reason.
Like we suspect.
We think it's the case.
If we ever meet any extremely wealthy people, we'll let you know.
Yeah.
Faith of the fart.
Well, it's time to meet what our next episode's going to be, Ben.
That's a great point, Adam.
I'm going to pull that up while you head to goch.biz/slash game and fire up the game of buttholes,
the will of the riker quantum leap uh the next episode of enterprise is season one episode twenty four
dessert crossing when archer and trip are invited to a desert like planet by an alien leader they discover he is a terrorist who has lured them there under false pretenses a dessert-like planet what's the roundest dessert
is that baked alaskas i was gonna say baked alaska yeah i mean but that's a hemisphere.
You know, you and I are really finishing each other's
baked Alaskas in this episode.
Yeah.
Clancy Brown in this episode.
Oh, what a treat.
This is obviously a prison episode.
Yeah, I don't know.
Where he's playing a hardened guard.
Yeah, maybe.
I mean, I'm looking at a thumbnail from the app, and Trip Tucker and Captain Archer are both pitting out in their desert camo Starfleet uniforms.
So a bucket of ice-cold beer might be just what these guys need.
I'm pitting out myself in my very hot studio, Ben.
Oh, shit.
Let's find out if we will experience this episode in any way that makes us sweat.
Okay.
You're required to learn as you play.
Roll.
Ben, I've got the enormous virtual 100-sided die in my hand.
It barely fits.
Hmm.
Let me give it a roll.
I think it was like a pomelo.
Oh, Ben, I've rolled an 18.
Tula!
Did I win?
Hardly.
Which has catapulted our runabout into a space on the board that declares definitively.
The next episode is just a regular episode for us.
It's regular.
It's regular.
Ben, you had me going there.
How would you like to do blood tests or something medical?
And it's not positive or negative, it's regular.
I guess that's how they do moles, right?
Like regular or irregular is how they do that.
But I think that that's used in the sense of like, is it like
a roughly straight line or whatever around the circumference of the mole?
So whether we're talking about moles or digestion or types of episode, next week will be a regular episode of The Greatest Generation.
Yeah, it's just going to fall out with minimal pushing and plop in one solid piece.
Yeah.
A nice little splash that pleases the judges.
Oh, man.
You'd love to experience that.
I would.
Yeah.
One of the great feelings that I so rarely have.
I have a great feeling doing the show with you, Ben.
Every time.
I love doing the show with you as well, man.
It's a hoot and a half.
Much appreciated to all the friends of DeSoto who support our efforts in doing this silly, silly thing by going to maximumfund.org/slash join.
Your contributions are deeply appreciated.
And especially thanks to any new FODs who have become supporting members in the last week or so during our little micro fundraising push.
You know, never easy to ask for money, so it's always appreciated when folks step up.
We've been meeting people at the live shows who have been supporters, and it's just a great and heartening thing to meet folks who actually support the show financially.
It's what makes it possible.
Really is.
So it makes the live show possible too.
Indeed.
Gotta thank Wendy Pretty for the production and editing.
she does on every episode of Greatest Gen and Greatest Crack.
Gotta thank Rob Adler, our social media director, director, and Bill Tilley.
I want to make it a temporal Cold Wartime consiglieri.
Those guys are helping run the at Greatest Trek social media accounts all over the internet.
Throw those a follow.
Sign up for our mailing list.
It's a ton of fun and gets you a discount at podshop.biz every time we send it out and it puts you on to all the fun projects we're working on.
So many fun projects, Ben.
Can hardly keep them all straight.
It's really cool to like do something, you know, like we just sit around and like do our show and stuff.
And then like every month now, we're writing a little newsletter about everything we've done in the last month.
And it's like, hey, we actually got kind of a lot done.
I'm just confused by that description.
Who's doing the sitting around?
We've been working our asses off for months.
Well, I'm sitting here.
I mean, I know you have a standing desk, but I have a sitting around desk.
Yeah.
Who knows if that's helping either of us, really?
I don't know.
They say it's worse than smoking, but smoking a desk
sounds worse than smoking cigarettes.
Yeah, my dad caught me smoking a desk one time and he made me smoke an entire pack of desks.
Learned my lesson that day, brother.
That was a weird day at the local IKEA.
Hey, go check out drunkshabota.com and the GrazGen wiki on Wikia.
What else?
The Facebook groups?
There are many of them.
Whatever you're interested in, whatever there's ever been a hobby magazine created about,
so too is there a faction of Friends of DeSoto who've made a group that has gathered around that specific interest.
So find a Friend of DeSoto group that you vibe with.
And if you don't vibe with that group, find another, because there are Miriam groups out there waiting for you.
And 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 Adam and I are totally pitted out
while recording.
I'm gonna hit the certain dry now.
See if I can't get a little help.
Strong enough for a man, but designed for a Star Trek podcaster.
Make it so.
Captain, John Luke Picard, the UK, present the crime.
Oh my god, there's not a third.
Let's not rule a third this.
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