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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 owns the sun.
Welcome to the greatest generation.
Star Trek podcast by a couple of guys who are just a little bit embarrassed about having a Star Trek podcast.
I'm Ben Harrison.
I'm Adam Pranica.
You feeling better after your five shots?
Yeah.
What happened after that?
I didn't have any broad.
I didn't have any, like...
I did that raw in a way that I haven't in a long time.
Yeah.
And then some buds were out getting drinks at Yew Rustic Inn.
I love that place.
So I went and got wings and drinks with the boys.
How do you get your wings at Yi?
Oh, I wasn't there when they got ordered.
I think they were just a pretty traditional Buffalo wing.
Well, I mean, famously, and this is LA specific, but in a way that I feel like any restaurant that makes and sells wings should do, you get to choose your doneness slash crispiness level
at this particular restaurant.
And I really like that.
Yeah.
Man, yeah, I wasn't there for that part.
I did a thing where I went in and I was like, oh, somehow I'm the first one here.
And I sat at the bar for like half an hour.
And then I was like, you know, I should probably check.
And it turned out that they'd been sitting in the side yard, which I didn't, I didn't look in.
Jesus, Ben.
The one place I didn't look.
Ben, when you arrive at a social gathering, like that's part of the job.
You got to do the full circuit.
I had done five shots, I will remind you.
Okay, all right.
This is starting to make sense now.
That's five shot Ben sitting at the bar
continuing the journey.
What do you order after five shots when you go to a bar after?
I had two tequila sodas, and then I coasted into the evening with with
maybe it was like a PBR, something in a can that was,
you know, crushable.
There is 0% chance I'm having more liquor after five shots.
I'm cruising right into Modelos after that.
Your capacity astounds me.
The thing to keep in mind is that the five shots happened between the hours of 2 and 3 p.m.
Yeah.
And my hangs started at, I mean, for me, it started at 7 and then really started in earnest closer to 7.30, 7.45.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
When I discovered my buddies.
Did you see a bottle of 99 bananas on the wall?
And did it give you a special feeling?
Yeah, the siren song was hard to resist, but I did it.
And I woke up pretty clear-headed after all that.
Amazingly.
That's great.
Yeah.
I love that.
It shouldn't be a punishment.
It should be a reward.
Yeah, I mean, like, I was telling my wife, like, yeah, I got a weird thing I have to do on the show today.
Don't worry, Adam's doing it too.
And she was like, Why do you do this?
That's important to say.
And I was like, That's the point of a wheel of fate, you know?
Like, there are going to be good things and bad things.
There are going to be things you want to do.
And, you know, fate doesn't always work out in your favor, as is evidenced by everything surrounding us.
You know what?
Message to your wife, who I know isn't listening to this program.
Never would.
Why do you do this?
It's a question that kind of goes without saying.
Just, it could apply apply to so many things related to our show and each other.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a question that just works across the board, and there is no answer.
There's no good answer.
That is also a question I had at the very end of today's episode of Star Trek Enterprise.
Ben,
coincidentally, do you want to get into it so we could get to that part?
Because I got a lot to say about Enterprise Season 3, Episode 24:
Zero Hour.
Got free to speech and guitar
dolem and the boys are getting ready for their big triumphant moment by chowing down on some on some live mice lizards love this shit man you got to do mouse shots yeah at this point
what do you think like because there's a cut right like they pick up the the wriggling I don't know if these are mice.
Maybe they're like baby guinea pigs or something, but they're some kind of live rodent and they pick them up and then there's a cut and they're lowering like jello stunt rodents into their mouths and like giving their hands a little quaver so that it looks like the limbs are moving.
What do you think those are made out of?
Do you think that that's actually jello or do you think it's just like a rubber thing that they're putting into their mouth and then spitting back out?
The problem is the hair or the fur, right?
Like it's one thing to make the jello mold mouse.
It's quite another to give it the texture of an actual mouse.
Sure.
I think the one disappointment about this take is that like less than half of it I feel like goes in
to the mouth.
I want to see it go in.
I mean, I've always wanted to see it go in generally.
When Riker does this maneuver, it goes in.
You see everything.
I want it down to the base of the tail.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is just too big of a mouthful.
Like generally, mouse or not, I hate that moment where I'll occasionally do this where it's just too big of a bite.
And then you're caught like you're at a table with friends or whatever, and you're like trying to play it off like it's not too big of a bite.
Yeah.
It's always with friends, right?
I don't think this happens to me when I'm eating alone.
No, never.
No.
It's so fucking humiliating.
But these lizards are freaks and they like doing it in front of each other.
Yeah.
And I thought this was a really interesting scene because they're like
kind of talking shit about their gods.
Like the guardians have been, we've come to understand that the Guardians are godlike figures in the lives of Zindi everywhere.
And they're like, finally, they're coming to their senses and putting us in charge of everything.
Which is sort of a like,
man, like, you are lucky a Guardian wasn't like listening in on your little conversation, you know?
It's a little bit sacrilegious.
That's a great point.
I didn't really consider how omniscient the Guardians might be in cases like this.
They they seem to be doing a fair bit of complaining about, like, if only the Guardians were on our side during the Civil War, we would have won that.
Yeah.
And yeah, like, that's...
Our brothers, the Avians, would still be alive.
I mean, if only Biff had had the sports almanac, you know, forever and ever.
Like, if only you had the cheat code to your life.
Exactly.
And...
You know,
I think they're bad for saying that.
I think this is the thing that's that's finally turned me against the reptilian Zindi.
I like to see them party.
I think it's, I don't want to say humanizes because that's a word I shouldn't throw around when we're talking about the Zindi, especially the reptiles.
Why, the very name is racist.
You know what it does for me is it Klingonizes them.
Like, they party the way Klingon warriors do.
You know what I feel like we haven't gotten a bunch of with Zindi reptiles is the wide shot, where it is so noticeable that they are wearing potato sack style pants?
They don't want you to see legs on the Ucindi.
Their costumes are big.
Yeah.
Degra's ship is chasing the weapon, and Archer and Reed, and some Makos, and Hoshi are aboard it.
And they're talking to the remaining counselors about how they just really hope they can figure out a way to destroy it from the inside.
Unfortunately, Degra left the password on on his computer
when he got murked.
So they're like, oh yeah, we have schematics for the weapon in here.
We could like look up, we could get like an internal map of it, no problem, if we knew his four-digit code, but we don't.
Such a bummer.
You don't think if you're Degra about to get stabbed in the chest by Dollum about closing that window,
about putting your laptop to sleep during...
it would be kind of grisly but it would have been smart for them to cut off the head of his body when they found it so that they could face ID into into the ship and like get access to these things very true yeah or just a thumb like maybe there's a fingerprint thing if you're already eating living mice and dropping them into your mouth there isn't a lot of gap between that and Dollum holding up a head
right by its hair.
Yeah, but this isn't Dollum, and that's the crucial difference.
Like, the arboreals are not going to hold up a head.
No, they're not.
No, we would never do something like that.
It's disgusting.
Almost as disgusting as my breath, because I cannot close my mouth.
Yeah, you can smell rot coming out of my mouth, and that is not my fault.
That's just the way, you know, that's the hand evolution dealt me.
I am 100% mouth-breathing.
I I kind of add to the disgustingness by carrying around the severed head of my former colleague.
I am also no longer sunburned.
Have you noticed that?
For one episode, I was very sunburned, and now I am not.
The aloe we have access to here in the expanse is of a particularly high quality.
Lot is made about...
Archer making sure Hoshi is involved in the master plan.
Problem is, she is still messed messed up.
Yeah.
He's going to go give her an iPad with this encrypted data on it, give her another encryption project.
And in white space, the sphere builders/slash guardians/slash transdimensional beings are freaking out.
They are so stressed that the timelines are still not going their way, even though they've launched the weapon.
Like, like the one main lady is like, like, come on, calm down.
Like, I'm doing my job.
And the rest of them are like, no, you're not.
We're looking at the timelines.
We're looking at how it works out.
And it does not.
I know exactly how this feels, Ben.
Cut to yesterday.
I have bet heavily on the Green Bay Packers to beat the Cleveland Browns.
Cleveland Browns, an absolute dog shit team.
Even Browns fans would say this about their own team.
Packers up 10 to nothing.
with five minutes left in the game.
You think we're just going to run the clock down?
You think they got this one in hand?
13 points in the last five minutes.
Packers inexplicably lose.
What the fuck?
This is how the Guardians are feeling in this moment.
They're like, look, we've got a lot of bets on the board.
And like, even though the weapon is getting closer to Earth, we have noticed that the odds are getting worse for some reason.
What is happening right now?
Oof.
We can't let the Browns win.
Like, that drive to Vegas to like, to like settle all these up is not going to be fun, you know?
There's no settling when you lose, Ben.
It's just over.
Oh, it's just over?
There's no drive.
Oh, because you put the money in at first.
You're not, you're not promising to pay.
Try to imagine a world where sports vetting was IOU-based.
Oh, man.
The chaos.
It is among friends, right?
Like, if you're like sitting watching the TV with your buddy and you say 20 gets you 40, that X happens, like, you're not expecting him to give you the money right then and there, right?
Oh, I think among my friends, that's the expectation.
Okay.
We're pretty serious about that.
All right, fair enough.
I, you know, I spoke of something that I have zero familiarity with.
We'll get you involved, Ben.
You'll be one of us soon.
Just what I want.
So, our Earthship, we learn from the Guardians, is heading for their primary sphere.
We thought it was just sphere 41.
I know.
This is the primary sphere.
Who knew?
And they're like, all right, well,
that's also a huge problem.
So we're going to have to whip up like quite a bit more queso around that one to stop them from messing with our main guy.
Over on Enterprise, Trip Tucker, I want to say, is our main guy over there, right?
He tells TePaul that their plan of using the deflector dish is still a go, except that once it's shot, it's going to fry every system on the ship almost completely.
And TePaul is like, fine, whatever.
What are you telling me this?
Like, yeah, of course, right?
And Trip is like, no, not whatever.
And TePaul tells Trip, Look, man, this is not all about Earth or Enterprise anymore.
Like, this is about the galaxy.
And that includes Vulcan.
I gotta tell you, if anything ever happened to Vulcan, I would be so pissed.
No one can destroy Vulcan.
Do you hear me, Trip?
No.
I am now a member of an endangered species.
I felt like a lot of the imagery in this episode reminded me of Star Trek 2009, like the fight with the platforms inside the sphere later where they're like falling down levels and stuff.
Yeah.
And this idea, like she goes full soap opera talking to him about this.
The emotions are all on the outside for this scene.
Very much so.
And the idea that this is very much a domino effect across the galaxy
maybe hits home for Trip.
I don't know.
I think this message is more for us than it is for Trip.
Yeah, like he's feeling selfish about blowing up the damn ship and not wanting to be on it when that happens.
And I can relate to that too.
On the bridge, Mayweather tells TePaul that the sphere they're heading for is doing some weird stuff.
The density of the space queso is entree-sized at this point.
And TePaul's like, okay, thanks, Mayweather.
Well, you're not going to be in this episode that much, so I'm going to go talk to Flox about it, not you.
And down to six bay, she goes, where Flox is worried about this because it's the same problem they had when they went through the queso before.
Their consciousness could get scrambled, and
he's got an injection that they can get, but it doesn't buy them that much time inside the queso, not as much as TePaul feels that they need.
I have gone to my shelf where I have a variety of medicines given to patients so that they will last 12 minutes.
Just generally, 12 minutes of time.
Normally an amount of time that a patient would be happy with.
And in this case, is the same.
Do you remember how Hoshi looked when she was in the shower that was far too hot for her?
You're all going to start to look like that.
Oh, gosh, I keep forgetting you weren't actually...
conscious during that period of time.
You were a fragment of my imagination.
I apologize to Paul.
In this scene, I was positive there would be another plan.
This could not be the plan.
The 12-minute plan, I mean.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But that's the plan.
It is.
And I've got faith of the far-hearted.
Legally, it's just a fur joke.
Cut over to Archer visiting Hoshi, who is also going through with a plan that I cannot believe is the plan.
Hoshi wrapped in the blanket of someone who has just had a mental parasite taken out of their brains.
But also the blanket of someone who works in an office that is, you know, temperature regulated to too cold for them, and everybody else is seemingly fine with it, so they just have to have a full fucking blanket at their desk.
Archer has done a lot of dark things over the course of this season and of the series.
But maybe the darkest, I don't know why this felt so dark to me, but when Hoshi asks for a doctor and Archer's like, no,
no, you don't need a doctor.
Rub some dirt on it, Hoshi.
Get back in the game.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing.
There are no sick days at this moment.
We left flocks behind ages ago.
You need to finish what you're doing.
I thought Linda Park did a really good job.
portraying somebody who is not just like sick and fucked up but like disoriented yeah like there are parts of this scene where she thinks she is talking to a lizard zindi and
uh there are parts where she like remembers what she did for them and is like racked with guilt and archer is sort of pitching her solving this cryptography problem as like a way to atone like oh you feel bad about like uh giving up the third code well uh you do this and uh you know nobody's gonna hold it against you.
Do you get the sense that she's ever going to be okay
from this experience?
I mean, Dr.
Flock says it'll take time.
Yeah.
But lordy, once there's a parasite wriggling around in your brains, I just don't know.
Yeah, she does not seem in her right mind, and it is hard to see coming back from a state like this in this moment.
Dahlum's on board a ship, shocked that they'll be dropping out of the vortex a little further from Earth than he was expecting.
And that's because they need time to enter the firing sequence of this big weapon they've got.
Since they only have three out of the five codes, if they had all five, they could get a lot closer and fire a lot sooner.
What is that about?
Like, I thought that the three codes were just enough yes votes that the weapon will work.
I thought the same thing.
It feels like the rules changed.
Like, is there also like a puzzle that you have to do?
I mean,
it seems like with a weapon like this you could still shoot from further away.
Yeah.
What is really the problem here?
What's the range on this thing?
Yeah, and like
just write it so that it's like, yeah, the weapon is like fucking huge and it takes a while to fire up, Dollum.
Like you know that.
That makes more sense to me.
This thing is huge.
It's got a lot of energy.
You can't just flip a switch and have it be ready to go.
It needs to be primed.
Yeah.
Tell me you're priming it.
It's got trillium in it.
I mean, wait.
Oh, no.
What's the other stuff?
There's a different substance
that the ape man was making for them.
It's not trillium.
That stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's full of that stuff, and that stuff just doesn't turn on on a dime.
We filled it with the spray you use when you have dry mouth.
That is what we make on the planet, in the lab.
It's actually strange to think about, but this is the largest banana delivery system the world has ever seen.
On Enterprise or in Engineering, where Tripp tells Mayweather that he's going to have to steer the ship by thrusters only.
That's the consequence of doing the deflector dish weapon.
And once they get near the sphere, because destroying the sphere will take all this energy, that's all you got, buddy.
Hope you're okay with that.
Hope you're okay with thrusters and no dialogue.
Yeah, yeah.
I thought Travis Mayweather was looking really good in this scene because he's also got the after-five shadow now.
It's just like being back in the womb.
Who are you?
Inson Travis Mayweather.
Parents must be very proud.
When I was a kid, we called it Sweet Spot.
Who are you?
I'm the helmsman.
I guess growing up a boomer has its advantages.
And your mom very proud.
That's true.
It takes practice.
Other than keeping Inson Mayweather up at night, I'm not sure what we expect to accomplish here.
I feel like with a little definition around his mouth, just like, hmm, looking good.
The problem when I grow facial hair and i'm putting that in quotes is that i just look dirty like i don't look like i'm growing facial hair i look like i got crud on me you fall into some crud or something this is what is true of a lot of the enterprise crew but when travis grows a little bit of facial hair he looks he looks very distinguished in my opinion yeah on dagger's ship the the group goes over the plan to beam onto the weapon ship and we learn that hoshi will be taken with the dustbuster club over there too because she's been there she's like familiar with the layout.
There's no decrypting for that.
I think it's one thing to hear Archer say this in private, but to like in the context of a pre-mission meeting say it to everyone.
No one feels good about this.
Reed especially.
There's no reason to believe that she'll remember anything.
She's coming with me.
Reed doesn't feel good at all.
Like Reed's feeling about the way the vibes are going is is tanking and he's like
maybe I can just like scratch an itch I've always wanted to scratch by convincing Archer to let me suicide by destroying weapon at the end of this thing.
And Archer's like, no, man,
you're going to leave with everybody else.
I'm staying behind, but I'm not going to die on that weapon.
Anyways, I got to go talk to Hoshi.
And he leaves the room and finds himself in
a like stadium style ribbon cutting ceremony on the foundation of the United Federation of Planets.
This is a scene that's supposed to show seven years into the future.
Archer, having just walked out of this meeting where he proposes bringing a drooling Hoshi along on the mission, a little bit distracted in this moment.
He has a boarding party to deal with.
He doesn't want to watch some sort of like administration, let alone be told that this administrative pomp and circumstance in this stadium is going to be put in danger.
He's feeling very don't give a shit vibes about this moment.
I've got other things to think about right now.
Daniels, did you not listen to the previous scene?
He just said he has no intention of dying.
You don't need to talk him out of dying.
With what we see later with the Guardians, like actually
getting personally involved with time travel mechanics and fucking shit up.
Yeah.
Did you ever have in the back of your mind the feeling of like, why being so passive, Daniels?
Like, why don't you get in there and get your hands dirty, you fucking asshole?
It seems like Daniels has access to better time travel technology than the Guardian.
Agreed.
Yeah.
Like, just go in there and fuck shit up, Daniels.
You got this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's frustrating to me.
Yeah.
But maybe part of it is that Archer needs to be like
an untouchable hero to everyone in the Alpha Quadrant
for accomplishing this or something.
So it's very unclear.
And Archer basically tells Daniel to kick rocks.
Like, I'm going to do this mission the way I think I should do this mission.
There's nothing about the future that you can tell me.
Like, even the stuff you're not supposed to tell me that is going to persuade me to change my plan.
So
get fucked.
This moment is trying to portray Archer as so instrumental in the founding of the Federation that to lose him during this mission would put the entire future in jeopardy, and that would be bad.
But do you think the show does a good enough job and the scene does a good enough job in making him that important?
Like,
we're seeing this moment and we're hearing the words out of Daniel's mouth.
They're trying to make him into a Kirk figure that he just isn't.
Well, you know, like, I kind of feel like the Federation would happen without him.
And I can't tell you why I believe that.
I just feel like if it's not Archer, someone else is going to be the guy.
If he was like down on the floor and there was like a shooter up in the gallery and Archer had done like a flying leap to protect one of the dignitaries, that would make him a Kirk figure.
I would like that, yeah.
Or he hits the mini tramp.
Flox is down in Six Bay recording his last will and testament to his buddy, the doctor that he's always written letters to when TePaul comes in.
Again, Six Bay being
a little too easy to just saunter into.
You know, this isn't a HIPAA violation.
It's more of a
attorney-client privilege violation.
I like this defiant TePaul.
I like the TePaul that we've experienced the last couple episodes.
Yeah.
Because she's not trying to hear the prepare for the worst part of the proverb that...
Dr.
Flox shares with her, you know?
She is a little bit more Kirk, honestly,
in these couple of episodes.
Like, she is not buying your bullshit about a no-win scenario.
She is going to fucking save the day.
And she's also wearing her emotions on her sleeve in this moment.
She's like, you got to get us ready with your neuroleptic compound because the queso is about to hit the fan.
I'm going to put you on the spot here.
Emotionally fragile Tepal.
Versus Dark Archer.
Who do you want as the captain of your ship for this mission?
TePaul all the way.
I do too.
I feel very safe with her throughout this mission.
In a way, I just don't with Archer.
So they pull up to the queso.
It's family size at this point, Ben.
Like when this thing hits the table, you're like, I know we're four people,
but this is like a platter.
And there's not enough chips.
What the fuck are you doing?
Like, we're going to have to summon more chips to the table.
And like, you just know that it's going to be a coagulated nightmare by the time that second batch of chips gets out here, right?
Do you want to be annoyed in the next five minutes when we ask for another basket of chips?
Just bring them at first.
Bring them up top.
This is a nightmare for everyone involved.
And Fox has worked the compound, so it's actually going to get them 15 entire minutes in there.
And in they go.
It's actually a lot more time than
couples tend to enjoy.
Starts to
sometimes it gets a little painful.
If you're not ready for that.
It kind of looked like a Hitachi magic wand, the thing that he hands to Te Paul.
Like a miniaturized Hitachi magic wand.
The kind that you would take into space, you know.
Yeah.
Legally, it's just a fart jump.
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You will never take the greatest shit alive.
Bam would rather
We're going right into the queso at this point.
There's no waiting.
They got their 15 minutes and the clock starts now.
Back on Degra's ship, Hoshi has actually made some progress.
It seems like she is getting better.
She seems a lot more with it.
The blanket does a lot to suggest this, right?
No more blanket.
Yeah, no more blanket.
She's talking to Archer about like a weird disease she had a different time they hung out.
And
there's like some promises of like when we get out of this like you can go on a vacation somewhere where they don't have weird diseases or reptiles this disabling of the weapon is not just about going over there and shooting a reactor and destroying it it's about a sequence right doing things at the right time in the right order because if not there's a bunch of safeguards that are going to pop up and once the safeguards pop there is going to to be zero chance of destroying this weapon at that point.
So it's a little more than brute force, is what it's going to take.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like brute force would work if the explosion was big enough, right?
Yeah, that doesn't seem on the table, though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Chemo sight, that's the stuff.
There it is.
In there.
Chemo sight.
Keeps my mouth moist.
Dry mouth, very painful for me.
Chemo site-flavored banana.
Available in all of your finest movie theater bathroom dispensers.
Speaking of Jannar, we're over on Degra's ship, and Archer is told by him and the counselor that the Zindi Insectoid ship not on their radar anymore.
They fucked off.
It's just the weapon ship escorted by only one other ship, and that's Dollum's.
Pretty silly of Dollum to not try to deceive the Insectoids into continuing to work with him.
Uh he just got rid of him and now he's he's out there on his lonesome with just his super weapon and his ship.
If you're an insectoid and you know the deal on the table is installing the reptiles as the leaders of the Zindi forevermore, yeah, I might I might fuck off at this point too.
Yeah.
What are you in it for if you're them?
It's true.
I guess better to serve in in hell than I don't know.
What's the motivation of the guys in Blade that like get the the vampire tattoo, even though they're human?
Better to lead in hell than serve in heaven.
Yeah.
Is that how it goes?
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
Is that it?
Why not?
I haven't seen the blades in a long time.
Oh, man.
We should do a blade trilogy bonus episode series.
Are they good?
They fucking rule.
Are you kidding me?
I have only room in my life for one vampire movie, and that's John Carpenter's Vampires.
After 600 years, how's that dick working?
Pretty good?
I reject that.
So the entrepreneur flies into this queso.
Somebody goes and grabs the slider that affects how much red is in the shot and slides it all the way up.
Yeah.
If you were to dip your face in queso that just hit the table, I feel like this is what your field of vision would look like.
Queso vision.
It's the tone that your skin would be once you took it back up out of the
dip as well.
Yeah.
We cut around so much in this episode.
We're back on Dolum's ship, and they have arrived pretty far from Earth, but they're like delighted to see that Earth has not launched any armada of defensive ships or anything like that.
There's nothing to protect the planet from their super weapon.
On Enterprise, they pick up the spheron sensors and Trip Tucker also picks up a rash on his hand.
Yeah.
Uh-oh.
They're going to need a lot of moisturizer when this is over.
I'm glad this thing is just on my hand at this point because
were it to grow up my forearm, that would be extremely painful.
I didn't bring any lanolin cream for cracked nipples.
You're never going to let that go, are you?
What's that pink stuff you're supposed to put on
when you get the chicken pox?
What is that?
What has that been?
Oh, shit, what is that stuff called?
You dip a little Q-tip on it, and then you put it on your scabs.
Calamine lotion?
Is that it?
It is Calamine lotion, isn't it?
Are we doing the rest of the episode like this?
Dolem has found this research station in orbit of Earth, and on Degra's ship, they realize, like, oh, shit, he's going to shoot that thing out of the sky.
I like this out of Dolem.
Like, the whole open-world video gameness of like,
we got some time before our big super weapon is activated, right?
Like, let's take the pawns off the board.
Like, let's just do it because it's fun.
They've also been told to like go run down any refugee alien trash of the galaxy type humans after this.
So, like, let's get a jump on it.
And I like this.
I wanted them to make a parallel of when Archer shot that lunar base when they first arrived in Zindi zindi space like yeah this is for them yeah yeah we're
for those three guys on that moon that wasn't weren't able to communicate with us when the entrepreneur first showed up yeah yeah i like the parallels there a lot anyways they yeah they blow up that research station rsvp those guys
the entrepreneur arrives at the sphere and starts trying to shoot it with the deflector and it seems like it's going really good at first.
What was your expectation W slash R slash T the big shot?
I mean couldn't help but think of best of both worlds and that big shot and that it was a giant energy pulse that was like a shot and less of a beam but this is just a beam and it goes on forever.
It goes on for a really long time.
They've got like 11 minutes remaining and they like like trip feels like they need every one of those 11 minutes of this beam going at the sphere.
And
I thought it was also interesting that at this point, like it is just their race against the clock in the space queso.
Like that those are the only stakes until a bunch of guardians show up in engineering and start Hadoukening engineers.
And you realize that they are taking matters into their own hands.
They've come out of their nice white space into reality.
And I guess they're able to do that because they're in the space queso, right?
I really wanted to see Daniels fight them.
Daniels being the only compatible enemy for the Guardians at this point.
What is he doing at this point?
Just watching this
on a time travel television screen?
Yeah, and he's like jacking himself off a little bit.
Like, oh, yeah, the timelines.
Oh, getting so complicated.
What would he do if somebody hadookened him also?
Like, can he like capture and send it back?
I wanted to know all this.
We just don't see any of it.
On the bridge, they can definitely tell something is wrong involving nine trans-dimensional beings that have beamed over to their ship.
Yeah.
Seems like things are affecting the beam also, and Trip is really starting to panic.
Not panicking is Dahlim, who is excited to learn that Degra's ship has showed up, and he's like, and they didn't even strap a bigger gun to it.
It's just regular Degra's ship.
Amazing.
Pathetic.
Prepare to intercept.
Yeah, what could feel better than destroying that for Dahlum?
Which is like a good point.
Like, they didn't really have much hope of winning this fight until an old friend rides to the rescue.
Bah, God, that's Tran's music.
And he's got a steel chair.
This is unbelievable, folks!
Tran is walking down the ramp!
What a moment.
What an entrance.
Amazing.
An entrance so good that it makes you really miss his exit at the end of the episode.
I will say this.
Yeah, I mean,
the episode zags so hard when you think it's going to zig that it's really disorienting.
It's really, you know, Enterprise starting to explore the space of what if an ending felt totally random and strange.
Ben, I was just thinking about what Shran's entrance music would be.
It's got to be blue, right?
Blue bottom.
Yeah, but like that, the like Roland is the like kind of rapt part.
Like that's a blue guy in a blue town.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
Like that's not where you cue it, right?
No.
You got to cue it on the on the hook, I think.
I think so too.
Anyways, people are going fucking mental in the audience.
And like there's so many signs that you're like, they must distribute some signs to the crowd, you know, because like, how did the crowd anticipate this to the extent that they went down to a staples and got a piece of foam core and wrote, we love Shran on it?
Dahlum makes a crucial mistake here because, as excited as we are for Shran's entrance, he kind of sees his ship as another target for him.
And he shouldn't.
Because once Shran's ship starts firing back, like, it starts giving Degra's ship a lot of cover
as a distraction.
And Shran's ship is big.
It's closer in size to the Entrepreneur.
So we've got kind of the space battle going on between
Shran and Degra's ship and Dollum's ship.
But we also have the battle going on inside the Entrepreneur, where we learn that the Mako weapons are not affecting trans-dimensional beings.
The shots go right through them.
And Phlox has studied one trans-dimensional being and gives them some frequency updates for their webs to potentially stun or kill the invaders.
And this is going to run them off for now, it seems.
Yeah.
On the weapons platform, Hoshi guides Archer into the sequence of light bulb replacements he's got to do.
And
Dumb Dollum finally realizes what's happening here.
They've been drawn away from the weapon ship, which Archer's Dustbuster Club is hard at work disabling.
I think that one of the great strengths of Star Trek Enterprise is their ability to design a mechanical prop that like works in a way that looks super futuristic and interesting and intricate.
And like flipping these tubes around and the changing color and the way they like interlock with the systems around them just looked fucking great to me.
Has there ever been anything like a fluorescent light tube that is so bad to be around generally, to be illuminated by, and yet so cool as a thing?
Like I love changing these things out in a garage.
I love buying them and disposing of them, but they are absolute shit to be around.
I hate their buzzing.
I hate the light they put off.
I hate everything about them.
But, like, there's nothing better than them for just handling.
I spent my entire childhood being illuminated by them in classrooms.
Yeah.
Just like getting fucking headaches from the horrific light quality that's coming out of them.
The worst.
And yet, I can't quit them.
I think they're really neat.
You throw one of those in a garbage can and it just explodes so satisfyingly.
It's fun.
And you're like, oh man, I bet I got a little cancer off of that, but worth it.
I was supposed to recycle that.
You know what?
Make them so they don't explode.
All right?
You want me to dispose of them safely?
Make it a little less fun to dispose of unsafely.
So the Guardians aboard the Entrepreneur have made it into some room where some piece of equipment is and they are like digging their hands through the guts of systems and this seems like it's going to fuck with their ability to emit this deflector-dish beam.
The Guardians are digging in the guts like a gardener.
If Enterprise starts feeling bangers, gonna dig a bit harder.
Oh, shit, he's doing it.
He's making this the horniest rap episode ever.
We get a scene straight out of Mortal Kombat here near where Hoshi and Archer are working.
This weapons platform has a lot of
scaffolds,
bridges, walkways with no like OSHA-compliant guardrails anywhere to be seen.
I think if you're a reptile Zindi and you're wearing the metal cage uniform,
guardrails are probably not what you want.
No.
You're probably catching yourself on those things and on
doorknob levers.
You probably hate those if you're a Zindi.
I wonder if this is a side effect of the aquatics having built this thing and it used to be full of water and they were like oh shit we should add some stuff for people who aren't going to be swimming around in here uh what are they using in walkways
i mean you'd laugh initially we didn't even have walkways as part of the design
i mean i I'm realizing that we're going to have to account for a lot more weight because we didn't have any way for them to get around in here.
And it's going to be a bunch of girders and metal.
Shit.
You know what it's going to mean is it's going to take a lot longer to turn this thing on.
That's the problem.
That's
the issue with adding these walkways.
I think we can live with that.
This poor Mako.
This fight with the reptile goes very poorly for him.
Yeah.
In an exciting way.
Like, you want to at least put up a fight, and he does, but it's just an absolute ass-kicking for him.
Yeah.
I mean, he does does get like a couple of good licks in, but he gets stabbed.
But like when you punch someone and they don't even feel it, does that count as a good lick?
Yeah, I guess not.
I don't know.
The surviving lizardman shoots Hoshi and she drops her iPhone in the toilet.
Ah!
I hate that.
It's the worst.
So she doesn't have the sequence in front of her anymore.
She's going to have to do the rest of this to memory.
If we could could see inside her skull and all of the the soft brain matter that's just been eaten by an eel.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think I like our chances at this point.
From memory, oh, she must instruct Archer.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
She starts talking like RFK Jr.
She's like, Hoge, you're gonna turn turn the other one over, but Before you do that, I want to talk to you about the amount of mercury and vaccines.
It seems like if she just cocked her head to the side, her entire brain mass would just sort of slurp
to the empty part.
Over on the Entrepreneur, though, whatever those guardians were doing in that equipment did not affect what Tripp was doing because he is able to push past the red line on their brain injections and destroy the sphere.
And there's a very cool implosion effect that sets off a chain reaction.
I love it.
This is like crunching up a ball of aluminum foil.
This effect looks really great.
It seems to dissipate the queso so their
brains aren't getting scrambled and they're not getting that crackler effect on their skin anymore.
You don't have to go through that indignity of flagging down a waiter and going, actually, I don't think we can finish this.
Like, we shouldn't have ordered the entree size amount of queso.
It's just too much.
And the waiter's like, oh, do you want me to box the rest of that up for you?
And you're like,
no.
And then a dishwasher has to, like, somehow scrape the coagulated queso off of the cast iron dish.
I don't know how they do it.
This seems like a soak job to me.
Yeah, it's terrible for everyone involved.
But a beam goes through space from this sphere to the next one, and the spheres start, like, punching their own tickets.
RSVP, the spheres!
And the queso.
It's all going away.
The guardians disappear.
This is great news.
I mean it's half great, right?
Because the Zindi weapon still exists.
Archer has finished his job of light bulb replacement over there.
And he orders Reed and Hoshi to return to the ship.
This is just exactly the thing that Reed didn't want to happen.
He didn't want Archer to sacrifice his life.
But he reluctantly beams back.
And that leaves Archer to plant the explosive charges himself alone.
But is it going to be in time?
I liked this sequence also.
Like, there's that big, like, multiply rotating
dingus, I would maybe call it, in the middle of the super weapon.
This is just gym equipment from Enterprise, right?
Yeah.
Or what gym was this?
Was this Voyager?
No, I think this was on Enterprise.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyways, yeah.
There's that thing he like, I like that he had to get one of the charges like onto a moving ring.
Like, he like quickly gets it on there, blows that that up.
Because you don't want to pinch your fingers at that point.
That would hurt so bad.
Yeah.
Catch your hand on that thing.
Oh.
And then the stakes of the episode are like too high at that point.
Yeah.
Can't have that.
This thing starts grinding to a stop, which is very satisfying.
Dollum, in a fit of rage, cannot believe that this is happening and they start fighting.
But the thing about reptiles is they're so much stronger than humans.
And Archer just gets ragdolled here a bunch of times.
Oh man, there's a moment where Dahlum like spins Archer parallel to the floor like he like flips him over and he spins like three.
That was so unnecessary and so fun.
I like that.
That's great.
Yeah.
You know, like
you're getting over your own bout of sickness.
How are you feeling, by the way?
I should have asked at the top of the show.
Oh,
it is so incremental day by day.
I would say since the last time we recorded, I'm 10 or 20%
better.
This is this is what happened to me.
There was like a, there was like two days of like feeling much better, and then like such a long tail of feeling like an imperceptible amount better from day to day.
Yeah.
One of the things I love to do when I'm very sick is watch some movies.
And I watched some old Jackie Chan Hong Kong movies
while I was down.
And I was just thinking about how much like physical combat stuff there is in so many of the modern like big tent action movies, you know, your Marvels and whatnot.
Yeah.
And how bankrupt they are in the creativity department in terms of like the design of those sequences.
And those fucking old Jackie Chan movies are so fucking fun.
The way he's like jumping through the like busted out cane work on a chair and like swinging around a pole to kick a guy, you know.
Like this felt like that.
It felt like so fucking clever and inventive.
Like it's so fun to watch.
Like what, yeah, what would it look like if one guy was super OP compared to the other guy and they're fighting in this like super weird complicated space where like one of them falls down a into a well and gets a bunch of kicks to the face like it's just so cool ben these people are still alive like Jackie Chan is alive Yin Wo Ping is alive I don't understand why their creativity isn't being brought to bear for modern film in a way that that feels so necessary.
Like there's this vanity to superhero films and their action sequences that's like, we know what we're doing.
We do the same thing every time.
Where it would be like a breath of fresh air to bring in someone with that resume to give us anything different.
I hadn't seen a fight sequence that like held my attention in such a long time.
And I was so fucking delighted to return to this.
And I feel like this episode of Star Trek Enterprise is also like just so inventive and clever in the way it does all of these things.
Will you please open a letterboxed account?
I want to know what you're watching.
I think that would be fun.
You want to know my thoughts on the first halves of a lot of movies.
I do.
I really do.
I'm the last person that should be encouraging anyone to participate in social media, but that's not social media.
It's just a way to log movies you watch.
And I think it's great.
Yeah.
I love the end of this sequence because...
Archer has this last sticky bomb that he slips like in between some of the outer layers of Dolum's costume.
So he's like, he's like, fuck, I'm too bulky.
I can't reach back there and get this thing off my shoulder blade.
There's too much fucking shit on me.
I can't breathe.
And Archer gets to push that remote that you clip to the sun visor in your car to open up a garage when you get home.
This is why I always use a back scratcher or ask my wife
to get me, please.
You know one thing my son with the deformed arm couldn't do?
Scratch his own back.
A lot of people think I killed him because he couldn't be in the military.
What I really killed him for was so that I could use his one good arm and preserve it as a back scratcher.
RSVP doll, he gets blowed into a billion bits.
I love blood on faces.
Can I just say that?
For the gore to hit Archer's face.
So satisfying.
It also a little bit got on his cake.
Did you see that?
It did get on his face and cake.
Yeah.
Happy birthday to me.
I didn't realize that was a reference.
They're calling back Enterprise.
This is so cool.
If we change the words,
then it's fair use all day long.
They can't beam out Archer.
So we get this like Archer slow-motion explosion run, like
every fucking action sequence from the 80s, 90s, and now.
He was running away from the explosion.
It makes all the sense in the world.
Like, even though he has nowhere to go, you got to run from the explosion.
Got to run from the explosion.
You're hoping, like, oh, he's going to be like running away from it.
They were saying he was too deep inside.
Yeah.
And we start to see the weapon come apart in space, and then it blows, and it blows big.
And you're like, okay, we've seen Star Trek.
We know that when the ship blows up, you then cut to the transporter pad and the sparkles happen.
Yeah.
And you see the guy.
And you're like, wow, they got him just in the nick of time.
But no, we do not get any resolution on this moment.
There's no sparkle.
We cut to Valentine's Day on Enterprise and love is in the air.
Or is it?
We're waiting for Degra's ship.
It seems like totally random and uncommented on that it's February 14th.
But we learn that the spheres and the anomalies are gone from the expanse and space is returning to normal.
Nature is healing.
Most of my lesions are feeling much better.
The calamine lotion helped me out a whole bunch, Doc.
And the lanolin on my forearms, you know, especially for that type of tissue.
The humans appear to be healing faster than to Paul,
which is something she is irritated by.
Irritated enough to disclose her age to Trip Tucker in this scene, something that is a very intimate admission for any Vulcan.
And it has been like a long-running question on board the ship, like how, how old precisely is she?
And she really does not like any remarks about the crackler on her face.
So they're having this conversation about how
deeply uncool it was, basically, for Trip to back her into a corner of admitting this to him when they get radio connectivity from Degra's ship, but it's all scramble.
They can't hear shit.
Tell me about that.
I didn't have the same interpretation of this disclosure.
Oh, she's just saying like it's really like private information for a Vulcan to say their age, right?
But she wanted to say it.
Like I didn't feel like she was forced to do it.
I thought this was a because she's so mentally
fatigued.
I thought it was because she was feeling like really defensive when he made the remark about her face scars.
Huh.
Interesting.
Yeah, I just saw it as like yet another example of her just being kind of worn down by this entire experience.
Yeah, maybe so.
Anyways, they go up to the bridge and they dock with Degra's ship, and you're like expecting the door to fly open and Archer to be there.
But Archer ain't there.
It's just fucking Reed.
How disappointing is that moment, you think?
Just crushing.
RSVP Archer.
We learn that he did not make it.
The entrepreneur is getting a ride back to human space in an aquatic vessel that's going to
take him home in its belly.
How fun is it that aquatic ships gobble you up like a giant whale?
Like a mega-mouth shark.
I mean, like
Job or whatever, you know, like
a literary reference where the aquatics will will take your ship and transport you and then spit you out.
That's a thing, right?
That's a literary reference.
Is it Job in the whale?
Isn't it?
Who's in the whale?
Is it the squid in the whale?
Oh, that's something else entirely, isn't it?
That's, you know, one of my favorite books, but I haven't read it in a long time, Adam.
Jonah.
It's Jonah in the whale.
It is Jonah.
I just saved us so many angry letters, Adam.
It's a J word.
I got hung up on the Js.
It's a J-O, even, you know?
Yeah.
I always get my J-O's in the Bibles mixed up.
I'm on drugs.
That's my excuse.
That much is certain.
Oh, man.
So many people are like swerving their cars on their way to work.
Like, shut up, you idiots.
You don't know anything.
The Zindi counselor goes to visit TePaul.
And, you know, that moment the insectoid ship ditched the mission was emblematic of where they're at on this conflict now.
Yeah.
They aren't really down with the Guardians anymore.
And as for the reptiles, they're kind of feeling the same way.
Like, how could they deny the truth that the Guardians had been using them this whole time?
Yeah.
No one likes that feeling of being used.
Nobody likes the feeling of being used, but also...
Politicians never admit when they're wrong.
So it's hard to imagine what's going on among the reptile leadership.
There's a lot of respect nucks for what Archer did for them because not only did he save the Earth, but he also, I guess, stopped them from having one of the galaxy's greatest atrocities on their hands and fixed their whole region of space while he was at it.
Kind of a lot happened.
Yeah.
In a very short amount of time.
Archer's sacrifice will not be forgotten, and neither will TePaul's Scarface.
We go down to Six Bay where we learned that his critters are really upset about the whole getting taken somewhere in an aquatic ship.
Pretty fun, like straight-out of gremlins type effects work here.
Like, give me some plants in a cage and then shake that cage from off-screen.
That's all you need for a moment like this.
There's just a PA like right below camera going like,
why does this stuff delight me so much?
I don't know.
It's fun.
I mean, but let's just, you know, put it out there that Enterprise had every opportunity to have a plant that looks like a jack-off hand in one of these cages, and they did not take it.
It's outrageous.
And if one crew person could have that plant, Dr.
Flox is the one you'd want to have that.
Like, definitely don't give it to Reed.
That would be a bad match.
I suppose you and I, Mr.
Sulu, are...
kindred spirits in a way.
Why hasn't Reed showed up for his shift?
My relationship is also not exclusive.
Kind of a lot and not enough has been made of who's going to take care of Porthos when Archer is off ship or possibly dead or going on a suicide mission.
And this is the scene where we learn that it's not just the people processing the death of Archer, it's the dogs, and specifically Porthos.
And this is the first time in the entire series that TePaul has talked to Porthos directly.
Did you know this?
I didn't.
TePaul's not a dog person.
Yeah, she really doesn't know how to talk to a doggie.
Did you hear that?
The doctor says you'll be fine.
Sort of seems like she thinks that Porthos might have a level of understanding quite a bit higher than Porthos probably does.
Can I ask you, do we know the answer to this question?
Can falcons mind-meld non-humanoids?
They can mind-meld a whale?
That's what I'm saying.
Like, but a whale is smart in a way that it,
I'm going to get so many letters, in a way that a dog is not.
Like, the level of intelligence is different.
Well, there's also that thing that can sometimes happen when you do a meld where you like take on elements of the personality of the person you've melded.
And you don't want TePaul going around like pissing on the floor of the entrepreneur, you know.
I actually would be all right if she started humping
people, humping people's legs specifically.
I'm bending over something in engineering.
In comes DePaul.
She starts smelling my butt.
I don't know what this is about.
I don't know what it is, but I sure do like it.
And get this, she didn't mind when I turned around and smelled hers.
Enterprise is released from the aquatic ship, kind of barfed out.
It's back underway.
I kept...
wondering where Shran was.
I'm like, certainly this is the moment where we meet back up up with Shran again.
We don't.
Instead, everyone's on the bridge.
We're going to get our beautiful moment where Earth is put up on the screen, an unexploded Earth that makes everyone happy to see.
And they're like still far enough out that you can't quite make out the damage that was done to Florida, so that's nice.
Yeah.
But they're like radioing and no response from Starfleet HQ.
They cannot detect any orbital platforms.
There's nothing on radio anywhere.
No moon radio.
No nothing.
Trip and Mayweather are ordered to go to San Francisco and figure out what's going on.
So they get in a shuttle pod.
They fly down there.
They're like, oh, yeah, looks about right.
Normal San Francisco.
They pick up some ships coming out to meet them.
I'm like, great, finally.
They do a little radioing with these guys.
And no answer.
Instead, they hear bullets pinging against the side of the shuttle.
What the hell?
Three P-51 Mustangs roll up.
Yeah.
What a sight.
We know that this shuttle is bulletproof as hell.
Just given the durability of the doors.
Like, this is going to be fine, right?
It's not where are we, Ben.
It's
when are we?
And when is Archer?
Because we cut to a scene in a Nazi field hospital where an officer is shown Archer and he's got a bunch of meatloaf on his face.
and then a mystery alien is there wearing a Nati uniform, too.
And that's the end of the episode.
What's crazy, Ben, is this for a long time could have been the end of the series.
This is sort of a poison pill moment that the show constructed, where they were like, you can't end the series like this, right?
Too many cliffs.
But did you like this episode, Ben?
I can't pay.
Couldn't for late.
Got no cake.
Tempting fate.
I'm going to say I respect the poison pillness of it.
Yeah.
The you cannot fucking end the series on this note energy of it.
But as a viewer, it is extremely disappointing.
It really feels like we got save the day blue balls here because it's like we've gone from one huge existential Star Trek plotline to another one without any any warning.
And I completely understand why the writer's room would make a choice like this, but I'd say, as a viewer, it fucking sucks ass.
I agree.
The moment it made me think of in a fun way was like, try to imagine the series finale of Voyager, where like instead of the final scene being Voyager escorted toward Earth by the Armada of Federation Starships, we cut down to Earth and it's fucking Nazis.
The idea that we cannot be satisfied or feel safe at the end of this season.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I'm with you.
Like,
I love the cocksureness of like, you got to bring us back.
Fuck you.
You can't end the show here.
Yeah.
But it is so deeply unsatisfying to reach this moment and have it be like, are we going to get another 24 episode arc?
for the next season.
I don't know why.
I kind of have arc fatigue.
Yeah, I don't know if I have that in me.
I mean, I have to.
It's my job, but
you don't have a choice.
Yeah, and who's this guy?
I don't know.
I guess we'll find out next season, which for us will be next week.
But for now, Ben, we got to go check the Priority One Message inbox for Nazis.
Yeah, we got to make sure there are no Nazis in there.
And if there are,
we'll take your $100 still.
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.
This is a promotional message, Adam.
It goes like this.
I'm getting this Jumbotron for two reasons.
One, because Ben and Adam helped me and many others through some tough times, and they deserve some extra scars.
And two, I'm trying my best to be a streamer with a full-time job and could use the greatest gen bump.
I'm trying to be a V-tuber and we'll be taking my first real steps toward that on September 22nd.
I'll start playing Star Trek Online weekly once this promo drops as well to celebrate.
So please check me out at twitch.tv slash William Ambervane.
So that's twitch.tv slash w-i-l-l-i-a-m-a-m-b-e-r-v-e-i-n.
And maybe just have me on in the background.
Oh, that's a nice idea.
Like, if you're at work or if you're like cooking for kids or something, just throw William Ambervane on in the background.
He's probably playing Star Trek Online.
Great job by William Ambervane getting past the character creation part of that game, which would be further than I've ever gone in Star Trek Online.
Yeah.
Good job by you.
You see
some ships designed by friend of DeSoto Thomas Marone, I believe.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Who has designed mostly great ships, I want to say.
Sure.
Yeah.
99 beautiful ships and one ugly one.
And you know which one that is.
That sounds like a lot of fun.
I'm going to check it out.
I hope other FODs do as well.
Absolutely.
Ben, we got a personal priority win message here from
Dare.
And it is to Rebecca or Rebi.
Here's how that goes.
Thank you for getting me into Greatest Gen once they did Enterprise because it's shamefully my favorite trek.
Whoa.
For 30 years of friendship, 24 of which you listened to me rage about Archer being the worst.
And thank you for hilarious memories like Tranier signing your trip to Paul's Sexy Times photo.
She used a body double.
Here's to 30 more years of Paardi Entral.
Wow.
Here's to 30 more years, Rebi and Dare.
That sounds like a lot of fun.
I love that
it's Dare's favorite trek, but also Dare hates Archer.
Yeah, yeah.
Weird dichotomy there, isn't it?
Yeah.
I respect the hell out of it because I think most people's favorite trek is the one with their favorite captain, you know?
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
I regret not meeting Connor Tranier at STLB this year.
Like, he was there the whole time.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Something about that guy.
We could have, because we'd already met Dominic Keating and he would, he was right there.
Yeah.
We could have been like, hey, Dominic, nice seeing you at dinner last night.
Introduce us to your little buddy.
Why don't you?
Yeah.
Yeah, we straight up partied with Dominic Keating.
It was great.
Nothing with Connor Tranier.
We got the Tranier cold shoulder.
This last one's from Kevin from Cincy, aka T underscore Earl underscore Greyhot on Discord.
And it's to all STLV FODs.
Speaking of STLV,
Hi to all FODs at STLV 2025.
As I adjust to a life where no one listens to my trek jokes and rants, I say thanks to you who made a solo trip anything but lonely.
Too many to name, but special thanks to Liz, Corey, and Ricky for organizing, Jay and Bowser for hangs, and all my photo buddies.
Miss you all, but Tim, you're still wrong about Celsius.
Hmm.
Man,
is Celsius another timeline that we haven't yet explored in the Star Trek universe?
I mean, we're talking about the beverage, aren't we?
Oh, I never think of the beverage.
I've never tried that.
I know people who swear by it as a performance-enhancing drug.
Uh-huh.
Like, just for all sorts of things.
It's like an energy drink, right?
It is, yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe I'll give it a try.
I've had extremely troubling luck with energy drinks in the past, so I'm a little gun-shy around those things.
Kevin from Cincy says a thing that maybe we haven't said enough.
STLV was made better, was made great for all the FODs who went and like self-organized a bunch of fun hangs
and invited and included folks who had never been to STLV before.
They just did a great job.
Totally.
It was really cool to see that in person because like we've always remarked on how lucky we are to have a listenership that has like undertaken to like organize so many great places online for each other to hang out and meet people and like seeing it in person was like oh man this is like it just happens it's an emergent property of the friends of deSoto they they organize fun hangs and and hang out yeah the biggest regret of my time there was just how little of it was spent participating in these things because we were stuck at a table
maybe next year well if you'd like to get a p1 on the show it's really easy to do.
You head to maximumfund.org slash jumbotron and set yours up today.
I see some availability for holiday ones.
If you'd like to wish someone a happy holiday, we got some inventory available on the show.
So run, don't walk to maximumfund.org slash jumbotron.
I like that.
Hey, Adam.
What?
Did you find yourself a drunk Shimoda?
Drunk Shimoda!
Do you wish Dollum was just just a little smarter?
I think that's where I'm at with it ultimately at the end.
Like, I don't think he ever was more dangerous feeling than when he stabbed Degra.
Yeah.
Like, he kind of coasted after that in terms of the sense of threat that I got from him, how evil he was willing to be, how craven he was for power.
And I kind of wish in the moments after stabbing Degra, he just got more and more evil and more and more threatening.
Right.
But that just felt like the apex for him.
And that was bad timing.
Yeah.
Like, make the lethality the absolute tops for this episode and not the episodes before.
And that's where I'm kind of like, that's drunk Shimoda shit.
You know, like, he had a great opportunity to destroy Earth, but he just got...
fucking in the weeds on too much shit.
And
I wanted him to be a more formidable opponent, especially for a story that lasted 24 episodes.
Like, I didn't want the energy to peter out at the end with him the way that it did.
That final fight scene with Archer and Dolem, like, you have to set it up that Archer wins because he fights smarter, not harder.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because Dolem is such an imposing figure in that moment.
Also, I wanted Dolem to break Archer there.
Like,
fuck him up.
Yeah.
And it's just not bad enough.
It's not, yeah.
Archer has some blood on his face, and that's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I want Dolem to like drop Archer over his knee the way Bane does Batman.
Same.
Yeah.
I think I'll join you on the Dolem Square.
I think
he's the coachman of this episode.
Yeah.
What was it all for, man?
You fucking blew it.
You blew it.
You blew it.
Faith of the fart.
Let's start talking about season four.
It's going to be season four, episode one, next week.
Aptly named for an episode that presumably will feature Nazis.
It's called Stormfront Part 1.
Archer and the NXO1 find themselves in Earth's past with the events of World War II altered by the temporal Cold War.
Oh, man.
Terrifying that that would be the case.
I got to head to goch.biz slash game and see
how it will be that we will be reviewing that episode.
It could be anything at this point.
It seriously could.
If the past is prologue.
Currently, our runabout is on square 29
and we're going to see exactly how we will be doing our next episode.
The ship could go anywhere, Adam.
Could hit anything.
And I hope it does.
You're required to learn as you play.
Roll.
But it didn't.
We jumped all the way up to square 93.
Tula!
Did I win?
Hardly.
Regular old episode next week.
How about that?
Maybe I'll be 100% by then.
Instead of 70.
I really want that for you, buddy.
We'll get there.
We'll get there eventually.
I've been sinus rinsing three times a day.
Wow.
Getting some exciting stuff out of there.
That's just it.
That's how I feel like I'm on the other side of it is initially, you know, you're just a garbage can of shit flying out of you.
Now it's not much of anything at all.
That's good.
That's good.
Yeah.
You know what we do have 100% of, Adam, is support from the friends of DeSoto who go to maximumfun.org slash join.
And if you're like, oh shit, I don't support at maximumfun.org slash join, get us back to 100%.
We don't want to be at 99.95%.
Yeah, it's up to you.
We got to thank Wendy Pretty, our producer, editor, who you're not going to believe how many sneezes and nose blows and coughs for both of us she has cut out over the last few weeks on this show.
You have no idea how much appreciation she deserves for all that.
It's outrageous.
And yet she remains.
Yeah, she hasn't given us her two weeks' notice or anything.
It's unbelievable.
Thank you, Wendy.
Thank you to Adam Ragusia, who made the original parody of Diane Warren's Enterprise theme song, and Dark Materia, who made the original Picard song.
Got to thank Rob Adler, who, as of this recording, is back from Family Leave.
Welcome back, Rob.
So happy to have you.
Check out all of the social media stuff he does for us at Greatest Trek, all over the internet.
And please sign up for our newsletter.
The greatest newsletter.
It comes out once a month.
It's got a discount code for
hotshop.biz and talks about all the stuff we got going on around here.
Also got to thank our Zindy wartime sigliary, Bill Tilly, who puts up the trading cards for this show, and he's doing Greatest Trek now as well on the at Greatest Trek feeds.
I saw some trading cards for TOS starting to come out.
If you didn't already know, we are covering Star Trek the Original series over on Greatest Trek right now.
We're having a lot of fun with it.
Get over there, man.
Yeah, if you've put off for some reason subscribing to Greatest Trek, now is the time to get in.
Got to.
All right, 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 I kind of wish they would come to our presence time to stop the Nazis.
Just that's me personally.
Make it so.
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