Slow-Motion Hulk (ENT S4E5)

Speaker 1 Here's to the finest crew in Starlink. When it comes to my crew, you won't get any argument from me.

Speaker 1 This is a parody.

Speaker 1 Paramount owns the sun.

Speaker 2 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 Peranica.

Speaker 1 I'm Ben Harrison.

Speaker 1 You've been in techno hell all day.

Speaker 2 Yeah, man.

Speaker 2 with my internet service provider specifically the kind that you can't talk to uh like a person you've got to go onto their website and then like do a chat bot thing and then what is probably a second chat bot that's supposed to like be more emotive than the first one to make it seem as though you're talking to a person right i can see how that would be frustrating mr pranica

Speaker 2 then i really think the thing that as a society we don't talk enough about W slash R slash T disasters

Speaker 2 is like when total internet outage inevitably happens.

Speaker 1 When the Omega Pulse comes.

Speaker 2 Ours was out for I think four hours.

Speaker 2 It was like the SNL sketch when the teleprompter goes out and it immediately goes into like order of the hand shit.

Speaker 1 I smell from your scent that you are weak. I challenge you.

Speaker 2 I'm ready to put bloody handprints on walls two hours into an internet outage. And this is consistent with.

Speaker 1 You and your wife are over there good morning Phoenixing.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 My wife would tell you this about me. The thing that my biggest button is a thing that

Speaker 2 should work not working. Like the expectation of working is almost assured and when that thing doesn't work

Speaker 2 oh man, that just

Speaker 2 burns my omelet. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I've been at Soundcheck with you. I know.

Speaker 2 Ben, there's never any expectation of tech working at Soundcheck. So I think that's a different, lesser version of this monster that came out today.

Speaker 1 Fair enough. The other morning, we were going to record two episodes of Wholesome, our Smash Hit, patrons only podcast.

Speaker 1 And we'd already had to double up because the goose had had an internet problem the week before.

Speaker 1 And we woke up at my house and my internet was not working and I discovered that my cable modem was bricked just like you know no lights no no response to any overture to see if it would come back to life and give us some internet and I had to like and you put that modem through a lot like probably more than most oh yeah oh there were some truly regrettable torrents that stopped downloading that day.

Speaker 2 Now before you disposed of it or gave it to an electronics recycler, did you like take the drill to it and physically destroy it?

Speaker 1 No, we actually did like a Viking burial. We shot a flaming arrow at it in a little boat out on the ocean.

Speaker 2 There's a little modem in a boat out there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a little modem in a modem.

Speaker 1 I had to find a store that sold like a cable modem that was on the approved cable modems list of my internet service provider at 7 a.m.

Speaker 1 you know like what a great errand at a great time yeah just the most delightful people you see in the Walmart in uh in Burbank

Speaker 2 you're on your own at the Walmart and Burbank I think yeah yeah I mean if they're locking up the the toothpaste and uh the socks and whatever, like how are they treating the modems at the Walmart and Burbank?

Speaker 1 It was a bit of an odyssey to find somebody that was qualified to open that particular case. I bet.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I mean, we've been struggling over here, you and I, with all of our internet connections, but we persevere

Speaker 1 and we bring the show, you know?

Speaker 2 We really do. I mean, I don't know, man.

Speaker 2 With our problem-solving abilities and the Merriam issues

Speaker 2 we've had to apply that toward.

Speaker 2 I don't know, man. Are you feeling like we could be

Speaker 2 augmented kind of superior intellects over here?

Speaker 1 Ours isn't quite the superior intellect, but it's on its way there.

Speaker 2 Ours is the embarrassed intellect, isn't it?

Speaker 1 It's season four, episode five of Star Trek Enterprise, Cold Station 12.

Speaker 2 Ben, what happened 11 years ago? That's a question I had all throughout the last episode.

Speaker 1 I had been wondering that too.

Speaker 2 We find out at the beginning of this one, it's AI Sung doing a sort of group lesson to his students. And

Speaker 2 this is what they would look like 11 years ago. Like little kids.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 His lesson is about the eugenics wars.

Speaker 1 Have their costumes been the same the entire time, and that's why they're all torn up now?

Speaker 2 That would explain it. Yeah, they're all, they all just became the Hulk.
Slow-motion Hulk.

Speaker 1 Wait, okay, so I'm trying to do some math here. Was 11 years ago in the timeline?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 So I'm fucked up because I'm thinking both the timeline of Star Trek Enterprise and the timeline of the release.

Speaker 1 Because I saw the kids in these costumes and I was like, these kids look like kids from TNG because they have shiny costumes. It's true.
But it's not 11 years ago and that puts us in the TNG era.

Speaker 1 That doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 That's personal time.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's your own Benjamin R. Harrison timeline.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know, there's maybe some kind of quantum entanglement thing going on making them have TNG kid outfits.
It's amazing that they don't have slick back hair. Let's just put it that way.

Speaker 2 I am too. When you get this kind of subjectivity about a major subject like the eugenics wars,

Speaker 2 it seems to me like this is what happens when you operate a school outside of a Department of Education style umbrella, when a school can just teach whatever it wants. This is what A.I.

Speaker 2 Sung is doing here, teaching his version of the eugenics wars, one that makes them the victims.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is much like my high school American history class being taught with a Howard Zinn book as its primary text. Soong is teaching a very woke version of the book.

Speaker 2 You were watching Goodwill Hunting and you Rick Dalton the screen

Speaker 2 when the Howard Zinn book is referenced.

Speaker 2 You're in the theater with a beer, also doing the point.

Speaker 1 That's great. Yeah, just a kid at the time.
Kind of amazing. How'd you know? But Soon has big plans for these kids.

Speaker 1 They will fulfill humanity's promise, which he believes to be augmenting humanity into

Speaker 1 a higher form of being.

Speaker 2 This is the moment, Ben, where you know he's a bad dad. You can't put that kind of pressure on a kid.

Speaker 1 Right? Yeah. And as somebody that has a college degree in the humanities, I wondered what humanity's promise was exactly.
Hmm.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Debt

Speaker 1 would be my answer to that.

Speaker 2 Setting the rest of their siblings free is

Speaker 2 like a big concluding statement to this scene. Like, it's ultimately like a message of encouragement, right? Like, I want to empower you to carp the DM.

Speaker 2 Like, get out there and do your best work because you're supposed to be genetically the best people.

Speaker 1 Mm-hmm. So with that, we cut to the bird of prey back in the present where Malik is talking about his plan to invade Cold Station 12.

Speaker 1 And like AI Sung has now kind of put himself in the captain's chair. And he's like,

Speaker 1 he's arguing for an invasion plan that involves no killing. And Malik is like,

Speaker 1 what is this guy even talking about? Dad, what are you talking about? No killing. What if they don't give us a choice? No one is to be killed.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you can just tell by the look on his face. Malik isn't loving that idea.

Speaker 1 Where's the fun in that? Photographs? Just photographs. Under no circumstances are you to engage the enemy.

Speaker 2 And given that he's the only one of this group of folks that we've seen kill already, I think he's got a taste for it.

Speaker 1 He does seem to enjoy it a little bit. You hear the Captain Starlog

Speaker 1 where the entrepreneur has pulled up to a desolate planet and Archer's explaining that they don't have anything to go on. They have no idea where AI Sung might have decided to go with these maniacs.

Speaker 1 So the one thing that they do have is coordinates of where he claims to have raised them and that's what they're here to poke around in.

Speaker 1 It's like a little mini colony that he's built on this desolate planet.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 a lot of words for a place like this. Compound,

Speaker 1 one of them. I think you might consider calling it a Felicity.

Speaker 2 I think so too.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 This looked like a Burbank airplane hangar from the 40s, right? Like built into this mountain.

Speaker 1 Yeah, very much so.

Speaker 1 I really like the set. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. They're poking around.
They got, you know, your various protein recombinators and water filtration systems. They got a classroom.

Speaker 1 They also have a room full of like plugs. They're like, what was plugged into this?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Medical equipment, they think.

Speaker 2 I mean, this is an audio program, so I just want to be clear about the room full of plugs and what that looks like.

Speaker 2 These are like cables and wires and stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, an FOD out there might have an idea of what a room full of plugs may look like.

Speaker 2 Go with your third guess.

Speaker 2 And that's what we have here in this episode.

Speaker 1 When E40 says, my plug met me at Denny's, this is not the kind of plug he's talking about. No.

Speaker 2 I mean, I was going to use that reference, but now I'm kind of struggling to come up with another one. You got to it first.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So they're not there alone. There is a knife-wielding maniac creeping around in the shadows at this place, as you would want in any shadowy, unlit, spooky Star Trek cave.

Speaker 2 I completely agree with you.

Speaker 2 If a realtor were showing this commercial property and like walking the Dustbuster Club around, they would be like, oh yeah, obviously the room full of plugs, I already showed you, pretty great.

Speaker 2 High vaulted ceilings. I think really great for making it feel spacious.
Also,

Speaker 2 lurking maniac with a knife in the shadows that comes with the property.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And like, you know, when you're looking at a house, often they'll have like cookies baking in the oven.

Speaker 1 You know, when you're at William Sonoma, they've got that simmer pot full of like cinnamon sticks and cloves and shit to make it smell like delicious food is on the on the stove.

Speaker 1 He's going to tell us what it smells like.

Speaker 1 You want to get the sense of a knife-wielding maniac, just you know, in the ambiance of the place, right?

Speaker 2 Archer's like, is that piss? Reed is like, that is definitely piss.

Speaker 1 Realtor's like, it is,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 2 we do have gestures out at the shadows, a knife-wielding maniac somewhere out there.

Speaker 1 So it's very stressful because you're like, this guy is fucking, he's like the sleeper agent augment that they left behind to kill whoever comes looking for them.

Speaker 1 He's going to have like the craziest augment ninja skills. And then he just goes and steps somewhere and makes a noise.
And Reed, of all people, notices him.

Speaker 1 I was like, how can it be that Reed would get the drop on this guy and this guy would not get the drop on Reed?

Speaker 2 Total coincidence, I think, is the answer to that.

Speaker 1 Well, I think that the reveal ultimately is that he's not an Augment. He doesn't have special skills.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's the Lenny Augment

Speaker 2 and he's the trash that the other Augments left behind. Look, Archer does his best to kind of negotiate with him.
Like, at no point does he ever drop the knife of his own volition.

Speaker 2 The ring encircles him. Archer's like, hey man, we're friends from

Speaker 1 Earth.

Speaker 2 That was exactly the wrong thing to say to this guy. And they get into a tussle right after.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And again, you're like, oh, no,

Speaker 1 this guy will destroy Archer with his fists. We've seen what augment fists do.

Speaker 2 During the tussle, I was looking for jerk cables. I was too.
But none were attached.

Speaker 1 Somehow, Archer knocks this guy out cold with one punch. Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 Why did they cut cut away before we got the moment when he looked down at his fist like, oh,

Speaker 1 yeah?

Speaker 1 I can't believe it.

Speaker 1 I knocked out an augment.

Speaker 1 Why didn't we do the thing that they do in Conair where we cut to the courtroom where they're like, your fists should be registered as deadly weapons?

Speaker 2 I think we know someone who could recut that into this moment.

Speaker 1 With your military skills, you are a deadly weapon and are not subject to the same laws as other people that are provoked because you can respond with deadly force.

Speaker 2 Cut to the bird of prey.

Speaker 2 AI Sung is visited by Malik in there and AI is looking at Rakin's pad like a parent looking at a dead kid's teddy bear. Like there is a lot of emotion projected onto this little device.

Speaker 2 AI just can't understand what happened to this guy. Last he heard, he was alive and well and doing great.

Speaker 2 And what's weird is no one on the Bird of Prey is answering any questions about him or the circumstances of his disappearance.

Speaker 1 Very strange. I love the idea that he's been going around going like, huh, where is Rocking?

Speaker 1 What's he up to nowadays?

Speaker 1 He ever

Speaker 1 go to college or anything like that?

Speaker 1 Malik explains, yeah, I did a fratricide on him. We had, you know, it wasn't me, it was him.
You know, he was the one that was the aggressor and it was self-defense, but he did.

Speaker 2 Absolute in-memorium reel at the Academy Awards level acting here.

Speaker 2 Totally going for it with this story of regret and blood and tears.

Speaker 1 I tried to save him. I tried.
He was your brother!

Speaker 2 Sorry. AI is quick to extend forgiveness here.

Speaker 2 AI believes, and I think this is a notable moment because I think we get several moments in this episode and the last where AI tends to believe people when he's being lied to.

Speaker 1 He does.

Speaker 1 Right? He's a little bit of a sucker, AI. So

Speaker 1 despite having a total fucking galaxy brain in many other respects. Yeah.
You know, a bit like myself, I do kind of identify with him in this way.

Speaker 1 You know, I think I'm a fairly clever guy in a lot of ways, but

Speaker 1 a bit of a sucker.

Speaker 2 I think we all believe we have one special gift that sometimes comes at the expense of other more useful gifts.

Speaker 1 If we change the words,

Speaker 1 then it's fair use all day long.

Speaker 1 They hug it out like, you know, this is, I'm not mad, I'm disappointed, dad, but ultimately we still have each other, and that's what's important.

Speaker 1 And we're back on the entrepreneur. This dude that archer ko'd is not an aug is reported by phlox he has no enhancements and

Speaker 1 he uh introduces himself as udar aka smike

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 if you're trying to imagine audio listener what this guy might look like an augment without augments as you put it He's got a real Frodo face, I thought.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 there is a a problem with this episode where so many of the augments are, like,

Speaker 1 they all have the same hair and the same like ripped up goth augment clothes. I was having a little bit of a tough time remembering which one was which from scene to scene.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But this guy I did not confuse with any of the other augments. No.

Speaker 2 His friends, friends I put in quotes, call him Smike because that is the name of a character in the hit classic tome Nicholas Nickleby. Are you familiar with this book, Ben?

Speaker 1 I have not read Nicholas Nickleby. I mean, I was, I was, here's my theory.

Speaker 1 If Star Trek Enterprise had been made in a post-Greatest Gen era, if it was, for example, a streaming show on Paramount Plus, this character would be named Lenny as a subtle nod to our show.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 These friends he describes don't seem nice.

Speaker 1 Actually, I should walk that back.

Speaker 2 If your friends come up with a cutting nickname for you that is also a literary reference like this,

Speaker 2 does that kind of take the sting out of it? Because it's so nerdy.

Speaker 1 Like, it's very nerdy.

Speaker 2 Who's the bad guy in this story? The one who they call Smike or the ones who came up with the name?

Speaker 1 You know what would have made it really clear is if Archer had been like, oh, like the guy from Nicholas Nickleby and he'd been like, oh, what?

Speaker 1 They told me no one would get that reference.

Speaker 1 That it was just between me and my friends.

Speaker 1 Why doesn't Star Trek do shit like that sometimes?

Speaker 2 That's such a Tim Robinson reaction. Like, that is a modern Tim reaction.

Speaker 1 Arthur wants to pump this dude for information, but he isn't going to give anything up. And he's like, you know, my brothers and sisters are the world's greatest badasses, and nobody can stop them.

Speaker 1 Whatever they're doing, don't even try. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm also not going to help you because you're from Earth.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I have very strong anti-earth sentiments.

Speaker 1 You should know. He's an anti-earthite.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 We get a call from Tripp down on the surface who's looked through some of the databases, I guess, and discovered that the stuff that they unplugged was a bunch of artificial wombs. Hmm.
So. Hmm.

Speaker 2 Well, now, if you're an audio-only listener, you might have an idea about what those look like.

Speaker 2 Just to let you know, go with your fourth or fifth idea on Malik.

Speaker 1 Malik and Persis have a little conversation about how weird it is that Sug doesn't want to just go down to this planet and murder everyone when they get to Cold Station 12.

Speaker 1 A sexy conversation about this, I should say. They're rolling around in bed together.

Speaker 2 The only time you do this sort of pose in bed is after you bust together. This is post-bust pose, right?

Speaker 1 Do you think augments can just go again?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I think when we're going down the list of things to augment genetically,

Speaker 2 the ability to go again.

Speaker 1 Refractory period that's like five or six seconds long.

Speaker 2 I mean, we were talking moments ago about like ways in which we are great in quotes at the expense of ways that we are not. I mean, what wouldn't you sacrifice for pushing this slider up to the max?

Speaker 2 I mean, personally, I would my choice would be never stop coughing, would be like what I would sacrifice.

Speaker 1 How about new?

Speaker 1 I mean, that would be a good thing to augment. I'm still thinking about sexual augmentations, though, and I'm wondering if volume could be, could be one of the things.

Speaker 1 Like, you just produce a lot more. Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 What is that called? Bust maxing?

Speaker 2 I read about that on

Speaker 1 something lately.

Speaker 1 I have not read about bust maxing, but tell me more. I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Speaker 2 There is a probably astoundingly small population of the internet that is interested in maximizing what comes out.

Speaker 2 And there are all sorts of

Speaker 2 vitamins and stuff that you can take to experiment in this way.

Speaker 2 Not that I was looking up any of this personally. This is not a problem problem that I have personally.
I'm just saying, like, you know, when you do your scrolling and sometimes randomly.

Speaker 1 Well, they hired you to come in as a guest speaker to give them some tips, right? Sure.

Speaker 2 Much like A.I. Seung does in the classroom.
Very inspiring speech I gave.

Speaker 1 These are all people that saw Scary Movie 2 at a very impressionable age, and it unlocked something in them.

Speaker 2 I bust a normal amount

Speaker 2 in both in terms of amount of times and amount of volume.

Speaker 2 There's nothing abnormal about either of those things with respect to me, okay?

Speaker 1 All right. Well, maybe.
Can we just put that issue to bed completely? I think there has been a special sub forum on the Discord of people discussing this. So maybe we can just delete that whole thing.

Speaker 2 All right. That's what I'm going to do right after we stop recording.

Speaker 1 Anyways, they're a little weirded out about the way dad is not a bloodthirsty maniac anymore, but not so weirded out that they don't want to have a little bit more sex.

Speaker 2 I think a big problem they talk about in this moment is like

Speaker 2 Malik thought he was going to be the leader after killing his brother and now fucking dad's home again.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, is he going to have to kill him too? Like, that seems to be the subtext here.

Speaker 1 Augments should be led by Augments. Oh, listen to this.

Speaker 2 He's making moves to become a leader, and he's being thwarted at every turn.

Speaker 1 Have you seen that guy bust? It's like almost nothing. It's like a teaspoon.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's another scene where you don't know what side purses is on except dick

Speaker 1 there's a mclaughlin group issue one aboard the bridge of the entrepreneur where we learn a little bit more about cold station 12.

Speaker 1 it's one of these high security labs where they have like copies of the smallpox virus and shit like that.

Speaker 2 Archer has a pretty fun introduction to his presentation about the station. He's like

Speaker 1 into the file we'll delve cold station number 12.

Speaker 1 I like it.

Speaker 1 I think it's good.

Speaker 2 I spend a lot of time looking up words that rhyme with 12.

Speaker 2 Very few. Delve is good.
Very few to make a song out of rhyming with 12.

Speaker 1 Shelve?

Speaker 1 Kind of a slant rhyme.

Speaker 2 Oh, I don't get that reference, Ben.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 2 That seems like something you shouldn't say.

Speaker 1 It's a slur against a type of wordplay?

Speaker 1 Jesus.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 My mind just didn't go there, Adam. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, there's 1800 augment embryos there. And, you know, there's like, there were like weird feelings at the end of the eugenics wars when they had all these augment embryos.

Speaker 1 Like, what do we do with these?

Speaker 1 And it seems like a lot of the like reconstruction after the eugenics wars involved freezing people and things that were inconvenient to deal with at the time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, how about that? Do not destroy. They just kick the can, the frozen can, down the road to deal with later.

Speaker 2 Sexual icon Admiral Forrest has authorized any force they want to stop AI Tsung and his plan here.

Speaker 1 So good.

Speaker 2 There's something about like in the action movie or like the movie about the danger of nuclear war where there's like something more specific than any force.

Speaker 2 Like in Crimson Tide, I think Gene Hackman says like the authorization for nuclear weapons is confirmed or whatever. And there's such like a specificity.

Speaker 2 There's a like an official terminology there that I really admire.

Speaker 2 Any force just doesn't mean anything to me. Yeah.
Like lethal force, I would have preferred, but they don't say that word here.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's just sexual icon Admiral Forrest trying to keep his hands clean, right?

Speaker 2 You know what? You're right.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, all calls are being recorded when sexual icon Admiral Forrest is concerned, right?

Speaker 1 They wipe out everybody at this complex or facility or whatever. And

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Speaker 1 You will never take the greatest shit alive.

Speaker 1 Man would rather die.

Speaker 2 Cut to the Denabulin ship Barzai.

Speaker 2 It is what you imagine it looks like on board. Yeah.
How very soft tones, a lot of beiges.

Speaker 1 Very warm looking.

Speaker 1 They get a distress call from the cargo ship Corsair, Corsair, and they're going to go help. Oops.

Speaker 1 The cargo ship Corsair was in fact the Klingon bird of prey, and this was a trick for the Augments to get their hands on a Denobulin medical ship that would look perfectly innocent approaching Cold Station 12.

Speaker 2 What would you think of new Star Trek if Federation starships look like the interior of Denobulin ship Barzai?

Speaker 2 I think it changes the whole game.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 If it's just muted tones and like natural colors and

Speaker 2 warm temperature light bulbs.

Speaker 1 The cool clinical nature of Starfleet bridges in New Trek. Yeah.
It's not my Star Trek, you know. We grew up with a carpeted bridge with wood accents, you know?

Speaker 2 Maybe I want a bridge where it would be a very bad thing to spill blood there. Like where you do everything you could to stop that from happening.

Speaker 2 It's just a little too easy to use a squeegee in New Star Trek, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
That's why eyeballs are popping out left and right.

Speaker 2 I know. I know.
Over in Six Bay on Enterprise, Archer goes to see about Smike.

Speaker 1 And Dr.

Speaker 2 Fox gives him a clean bill of health. Archer also has some news for the doctor about Dr.
Jeremy Lucas being over on Cold Station 12. And this news...

Speaker 2 Does not sound great to Dr. Flox when he gets it.
You see his face. He does not look happy.

Speaker 1 This This is Fox's homie.

Speaker 2 What he asked for after hearing it is that he wants to go along on the Dustbuster Club when it's time. And Archer agrees.

Speaker 1 We also learned that Flox used to work at Cold Station 12. It's like,

Speaker 1 how many people didn't work at Cold Station 12? Maybe that's the number that we should be looking for.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wonder if they keep their lanyards on a lamp or something in their office. Like somewhere in there, they got a Cold Station 12 lanyard.
They could probably try using it as a swiper, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Let's bring it down, like, just see if they haven't changed the codes, Fox.

Speaker 1 Smike gets the coveted Captain's Mess invite.

Speaker 1 Pretty nice.

Speaker 2 We do not see the reaction of other crew people to this being extended.

Speaker 1 You know?

Speaker 1 It would have been nice if Mayweather had been like off in the corner, like, what? What?

Speaker 1 It's just like being back in the wood.

Speaker 1 Who are you? And some Travis Mayweather.

Speaker 1 Parents must be very proud. When I was a kid, we called it the 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.

Speaker 1 Takes practice.

Speaker 2 Other than keeping Inson Mayweather up at night, I'm not sure what we expect to accomplish here. Especially when we see later what's for dinner.
Is that all the beef on board? Steak was enormous.

Speaker 1 They're not quite dare steaks.

Speaker 1 They're not like man versus food size, but they're further in that direction than you would think it sounds like something John Candy would struggle to eat in a movie until he gets to the gristle and fat part

Speaker 1 So the the barzai the the ship that they stole sneaks into cold station 12 and Percy walks around the corner to the Federation security dude who's standing in front of the door into the lab and he's like you're not denobulin and she's like i know and uppercuts him in a way that causes his body to do a 360 backflip.

Speaker 2 Amazing, right?

Speaker 1 This guy's fucking jaw is in a billion pieces, right?

Speaker 2 How do you set up the jerk cable to make this happen? I don't know. It's got to be on the floor, right? It's on the floor, and then you tuck back to.

Speaker 1 Is he like...

Speaker 2 Or no, it's on the ceiling, but the cable goes through the front of your crotch to your back. Wow.
So that you can, so that it pulls you up like some kind of weird wedgie.

Speaker 2 wedgie, like it pulls the back of your pants forward so you can spin around, right?

Speaker 1 I was thinking maybe he's in some kind of rig where he can pivot at his hips and just spin ass over a tea kettle, right?

Speaker 2 So that would be the center of gravity.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because he goes like

Speaker 1 we see his head and then his feet and then his head again. It's amazing.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 They beat up a bunch of these guys and they are in.

Speaker 1 And Soong gets on a computer and initiates Protocol 69. Nice.
Which we learn about what that means over the course of the next scene. We finally get to meet Dr.
Lucas. What a fun reveal.

Speaker 1 I have people skills. I am good at dealing with people.
Can't you understand it?

Speaker 2 That it is Richard Real is

Speaker 2 the best.

Speaker 1 Never would have pictured it being Richard Real in a million years.

Speaker 2 I'm really, really,

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 excited that he's the guy.

Speaker 1 Real pain for my jam friends. Champagne for my real friends.

Speaker 2 How much of his life do you think he went through with people, like, in a, uh, in an appointment context, you know, saying, uh, Mr. Really?

Speaker 2 You can come on back? Like, I bet his last name has been... mispronounced so often over the course of his life until he got famous.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. That's why you get famous if you're a Richard Real.
You know, there are people in this world that don't have to put up with all this shit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, one of the greats. Really great to see him.
Anyway, he's told about the security situation elsewhere on Cold Station number 12.

Speaker 2 What he should be concerned about is the gas situation as it comes pouring through these ceiling vents.

Speaker 1 What the hell?

Speaker 1 Knocking everybody in this room out.

Speaker 1 Cold. Yeah.
Station 12.

Speaker 2 in the captain's mess it's giant steak and potato dinner time totally uncommented on by a dude that you know has not had a proper meal for 11 years he's been eating mres he's been alone for a really long time too like yeah ever since rocking and them left he's he he got left behind because he was a weakling and he wouldn't be you know he wouldn't be able to keep up with them i keep calling rocking rakin like a monster It's going to be very confusing for people.

Speaker 1 I think you might be right. I don't remember how they pronounce it.
Anyways, Smike is like, oh, so you're taking me to jail, right? And Archer's like, you have got Earth all wrong.

Speaker 1 Like, we're not like that. I don't know who told you that.
Maybe that Tsung guy. Anyways, like, here's a picture of your dad, a geophysicist who looks like John McAfee.

Speaker 2 This is a terrible picture, right? They had to use any picture but this.

Speaker 1 It looked so photoshopped for no reason.

Speaker 1 Like, why couldn't you just have a regular picture of a regular looking person and not a strange, heavily photoshopped picture of a very strange looking person?

Speaker 2 Any photograph inside the frame that you get from a drugstore has a more

Speaker 2 realistic looking picture than whatever the fuck this is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's like, we have a lot of information in our computer about your parents. For example, here's your father.
And he shows him a picture of like a black and white picture of a Dalmatian puppy.

Speaker 1 No spots. No spots at all.
What a hothead little white rat.

Speaker 2 Look, Greatest Trek and Greatest Jen, both friends to the art department, always have been. But I want to say, like, we're also honest enough to call it like we see it.
You fucked up on this one.

Speaker 1 This picture's bad. It's very weird.
Flox and Archer have a conversation about whether the ban on genetic engineering that happened on Earth after the eugenics wars was a good choice or not.

Speaker 1 Because like the Dinobulans are like very pro-genetic engineering, and they never had anything like the eugenics wars. And they talk about

Speaker 1 whether human technology outpaced human ethics, basically.

Speaker 2 Also,

Speaker 2 Dr. Flox, what's up with all the food, dude?

Speaker 1 He's so much food on his plate.

Speaker 2 In the very same conversation when they are talking about heavy shit, Dr. Flox seems to admit that he's in a one-person gainer relationship with himself.

Speaker 1 To tell you the truth, I'm not very hungry. I am the feeder and the gainer.

Speaker 2 I am the feeder and the gainer?

Speaker 1 I Obama that again. Why do I keep doing that?

Speaker 1 I mean, why wouldn't you? Yeah, at this point.

Speaker 2 Clark syndrome. Did you know what Archer's dad died of?

Speaker 1 That was it. Oh.

Speaker 2 Clark syndrome. What if genetic engineering were allowed at the time that could have saved his life? Then we would have

Speaker 2 just a sickly sweet father figure on the show from time to time, giving us cavities once every six episodes when Archer talks to his dad. I think we're better off without him.

Speaker 1 Hi, Jonathan. It's real good to see you.
Here at the Warp 7 research facility, we've just been, we've all been pulling real hard hard for you.

Speaker 2 Every time he's on screen, he's asking Jonathan if he was a good dad.

Speaker 2 Why? I mean, I told you last week that I, yeah, you, but the more you ask, I gotta say, like,

Speaker 2 that answer may change.

Speaker 1 Makes me wonder if there's something you worry was like a, like a majorly fucked up choice you made. And I'm trying to think of what that could have been.

Speaker 2 That is yet to be revealed to me, or that I've not uncovered yet.

Speaker 1 I just want you to know that there were certain things that your mother and I tried to hide from you for your own safety, and that may or may not have been the right choice. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But we just love you a whole bunch of Brown here.

Speaker 1 It's good faith to believe

Speaker 1 I can

Speaker 1 prepare it.

Speaker 1 Bit of an impasse at Cold Station 12 because Dr. Lucas is not giving up access to the embryos.
He claims he doesn't even have the code. But Soong, he used to have Dr.
Lucas' job.

Speaker 1 He knows that that guy gets the codes to go into the embryo room.

Speaker 2 And yet,

Speaker 2 Soong believes him through some sort of...

Speaker 2 I don't know, professional courtesy or...

Speaker 1 Yeah. We had an embryo heist.
It does seem like reasonable to assume that they would like change some of the rules about how you get in at the embryos if we had an embryo heist.

Speaker 2 To borrow my friend's term, the station wasn't just going to throw its legs up in the air. Like

Speaker 2 this was going to be challenging at some point.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Like I'm guessing probably the Louvre has like stronger windows now that the crown jewels have been stolen from it.

Speaker 1 Like they probably do something to prevent that kind of thing from happening again. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 So, the entrepreneur is entering the system, and we get a FaceTime confrontation between Archer and Sung. And

Speaker 1 Archer's like, well, this is the end of the road for you, assholes. And Sung is like, not so fast, Archer.
We've got hostages.

Speaker 2 This is why you cast a Richard Real here

Speaker 2 because who do you care about the most among this rabble?

Speaker 1 Richard Real. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So when he's brought out forward, like out of the cell.

Speaker 1 Yeah, holding up a copy of the day's newspaper saying that they haven't been hurt or whatever.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, you definitely don't want to see him shot in the face point blank from a Klingon Disruptor. No one wants to see that.
There's a lot of face and head mass

Speaker 2 to work with there, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, he's no Brian Dennehy, but like this is going to make a big mess.
And soon he's conscientious of that.

Speaker 2 If you're Richard Real and you're hearing this dialogue, are you taking this a little bit personally? Like, God,

Speaker 2 I mean, I know I am a hit star of stage and screen Richard Real, but like

Speaker 2 my head isn't that out of proportion with the rest of my body, is it?

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm no Dennahee. No.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 Archer has to turn Enterprise around at this point. I'll stop.
The only FaceTime Archer is having after he does is sad FaceTime.

Speaker 1 Yo.

Speaker 2 His.

Speaker 1 So Malik discovers that Dr. Lucas does, in fact, have the codes to the embryo chamber because there's like records of him going in there in the system.

Speaker 1 And meanwhile, they're also figuring out that the algorithm that one guy wrote to crack the code may take a little longer than they anticipated.

Speaker 1 So they're getting stressed out about this situation. And on the Entrepreneur, a huge away team gets ready to beam over.

Speaker 1 Like more people that have been crammed on this transporter pad in the history of the show so far.

Speaker 2 We speed right past how significant this moment is because you can't tell me anyone on that pad isn't a little uncomfortable.

Speaker 2 Like it's that, it's like when the elevator doors open and there's already 14 people inside. You kind of want to take the next transport, don't you?

Speaker 1 Yeah, like nobody fart.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, also like Trip has tweaked the transporters ahead of this in order to go the great distance necessary to get to the station. I'm not going on this one.
I'm definitely taking the next one.

Speaker 2 I don't like it.

Speaker 1 Malik has decided to try to beat the codes out of Dr. Lucas, and he's a total G.
He is taking this beating and not giving anything up.

Speaker 2 I mean, have you seen the head on this guy?

Speaker 1 Yeah. He's got that like Homer Simpson thing where he's like, his brain is padded within an extra layer.

Speaker 2 You better watch your mouth talking about real like this.

Speaker 1 I'm just saying his character does. Oh, right.
Okay. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So they're like, okay, well, he's standing up to torture pretty good, but maybe

Speaker 1 if we throw one of his little buddies in an agonizer booth and expose them to a very painful death in the form of one of these pathogens that they also have at this facility. Was it a Felicity?

Speaker 2 I believe it was a compound. No,

Speaker 2 it was a facility. Okay.
No, it was a felicity.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Maybe he'll talk then.

Speaker 2 This is the power of Richard Real. We don't know this fucking random doctor being put in the agonizer.
All we see is the expression on his face to tell us how we're supposed to feel about it.

Speaker 2 And even though his eye is swollen shut and he's covered in blood, like I got the sense that this guy shouldn't die.

Speaker 1 Mm-hmm. They have a real closeness.

Speaker 1 Closer than family.

Speaker 1 Closer than family. Yeah.
And I will let him go. So meanwhile, the Dustbuster Club is sneaking around.

Speaker 1 They triple stun an augmented guard, and they realize that their phasers are kind of nerf relative to the superhuman strength of the augments.

Speaker 1 There's an amazing line where

Speaker 1 Richard Real.

Speaker 1 Says, you son of a bitch to AI Sug. And he says, my mom wasn't a bitch.
She was a chemist.

Speaker 1 And they dump the pathogens on Lucas's colleague, and he suffers a horrific, painful death.

Speaker 2 Did you want because we do a lot of cutting back and forth between the Dustbuster Club in darkness outside of this lab setting and what happens in the lab?

Speaker 2 And I really kind of wanted some sort of way to bridge the two, like where the urgency to the Dustbuster Club would be made so via

Speaker 2 seeing or sensing through sensors

Speaker 2 someone dying in there or being poisoned or whatever, like something to hasten the urgency.

Speaker 1 But like, when we come- Because we have no idea, like, where they are relative to that room.

Speaker 1 Like, they're, you know, they're messing with life support and stuff, but it's like it's not really clear, like, what effects any of this is going to have in the immediate term.

Speaker 2 I found this sequence, like, strangely numb compared to what it could and should be, given the stakes and what's happening.

Speaker 2 Like, because we keep going back and forth from great, great stakes to, I'm just going to shoot out a panel here and mess with some wires, like, see if we can't affect some change to the life support system that way.

Speaker 2 Like, I would much rather one of them is watching closed-circuit television on a screen of a guy coughing blood into his mouth to, like,

Speaker 2 goose what's happening.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think they missed an opportunity there. Lucas completely resists this tactic, and this dude is on the verge of death.

Speaker 1 And Soong tells Malik, like, hey, okay, give him the anti-serum so that he doesn't actually die. And Malik is like, what the hell, dad? I want to do.
Do it!

Speaker 1 No!

Speaker 1 That's too late.

Speaker 1 Dang.

Speaker 2 Maybe if Malik didn't resist, this guy wouldn't be RSVP'd. But he is.
RSVP, this random doctor.

Speaker 2 Cut to the Dustbuster Club. They are completely unaware that this has happened.
What they do know is that Smike

Speaker 2 has one X-Man power, and that is kind of like better. I won't say super hearing.
I won't even say advanced hearing. Maybe hearing that is not damaged from years of concert going and

Speaker 2 wearing in your

Speaker 2 headphones or whatever. Like, I think maybe that's as far as I'll go.

Speaker 1 Yeah. He's pretty good at listening to stuff, and he can hear that the augments are coming, and they get the drop on the away team

Speaker 1 and immediately destroy all of their communicators, which signals to the crew of the Enterprise that the away team has been captured. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We get the reunion of Flox and his buddy Dr. Lucas.
They haven't seen each other in years. What are you doing here now?

Speaker 2 Nice that he's allowed to try to fix him up. Dr.
Flox can't be resisted. His instinct to help.
No. To deliver aid.

Speaker 1 We also get the reunion of Udar and Sung.

Speaker 1 And Soong is really happy to see him. Weird that he didn't ask around about him.
Like he asked about Rakin a lot. Didn't ask about Udar.

Speaker 2 It's nice that dad doesn't call him Smike. That was just for his bully friends.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Right?

Speaker 1 His bully friends who banished him because he wasn't strong enough. And yeah.

Speaker 2 He's like, but my hearing, I told you about my hearing, right? And they're like, what are you talking about, dude?

Speaker 2 We got the hearing thing covered.

Speaker 1 It's like the Jerry Seinfeld joke: I'm not a leg man, I'm a tit man. I have legs.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Nobody needs Smike's amazing sense of hearing.

Speaker 1 I won't cease or desist.

Speaker 1 Cause you

Speaker 2 Alert sound. Enterprise is on screen and Archer in that split second tells them to execute their orders.

Speaker 1 What could that be?

Speaker 2 Orders in this case? Switching on self-destruct for

Speaker 2 Ice Station number 12.

Speaker 2 This is the moment, Ben, that Archer becomes a real starship captain, I thought.

Speaker 1 It finally happened.

Speaker 2 On Enterprise, they start hitting the switches to make it happen. Yeah.
10 seconds is the countdown, Ben. That is sporty.

Speaker 1 Hoshi transmits the code, but a feedback pulse kills their comms and aborts self-destruct. And Tabal's like, all right, we'll just nuke the site from orbit.

Speaker 2 It's the only way to be sure.

Speaker 1 Fucking hey.

Speaker 2 She seems very excited to do this.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So back in the lab, Soong is gloating about how the self-destruct sequence didn't go. And Malik reveals that Lucas and Flox know each other.

Speaker 1 And so Flox might be even more persuasive in the agonizer booth. So they put Flox in there, and they go, what do you think now, Lucas? You going to give us those codes?

Speaker 2 This is his limit. He will.
He does know how the codes go. He types them in.
gets them into the embryo chamber. Ben, I wanted just a classic Dr.
Flox puff up when he's in this chamber, right?

Speaker 2 We're told he puffs in times of danger and times of aggression. How is this not either of those?

Speaker 1 It seems like it would be a perfect time. And it would be extra funny because his puff would like, like, push against the glass walls of the, of the cylinder.

Speaker 2 He'd have to go out sideways through the cylinder door.

Speaker 1 Oh, come on. Do bits.
Dupits, Star Trek.

Speaker 2 I'd forgotten about the bird of prey. Had you? Like, that being still a thing out there? We remember when it starts firing on Enterprise.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and then it's revealed that they left only black characters on board the bird of prey, which is a very

Speaker 1 strange detail.

Speaker 1 Anyways, the entrepreneur is really going to have to fight for this nuking from orbit. Flox is released, and they're like splitting up.

Speaker 1 They're like, okay, like the augments are going to grab the embryos and go. Smike, you're coming with us.
And he's like,

Speaker 1 I don't know. I think I might stick with these guys.

Speaker 2 This moment I found pretty touching. And I think this is because of Brent Spiner.
Like, the way he can shift gears between

Speaker 2 being lore-like and being this caring father.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. In this moment, I thought was just really well done.

Speaker 2 I believed him is what I'm saying. Like, sometimes you'll get a character like A.I.

Speaker 2 Sung in these last few episodes, and you're like, at any moment, like, here here comes the knife to stab someone in the back. So far, he's been

Speaker 2 like, he's been a guy who doesn't want to kill or want other people to kill on his behalf. He's been kind to people.
Yeah. He's, he cares for this flock that he's created.

Speaker 1 He is just iconoclastically devoted to the idea that the OGs should be free and is like faithful to that in every action.

Speaker 1 And that, like, Smike wanting to go with the entrepreneur doesn't threaten that at all. So he's like, go with God.
You've got my blessing as a a daddy.

Speaker 2 The part that really sold Dr. Soong in this moment, and the moment that I knew that he was being sincere, was when he embraces his son, tells him to like, go be free, go, go on, go with,

Speaker 1 get out of here, I don't want you.

Speaker 2 But then when Life as a Highway plays afterwards, and then we go to the credits,

Speaker 2 I kind of like Udar's chances.

Speaker 1 He was throwing a Parker roll at Udar at one point.

Speaker 2 Those things get hard when they're stale.

Speaker 1 They do, yeah.

Speaker 1 Tapal is not going to let this Klingon ship scare her off. She focuses all of their energy on targeting the facility.

Speaker 1 And so there's like bangers getting dropped on the Felicity while Tzung and one of the other AUGs like enter the embryo storage room. And he's like, he's all wistful about it.

Speaker 1 He's like, ah, your embryo was over there. And

Speaker 1 Percy's embryo was over here.

Speaker 1 Very weird shot because they created this entire room digitally. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But like, I don't know, like the dolly move isn't quite smooth enough to sell that they're actually standing in it and the render is just not that great. Like

Speaker 1 very strange Star Trek moment.

Speaker 2 Especially because the lab is so realized as a place and with so many different areas and I don't know. It seems like maybe

Speaker 2 it should have been dressed like that. Like, just make this a part of that somehow.
Yeah. Like, lock behind some sort of

Speaker 2 vault-style door.

Speaker 1 Are you telling me you can't get your hands on the embryo chilling towers from Jurassic Park and like repaint them and put some Federation-looking

Speaker 1 computer logos on them?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's what you should do. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Telling me you can't get like 200 bank teller containers, hit them with a bunch of silver silver spray paint. There you go.
Load them up into some holes in a wall. You're good.

Speaker 1 Good to go. Yeah.
Malik decides that he wants some insurance, so he downloads a bunch of smallpox samples and things on their way out.

Speaker 2 There's so many like infectious diseases he downloads. And then Percy's is like, what's this container? I don't recognize it.

Speaker 2 Malik looks at her and then looks at the camera and is like, extra strength, Tylenol.

Speaker 1 You know, because like a lot of things got revealed in the future. Like, for example, that being bad.

Speaker 2 Oh, so that's how Udar got to be the way he was? Okay.

Speaker 1 I get it.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, like his mom had some during

Speaker 1 his artificial womb was administered some extra strength Tylenol during his gestation. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So they're going to put all the prisoners in that one room that they were, that the hostages were locked up in, so that when the site gets nuked from orbit, they all die, which is a little bit against Sung's whole thing.

Speaker 1 But that's what they're going to do. And there's another banger, and Archer uses this as an opportunity to knock a gun out of a guy's hand.
And they're like struggling to try and take over.

Speaker 1 And I thought it was interesting that Smike tried to help in this moment.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 Unlike the punches that worked before in the Felicity,

Speaker 2 these punches don't seem to faze Malik at all. That Archer rains on him.

Speaker 1 Archer really gets his ass kicked, and eventually Malik gets the gun and shoots Smike, of all people.

Speaker 1 RSVP Smike.

Speaker 2 Ben, I think the answer to this is evident. Is Archer the captain who gets his ass kicked the most in Star Trek? Of all the Star Trek captains?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think he gets his ass kicked the most.

Speaker 2 I don't think it's even close.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's always getting his ass kicked. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The augments escape in their medical shuttle. Yeah.
Lucas says they can stop the containment breach if only somebody can get to the primary junction, which is somewhere else in the Felicity? Hmm.

Speaker 2 I don't know. Anytime on Star Trek a main character does something having to do with going up a long ladder, I'm just kind of prepared to be disappointed and maybe a little offended

Speaker 2 at what happens during.

Speaker 1 I just like the idea that, okay, well, there's a bunch of us here and we need to do something at the primary junction. Let's send one of us.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Also, make sure that one is the one who just got his ass kicked.

Speaker 2 Probably having a hard time closing a fist at this point. Something you'd want to be able to do.

Speaker 1 Down a ladder rung, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 To be continuous. To be continued.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Ben, did you know we're in an arc right now until this moment?

Speaker 2 We're in an arc.

Speaker 1 We're in an arc.

Speaker 2 A nine-episode arc, of which this is its second episode.

Speaker 1 Oh, really? Is this a...

Speaker 1 Because I saw one, two, and three next to the names of the episodes. But wow, that's shocking.

Speaker 2 Arc one is Tsung's augments. where in two of three, there's a maybe arc

Speaker 1 overarching

Speaker 2 both of these, which is just called the Augments, and this is episode two of nine of that.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.
Amazing. Yeah.
You got arced, Adam, but did you like this episode? I can't pay. Couldn't for late.
Got no key. Tempting fate.

Speaker 2 I think this episode has to

Speaker 2 make you get to know the augments as people,

Speaker 2 but I think it's unfortunate that they are so uninteresting compared to Soong

Speaker 2 and Dr. Richard Real

Speaker 2 and anyone else involved.

Speaker 2 Like, I wish I cared a little bit more about Malik and Persis, but there's just kind of nothing there except a struggle for power where I think there is an attempt to make this issue more complex, but the ways we do that is to give those opinions to Archer and Flox in the lunchroom.

Speaker 2 Like, we don't have the augments speak for their own circumstances ever or that much.

Speaker 2 And I wonder if like at the conclusion of this arc or the larger arc, someone's going to say something more profound about that.

Speaker 2 But like it's it's weird in an arc that's about augments, I feel like we know so very little about them or what they want besides to fly around in a bird of prey doing gangster shit with their friends.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, we understood what Rock Hidden wanted to do, but less what Malik want Malik wants to do. Like,

Speaker 1 is he a genocidal maniac? Does he want to eventually get back to Earth and conquer it? Or

Speaker 1 like, what's his goal?

Speaker 2 Him being so unpredictable, I think, is the thing that makes him interesting. Yeah.
Because he's so willing to kill, and he clearly doesn't like his dad as much as everyone else.

Speaker 1 You talking about the scene where Doctor Lucas Lucas is resisting giving up the code while his colleague is killed and that having been a missed opportunity because the away team isn't aware of it while they're doing their parallel action somewhere else in the complex.

Speaker 1 I think laid something bare about this episode to me. Like this is this episode is directed by Mike Vihar, who directed a million billion episodes of Star Trek, like starting with TNG.

Speaker 2 And good ones.

Speaker 1 And I think in TNG, like they would have been more focused on the

Speaker 1 ethical perils of that moment and how you grapple with making a decision like that. Do I give these maniacs the thing that they want or do I,

Speaker 1 you know, it's a, it's a trolley problem, but like a very interestingly Star Trek-y one and the element of pain being something that's discussed.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, like, let's pick a, let's pick a pathogen that really fucking sucks the way it kills you. Yeah.
Yeah. It's a choice that they make.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I wish that hadn't been kind of an afterthought of this episode. I wish that the episode had sort of been about that in a way, because it's, you're right.

Speaker 1 It's like the centerpiece, like exciting, dynamic, two things are happening at once scene in the middle of the episode. And it feels like.

Speaker 2 Yeah, can't two things be dangerous? Like in an existential way? Yeah. I like where you're going with this.
Like this could have been outbreak on top of this story. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, and I guess it is to a lesser degree because Malik is going to take a few of these.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, if you'd had Quentin Tarantino do punch up on this script, somebody would have said something about how, like, Cold Base 12 is the bulwark that protects the Federation from the microbiological

Speaker 1 genocide that something, something, something. And, you know, like the import of their work and the risk of their work getting out into the, you know, a lab leak situation happening.

Speaker 2 Richard Real like rolls his head up into consciousness and he's like, Dr. Flux, do you prefer the Kirby Silver Surfer or the Mobia Silver Surfer?

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Dr.

Speaker 2 Flux is like, I am familiar with both.

Speaker 1 I thought it was a little bit strange that they made her a girl in the new movie.

Speaker 1 I haven't seen the new movie.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it's like it's an episode that felt like it had a lot more potential than it realized. There you go.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Always realizing the potential of any episode Bene. Priority one message, maybe even two of them.
Let's see what we got over in our inbox.

Speaker 2 Priority one message from Starfleet coming in on secured channel.

Speaker 1 Need a supplemental income. Supplemental income.
Supplemental. Supplemental income.
Yes, extra. But the interest alone could be enough to buy this ship.

Speaker 1 Howdy, fellas. I'm here for the TGG bump.

Speaker 1 I write queer cowboy books set in a fantastical world. The player, Tales of Zeppish, by Tiernan Patrick McCantoe, is available now on Amazon.com.
Where cowgirls wield golden ray guns.

Speaker 1 We follow Rush Grimshaw. The Player, a complex bisexual black man haunted by ghosts that won't leave them alone.

Speaker 1 I hand-drew a map of the landscape in the front and hid a glossary of secret details in the back. I'm very proud of this, and I hope you enjoy.
Ben Cisco drop!

Speaker 2 Wow, you gotta buy this book. Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 This fantastical world we only got a small piece of here in the description.

Speaker 1 I'm fascinated by this book. I gotta check it out.
It's called The Player Tales of Zeppish.

Speaker 1 I feel like that's like searchable, right? If you just type in Tales of Zeppish.

Speaker 2 Zeppish is the word you should search for. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Z-E-P-I-S-H.

Speaker 2 Ben, we got a priority one message here of a personal nature. It's from Afton.

Speaker 2 It is to Hannah. Here's that message.
Happy birthday to the best little sister ever.

Speaker 2 The birthday message from Ben and Adam that you got me this spring was a true delight, so I had to return the favor.

Speaker 2 Thank you for sticking with our Star Trek Sundays, even though you just hate Archer so much.

Speaker 2 I love living in the Spinster Sisters Bam with you. And Wesley, the cat drop?

Speaker 1 I hate cats. Go ahead, Wesley.
You're telling me the kitty cat?

Speaker 1 Chris Brenner drop.

Speaker 1 I'm Chris Brenner.

Speaker 1 Brynner Information Systems.

Speaker 1 You know, interface, operations, net access, channel 90.

Speaker 1 That, Chris Brenner.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 We have been asked to send this message as close to the 10th of November as we could. The 8th of November being Hannah's actual birthday.
Okay.

Speaker 2 A little late on that one, but hope it was a great one for everyone involved.

Speaker 1 Sure do. Happy birthday.
Sorry about Archer sucking.

Speaker 1 But he became a captain today, you know?

Speaker 2 You can think Archer sucks and still enjoy the show, right? I think so. You just recognize that he's bad and you make fun of him.

Speaker 1 I think that the show kind of thinks Archer sucks.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Speaker 2 We're definitely picking up what the show is putting down.

Speaker 1 Really appreciate all the folks that got a P1 today, and I hope folks in the future will get them. It is maximumfund.org slash jumbotron to book yours today, and it really helps.

Speaker 2 Thanks. Hey, Ben.

Speaker 1 What's that, Adam?

Speaker 2 Did you find yourself a drunk Shimoda? Incredible.

Speaker 1 Drunk Shimoda! Gotta give it to my boy, Dr. Lucas.
I love that they gave him a funny real reveal, the way he turns away from the thing he's scanning at the beginning of his scene.

Speaker 2 Real reveal you saved until the drunk Shimoda segment? That's amazing.

Speaker 1 What the hell is wrong with you people? I think everything he's in should have a real reveal because I'm always like, yay, Richard Real.

Speaker 1 You know? Like, have fun with it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Ben, there wasn't any chance my drunk Shimoda wouldn't be Richard Real

Speaker 2 for the same reason. Just love seeing him on screen.
Can do no wrong. I forgive him for giving up how the codes go.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 he had to break at some point. Everybody breaks eventually.

Speaker 2 Did you want to see Dr. Flox suffer a little bit? Would that have helped the anxiety of the episode? Because they stick Flox in there, and we love Flox.

Speaker 2 Flox may be our favorite character, but like they don't even have him cough into his hand.

Speaker 1 Here's my theory: if they're making a room full of embryos digitally, they might have been low on budget for this episode.

Speaker 1 And if they're making Flox suffer, they're making Flox's head blow up, and that's probably a very expensive special effect to accomplish in this era. So I'm guessing that that's why it was not thus.

Speaker 2 That's a great point.

Speaker 1 Faith of the fart.

Speaker 2 Then what is thus? Is

Speaker 2 our next episode of this hit program? We got to find out what we're watching and how we're watching it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we sure do, Adam.

Speaker 2 One of those is your job. The other one is my job.

Speaker 1 Yes. The next episode is the sixth episode of season four.
It's called The Augments. The summary is as follows.

Speaker 1 In defiance of their father, Eric Sung's Augments devise a heinous plot against the Klingons, which will surely lead to interstellar war.

Speaker 1 Wow, so maybe we are going to get a little bit more about what makes Malak tick.

Speaker 2 I hope so.

Speaker 2 Maybe that'll help.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 In episode three of this arc. Ben, we're on kind of an arc of our own, aren't we, over at the game of buttholes, Wheel of the Riker, Quantum Leap.

Speaker 1 Indeed.

Speaker 2 An arc that is hundreds and hundreds of episodes long.

Speaker 2 For now, our runabout is safely on square 67.

Speaker 2 By the time I roll this hunter-sided die, we could be anywhere, though. Sure could.

Speaker 1 You're required to learn as you play. Roll.

Speaker 2 Ben, I've rolled an 89. That puts us on square 56.

Speaker 1 Tula!

Speaker 1 Did I win?

Speaker 2 Hardly. On the doorstep of a morn-hammered episode, but not quite.
On it, that means a regular old episode for you and me.

Speaker 1 Okay. Regular e.
Yeah. I'm looking forward to to it.

Speaker 2 Not an augmented app for us.

Speaker 1 Always augmented is this show by the generous support of maximumfun.org slash join members.

Speaker 1 Everybody that supports is the reason this thing can happen. Doesn't matter how much, it matters that you do it.

Speaker 2 I feel like we're the fathers of all the supporters, you know? Like

Speaker 2 I have that same sort of affection for supporter of our show.

Speaker 1 I sure do. Got to thank Wendy Pretty, who is the producer and editor of this program.
She's kind of like the cool aunt of the supporters of our show, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 God, how cool would Wendy be as an aunt?

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Cool as hell.
Unimaginably cool. Yeah.
You know, you're growing up, Wendy's for sure giving you like a sip of Mai Thai with the like big family trip to Waikiki. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 She's teaching you about Big Dirty Rings. She's teaching you about roller derby.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Giving you your first Big Dirty Ring, which is like a smaller size Big Dirty Ring for littles.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Got to thank Rob Adler, our social media director and the editor of the greatest newsletter. Sign up for the greatest newsletter.
It's really good.

Speaker 1 Grazetrek.com is where you can go to get that and find links to all of the stuff there.

Speaker 1 Also got to thank our peacetime concigliary, Bill Tilley, who is making hilarious trading cards on the Act Greatest Trek social media accounts.

Speaker 1 Adam Ragusia, with whom we collaborate on the Wholesome podcast at patreon.com underscore wholesome. He made the parody theme music of this show.
And Dark Materia made the original Picard song.

Speaker 1 With that, we will be back at you next time with another great episode of Star Trek Enterprise, an episode of the Greatest Generation Enterprise that...

Speaker 1 Ooh, I hope it has another that guy in addition to Richard Real.

Speaker 1 It does.

Speaker 1 Happy Thanksgiving.

Speaker 1 Captain Jono Picard of the U.S. Finn.

Speaker 1 Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows.

Speaker 2 Supported directly by you.