The Greatest Generation - Galaxy Hall Pass (VOY S1E3)

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

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Priority 1 message from Starfleet coming in on Secured Channel. Hey friends of Disodo. Before today's episode, we just wanted to take a moment to talk about the historic labor actions being taken by writers and actors in the American Film and Television industry. If you're a fan of the work done by the people who make Star Trek, we hope you'll join us in standing in solidarity with the folks who actually bring these adventures to life. Over the past several years, the AMPTP, the organization that represents the American Film and Television Production Studios, have reduced the profit from movies and TV going to workers. And in so doing,

they've attempted to weaken the labor unions that represent those workers. They wouldn't even engage the unions on many issues in their negotiations. And so a strike was the only course of action to take. Adam, Wendy and I have been having a lot of internal discussions about how best to stand with the unions and we are continuing those conversations in a dynamic situation. We're doing our best to understand where the picket lines are in these digital spaces,

and we would never intentionally cross one. With the information we have, we feel like we can do more good talking about and supporting the strike and continuing our show as planned. We'll keep you informed about what all this means for greatest trek specifically. Today we're making a contribution to the Entertainment Community Fund. This fund exists to help all the people whose livelihoods have been put on hold because the AMPTP refuses to negotiate

in good faith with the unions. It provides financial support for writers, actors, and all the thousands of laborers who make the shows that we talk about here and without whom we wouldn't have Star Trek to cast pot about. Those folks are all out of work because billionaires, company shareholders, and the executives of these companies don't want to compromise on the length of their yachts. We hope you'll join us in supporting entertainment workers in a challenging time, especially after they've already endured several years of challenges brought on by the pandemic

and season two of Star Trek Picard. We've set up a page where you can also contribute. It's at friendsofdecotoforlabor.com. That's friendsofdececoto for Labor.com. That's FriendsOfDecoto for Labor.com. Link in the episode description. Okay, now let's get on with the show. Brington, what is the U.S.S. Board of the Dirk or Captain, Captain, Brington, what is the U.S.S. Board of the Dirk or Captain, Captain, Captain.

Welcome to the greatest generation Star Trek podcast by a couple of guys. It's a little bit embarrassed about having a Star Trek podcast. I'm Adam Pryanaka. I've been Harrison. Something happened to me this week that I want to run by you because I feel like what a person does when confronted with this decision, I think says a lot about them. So just to paint you a picture, I live on a street with a bunch of apartments and some

single family homes and then some town homes too. Yeah, a pretty high density neighborhood for Los Angeles. Yeah. And like, there's a garage underneath and a gate that you have to hit the code to like walking and out of. But this is a pretty common setup for people who live in LA. So it's also not uncommon to find like packages outside the gate. This is the first time I've ever seen food out there. Two pizza boxes and a bag on top right near the gate.

So I look at the little ticket. I see that it was like the order was within the hour, like order and delivery. Okay. But the name on the ticket isn't familiar to me. I know everyone who lives in the complex. Yeah. I'm like, who is this?

Maybe it's a guest of someone who lives in the complex. Yeah. I'm like, who is this? Maybe it's a guest of someone who lives in the complex. So I leave it. I don't feel good about it, but I leave it outside the gate. I walk, I walk it back inside, and I pitch this to my wife. Every night it's the same struggle. What do we have in for dinner? Pizza free pizza from outside? This is the pitch that I make. I'm like, look, we don't know what our plan is. It's already like seven. There are two

pizzas in a bag of more food outside the gate. What do you say? My wife is the smarter of the two of us. She's like, I don't think that's a good idea. Probably belongs to someone in the complex. And if it doesn't, do you want to eat stranger pizza? Yeah. The ball that I batted back at her was like, if we leave it out there, it's going to be trash, either because someone throws it into the street as a prank or whatever, or it's just gonna go bad. It's gonna go into the danger zone and then it's gonna get cold

and it's gonna go into the garbage anyway. Here's what I picture. I'm like, let's call the restaurant. And let them know that we received a delivery that doesn't ours. So this was the compromise we reached. She's like, fine, I don't want a project, do you do it? So I get these two pizza boxes and the bag of food on top and I bring them inside

Can I just you sealed okay? I was gonna ask were they did they have that that tape that shows whether it's been tampered with yeah So I bring it in the house It's in the house and I and I and I, and this is from a place that we haven't ordered pizza from before. And it's got a phone number. And so I call the number and I talk to a very nice person and explain to them what happened. And she is flummox because this is Friday night

at around seven o'clock. That's probably pizza time. I'm hearing a person get slammed. And she's like, I'm just gonna have you talk to the manager. I can't, I can't, I can't even. I'm on hold for a real world five minutes. Like, I've committed to the idea of connecting these dots. This is a fun social project for me.

Because inside I'm like, there is someone out there missing their food and feeling sad and angry yeah and hangry the worst kind of anger and also there is a there's a small business owner I should make that clear it's not a chain pizza I picked up this is like a a one-off restaurant pizza that I found outside my place so so I finally talked to the manager. She's super pleasant. And I was like, hey, you might have a sad customer out there who is missing this pile of pizza that I have. And I just wanted to let you know. And she's like, oh, thank you so much for telling me.

She explained to me how this works. When you are a pizza place and someone orders like through Uber Eats or something, it is actually very difficult for you as a restaurant heats a place and someone orders like through Uber Eats or something. Yeah. It is actually very difficult for you as a restaurant tour to make direct contact with your customer. Right. Because there's a membrane that is the delivery company that gets in between you.

And Uber wants to own that relationship and it sucks the restaurant over because they if there's something wrong, the bad review goes to the restaurant. Exactly. So she explained the shitty situation she was in, and I was like, oh God, that sucks. She's like, yeah, there's really not a lot that I can do, unfortunately. Hopefully they can contact me and I can try to make it right.

But if you haven't tried this before, we hope you're surprised dinner. If you put it like that, we hope you like your surprise dinner. You put it like that. She's like, enjoy the pies. Wow, that is such an ideal outcome for the Pranica version of this scheme. Yeah, I mean, it could have ended 10 horrible ways, but the way it ended up ending was two delicious pizzas,

a Caesar salad and fresh meatballs. Hell yeah! Should I shout them out? Yeah, shout them out. So the place was called Stella Barra, Pizzeria and Weinbarra. The place I'd never been before, a place near where you and I had lunch one day called Cha Cha Chicken, which was fucking dynamite. That's a great chicken check. This mystery pile of food ended up being a great meal. Wow. A great surprise meal. And it also presents the challenge, right? Which is what do you do with found food? Would you have done the same thing? Would you have left it outside your home just to be kicked into the street? I just I thought thought this was gonna be thrown at a car

or smashed into a windshield or like a mess. I think it depends on where you live. The like arrangement of your home in Los Angeles is a pretty like lends itself to this specific thing. But I think that crucially, you also did the like work. You, you checked in on the person that tried to get the food and made sure it was okay. You know, I think that like probably Uber Eats

winds up paying for a replacement meal to go out, right? Yeah, hope anyway. Like, I don't know a ton about it, but like, we've turned down a couple of food delivery businesses as sponsors because the word is that they just take like a huge percentage of the money and they're kind of eating restaurants alive by presenting this convenient home delivery solution

that they show you a portion of the fees that they're charging, but they're charging you fees and they're charging fees to the restaurant basically. Yeah, you really have to be selective about that sort of thing and where possible just order directly from the restaurant, which I'm one of these people. I don't like talking on the phone and placing an order and being put on hold and shit.

Like it's so much easier to use a website to... Yeah, that's why your wife's position on this was like so relatable to me was like, I can't imagine getting on the phone for this purpose, so. But I like a weird social project like that. You've loved a weird social project like that. Yeah. I felt a great amount of empathy for whoever it was

that was missing a really great meal, but... It sounds like they ordered well too. Yeah. I think that... Yeah, they altered the mushroom pizza too because the mushroom pizza was white and they altered it to the red sauce. Oh, it was nice. It was like, this person has great taste.

Strong move. I'd alter the red sauce. Yeah. I think ordering salad from a pizza place is often a fraught maneuver, but the Caesar is especially especially my here's here's my number one move look up a Caesar salad recipe on the internet and find the dressing part Caesar salad dressing that you make at home is going to knock the shit out of anything that you buy in a bottle or get in a little plastic cup with a lid from a pizza restaurant. So you get their lettuce, their croutons, their parmesan.

You put your own dressing on that, it's gonna be a good salad. Really great Caesar dressing should clear your sinuses like Chinese hot mustard. It should be, it should fucking blast you. My, here's my Caesar dressing recipe, Adam. Put a couple of cloves of garlic, a couple of anchovies, a squirt of good mayonnaise,

a couple of ropes of mayonnaise in there, a couple of ropes of mayonnaise, squeeze of half a lemon, glug of olive oil, a couple of dashes of Worcestershire, salt pep, hit it with the stick blender in the jar that I put all that stuff in, and then just pour it into the salad.

So good. Hot damn. I was looking at you during and you didn't have to look up their recipe. Got it up here. You had it in the dome. Yeah. Well, Adam, we've wasted these people's time

talking about pizza for a lot of this episode. Who knew? A pizza marin. With our remaining time, what do you say we get to the matter at hand? It's the third episode of the first season of Star Trek Voyager. It's called Time and Again. Reaver course. Unless you've got something a little bigger in your torpedo toots,

I'm not turning around. Hard. And it's a shift change for Tom Paris. Ben, he does that thing. He gives it a big stretch. Cracks his knuckles and is about to clock out. He makes sure to hit Harry Kim's station on his way and he's like, you know, those Delaney Sisters of Stellar Cartography. What do you say, you and I study the globes of the Delaney Sisters? They come as a pair. The Crossword clue is they study them and have them.

And it is a very neat introduction to one of the long-term tensions on the show. I've got to believe. The uppermost tension is what the hell Janeway, what did you do to us? That's a number one bullet point. And then a few bullet points down is, do you hold on to or let go of your old life, given what you know to be the path ahead for you. You sort of think about the phrase, what we left behind, and you're like, how did Deep Space Nine take hold of that one? Yeah.

Because this is a crew that left a lot behind, and basically Paris is like ready to horn-dog his way through the entire ship, and Harry is thinking about his sweetie back home, and how he can't, he can't stray even though he's not going to sear for 75 years. He can't, he can't let his eye wander. Paris has been living off of conjugal visits for however long his, his Starfleet prison sentence was. Yeah. He's got a blast. Yeah. He's got mayonnaise to turn into Caesar salad. And those the globes of the Delaney sisters

would be a welcome distraction for him, except Harry Kim, he's holding on. It's still too soon to let go of his lady friend back home. I love when horny Star Trek and Chase Star Trek lock horns like this because Paris is really giving like Shatner like hornyness and Harry Kim is like, I don't know, data like in his unwillingness to violate and a rule. And he's not wrong, right? Like they, they live in Star Trek.

They could find a fucking wormhole tomorrow and then he'd feel terrible. He's like, yeah, like me and Nancy Delaney did technically knock boots, but I had no reason to believe I would be seeing you this soon. So. Yeah, this seems to be like the galaxy all past, right? The situation.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, they've got their, their, their decoad license to bone. A pretty significant banger interrupts this conflict. We don't really get a resolution about whether or not Kim is considering the Delaney sisters or not. And what the sensors indicate is that this was an unnaturally occurring explosion, a praxis-like explosion occurring in their vicinity. She's like, after episode one,

I would think we wouldn't have one of those for like at least several more episodes, but episode three, okay, here we go. I like that the rundown for any unexplained or unexpected situation is, hey, Neelix, know anything about this? Like, do you know anyone who lives in this area? Yeah.

Anyone known to be blowing shit up in this neighborhood? And Neelix does not know any fireworks enthusiasts in this part of the galaxy. He is of no help in this moment, but Kess appears to maybe feel this in a way that would be useful. She enters the bridge and her emotional Spider-Man costume. She got woken up out of bed. There's like a cut down to Kess in bed when this happened. And yeah, her ocopy senses are tingling. So this is like catnip to a Star Trek episode. What the hell happened is the question.

Yes. We better take the ship to investigate, and they do. Yeah, there's an M-Class planet in orbit of a red dwarf star, and they haul the ship up to this planet and start scanning it, and it's a real dumb. Just wait till you see the pool. Whatever this explosion was, wiped it out. There's no life on the surface.

It wasn't a warp capable species. There's no satellites or anything like that. But when they scan, they do see evidence of pretty advanced technology. Like, there are aqueducts and buildings and cities and stuff. So they're like, hey, why don't we put together a little dust buster club and go down and kick the tires on this planet? Every time they configure a dust buster club, leaving Chicoete with the ship, you got to believe Chicoete loves this. Oh, come on. He's a heartbeat from being the captain

of the ship. And this is our third episode. Every away team includes Captain Janeway in a way that goes completely uncommented on. I think that there is something, you know, that we know the regs, right? We know when Picard wants to go on an away mission, Riker has feelings about it. Clock, clock, clock, number one. But we also know that this crew is a little bit ad hoc, a little bit thrown together,

and that while Chicoet and the rest of the bar sporting members of the crew are being treated more or less as co-equal members, there are certain things that are being kind of skipped past in moments like this. And I wonder if that'll come to a head. I wonder if Chicoetay will ever bring that up. Like, hey, Cap, I think it's great that you want to get your hands dirty here, but if we're going to be going by the book in the way that you do in so many of the choices you make, I think you need to not be the first person on the away team list every time.

And that could be an interesting conflict for these two characters. If you're adding volume to Captain Janeway's character development, this is the fastest way to do it. Get her out on missions, many missions in a row if you can, and get these reps. Early season TNG seemed to present the conflict of Captain Exo tension in terms of these away teams, but ultimately would place the tension of the conflict with the captain up on the ship, right? So Ryker would go down into his thing, oh, something weird is down here.

It's up to the captain to figure out. But these earlier Voyager episodes are like the conflict stays with the away team and with the captain wherever they end up being. And I think that's a distinction here that's important when we're talking about comparing the two. Commander, you have the bridge. They beam down to a pretty sterile post-expression environment, I would say, because for a world that was at one point populated by, I don't know, many, many people, there are no bodies here. It reminds me of like in elementary school, people would tell you about neutron bombs that you can drop them on a city and they will like evaporate all the people but leave all

the structures in place. Yeah. all the people but leave all the structures in place. And it was like a cold war idea of how you could like take over territory by just getting rid of the people that are using it. Anybody not wearing two million sunwalkers could have a real bad day, get it? It's kind of what this felt like, but they're detecting the aftermath of of Polaric energy here. And this planet has been left with all of the organic material gone. Well, they're describing kind of reminds me of the burn that they describe in season three of discovery. It's something that happened at the subspace level. It blew up in a way that is not conventional at all. And there's some like historical precedent that they cite.

The Polaric Energy was being studied by the ROMs and the Romulans had a bad Polaric energy disaster that caused, you know, the civilizations of the A-Quad to join a Polaric test band treaty. So it's pretty clear that this is going to be a nuclear energy metaphor episode. A civilization powered by Polaric ion energy? A time bomb underneath the free street. Paris is among the dustbuster club, and he's the first one to kind of feel this flash

into a previous time, a time where the planets inhabitants are alive. Yeah, he turns to everyone and he's like, hey, did you guys hear those children laughing? And they're like, yikes, Tom. What the hell are you talking about? You guys hear children's voices, don't you? The children? You hear them, right? A two-fock just like silently puts his phaser up to maximum and takes Tom Paris off of the keyboard. That is strangely not the creepiest part of his shifting. He shifts into an environment where these aliens are all human.

This felt so TNG in so many ways. It both uses ideas from TNG because they're talking about like all the substaces like all fucked up and messy on this planet and there's probably like icebergs of subspace moving around. And so like don't don't move and that felt very much like the episode of TNG where there were like the bubbles that like caused matter to disintegrate or whatever like stuff was falling through the floor. You know TNG would have we would have gone to the conference room and seen like a visual diagram that showed you like a way to think about it.

And this can rely on you just having that. But also the TNG thing of like most of the aliens we meet are just indistinguishable from us and speak the same language as us. There is a really fun bit of practical effects work that I'm sure you noticed, which is when characters are shifting between post-explosion time and pre-explosion time, the camera is at an ECU The camera is at an ECU with a face and then it pulls back to reveal where they're at. The one instance of this that I found especially interesting was on Janeways face where they use lighting. So they're very close in on Janeways face and they just pop some practical lighting at her and then they widen the shot back out and it reveals her location to be the pre-explosion version of the world.

And that's such, I don't wanna say it's easy, but that is a technique that a normal can understand. Like that's not an effect, that's something happening with lights and cameras. It's subtle. Like the other one that I really liked was Paris's standing in his, in the town square with the children playing and commerce going about. And a hand comes from out of screen and lands on his shoulder and he turns around and he's back in the gloomy cold

post-explotion. And it's Janeway's hand. So her hand presumably kind of reached into the fracture and subspace there in a way that's really cool. I thought that this transition was so well done. I think both of those are examples of horror movie techniques in an interesting way. Like horror movies play so well with those kind of transitions.

Yeah. Having characters drag a frame through a location that instance with a hand. Like these are examples that I know we've seen dozens of times in horror movies. While they're down there, we do cut back up to the ship at least once to check in on Kess,

who has had a really emotional reaction to this explosion. And she's talking to Nielix about the fact that she is feeling like real impacts about the death of the civilization. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and was suddenly silenced. Just your imagination. She's saying, there are these rumors that the Ocampa have mental abilities that have atrophied

somewhat and I'm wondering if I'm like accessing some of that and Nelix is really incredibly dismissive of that idea. Nelix is quick to blame the gumbo he made last night and also disagreeing with him. I just wouldn't use that tub. I thought it was a, I mean, I thought it was a tub. It was actually a toilet. Instant Kim runs a McLaughlin group in the aftermath with Coach Cote,

Tuva Contouris, who have made it back from the away mission. Who's been left behind our Janeway in Paris. And I get to tell you, man, data was so much better at explaining shit like this than this episode was, I get the general premise of the problem, but this episode dives deeply into the specifics of the mechanics of what happened and the problem they need to solve in such a way that it made it fairly inscrutable to me.

How do you suggest we do that? The basics are that the shockwave from the explosion are dissipating all into the past as well as the future. Like entropy has gone in reverse because of some subspace thing to do with this particular type of energy production and it's confusing And it's also weirdly similar to the problem that they had in the last episode, which was that time was kind of running in reverse and forward at the same time.

And like, we talk about this all the time, like this episode order choice that they made is so weird. And I think that this episode is generally pretty strong and could be, could happen at any point in the journey of the Starship Voyager Like the the point of it is that at the end the conditions are the same as at the beginning You know So so I have this be episode three. Yeah strange choice We get a fun like a fun field trip vibe is happening on the planet.

Don't even think about it Tom. Paris and Janeway are spotted by a little kid. Hey, calm down. Now what's the problem? Two dollars. Yeah. And after having been spotted, realize that they need to change uniforms pretty quickly. So they, they duck into a Plato's closet type of store and emerge wearing the baseball uniforms from the 1970s Houston Astros team

This is a late 90s early 2000s amount of orange. Yeah, it's a part of the palette here I thought it was pretty convenient that these aliens wear a shirt design that isn't like wildly dissimilar from a Starfleet uniform. They still have the yokes over the shoulders and everything. So it's like... Even Paris looks like he's wearing a scant, right? So they do blend in pretty quickly. Lucky that they speak the language, lucky that they are among an unloved alien species. They put it together pretty quickly that they have gone backward in time a little bit.

And they have a little bit of an argument about just what to do about these circumstances. Do they only look for a way out and back into their own time, or do they warn these people about their impending doom? Yeah, because they've found a clock and they realize that they're like one day ahead of the disaster.

So the impendingness of the doom is big. Paris looks down at his scant and he's like, I don't know about you, but I don't want to tell anyone that they're going to die wearing this. Hahaha. I mean, it's a prime directive issue as far as Janeway is concerned.

And that's another, another moment for Paris to be like, what the fuck are you talking about? We're in the fucking Delta Quad. Paris finds a power conduit at about shin level, which is very unfortunate because when he bends over to inspect this thing, everyone behind him is getting a view of the full moon. Yeah, everything that comes out the bottom of that bodice

is really crunched. And they also keep kind of running a foul of this little boy who is like completely onto them. I want my $2! Like, he got told to go like fuck off and need a confection bar earlier by a cop But he has not settled down at all and this kid's gonna be a problem Yeah, and he and he went and like tried to verify parts of their story like there's this story about we're from

Calto province and we came in on the continental transport and He has he has the passenger manifest of the continental transport and he knows they weren't on it He's throwing real young sheldon vibes in a way that made me hate him almost immediately He's super hateable Like like maybe the explosion that killed everyone on this planet wasn't so bad. Yeah People are quick to assume my extermination of the Hushnak with some sort of huge crime. But those people also forget that there were a couple of very hateable Hushnak among those they exterminated.

It's a terrible snap judgment to assume that this genocide was just a crime full stop. They were benefits to it. There was benefits being the death of many annoying child who snacks. One of the highest degrees of difficulty in Star Trek, I feel like, isn't just the town square setup with the people going about their business. It seems to be the scene of people doing something collectively.

And often that takes the form of a protest. Because this scene of protest with these towns people, it's tough, man. It's tough when you only have six people to evoke a feeling, and they're wearing these Houston Astros uniforms. And they're protesting a thing you don't quite understand contextually. Yeah, it does not feel like the kind of protest that would get violent.

And for some reason, the people involved in the protest want to hand pamphlets to the cops who are like pushing back on them with a Billy Club. But it's like cops don't ever want more literature. Like, the cops have enough literature. Yeah, these are not the guys that you can win over, you know. This is a lawful demonstration. We have a right to be here. And also like the idea that a fight breaks out

in this protest where like Janeway takes a Billy Club to the forehead, Paris has to lay some Kirk shops on one of the cops, but then it just kind of breaks up peacefully after that. Like it doesn't, it doesn't read true, you know. If your cop isn't wearing a helmet and is instead wearing just the pull-down flaps of a winter hat that cover your ears. But not the hat part, crucially. I just don't understand the visual. There's a lot of good, like, this is an alien society stuff in this episode. Like, when they read the clock and it's like, oh, there's like cycles and intervals and subdivisions or whatever,

the idea that like they would have like a different set of words and methods for reckoning time is great. And it doesn't feel plausible that in a society where there's some like authoritarian energy companies that are using a type of energy that is super dangerous. People feel free to show up and protest in this way. And... That's such a great point, Ben.

The color of authoritarianism is black. Yeah. And I think the color palette is the hurdle I couldn't get over. The cops are just in like... In like UPS uniforms basically. Coffee black, make it yourself. I'm trying to help you see this as an opportunity to grow. Make it yourself.

Back on Voyager, they're testing out the science that they're hoping to use to get Paris and Jane way back. And I don't know about you, Ben, but if I'm testing out my laser beam that opens up holes in space, I'd probably run this experiment somewhere far away from the warp core. This device uses the same polaric energy that destroys the planet.

They basically aim this laser at the warp core. Yeah, they seem to know what they're doing with it though, and this really gave me warm and fuzzies for Jordy and Data just like doing an experiment in that part. It's like the same part of engineering where Jordy and data would have been doing something. And I almost feel like they did this for dramatic effect to demonstrate to Shikote that this machine is gonna burn itself out.

Because when that rift that they're opening up, like flashes and then sputters out, it's like, as a viewer, you're like, oh fuck, is this going to be a problem for warp core stability or whatever? And I feel like if you know that the effects are contained to where the rift is, you might show the acting captain the experiment where you show it to him until like really

impress on him. This is a limited intervention. Like we cannot count on this to like save the day or do the right thing. Like we have 30 seconds. It's dangerous. It's scary. This is a long shot. Nice one.

Another thing that's happening on the ship at this point is Kess is in Six Bay with Nielix and the EMH and she's getting her brain scanned. And I really liked this moment because, you know, the Kess storyline here is, it really feels like C story, you know, the cast storyline here is, it really feels like C story, you know, like she is coming up and up to the bridge and expressing a concern at the beginning and a little bit like pushed aside or padded on the head.

And she's really freaking out. And I like that the EMH is trying, but really has no context to bring. And also, like expressing how at sea he is in a way, like, like, he has, he doesn't know who these people are who have come into his six bay, why they're on the ship. He doesn't know where they came from. He has nothing to compare their medical readings to. He doesn't know about the make-wease. And like, I love that this character of the EMH is like lower decks basically at this point. Yeah, it's really true. I also think that there's a lot of truth in depicting a female character

going to a doctor and not really like getting a satisfactory answer to her question. I don't think that this show was trying to explore that as an issue here, but the truth of that is real. Women's pain and medical questions are not taken as seriously by medical professionals, and there's tons of data about it. And I think that showing it in this way is at least authentic to modern life. I think that's giving the show a lot of credit, Ben. Ha-ha-ha-ha.

Cass gets a little something out of column B, though, because she gets permission to go on the subsequent away team after just asking Chicoete if she can. Yeah. You do Chicoetay. Like really, you just met this lady. She may or may not be going through a medical problem.

And now she's granted permission to go down on the next away team. So, all right, that's fine. So at the end of the big eco protest on this planet, at the end of the the big eco protest on this planet, Janeway and Paris wind up back in the safe house or something of the eco terrorists that they are now friends with. I guess if you've been beaten by the cops on this planet, you've joined a group, a select group. You've been jumping in. Like, it's invited back to the home base.

He's fucking guys, Ben. We got Pinar and Nyterla. The actor who plays Pinar is doing a perfectly Lee Marvin voice. When was the last time you were in a power plant? Not since we left home. Yes, I was shouting in the ass. We're not spies.

Yeah, he really is. He looks exactly like Hewl Hauser, but his voice says Lee Marvin. Hewl Hauser or a young Kevin Oxbridge. And Pina and Nighterla are power protesters, basically. They're the leaders of this thing, and they've got a lot of questions for Paris and Janeway. They think that they're like leaders of this thing and they've got a lot of questions for Paris

and Janeway. They think that they're like infiltrators, right? Maybe the government or these energy companies sent you to become sleeper agents in our cell. If I was casting this, if I was like, okay, they're gonna be, they're gonna meet up with two guys that are the leaders of a group that is doing like direct action against a sort of craven power-hungry energy

company. What do I want that guy to look like? And it's like two dudes that your dad is trying to curry favor with at the office so that he can get the big promotion is not where I would have gone. They look like energy company guys. Right. They look like they work for Enron. They look like they may be best friends with Chris Brenner. You know, interface operations, net access, channel 90.

Yeah. I think they went wrong with this casting choice. I'm not saying that they should be guys with white guy dreadlocks and fucking biodiesel Toyota pickup trucks or anything, but I just don't make them look like suits. And these dudes look like suits. You have a choice, right, when you're constructing characters, you can either make them understood through dialogue

or action or through setting and visual. And what these guys get is just the barest minimum of descriptive dialogue to tell us who and what they are. When you don't have to sacrifice time in the episode to to give them backstory but making them look a certain way and having them occupy a certain kind of place would do that work. Yeah, this like mid-century modern fancy office that they are are are are hunkering down in just doesn't it doesn't read as this guy gives a fuck about the environment right

Unfortunately for Janeway and Paris like the Geiger counter that a nighterla has Has indicated that they are just popping with this Polaric energy which confirms their suspicion that they're that they're Sleeper agents sent by the power company because the only type of person that would have this amount of polaric energy on them would be someone who works for the company. Not a great look. Their We're Not Spies line starts to really wear thin and gets especially thin when the brat kid shows up.

He's been sniffing around the safe house. Look what I caught,. Sneaking around outside. Two dogs. He is able to, you know, share what he knows about them, which is that they've lied about where they're from and who they are. It's not great for for for Janeway and Paris, if they are going to keep up the pretence of we need to follow the prime directive here. Pretty fun scene where Chico Tay, two Vactoris and Kess are on the planet's surface

kind of digging through the rubble. Kess is having feelings adjacent to the ones Paris did. Like she's getting a vibe off of the place, a living vibe. Yeah. And it's a very haunted house sort of feeling to things, like Kim finds a combatge in the debris, which seems to indicate that Janeway and Paris were killed in the explosion,

which introduces a slippery form of time paradox to the proceedings. Am I making any sense here? Yeah, it's really scary for them that they find this because it does seem like pretty definitive, right? Like they found the remains of these two characters that they're looking for, but because it's a time travel episode that is a little bit in question.

I really like the performance of Jennifer Leane in this episode. She is walking through these spaces kind of like a person on a reality TV show about ghost hunting. She's giving that like John Edwards medium kind of energy where she's in contact with this other plane of existence almost. I think it's hard to do not cheesy and she does it not cheesy. I've never seen it done not cheesy, you know?

Yeah. Like even in a fucking Spielberg movie it's cheesy and she kind of finds a way to do it where it doesn't put me off. And it also doesn't feel like it's making fun of people that believe in that stuff, you know? She does a thing that suggests a predictability to the rest of the episode that actually doesn't turn out that way, like Kessie uses her mind to communicate to Janeway, except no one else in the room can hear it. But it's a thing that inspires Janeway to out herself as the captain of a

starship and from the future. And this is a fun scene where Paris is dragged along in this change, of course, in a pretty fun way. And like you think this is the moment where we're the membrane between the time periods is going to dissolve and there's going to be a predictable way that this episode draws to a conclusion, but this is actually a failed attempt. Like, they get escorted out of the interrogation room and then the away team starts messing around with laser beams and trying to make their communications work that way. And it's a failure because they're not in the room for the time that that experiment

happens. That subspace wedge does not work and they can't get them back. And I think that that's also really like playing nicely with those TNG tropes. Like, the doctor is isolated on the ship and people keep disappearing until she's all by herself and she has to know to jump through the portal at the right moment, you know. It feels so much like that and when they miss that opportunity it's like, oh, come on! A greatest-gen live show is something you don't want to miss. Why? Well, it's a great opportunity to see me and Ben in person, but that's not all.

FODs from all over gather at these shows to cosplay, to do pre and post show hangs, to make friends, and share their embarrassment. Hey, let's make a pretty great name for a tour. Let's do it. The Sherry Reembarishment Tour is coming in August 2023 and we've got a bunch of dates in a lot of great places. Go to GreatestGenTour.com to get more info. That's GreatestGenTour.com for dates and ticketing information for the Sherry Reembarishment

Tour. I'm Jordan Morris and I'm Jesse Thorne. On Jordan Jesse Go, we make pure, delightful nonsense. We were open awesome guests and bring them down to our level. We get stupid with Judy Greer. My friend Molly and I call it having the spaceweirds. Pat Noswald. Could I get a Balrog burger and some air-gorn fries? Thank you. And Kumail Non-Giani. I've come back with cat toothbrushes, which is impossible to use. Come get stupider with us at MaximumFun.org.

Look, your podcast apps are already open, just pull it out, give Jordan Jesse Goatry. Being smart is hard, be dumb instead. Oh, rats, hey, hey, oh, I'm about to count you in line. These clouds are really frigging me out. I hate having to stand in line and, boy, what do I? These giraffes do not smell good. No, they do not, and they've such short neck. But I'm hearing we need to get on this off.

We've got to get on the art. It is about terrain, about a spout to destroy humanity. Hey, oh, sorry, sorry, are you Noah? Yeah, I know we look like humans, but we're actually, we're podcasters. We are podcasters, so it's different. Have you heard of Ono Ross and Kerry? We investigate spirituality,

claims of the paranormal stuff like that And you have a boat and say the world's gonna end so seem like something for us to check out We would love to be on the boats. We came two by two. What do you think? Ono Ross and Carrie available on maximumfund.org Get that old, better lodgeman. Here I've got to get that. Not good, not good. Are you selling a heist? Gold. Janeway is feeling her own type of regret here

because she has put together that perhaps they are the cause of the explosion that destroyed this world. It's some real Carl's whole shit. Right? It's a Harlan Ellison adjacent story. Like, are they the cause? What do they do now? Yeah. An interesting parallel conflict to this moment as Captain Janeway is feeling the feels of

partial responsibility for a genocide. Think about it, Tom. The away team is like, well, if this first laser beam experiment failed, what's the next place we can set this thing up? Because you can't do it twice in the same spot. Yeah, and they're running out of riffs. There are these fractures in subspace that are healing. subspace is healing.

It's a smug ass Twitter post is basically what it is that they're up against. And they're like, why don't we set this thing up to happen at the location of the explosion? Like there was one explosion to rule them all on this planet. Let's wheel this thing over there and set it up thinking that this will be the place that Janeway and Paris would convene. Yeah. So... Their instincts end up being right, because when Painar and Nyterla walk Janeway and Paris

to the guards outside the power plant where they want to do their bit of business, the feeling gets very dark. TURLA has a weapon trained on the boy, if shooting begins he'll be the first victim. And I think a big reason for that bend is how these weapons look. Yeah. The fact that they are dressed sort of in a recognizable way.

And this science fiction program is showing us firearms that look like conventional weapons involving a scene with a kid and in a scene where Paris gets shot, it is a familiar kind of violence. Yeah, and at this point, I didn't know where the episode was going. Like when Paris is shot, I was like, fuck,

are they gonna have to like throw his arm over Janeway's shoulder and have her like walk him through the portal at some point, because after that they kind of split up. It makes sense, right? They wrote these people as a pre-warp civilization. Maybe their technology level is basically our current level, but they have this weird one energy technology that they've figured out.

It makes sense that they aren't shooting beam weapons, but like when Night Turtle pulls out a desert eagle or something, it's still like a bracing visual. Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of like James Bond looking guns in this episode. I really love the moment where they tell Janeway, like you get to talk us past these guards of the power plant. If you're really the mole we suspect you to be,

you're gonna be able to get us inside. And Janeway walks up to the garden, she's like, I'm a hostage. Fuck with these people. Yeah. I am a hostage. These men are here to break into the plant. It's so good.

It's like the like leverage that she has over them is like so apparent to her and not apparent to them. It's the same energy that she used in the pilot episode in making the quick decision to not take the care, take her up on a chance to go home and instead save the O'Coppa or whatever. It's very Kirk-like, right? It's that, like, it is a snap decision

that is a bet on herself. I know that this is gonna make it harder in the short term, but I'm gonna, like, I kick so much ass. I know I will be able to solve the problem because I am starting to like change the rules of engagement here. Right, so Paris gets left outside having been shot in the gut. Yeah, being tended to by Latica, the boy reporter.

Where are friends now, aren't we? Yeah. Two dogs. I'll be back for you. He's busy stuffing, watted up sheets of newspaper into the wound. And they go in and she is solid snaking around inside this power plant looking for them and trying to stop whatever she imagines they're doing because her theory at this point

is these guys are sabotaging the power plant and that must be the inciting incident that caused the explosion. But what she wants to do is get her phasers and tricorders back from them. They've left them in a bag on the floor. She steps out with the gap. Just hand that back to me. Ready to kill Pinar for those things.

And this is all happening in parallel. While the next day, Belana and Harry and Tuvac and Kess and Chicoetay are in the same corridor at the power plant in the aftermath of the explosion, which is like the last place on the planet where these subspace rifts are taking place. And they're like, this is our last shot.

This is clearly where the explosion originated. It's the only place that there are rifts left over that we can take advantage of, that we can shove this wedge into. So like if we're gonna own fuck the timeline and get the captain and Tom Paris back, we need to scan here and find their subspace signal and you get the back.

One thing I like about the earlyness of this episode in the episode order is that this is a really new crew. Most of them are really green, and the ones that aren't green don't know the captain that well. Two Voc is the only character that really has a history with the captain. And they are trying to imagine what would Janeway do if,

and they are really limited in how much they can extrapolate based on how they know her, because they just don't. Who the fuck is running the ship while Voyager is emptied their entire senior staff on the surface of this planet? Is it Rollins? I think probably Neelix isn't charged right now. I couldn't get out of my own head about that. Like everyone is on the planet charge right now. I couldn't get out of my own head about that. Like, everyone is on the planet's surface right now.

Yeah. I mean, that's the nice thing about Chain of Command though, right? Like, there's somebody that's got responsibility. It's a fun tension when the portal gets opened up and its rim is inching closer to the power conduit and Chain weighs like holy shit. This is the cause of the whole thing. Like I've got to shoot my phaser at the hole

in order to get them to knock this shit off. Yeah. It's a weird like that Mexican standoff quality in an action movie where like you don't know where to aim your weapon. Like I'm pretty sure I need to aim it at night, Turell and Pinar, but I mean, the actual enemy here is the portal.

She's like, Pinar, I'm gonna shoot my phaser at that hole and he's like, well, why don't you just wipe? And she's like, no, like, I know that this seems weird, but if you spray it, it's so much better than just wiping. What exactly do you think we are planning to do here? So she snatches one of the dustbusters and it's a showdown and I feel like so much of the time when a phaser is being pointed

at an opposing energetic force, there's like a ball of energy that then explodes, that I, I mean, I admire the Hutzba, but like Janeway really trusted that that wasn't gonna be the actual inciting incident was shooting an energy weapon at a space butthole. That's often the paradox in stories like this.

That's why so often the plan when confronted with a paradox is do nothing. Yeah, nothing. But it works. And, boy, this is the kind of timeline unfuck I can really get behind. It just like undoes the whole episode. Yeah. I don't think you can do this more than once in an entire series of a show. It cuts back to Tom Paris shooting mayonnaise into a Caesar dressing. He's prepared for the Delaney sisters. Yeah, but like, this is a level of Deus Ex Machina,

where like, not only isn't this, is this not a problem anymore, but it's a problem that never happened and never will happen. Yeah. That I kind of admire the writers for doing this this early, because you basically can't return to the well

of the, you can't return to the DSX market of well when you do it this early. I mean, this is sort of how yesterday's enterprise ended, right? Right. Like, oh, that's interesting. There was evidence of a phenomenon here. Let's drop a boi.

And emergencyfully. And keep going on our way. Yeah, but that was not episode three, crucially. And Kess is the one to underscore this by by arriving on the bridge the way that she did in the opening scene. And it seems very kind in way, right? Yeah, I love like low key, the shade that they throw at this planet, cast is like, hey, is everything all right on that planet? And they scan it and they're like, they're warp poor, so they're actually beneath our interest in going and checking up on. Like, we can show you the magnification of their planet.

Yeah. And hopefully that'll be proof enough that they're okay. I was a little distracted when I watched this scene the first time and I was like, ah, it's so unfortunate that they're being so condescending to Kess in this moment. And then I rewatched and I was like, oh no, they're not being condescending to Kess, they're being condescending to an entire civilization. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you like this episode,? I did I think that my stated complaint is is the episode order issue but overall fun Star Trek episode and I enjoyed watching it. And I think that if you're gonna do time travel, this is the way you've gotta do it, in my opinion, because I get so angry when it's as easy as you gotta kill this one guy

and then everything's fine or whatever. I've never seen you angrier than when you're confronted with science fiction that does that. Like the TOS. It's just. It's just, the Harlan Ellison episode we were talking about. I can forgive that because it predates chaos theory, you know? Like the idea that small changes in a system ramify out

and make massive differences just like wasn't really on people's radar in the 60s in the way that it is now. And I think that if you're doing time travel now, the way out is not, we stepped on this one guy's toe at the right moment and it fixed it. So the day of sex machina, it all didn't even happen really. This of it actually really worked for me. And I really liked the way they took this. And it surprised me. It was a delightful conclusion. I liked those aspects of it too. The part that didn't work for me was that Kess seems

to be experiencing the show in a serialized kind of way where the show isn't. The show is still doing planet of the week. Well, she is going through a thing that is giving us very little to hold on to. If they're suggesting that she has powers that are supernatural, then I think I could use 10% more of that per episode than what we're getting. Yeah. Because she's not giving Chicoete enough information to put her on an away team is the problem. Like the context that the show is using to make her an instrument of its storytelling isn't sufficient. You know?

I'm not just saying that personally like I would like to know more about her. I'm saying it doesn't make any sense how she's being used if that's really the case. I wonder if that's like because this is a 20 something episodes a season show and not a 13 episodes a season show, like our contemporary TV watching brains are so different from what the producers and writers could expect of their audience in 1994 or whenever this came out. Right, right. But yeah, I think I

think that's a good point. Well Adam, do you want to see if we have any priority one messages in the inbox? I mean, hopefully they were written for the correct time period. It's all I can say. Mm, fingers crossed. Priority 1 message from Starfleet coming in on Secured Channel. Need a supplemental link. A supplemental link? A supplemental link. A supplemental link. Yes, extra.

The interest alone could be enough to buy this ship! Ben, our first priority one message is from past Stephen, and it's to future Stephen. This is great, right? This is perfect for a time travel episode. Yeah, I love it. Message goes like this. You are doing a great job. A full-time job, while pandemically press-ganged into teaching your son, kindergarten. Wow. Being a single parent is harder than Murphy Brown made it look, but you're doing it bud.

Hell yeah. Alive and able to throw scarves to a podcast that's kept you sane through shittful times. You'll always be a better father than Warp. Kaplah! Wait a second, there's a low bar at the end there Stephen. Yeah, Stephen I think you're doing much, much, much better than Wharf. Yeah. I don't know.

It was Murphy Brown, a good mom. I barely remember that show. I think Murphy Brown was one of the first shows that presented the idea of a single mom. In a non-pathological way. Yeah. Well, Stephen, the pandemic has been really hard for parents of young children in particular. And you have my admiration for getting through it with your kidney gardener. So good for you, man. Our next priority on message is from your

past self, a max fund member because of greatest gen. And it's to my future self. How often does this happen that it's two time travel messages? Wow. It goes like this, future self. 2020 has been a thing, but a highlight is you and the snark have finished all the TNG episodes and back catalog pods. You were drawn in by the Shemotas, then stayed for the

Kern voice, McLaughlin group and honest videos. Now that you've started DS9 someday, you'll hear this P1 and laugh. Ben and Adam, thanks for the great pod. At this, the past self in question here asked for this to air before the end of the DS9 run, but the past self arranged this P1 recently enough that we were all booked up. I'm glad the past self referred to the Vitos as honest videos because that's what they were. They were honest. Everyone. We don't lie. We don't game the system. No. We're here to make each other laugh and be honest with each other. That's the

greatest gen promise. Well thanks to all you time travelers. Yeah, if you aren't too busy traveling through time and want to support the greatest generation or a great way to do it. It's by going to Maximumfund.org slash jumbo-tron where priority-one messages go a long way and supporting the production of our show. Sure do. Hey Adam. What's that been? Did you find yourself a drunk Shimoda?

Incredible! Drunk Shimoda! Yeah, I mean it's Tom Paris to me. He's the one who comes pretty close to killing a kid. He's the one wearing a scant. He's the one that gets shot. I think he accomplishes a lot in this episode. He doesn't solve the essential mystery of it. I feel bad that he's sidelined during the climax. It's not good. But uh, But he bookends the episode and he has a great adventure during I think I'm gonna pick Tom Parris, what about you?

I thought it was amazing how much of his monologue to Kim, they kept in the end, right? Like they didn't trim that down in the way that often happens when you're seeing the same scene for a second time. Do you think Robert Duncan McNeil is second billing on the show at this point? Like I think you got to make the case that he is. Yeah, I think he's kind of the secondary star to Kate Mogueira. My Shemota is Latica, boy boy reporter He just felt like the chaos agent and the thing I think that reminded me of Jim Shemota the most in him was the

Disregard for his own safety to like go do whatever the fuck he wanted to do and You know Shemota famously just I mean he was drunk at the time so he could be forgiven But you know did not consider what throwing his lot in with Wesley Crusher might mean. And, and I think that, well, Latika had lots of opportunities to be like, I let them go about their business, who cares about these people, and, and made himself a chaos agent, made himself a part of the story by just insisting on getting to the bottom of what was going on with them. So, Drunk Shimo to move, Latika. That kid should be in school or something.

Yeah. The hell is going on on that planet. The dork. That's one of those rare planets where you don't know what it's called or like what the race of the aliens are or anything. No, none of it. And we never will find out about them because they're a pre-warp, they're a one-off. Just normal looking people wearing Houston Astros uniforms.

It's great. Objection noted, we'll do this without you. We'll do it. We'll do it. We'll do it. Well, we got to figure out if we're going to do a normal, greatest gen episode next time around for that I'm gonna go to the game of buttholes

Will of the caretaker while I tell you about season one episode four Fage Helix faces wait what's it called? Fage Fage yeah, Fage Like PHAGE yeah, you got it Fage. Fage? Fage. Like PHAGE? Yeah, you got it. Fage. Mielix faces certain death when an alien race stricken by a devastating plague quote, harvests his lungs. RSVP Nielix. Gone too soon. I could tell by looking at him just being around him at all that he was not long for this

show. So I get it. Well, then I'm over at the Game of Buttholes Game Board where currently I run about as on Square 25, a couple of squares ahead. We've got a naked now episode. Oh boy. An episode done Nielik's style from the bathtub. Or the worst possible kind of episode we can do,

and I'm personally hoping that I do not roll the three. You really hated that, but I kind of thought it was a great hang. Too hot and then too cold is what that episode was. If we could do a 20 minute episode, that'd be fine. But over and over and over. We have it done that for years. Yeah. You're required to learn as you play, roll.

All right, Ben, I've got the die on my hand. I'm gonna give it a roll. And I have rolled a six, that is a big roll for me. Shula! Did I win? Oh, I think. Put this on square 31, which makes the next episode in the series a regular old episode for us.

Okay. Well, I am looking forward to it. In episode, done the old school way. Mm-hmm. All right, man, well, I hope folks that enjoyed this episode are supporters of the show, and if they're not, and would like to be, they can head to maximumfund.org slash join. Other ways you can support the show that don't cost money, include giving us a nice review on Apple podcasts or just

recommending us to a friend We've got a number of places where friends of DeSoto gather. This is true. We've got the Facebook group filled with the best of Facebook The rest of Facebook dead to us the worst We we don't even think of them at all, but friends of DeSoto have walled off an enclave there. More than one enclave, right? There's like the greatest exo-cooks, and there's the fems of DeSoto, and there's the main line. I mean, there's Jim Schemot, and there's so many great groups on Facebook. Right, none of them started by us, that's that's really like emblematic of

Everything about the Friends of Disoto like we didn't set up this great fan community The fan community set itself up and it's and it's a place where they've made friends with each other They've made relationships with each other. They've made marriages with each other. Yeah, it's not just on Facebook They are also on the discord at trunksmota.com. They also gather on Twitter where they enjoy the work of our social media manager, Bill Tilly. That account is at greatest trek. Bill Tilly also runs the Instagram account of the same name. You can join the Reddit sub. You can check out the wikia, there's an extensive wikia about the

greatest generation, really fun to read through all of the origins of the jokes and all that stuff. It's amazing, I can't believe that it all exists, it blows me away every time I look at it. It's one of the great things about the show, along with its great music created by the awesome Adam Magusia, who's made the theme song and interstitial music for the show, for years and years, and also as a great YouTube channel, the hit-coking episodes that he creates are some of the best that YouTube has. And with that, we will be back at you next week with another great episode of Star Trek

Voyager and an episode of the greatest generation Voyager that is harvesting a lot more than lungs. Going for like kidneys, splines, selling all that stuff on the open market. Would you eat Nielix? I sure would. If you were going to eat a God of God, God of God, God of God. If you were gonna eat a part of Nelix, what part would you eat? Well, I definitely wanna shave him first.

I wouldn't want any of that hair on my plate. Rose. Yeah, looks nasty. Probably give him a good bath first. He would enjoy that. That would be ample payment to be eaten. That's probably how I would cook him. I'd just turn up the heat in the bathtub. That would be ample payment to be eaten. That's probably how I would cook him.

I'd just turn up the heat in the bathtub. Cook him in his own juices. That's no bathtub at him. Maximumfund.org Comedy and culture. Artist-owned? Audience-supported.