The Greatest Generation - Ice Desk (ENT S2E18)
Episode Date: March 10, 2025When a huge chode ship approaches the Entrepreneur, Captain Archer assembles a team to investigate its gaping maw immediately. But when wispy beings start inhabiting members of the crew, their strange... experiences and after-school special behavior make another mass retreat to the catwalk necessary. How could Reed be caught unawares? Which wisp should have been sent first? What was Mayweather doing all day? It’s the episode that’s gotta put a Ritter in.Support the production of The Greatest GenerationGet a thing at podshop.biz!Sign up for our mailing list!Follow The Game of Buttholes: The Will of the Riker - Quantum LeapThe Greatest Generation is produced by Wynde PriddySocial media is managed by Rob Adler and Bill TilleyMusic by Adam Ragusea & Dark MateriaFriends of DeSoto for: Labor | Democracy | JusticeDiscuss the show using the hashtag #GreatestGen and find us on social media:YouTube | Facebook | X | Instagram | TikTok | Mastodon | Bluesky | ThreadsAnd check out these online communities run by FODs: Reddit | USS Hood Discord | Facebook group | Wikia | FriendsOfDeSoto.social
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Here's to the finest crew in Starling.
When it comes to my crew, you won't get any argument from me.
This is a parody.
Paramount owns the song.
Welcome to the Greatest Generation.
It's a Star Trek podcast by a couple of guys.
A couple of very horny guys.
Hmm.
Who are just a little bit embarrassed
about having a Star Trek podcast.
I'm one of those horn dogs.
I'm Ben Harrison.
I'm Adam Pranica, and the reason you say that is because at the end of the last episode,
we hit a square on the Game of Buttholes that we have never hit before.
It's true.
I mean, I also said it just because it's generally true. Ben, we landed on a square called J slash C.
This is where a picture of Shran is on the game board and the rules state,
the person who rolled has to read Jeffrey Combs' character slash Vic
to the other in next week's Marin, and this is next week's Marin.
It feels a little bit cruel to me that given how many
episodes of Star Trek Jeffrey Combs is in,
the first time we hit this is not an episode
that he has a guest appearance in.
You know, like it just seems like,
what are we doing here?
At the same time, we can't be sure Jeffrey Combs
isn't in this episode.
He very well could be.
Well, my loins are kind of feeling like maybe he is here.
Adam, is Jeffrey Combs with us?
I believe so, Ben.
It's too bad we didn't really have enough turnaround time on this
to get noted Star Trek novel book on tape reader, who will remain nameless.
Right, that guy.
To read one of these, because he's done it before.
He's a delight.
We had very little time between last episode
and this one in order to do something like that.
But I think with a little more, that's something
I'd like to continue to do.
I'd like to continue writing more of this stuff.
I really found the exercise pleasurable.
You know, fan fiction can still get you pregnant.
This fan fiction could get us fired from Star Trek podcasting.
Okay, here we go.
Oh, just to place this in time, this is right after the last Shran episode where Tara is
arrested for fucking over Sran.
The Suzy Plaxton, Admiral Cartwright type character.
Right, so imagine Suzy Plaxton playing Tara
and Jeffrey Combs playing Sran in this scene, okay?
Okay. Okay.
Let's begin the reading of a story I have titled,
Face Riders Incorporated.
Two guards lead Tara, clad in chains
and a baggy prison issued uniform,
down into the ice caves beneath Andoria's surface.
The room glowed with an ethereal blue light,
casting sharp shadows across Commander Shran's face as he confronted
his former lieutenant. Shran wordlessly dismissed the guards, leaving Tara to stand defiantly
before him, her face long and tall and steely, like the fascia of a large sport utility vehicle.
Or a side-by-side front-loading washer dryer set.
Perspiration had formed around Tara's temples and around the base of her two Montana, from
either the walk or the anxiety of the moment.
Both would be acceptable to Shran, who longed to discipline
her for both her attempted sabotage of the peace talks, but also because she had the
finest blue ass in the quadrant.
"'You betrayed everything the Guard stands for,' Shran said, his voice echoing off the
crystalline walls. The cold seemed to deepen with each word. Tara's antennae twitched forward
aggressively. I stayed true to the guard's primary purpose, protecting Andoria. These
humans, these Vulcans, they'll be our undoing, Shran. You know this in your bones, in your
blood. Shran had been seated behind an ice desk, but stood up to emphasize his point. "'The guard exists to protect our people, yes,' Shran rounded the front of the ice desk,
which is a desk made of ice.
To step closer to Tara, the sound of his footfalls crunching beneath his boots.
But protection isn't always achieved through isolation and violence.
Sometimes it requires courage to extend trust. Trust? Tara's laugh was bitter as Andorian ale. Like the trust Vulcans extended
when they placed sensors around our home world, Tara's eyes darted between Shran's face to
the ice desk and back and forth. How did they make this? She wondered.
Did they move it down here or was it too big and heavy
so they had to build it right here in place?
Does it have working drawers?
Times change.
Enemies can become allies.
I fought the Vulcans for years.
I killed their soldiers.
I hated them with every fiber of my being, but I've seen another path now."
"'You've grown weak,' Tara spat.
"'The Shran I served under would never speak of peace with our ancestral enemies.'
"'If the Ice Desk had ice drawers, how did they slide open and closed?'
Tara wondered.
"'It probably made a terrible sound.
She amused herself by the notion of being an Andorian and also hating the sound of ice.
Oh Tara, she thought, you really are full of contradictions.
The Shran you served under has grown wiser, he said, meeting her gaze steadily.
Wisdom isn't weakness, Tara.
For a moment something flickered in Tara's eyes.
Doubt, perhaps, or recognition.
But maybe also a third thing.
Something she had worked very hard to suppress whenever she was around Shran.
She wondered if Shran noticed, not just now, but always.
How she tried to keep it all business as they worked toward the goals of the Andorian
Guard. How impossible that felt now, in the caves, in front of the ice desk.
I believe you can be redeemed, Shran placed a hand on the ice wall, feeling the pulse
of his homeworld beneath his palm. I've seen the humans' determination to forge connections
even across vast differences. I've seen the Vulcans to forge connections even across vast differences.
I've seen the Vulcans' ability to move beyond their violent past.
If they can change, so can we."
The silence now stretched between them, filled only by the distant sound of water dripping
in the caves.
Finally Tara spoke, her voice barely above a whisper.
"'I don't know how to be that person, Shran. I don't know how to be that person, Shran.
I don't know how to trust.
Then let me show you.
Shran leaned over to open a drawer on the front of the ice desk.
So clearly this was a sort of desk that executives had in the front and behind for access on
either side, Tara mentally noted. When the drawer closed, it glided softly to a stop.
Nice, thought Tara.
Shran extended his arm toward Tara, his hand in a fist, fingers up.
Not as your commander, but as a fellow Andorian who once stood where you are now.
His hand opened.
What is that? Tara exclaimed.
An old earth contraption, said Shran.
In his palm was a braided tube of leather, open on either end.
Known as a Chinese finger trap.
Can you even say that?
Tara wondered aloud.
Shshh.
Shran whispered.
As he lowered the ends onto both of Tara's antennae, just go with it.
For Andorians, tese is the word for a sexual union outside of the shlereth or marriage.
But as Tara felt her antennae struggle to wiggle and then failed to escape the bonds of the leather sex toy
affixed to her most sensitive area.
Was this Sran's idea of sex, or something else?
He backed away from Tara in order to sit on the edge
of his ice desk, in the smug appreciation of his creation
on top of her skyscraper-like head.
And also, Tara had surmised about the ice desk
and its ability to bear weight.
But could it support two bodies?
She'd soon find out when she abruptly shoved Shram hard,
his back slamming against the icy desktop.
With a quick tug, her prison issued jumpsuit broke free
like the uniform a stripper would wear while dressed as a police officer or a fire person.
Still on his back, Shran soon felt the full weight of Tara's body as she crawled on her knees toward his head and sat astride his face.
And like a grizzled bucket loader operator on a construction site, Tara grasped Shran's antenna and pointed them
in alternating practiced angles. Except the excavation she was supervising was of the walls
of her blue vagina, and the bucket scraping the dirt was Shran's tongue. Shran's muffled groans
emanated from Tara's loins as she ground her pelvis into his jaw like a
child of the 80s riding that green caterpillar toy on the playground. If
Shran was surprised at his circumstances you wouldn't know it by looking at him
his third antenna testing the fibers of his thick pants as she rode him the
sound of the ice desk creaking as if a great icy lake were being thawed by the
springtime sun.
Shran could barely breathe.
The two pipes on his head were being savaged by Tara's hands now, milking and squeezing
and sticking fingers deeply within their holes.
Yes, their holes at the end of the antenna.
Tara's hands explored, both of them roughly, like a curious Klingon male going through
puberty when his parents are out of the house.
It was what Tara had always wanted, but was it what Shran desired?
Could he ever reciprocate the orgasm that she had just conjured from him, spilling wet
blue ropes that slapped against the ice cave's walls out of both antennae,
like two buckets of blue paint that a clumsy dad decorating a room to become a nursery had just
spilled. It was a debt that Shran would likely never repay. As his exhausted jaw continued to
work beneath Tara's blue hips, he was sure his sleep deprivation would continue for the rest of his life.
His debt and unending sexual repayment
that he would never repay.
He was in debt to our right and for the rest of his life.
But what would be called the business
that they were engaged in?
Face writers incorporated.
in. Face writers incorporated.
So ends the reading.
Wow.
That was tremendous.
A little wordy, I thought, it might have been in parts.
Yeah.
Well, some spicy maneuvering there by Tara, you know, not really asking so much as taking,
much in the way that the wisps do on today's episode of Star Trek Enterprise.
Do you want to get into the F we came to talk about?
I sure do, Ben. Let's get into something a little less sexualized as we
into something a little less sexualized as we recap Star Trek Enterprise season 2 episode 18, The Crossing.
We drop in, in media warp, and something big is coming up, a stern of the entrepreneur,
real big. And it's coming up faster than of the entrepreneur, real big.
And it's coming up faster than they can run.
It's coming up at warp six.
And before we know, we see this ship.
It's kind of a wide boy.
Yeah, it's like hundreds of yards wide.
It's not very tall.
It's just an absolute chode ship.
Size 54 waist, 10 inch legs, fucking junk.
Yeah.
This is an idea from an earlier script and they did have a scene where Tara tried to
walk into it, but she bumped her forehead.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's going to happen.
Just kind of, you know, two kind of opposing shapes there.
But yeah, it's got a big maw that opens up and just scoops them in. It's
a Jonah and the whale story and that's our cold open.
One thing I noticed during this cold open was the new earpiece that Hoshi's wearing,
which looks like it's that circular case for birth control. She's wearing it right on her
ear now just to keep it close.
I mean, definitely an homage to Uhura.
But yeah, like the kind of accrue plastic that they manufacture it out of makes it look
like something you get out of like a box of cereal as a toy.
The ship is a mystery to them because their sensors can't penetrate it.
No engines, no like, you know,
the stuff that you typically associate with a ship
seems to be absent here in this case.
Yeah, well, and not just that,
but it's also turned off everything in their ship.
They have no webs, they have no engines.
I mean, like maybe their sensors can't penetrate the hull,
but maybe the sensors just can't do anything right now.
Life support seems to be the only thing that works
inside this thing, and that's good, I guess.
Life support finds a way.
They start moving the camera around
and looking out the viewer at what's going on
inside this ship, and there are some little glowy lights
in the bay
that they've been drawn into.
They're curious about that.
So it's not long before Archer orders a shuttle pod prepared
so that they can go investigate.
And all but to Paul of the most important characters
on the ship make themselves even more vulnerable.
If you were expecting a kind of drive around the interior of this ship that
you would get from a Star Trek film, you know, like where you look out the window,
you get really close to the interior of the hull for an examination.
If you were expecting any kind of trip at all or tour inside the shuttle pod,
brother, you would be disappointed because it basically like,
it blurps out of the bottom of Enterprise
and it's like an elevator.
It just goes straight down to the surface of the ship.
I laughed and laughed at this.
I mean, it's like taking a rideshare
to a place that's a block away.
Yeah.
But it's also like, if you take it a rideshare
to get like a good look at something
for like a sightseeing purpose and the rideshare you get into has one little window and it's like
a little bubble right at the front, you're not going to see much, you know?
No, I guess not. Yeah. So everyone's in EV suits. And I also love the rapidity of like,
a second after the shuttle pod lands, the hatch is open
and they're out of there.
Let's see what we can find.
Like if we're trying to make time on the episode,
I think they clawed back 10 seconds here.
Easily, yeah.
It did strike me that like when you're throwing open
the side of that shuttle, like you're potentially
throwing it open to hard vacuum.
Like there's no airlock on the shuttle.
Right.
So if everybody's suit isn't on just right, that could be a risky maneuver.
You're going to find out pretty fast.
Yeah.
So the atmosphere inside the bay starts to change almost immediately to be human breathable.
But I think wisely, they choose not to take their helmets off just yet.
Yeah, that's smart.
And you see that all the time in TV and movies though,
the how quickly they assume, oh yeah, this is fine.
This is breathable.
Yeah.
Way to keep them on.
Yeah.
I've respected the choice.
Um, there's some sparkly lights that they can see kind of hovering around, but
they don't show up on the tricorder. They can't scan them. And as they are standing
here talking about the fact that they can't scan these lights, one of them just
kind of goes right through the face mask on Tripp's helmet and into his head.
Let's talk about this effect a little bit,
because we see it a lot this episode.
You know how sometimes we'll see in like horror movies, especially,
there's like a force required to get through the glass of a helmet
and like get at a person inside.
Like I can't overstate how little effort is put into the wisp going in.
It just kind of like floats around and like nothing.
Like, there's no resistance that the glass presents at all.
Yeah.
They looked really good.
There's like, so it goes in blue
and it comes out yellow, right?
Yeah.
And then the yellow goes back in.
I know that feeling, right? Comes back.
Am I right?
High five.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so it kind of goes in and comes back out
a couple of times.
And that part of the effect is also really interesting
because it seems to come away from the face like a cloth,
like a shroud being pulled away from the face.
It's a meaningful color change, isn't it?
Yeah.
He seems to have lost the time that it was inside of him too.
What the hell happened?
That's what I was about to ask you.
He thought he was on the ceiling.
I mean, there's like, there's a moment of catatonia that Tripp feels.
It's like he just took a massive bong hit.
Like, you can see his expression,
like he's trying to figure it out
before he's able to talk.
Yeah.
It's a really fun acting choice by him.
I thought so too.
He also describes being on earth in Florida
with a girl, you know, this was not a dream in his opinion.
He was really experiencing it.
The reaction is much like a dream though, because everyone who's with him as he describes
this is like, all right, let's get you up to Six-Bay.
Like, I'm done hearing about this.
Yeah, not interested.
But Flax gives him a clean bill of health.
They leave him in the decon chamber and Archer and Reed are like, I don't know
if I want to be near Trip right now.
And Flax was like, no, I mean, he seems good.
I love the composition of this scene.
We got the three shot of Archer, Reed and Dr.
Flax and then the reflected Trip Tucker.
Yeah.
Due to the reflection,
like having them all face in the same direction.
I thought this was really great.
And you get it a couple of times in this scene,
in the sequence.
It was really nice.
I think that like the Decon Chamber
is just such a great set in general
for enabling shot compositions like that.
But also like when you frame a character
within a window in a shot,
like you can do so much with that just thematically.
And like we talked about how like
freaks would always find interesting ways
to frame characters within a shot.
Like especially in his early directing,
I feel like that really stood out as like a big,
strong swing that he would take.
This is a David Livingston directed episode
and he's one of the most frequent directors
of Star Trek TV.
I love the choice of like,
you know how if you were gonna do this,
you might think to like do the three shot
and have the reflection appear perfectly
between two of the people?
I like how that's not the case.
Like it's dirty.
Like Tripp's face is over another face in conversation.
T'Pol goes into the clarinet closet to talk to Archer
about what's going on.
And Archer is, he's kind of got like trapped animal energy
in this scene.
T'Pol has not really like decided that this is a hostile act.
And he's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
They have my ship, they went inside my beautiful boy.
How could you just interpret this as anything but hostile?
And T'Pol's like, well, we just don't know.
This might be how they are, the people that run this ship.
Your description is really interesting to me
because I think you give more weight to
Trip and Archer's relationship, their personal relationship, than the show does.
And I feel like that was missing.
So much of Archer's gripe is like, I'm stuck in the whale and I don't want to be here and
this sucks and I don't like having control. But like,
I don't think there's ever a bit of dialogue concerning Trip or Reed later or anyone else
where he personalizes what's happened to them outside of like what these people provide him
professionally. Yeah. And I wonder if that is something in the writer's room to do with,
I wonder if that is something in the writers' room
to do with, like, we want to, like, string out
how hostile these aliens may or may not be until...
Because that's kind of the crux of the mystery.
So if you feel like somebody's imperiled
by being inhabited by one of these,
I feel like the, like, what Archer is writing for
in this scene comes a lot earlier,
and there's less tension in that. He seems like his position is weird,
especially when you compare it to Tripp's
lived in experience as he describes it.
He describes it as very pleasant and cool.
He liked it.
Yeah.
You can't believe how amazing it was.
He wants to go again.
T'Pol gives Archer an update in this scene too. Like, Hoshi's been trying to communicate with these things.
Hasn't really been a response to that.
And just so you know, the rest of the crew is low key concerned, but not anything too
crazy at this point, under the circumstances.
Yeah, we're not stressing, but Archer's like, no, man, we've got to get the fuck out of
here.
And down in engineering, Trip is hanging out at his little warp core station.
He gets another visit from one of these glowy lights.
Doesn't the warp core station trip works in
remind you of like the carnival station
of the guy who hits the button on the rickety ride?
You know?
Yeah.
It does seem like the fact that you have to climb a little ladder to get up there just
feels like they did a bad job laying out the warp core when they were building it at Utopia
Planitia or whatever.
It just seems like we get a lot of moments at this station.
It just seems like trips the burnout at the Tilted World, you know?
The way the cigarette dangles off his lip just so as he pulls that one lever.
Yeah. God, they just let Tripp go right back to work, huh? I know he got a clean bill of health,
but man.
I need you to get those engines back online. I'll see what I can do.
Right back to the Warp Corps. And yeah, so he gets a light inside him. He immediately gets clocked as acting weird
by a guy named Rostov, who is just an enlisted guy
and is unaccustomed to being called Sir
by Commander Tucker.
I love that it's Rostov that clock strip is being weird
when everything about Rostov makes him seem
to be the weird one, you know? I feel like he responded, the actor who plays Rostov
responded to a casting call that was like,
unique face, wanted.
Yeah, like he's in the room and like all of the other actors
kind of read as maybe possessed by aliens.
Yeah.
Throwing us off the scent a little bit.
Whiskey Trip is so fun in this episode with what he does.
Cause as soon as he's like afflicted by this thing,
he's like, all right, I'm just gonna clock out from here.
Yeah. I mean, I love that he's like, all right, I'm just going to clock out from here. Yeah.
I mean, I love that he takes like a weird door,
like not the door that you normally see him go in and out of.
I mean, you and I have been watching Enterprise
pretty steadily for months.
I don't know where this door goes.
Yeah.
It would be great if there was like a, you know,
a mop closet in the engineering section that he went into and then like,
I thought that was the bathroom, I'm sorry.
Like the second the door shuts behind him
and opens back up again.
Well, Rostov has seen something,
so he says something by blowing in a call to Archer
to tell him what just went down
and Archer goes and radios Tripp,
but there's no response.
Gotta find him.
We don't seem to have the ability to just like
ask the computer where people are on the ship yet
in the timeline.
Which is what makes this cut so much fun.
Like we cut from no response to the mess hall
where Tripp is sitting at a table with way more
than a buffet will ever let you take at one time.
Yeah. He's got some desserts, he's got some fried chicken, is sitting at a table with way more than a buffet will ever let you take at one time.
Yeah. He's got some desserts, he's got some fried chicken, he's got some spaghetti. It's the three drinks that trip me. Like anytime you see anyone in a restaurant with three drinks,
something terrible has happened.
Unless it's like one of those things where like you're kind of friendly with the staff
and like they come by and they're like someone ordered a Mai Tai and then decided they didn't
want it and you know they drop it on your table.
Ben what you've described as friendly I would say is deeply hostile.
If I'm in a bar and the bartender gives me a second and then a third drink and none of them have been finished yet.
I'd be like, what is going on here?
This bartender hates me and wants me to get plastered.
Just for the record, if there are any bartenders listening, I would be fucking delighted.
Please do that to me.
All right.
So yeah, he's eating all the things,
and T'Pol and Archer kind of confront him,
and are like,
uh, what's going on, Trip?
Hungry?
Yes, it's all very good.
I love how he doesn't fight it.
Yeah.
Like, he isn't like the guy who's been caught.
Yeah.
He keeps introducing himself as Charles Tucker, but you know, not that Charles Tucker, basically.
Right.
And I love the question Archer asks here.
He says, where is the man who used to be Charles Tucker?
Yeah, weird way of putting it, Captain.
Fun sentence.
This person explains that that guy,
whoever you just asked for in that weird way, Captain
Archer, that guy, he's out exploring my realm, where I'm from, that's where Trip is. We sort
of did a Freaky Friday with each other and he's having a non-corporeal vacation.
Yeah. He's become a being of pure energy and I mean, better than a vacation.
It sounds like he's having an absolute fuckfest.
Please trust me.
He's experiencing things he never thought he could.
We learned that these are the wisps.
They agree to be called that by us.
So it's not problematic.
They live in subspace and they are much like us. They are explorers and
the fact that this corporeal being was compatible is very interesting to them because they used to be
corporeal and this is like an exploration of their ancient past for them to be an inhabiting trip.
of their ancient past for them to be a inhabiting trip. Archer is as aggressive here as we tend to see him.
He's like pushing really hard for Tripp to come back.
And the harder he pushes, the softer Wisp Tripp gets
about like observing Archer's whole deal.
He's like, you know, man, you say you're an explorer,
but you sure seem a little close-minded about
the types of exploration you're interested in, you know, man. I really like that tension
between them. The more angry Archer gets, the cooler trip becomes, Wisp trip, I mean. I mean, it also just makes Archer seem unreasonable with how
backed into a corner he's acting.
Cause like when he says to Wisp trip, you got to let my ship go.
Like it spits the ship out immediately.
Yeah.
And that's good, right?
Archer, you can't be mad at that.
Yeah.
Gotta love that.
We also get trip back.
The, the yellow get Tripp back.
The yellow wisp comes back.
I love that that was never explained, right?
Like that there's a part of the wisp that never fully joins your birdie.
Blue part goes in, yellow part has to come back and pick up blue part to go.
One thing that contradicts your suspicion that Tripp goes on a non-corporeal sex vacation
was that he describes his time being an eight-year-old kid
in whatever this place was he was in.
Yeah, but also so many ribs.
I've never seen so many ribs.
Yeah, Trip is like, you gotta hit this wisp, Captain.
It's fucking good
And he wants everyone to try it he is an enthusiastic proponent of the wisp mm-hmm Yeah, he starts peer pressuring everybody kind of turns into like an after-school special kind of thing. You should try it
You'll understand what I'm talking about
Y'all should try it. Archer does not want to try it. Archer wants Trip taking to Six Bay, actually.
It's like, what are you running from, Trip?
You know, maybe you should just try and enjoy the company of a good friend.
Hey, Archer, you came to a wisp party.
If you didn't want to wisp down, why are you even here?
Staying and scolding our asses for getting all wispy?
Why don't you leave?
Yeah.
When in that huge bay full of wisps and complained
about getting contact wisp.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Archer, uh, clearly doesn't like how this whole situation feels.
And T'Pol is like, look man, uh, the wisps are cool, right?
You asked them to leave Trip alone.
They did.
Uh, they've given Trip a hell of a ride as sort of a gift.
Maybe they're cool.
Maybe you should rethink this.
It was a ride that he didn't bother me to
pull with, which I appreciate.
Yeah.
So later Archer's log tells us that it is his top priority to get the hell out of
this whale, but the big problem remains,
there's no engines yet to do it.
And the log continues,
like we hear it over the exterior shot,
and then we cut into his quarters,
and he goes,
I've always hated non-Coporial beings,
and I always will.
I'll never forgive them for the death of my boy.
And then Dr. Flax is at the door,
and you're like,
how long was that door open?
How long have you been there?
Why is Dr. Flax being played by Samantha?
Dr. Flax tells Archer that a wisp tried to get in I can do, I can do parody. I can do, I can do parody.
Dr. Flax tells Archer that a wisp tried to get
in his face earlier.
It entered me right here.
But it didn't like it, like the way it did with Trip.
Yeah.
But the way he describes this moment was like,
boy oh boy, did this wisp try.
Over and over again, it tried going into my face,
but we just couldn't make it work.
Did you feel the kind of darkness about his description?
The way John Billingsley plays it with that like thousand yard stare.
I mean, he kind of does a thousand yard stare with flocks a lot.
It feels like an assault he's describing.
Are you sure you're all right?
I'm fine.
But it was disturbing.
The life form was trying very hard to reach me.
It doesn't feel great.
Yeah.
Well, presumably this wisp doesn't like the doctor,
but it does like Reed,
who is wandering around and gets pursued by one and he like, he fully does
like a shoulder roll over to the weapons locker and tries shooting the wisp.
Oh, I wanted to see what would happen if a wisp got shot.
What a stupid fucking wisp to roll up on Reed while he's in the armory.
Talk about the worst place to do that.
Like grab him when he's shitting, you know, like,
yeah, there are ways to get Reed caught
unaware.
This ain't one of them.
The Wisp is faster than Reed and finally goes in
and Wisp Reed is profoundly horny in a way that is
deeply uncomfortable for other people to be around.
Especially in a turbo lift when he uncomfortable for other people to be around. Yeah.
Especially in a turbo lift
when he becomes the kid from Kindergarten Cop.
Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina.
Yeah.
Thanks for the tip.
That's not good.
And this lady gets out of there pretty fast.
Yeah.
It made me wistful for the Aerosmith hit HR violation in an elevator. Mm-hmm. Going down.
Second floor, hardware, children's wear, ladies lingerie.
We cut over to T'Pol who wears OR scrubs to bed when Reid walks in.
Unclear whether Reid knocked or rang the bell or just walked right on in there.
Yeah. I mean, it doesn't seem like these Wisps
really asked to be let in, so...
You know, whether or not Wisp Reed had to ask
to enter her quarters, he does attempt to sell
to Paul two things.
Sex with him and the crossing, which is what he calls
what the Wisps are doing
with folks on the ship.
And it's the title of the episode.
Yeah.
So T'Pol calls security to her quarters.
I really love Jolene Blaylock's performance in this scene
that both feels like she is in danger from wisp read,
but also at no point do I ever feel like she doesn't have this figured and dealt with.
Like, I'm not fearful for her in a way that I would presume her to be weak or unable to
defend herself here.
Like I always felt like she was going to be okay. She is kind of keeping her distance from him in the room and deferring to him while she arranges
for security to come. But also there is like a pent up, like if you want to catch those hands,
Reed, I'm sure she will beat you kind of feeling to it.
One question for you, Ben, and I still don't have an answer to this question myself.
Do we ever find out whether or not this is Wisp Reed
or Reed actual in this scene with how creepy he is?
Because there is some time between the moment the Wisp went in
where the Wisp could have left.
Yeah. Yeah.
It could have left.
I think we have to just...
It's sort of Schrodinger's
whispered kind of a situation. Once again, it occupies two quantum positions.
Security and Archer arrive at T'Pol's quarters. And as soon as Archer walks in, he turns to
Paul's desk chair backwards and explains to whisperisp Reed that consent is a great big part
of being human, male or female.
Have you encountered this idea in your extensive
exploration of the galaxy?
Wisp?
Wisp Reed gets a lesson in non-consensual lockup by
being sent to his quarters.
Locked up for whatever that was,
and also probably whatever happened in the elevator.
I wonder if that crew person reported their situation with Reed.
I think it's the sort of thing where a senior crew person makes
a report and then it seems safe for the other crew to come out and say
something shitty happened to them.
Yeah, it was that one brave act and then sort of an outpouring. It's like, wow, a lot of
the details do line up.
Yeah, yeah. All completely believable, really, when you consider them in totality.
Wow, look at this. He had pineapple on his breath when he got on the elevator
and then again when he entered to Paul's room.
Yeah.
In a corridor Archer radios Trip Tucker
wondering where the fuck those engines are,
he is so ready to go.
Yeah.
And Trip is gonna try and get the engines back,
but now it seems that Rostov has been gotten
and on the bridge we learned that reports are coming in from all over the ship that
people are acting strange and our chair orders anyone acting strange to be confined to quarters.
I love Mayweather with just the absolute lightest amount of pushback here in conversation.
He's like, but how do we know security hasn't also been wisped?
Captain?
Archer's like, we will never know that.
We'll just have to do our best.
Okay.
Cool.
There's another engineer down there with Tripp who also seemed to kind of sus.
But, like, I think that there's, like, a couple of, like, extras
that got speaking parts in this episode
that aren't meant to be taken over.
But, like, because we've never met them
and we don't know what they're supposed to act like,
we're like, ooh, is this guy one of them?
Or it's a fun effect that they get from just kind of peppering in a couple more
speaking lines than they might otherwise.
I think you're onto something though, because like there's a shot,
reverse shot kind of nature to both Rostov and this mystery guy that almost seems
like they were shot later, like for insert, that just felt a little mismatched to the moment
that like draws your attention to like, well, who the fuck is that guy making
Rostov face?
Yeah.
So they get the engine up and T'Pol's like, okay, like it's time to go, right?
Like you're, you're super spooked by these aliens and you want to get out of here.
And suddenly Archer's like, not without noted creep Malcolm Reed being
returns to us. I
Think if you're archer, you got to be willing to let Reed go at this point, right?
Yeah, that's just the cost of doing business with the wisps
Yeah, I mean they didn't know that going in but they've learned that and next time they will you know like a they'll bring a different
Guy than Reed on the on the big deep space mission, but B, you know.
You know what's very telling, just in this episode in totality, when Reed comes back, you never get his experience in the non-corporeal dream world,
which I think would probably be very upsetting to everyone who heard it.
Well, I was in Florida as well, but not that part of Florida.
Oh no, where is this going?
So there's another, another real creepy moment because Tripp calls up to Mayweather
and asks them to go do something in the starboard nacelle. And it's like, oh, is like Tripp possessed
and trying to get Mayweather alone, isolated
so that he can get body snatched also,
or is he gonna like turn on the nacelle
and cook him in there?
Like we've learned as possible.
It's such a short scene that it really sticks out when compared to the rest of the moments
we get this episode.
This is one of like a number of scenes that occur in this moment, which is like we cut
to Six-Bay very briefly where Dr. Flax is working on a hand scanner that he's going
to turn into a Wisp detector.
We get the scene with Tripp asking Mayweather for some engineering shit. And in the mess hall, we see a payoff of the device
that Dr. Flax makes, which is he and T'Pol are sitting
enjoying a regular sized meal for two adults on the ship.
And they can tell by looking at the scanner
that two Wisp people are in their midst.
And that's when T'Pol gets up from the table,
goes into the kitchen, and grabs two security people who are in there just waiting for this
opportunity. Yeah, Flax is a regular Dian Fossey, realizing that there's Wisp in the Mist.
Wisp's in its design. Nidu-dur. So Travis gets chased by a wisp and we've seen a
couple of people run from these things and then go
right through the doors that they're closing behind
them.
So it feels like a real waste of time every time
Travis stops and turns around and closes a hatch
that he goes through.
Yeah, that seems silly.
Until it isn't.
Yeah.
It works the last time and he's like in the nacelle closes a hatch that he goes through. Yeah, that seems silly. Until it isn't. Yeah.
It works the last time and he's like in the nacelle and he radios up like he's basically
discovered that there's something in that specific door that can prevent them from coming through.
Pretty amazing. Archer asked Tripp what the deal is with that door and maybe the catwalk
trip what the deal is with that door and maybe the catwalk that he retreated to. And Osmium alloy is the answer, but that's not exotic.
That's like a normal type of metal the ship's made of.
That's weird.
Yeah.
It's special enough for Archer to order the entire crew back up into the catwalk.
Like he did several episodes ago.
Yeah.
How happy do you think people are to return to the catwalk like he did several episodes ago. Yeah. How happy do you think people are to return to the catwalk?
I think the producers are happy to return to a set that they already paid to have built.
Yeah, exactly.
We're going to get our money's worth out of the catwalk.
Yeah.
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So they're getting ready to get everyone back up there and Archer turns to Hoshi for something
and it seems as though she's been the crossing as well.
It would be best if they stayed where they were.
What?
We're offering them a great opportunity.
Linda Park's performance seems more threatening than the other Wisp people. And I think that is both because
her Wisp is just different and maybe is more of an authority figure Wisp.
Yeah. It seems to be a better salesperson of the Wisp Crossing lifestyle.
I mean, hard sell is what this Wisp is doing.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that maybe if they'd gotten this Wisp first, like, I think
the Wisp's fucked up not sending this one earlier.
You know, if you say no to this Wisp early on, you get left alone for the rest
of the time you're at this hotel.
Right.
You know?
Right.
But this Wisp is telling them what a great opportunity is.
Like, we'll explore corporeal life.
You guys can explore non-corporeal life.
You're going to love it.
And Archer gets like physically aggressive with Wisp Hoshi.
He's like shaking her shoulders and stuff.
He is, he's very cranky in this episode.
Yeah.
I didn't like it when he put his hands on her, mostly because it was like a real,
like the thing that men do to women in TV and movies where they just give them a shaking
by, by their arms is like.
I hope they don't do that in real life. I, I suspect that they do, but yeah, it's like.
It came from somewhere, Ben.
Yeah.
Ask your grandparents about that.
Is the logic like, I'm gonna shake some damn sense
into you, woman?
Yeah, yeah, it seems that way.
Yeah, it feels bad.
It feels bad to see.
Hoshi is about to feel bad by getting locked
into recorders by security.
And over in the nacelle, folks are starting to make themselves
at home again in the catwalk.
And once there, Archer and DePaul discuss what the hell to do now.
I mean, being back here feels like it's an even greater retreat than it was before.
Like, ugh.
And it's so aggravating that for this retreat
to have happened, T'Pol still maintains that like,
the wisps can be negotiated with.
They seem to be acting not entirely in bad faith.
Maybe there's just like a miscommunication happening here.
Maybe I should give my mind over to them,
my strong steel chat mind, so that we can have an
interaction, unlike your flimsy human minds that fold
up like a wet paper bag, like get this thing on the
scene and we'll get this thing figured out.
These things are basically wet wads of bathroom tissue
floating around in the air and somehow they're penetrating your minds.
Yeah.
Doesn't take that much mental discipline to resist.
No.
But I think I've got enough.
I mean, Archer was like confronted with the idea
of what if we just leave and like a third of the crew
will be sacrificed to that.
So the idea of letting T'Pol risk her one measly mind
doesn't seem like that big of an ask relative
to the options on the table.
Did you feel like there needed to be another element
to this moment to force Archer's hand?
Like I kept thinking that there should be
the running out of life support or something,
like some sort of external force that created
a desperation that wasn't necessarily here.
What I feel is desperation is Archer getting more and more upset instead of a need to do
something immediately because of reasons.
The thing that occurred to me after I watched it was,
like they're in the nacelle,
they can't go anywhere while they're in there.
So there's no escaping right now anyways.
Like this is like literally the only option that they have.
They haven't even set up that temporary bridge
with the upturned buckets and stuff.
Yeah.
It's like, we don't know how long we're gonna be here guys.
Like when are we getting the land party started? Yeah. It's like, we don't know how long we're going to be here, guys. Like, when are we getting the land party started?
Yeah.
Is a question that needs to be asked.
He's talked into letting T'Pol go, and Flax is not in the nacelle.
He's still hanging out in Sixpey because every time a wisp tries to go in, it just bounces right off the surface.
He's got a hard face.
Yeah.
And he gets a call from third person Hoshi,
who is complaining of having fractured the leg of Hoshi's chateau
and needing some help.
This is described in a very creepy way, I thought.
This dialogue made my skin crawl.
Six-eight.
There's been an accident.
Hoshi?
Hoshi Sato's been injured.
I don't know how to repair the damage to her body.
That was very well-written episode.
Because third-person Hoshi, like that tense being used by Hoshi Wisp just
doesn't work in the same way.
I don't know.
So Flox, Flox goes to her quarters with a phaser in hand and inside Hoshi's quarters,
she's kind of leaned up against your bed as if she's fallen.
But when Flox scans her, there's nothing wrong.
if she's fallen, but when Flock scans her, there's nothing wrong.
And that's when Hoshi starts kicking and kicking and kicking.
Like, this is the move when I was a little kid wrestling with my brother, this was my brother's move.
Like jamming his feet out, like, like kicking like that.
Oh, it was aggravating.
It is a spooky fight, man. It feels so scrappy and desperate
in a way that Star Trek fights don't often feel.
It's also interesting because Hoji gets the gun
and she's like trying to interrogate Flox a little bit
before the fight is ended. And it seems like when they went into the nacelle,
the Wisps stopped being able to find them.
Like the Wisps can't penetrate the nacelle
and I guess can't see through it or whatever.
So she wants to find the crew.
He hyposprays some kind of knockout drug into her ankle
and that settles the matter as it were.
Did Wisp hoes she fuck up by telling Dr. Flax
that her leg was broken, thus inspiring Dr. Flax
to bring the knockout hypospray with him?
To give to her, thinking that with a broken leg,
she would need to be anesthetized a little bit?
Maybe.
I interpreted that as him just having gone in,
not trusting the situation at all, but...
Yeah.
He does like pat himself on the back
for remembering to bring that thing.
Yeah, good job by him.
The way Dr. Flax plays this in the aftermath though,
is also a little weird feeling.
Like out in the corridor, Archer's like,
hey, everything cool?
Dr. Flax is like, yeah, things are fine.
Nothing to report, Captain.
It's not like I have blood dribbling out the side
of my mouth or anything.
Yeah, wild.
So T'Pol goes looking for smoke.
And like people who go looking for smoke, she finds it.
Archer has let Flax know that this is going on.
So Flax finds her almost the moment after
a wisp went into her head. And it's almost like she's just like paused. She's just standing there
like a mannequin, which Phlox reports to the captain. And there's a moment where they're
talking about anesthetizing her with the same stuff that they did Hoshi with.
And I was wondering if that was going,
because what T'Pol described was like having the mental discipline
to repel the wisp when it gets inside her head.
And I was wondering if knocking her out would drop her defenses.
You know, the most powerful mind on the crew
would be sacrificed to the wisps by this action.
I thought Jolene Blaylock's face from the movie Get Out here
was really incredible.
Like, that she clearly was sturdy enough mentally
to repel it, but also, like, at great sacrifice
and maybe pain and maybe fear.
Yeah.
Wow, I really felt this moment.
I thought she was great here.
I feel like it's the movie, get out used face from this episode of enterprise,
you know, like clearly she was in the sunken place walking so that Daniel
Kaluuya could be running in it.
She so rarely needs anyone for anything on this show, but when T'Pol kind of collapses
in Dr. Flax's arms, that's kind of the punctuation to this whole scene.
They're lying to us, she says.
Yeah.
Uh-oh. So we learned that the wisps, that great big ship of theirs is kind of EOL.
It's breaking down.
They haven't been keeping up with the scheduled maintenance and the insurance company is going
to total it out pretty soon. And so they are looking for ships to take over. And some number of them equal to the number of
compatible mines on the Enterprise crew are going to take this ship and then they're
planning on kind of marauding through corporeal space, taking as many ships as they can until
they're all saved.
So this has not been on the up and up.
This has not been a good faith exploration trade,
the way it's been sold to them.
The wisps are like talking amongst themselves like,
yeah, this is a great plan.
I love it.
We're gonna have this new ship
and maybe you could tell me a little bit about
like how fast it goes or what its armament is.
Oh no.
Warp four?
Is that what you, did you really just say warp four?
The warp five is theoretical.
I'm looking at the computer database here.
What is a grappler?
And why is it listed under weapon?
I need something to do on this ship.
Come on.
Fair enough.
I think maybe we should let these people go and maybe, uh, find another type of
corporeal.
What do you think?
We still got two, three months of good use in this ship.
Maybe we stopped too soon.
This is a classic case of like going fishing and having to, uh, to put the fish back.
Cause it's too small, you know, catch and release.
So Archer and flocks work on a plan to kill everyone that's been infected.
Cause they, they feel like the wisps will just leave the bodies if their bodies are no longer useful to them.
And they're talking about this and they're like,
we should get Trip involved in this cool plan,
but nobody can find Trip. He has gone missing in the nacelle.
I love that when Mayweather reports to Archer and DePaul
that he can't find Trip, he is told to just look harder.
You must have missed it.
I'll look again.
That is the only recourse for a ship
that doesn't have the technology to scan for people.
Like, yes, but also everyone is in one place.
This would be like, like, you're on like a 737
and one of the passengers on the manifest
isn't on board the plane.
Like that's a fucking problem.
Like you land the plane over that, you know?
Yeah.
So Archer is like John Hammond
and Flox is like Ellie Sattler
and Flox is going around the ship,
reconfiguring the life support system
to spray knockout gas basically.
And Archer is describing all of the procedures
over the radio while the camera kind of sidles over
and reveals that Trip is sneakily listening in
from a different part of the room
that they're all standing in.
That it is a dolly move, I think is so fun.
And I think it tells you a lot about Livingston as a consumer of media.
Because that's straight out of a horror film.
Totally.
It's really great. I love this move.
I love how, like, nonchalantly he's just standing there
behind that girder, too.
It's not like, he's not, like, peering in or anything.
Well, because he's dressed in the jumpsuit,
like, he looks like Michael
Meyer's back there, like kind of unmoving and, and like with his posture, it's great.
Yeah.
And he's wearing that Captain Kirk mask, which is like.
Yeah.
We should do Halloween as a bonus episode because of its
relationship to Star Trek.
I like that idea.
Do that for October.
I watched a scary movie yesterday, Adam.
Maybe I'm into scary movies now.
The whole thing or just the first half?
I watched the whole thing.
Which one was it?
The Gorge.
Oh yeah.
The Miles Taylor, Anya Taylor Joy movie?
Yeah.
How was that?
I thought it was a lot of fun.
I didn't think it quite stuck the landing, but it was a hell of a movie all the way through.
It wasn't a movie about an eating contest?
No.
I wanted there to be more of that, you know?
There's a lot about food in it actually, but a very cute, like weird romance movie from,
you know, like the first half and then like a pretty wild action movie in the second half,
but very scary.
I'll check it out.
And you tell her Joyce making interesting career choices.
Yeah.
I kind of like what she's doing.
I do too.
Not all of one kind of thing.
Yeah.
She seemed to have interesting taste, you know?
Although actually, you know what? There's chess in the gorge.
So it is kind of all of one thing, actually.
All right. Maybe I'll skip it. I've already seen that movie before.
So Flox learns that the other wisps are like looking for him. So he's got to get this done before he like gets
jumped in the street by a crowd of ass-kicking Wisps.
But the first one that finds him is Wisptrip.
And we get an access panel fight.
Because that is the primary thing that they are using to bonk each other.
Doors as improvised weapons.
You can't overdo that to me.
Yeah, it's very fun.
And such a different kind of fight scene
than the earlier one with Hoshi.
And the fact that Flox is in this EVA suit,
which is like sort of armor,
but it also encumbers him. So it's kind of an interesting, like some of his stats are
plussed up and some of his stats are down because of it.
I mean, I really love how he's not impervious to pain when he's wearing it. Like he gets
knocked down and he looks like he's in pain when he's taken down in the suit.
And I like that detail.
Yeah, at the center of this fight is this handle release
that's going to start gassing the ship.
And if Flox can overcome Trip for long enough
to turn the handle, Trip will fall unconscious
because to win this fight, you're going to need an EVA suit.
Oh, you don't have one of these, do you, Trip?
You got to put a ridder in this scene.
I love that they're so proximate to the gas too.
It's not like they're in a part of the ship where handles get turned and then like you cut to an angle of a vent
or whatever like trip is in the gas. It's a fucking face full of it. I like that choice a lot.
I also like the choice to just cut around and show the gas acting on a few people. Like Reed
fully gets a death scene in this. That's fun. Yeah. So this knocks them all out.
Flax reports when the yellow wisp comes to pick up blue wisp
after soccer practice and drive it home.
And now they've got to vent the gas and wake everybody up
and also get the fuck out of here.
They've got to get their ship away from the Wisp mothership
that gobbled them up earlier in the episode.
And immediately it starts pursuing them
and trying to gobble them anew.
But they're ready for this with a couple of missiles
that go into the Maw and they commit Wisp Geneshide.
and they commit Wisp Geneshide. [♪ MUSIC PLAYING FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES OUT, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, FADES out, Yeah. I mean, if, if Susie Plaxton had been at the weapon station, they would have gone
vertically and gone, you know, one would have gone over and one would have gone under the ship.
How dare you.
Wouldn't have done anything.
Susie Plaxton's beautiful. I was talking about Tara, the Andorian, played by Susie Plaxton. Ben.
I feel bad for these wisps.
Like they, they didn't do anything that the binars didn't.
Like you would, if they just asked for help, enterprise might have said no.
The wisps were bad.
They're bad and they took them over.
I know, but now they're all dead.
Did they deserve to all be dead?
Yeah, I think they deserve to be dead.
This is a ship jacking.
Wow.
You get what you get.
Yeah.
And they're in a stand your ground sector.
Yeah.
Great effect on the ship exploding, though.
I loved seeing it kind of dissolve.
Yeah.
From the inside.
Yeah.
I mean, you could really tell that the maintenance had been pretty lacking on that ship when it dissolves the way it does.
Yeah.
Some reward for Tripp Tucker though.
Kind of a weird tone the episode ends on, right?
Like, Tripp Tucker's back, baby!
Yeah.
Are you ready to go back to work doing a bunch of unlocking of crew from their quarters with Dr. Flax?
You better be, because that's what you get to do.
I had a deeply intimate experience with an alien and I'm not even pregnant.
I don't understand it.
I was eight years old at one time pre and post pubescent.
Did you like this episode?
I love an episode where the actors act against the characters that we know.
That was fun.
Every time we got it, it was fun.
Except with Reed, because Reed went full creep.
He was just too creepy with DePaul.
It made me want to leave him behind.
Because here's the thing, we aren't exactly sure
how much puppeteering is happening of the wisps
and the bodies they possess.
So I'm still, even in this scene, not super sure
that this isn't something that isn't a deeply
held feeling inside of Reed or Tripp or Hoshi or anyone else. It feels like there's a little bit
of them in there. And in that scene in particular, that Reed's is a little gross to me.
I also just feel like, I mean, I don't know, it seems to me, and you know, maybe I'm wrong on this, but whenever Rick Berman
has a writing credit on an episode where T'Pol
is in her sleepy time outfit, she is in peril of assault.
And it just seems like a pattern that I could really
use this show
not repeating over and over again.
Hmm. I would agree, but also, she is so fucking strong
and badass in that scene.
I never felt like she was in danger because I think
I just believe too much in her ability to kick Reed's ass.
Yeah. Let's just say, like the internet meme that goes around
the barely concealed fetish of the writer,
I felt a little bit like DePaul was wondering
what a drawer going in and out of an ice desk
might sound like in that scene.
Hehehe.
We want to know more about that ice desk.
I want to know what's going on in the Priority 1 inbox, Adam.
Should we check in there?
Priority 1 message from Starfleet coming in on Secure Channel.
Need a supplemental income.
Supplemental income.
Supplemental.
Supplemental.
Yeah, it's extra.
By the interest alone, could be enough to buy this ship.
Adam, we've got a promotional message here.
It's like this.
It's been a minute, so I wanted to throw some extra scarves your way.
Love hanging with Ben while he's blowing up scary monsters on Twitch.
Hope to see you both in Seattle again soon.
And the call to action here is just subscribe at maximumfunFun.org slash join and that's from Your Frog Prince.
Love your frog prince.
Yeah, we've not just performed in Your Frog Prince's City, we've talked to Your Frog Prince at some of our meet and greets. I've been back on the Greatest Trek Twitch channel semi-regularly doing XCOM 2, which
is a video game that has a pretty substantial number of TNG alumni in the voice cast.
So yeah, trying to get on there on Fridays specifically and sometimes Mondays as well.
Time permitting.
Thanks, YourFrogPrince, and a great reminder to join.
We got the pledge drive coming up right around the corner.
Next week's show, I believe, will be the first week
of the greatest gen drive, as we're calling it.
So I hope folks do what YourFrogPrince
is demanding that they do.
Yeah, if you don't believe us, believe your frog prince.
Ben, we got a personal priority one message here.
It's from Matt, the one doing P1s for every season.
Oh, wow.
And it's to Ben and Adam forever.
Here's that message.
Just finished season five of TNG with you two,
and I'm trying to figure out if I'm supposed
to be Team Raz or Team Clavime.
Wow.
They both seem great.
But you gotta stop vetoing the vetoes.
Love your show and love that you got more than dozens of followers despite your initial
intentions.
Thanks, Matt.
Yeah.
Hey, how about Matt back in the stacks?
Matt, you'll eventually get to this recording as you make your way through the archive and
just know that in late February, early March of 2025, Jerry's still out on which team we
should be on, Raz or Plavim.
I don't know. One of them's gonna fuck up eventually, right?
Yeah, I mean, my money's on Plavim
being the one that fucks up,
but I'm not sure I don't wanna back team Plavim
until that time, you know?
Yeah, that makes sense.
I have a lot of complicated feelings about it.
Yeah, nothing complicated about supporting
Greatest Generation.
One of the best ways to do it is to go to maximumfun.org
slash Jombotron, write a brief Priority One message and we'll do the rest like we've done right here.
It's a great way to support the production of our shows.
Hey Adam.
What's up Ben?
Did you find yourself a drunk Shimoda?
Incredible.
Drunk Shimoda! Mine's gonna be to Paul, but for not the scene
where Reed gets weird with her.
It's for the scene where I feel like she's trying to captain
from behind a little bit as the XO,
and I think she finally reaches the end of her rope
when she's like, all right, you know,
I'm gonna go out into a corridor and just present my face.
Because this Vulcan face is sturdy enough to take it.
Like she runs out of ways to encourage Archer to do a thing.
She can only be so persuasive with him before she's got to take the reins of
this, of this story and put herself in danger.
And I thought that was a very drunk Shimoda
moment for her. Like, fine, I'll do it myself with my face.
What about you, Ben?
I got to go to Mayweather this episode because he had one job and that was find Trip.
Blew it the first time. When he does find Trip the second time time he's like, hey Tripp, the captain needs you. Tripp, everything okay? Tripp seemed to be acting weird and then Tripp like pushes past him and
races toward the other end of the catwalk and then is like poised at a hatch and Mayweather's like,
Tripp, what I'm trying to get you to understand is that the captain needs to talk to you.
Mayweather, where have you been all day?
Like, people are getting body snatched.
Clearly that is what's going on with Tripp.
You should have assumed that from the second he acted a tiny bit strange around you.
I'll tell you what Mayweather was doing.
Bunch of crunches.
Bunch of abdominal exercises.
Could not be bothered to really seriously look for Tripp. A bunch of abdominal exercises.
Could not be bothered to really seriously look for Tripp.
Maybe this all stems back to him pushing back when the captain says that they have to lock up anyone acting strange.
Like Mayweather's like, I don't know what it means to act strange.
Literally.
I do not understand what you're talking about.
I mean, if you suspect that me, Mayweather, is acting strange, I do crunches all the time.
I'm doing isometrics right here in my seat, right now.
You should see my fucking pelvic floor.
It is ripped and exploded in the good way.
You just follow my cum gutters down to my pelvic my pelvic floor. You're gonna be a happy camper
Thanks for the fart in what gutter are we going to?
recap the next episode of
Star Trek Enterprise Ben. Oh boy. I thought you'd never ask
The episode is is called judgment. It's season two, episode 19 of Star Trek Enterprise.
And it's a Klingon trial episode.
Archer is put on trial for crimes
against the Klingon Empire.
Oh, you think we're going to see the ball gavel
that does the lightning when you crack it?
The ball gavel is in the thumbnail
that I'm looking at here.
And J.G. Hertzler also in the episode I'm seeing here.
Wow.
Pretty exciting.
To find out how we're gonna be doing this episode,
I'm going to gach.biz slash game,
where we keep the game of butt holes.
The will of the Riker quantum leap.
Our runabout is currently on square four, that's J slash C square.
And roll this 100 sided die to find out where we will land next.
You're required to learn as you play.
Roll.
Could land anywhere, Adam.
Got any predictions?
I'm going to predict that it lands on this square again, cause I wanna hear your J slash C story.
Okay, that would be a lot of fun.
Let's see what happens.
Well, you didn't get your wish, Adam,
but I got my wish.
I rolled a 71 landing us on square 75,
regular episode next week.
Chula!
Did I win?
Hardly.
Hey, that's nice.
It'll be a fun one.
And yeah, I think that's it, right?
We just gotta thank some people and get the hell out of here.
Yeah, just gotta thank the FODs who support our show.
There's a number of ways to do it.
There's the monthly way at maximumfund.org slash join.
There's the merchy way at podshop.biz. There's the P1 way maximumfund.org slash jumbotron.
Mm-hmm. There's all kinds of ways. There's the foot fist way where you defend us
from an attacker using your martial arts skills. Yeah. You know, all of these are appreciated.
Art faces do not have the fortitude of T'Pol's.
No.
Soft faces.
That's what we've got.
But we also really appreciate the efforts of Wendy Pretty, our producer and editor.
I gotta thank the card daddy Bill Tilly, who makes trading cards about every episode.
The easiest place to find those these days is the Greatest Trek Instagram.
Follow at Greatest Trek on all social media.
Those accounts run by our social media director, Rob Adler, who makes them a really fun follow.
I hope people will follow in advance of the drive especially.
That guy just told us that he just reached his one year anniversary to Expert Shimoda.
Rob Adler!
He made it!
He made it!
Rob Adler!
We gotta do a, we gotta do like an employee review, I guess.
I guess.
He knows, he knows how he's done.
Oh yeah, also follow the, subscribe to the mailing list, gach.biz slash mail.
Rob works real hard on that every month.
Another Rob Adler joint.
Adam and I submit articles to him to go into it.
I feel like maybe next mailing list
should have the text of your story in it
if you're into that, Adam.
Oh man.
Maybe, I don't know.
Give it some thought.
All right.
I mean, I think once people see how often the words ice desk appear.
I think most people have an ice desk blocker on their email.
Like I think it would just go to junk.
I don't want that to happen. You know, we have a friend who writes real spicy novels,
Adam, Lauren, the wife of the goose,
with whom we do the Wholesome podcast.
But he also made our original theme song on this show.
That's right.
Our original theme song, by which I mean to say,
our parody theme song of Diane Warren's original
Phase of the Heart.
Correct. Got to thank Dark Materia for the card song, which you hear right now.
And with that, we will be back at you next week with another great episode of Star Trek Enterprise
and an episode of the Greatest Generation Enterprise where, man, can you met like could could we find out if there was a stockade and
That space prison like in an earlier era and they took it out
ball gavel
Of the dead
Ice desk of the horny!
Make it so. Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.
Make it so.