Mayweather speaks!
Come to think of it, most everybody speaks. Folks we never saw before speaks.
Icky stuff abounds, and almost everyone gets there own game boy/remote control thingie.
Does Garbo laugh?
Does Ole’ Blue Eyes sing?
Yes.
No.
Maybe.
(Ha! Three answers, two questions, That’ll fox 'em. Put an ass between two equal piles of hay…)
Hey, are you calling me a pile of hay???
::Gives evil leer::
Is this Rick’s Cafe Americane or the Pit, fodder face?
Random info: the title of tonight’s episode, translated from Latin, means “lone voice”.
Um… three good-looking guys, all trussed up in what looked like… well… um… spooje, while being in direct mind to mind contact, and thinking about water polo players…
Even I found this disturbingly homoerotic.
Are you the one writing all those Archer/Trip slash stories?
You’re gonna love it next week when the second ep. of the double header has A and T gettin’ in trouble together again.
Just funnin’. 
–Was Big Icky Sticky just trying to stay alive long enough to get home? I missed something during Hoshi’s translation–or did I?
Hot Engineer Lady: “Oh no! Something has gone wrong in a rarely used part of the ship. You go check it out all by yourself. Oh yeah, all the lights are out too.”
Dumb Engineer Guy: “OK.”
H.E.L.: “Hmmm… I wonder where my date for tonight’s movie is? He’s been gone to the rarely used part of the ship for a long time. I’ll go look for him. Alone.”
These people watch old movies. Don’t they learn anything?
Then Malcolm goes in and sees a really scare Space Thingy. So he stands there in the middle of the room, looking all scared untill it trusses up the rest of the security detail.
And about Malcolm… “Yeah, the smartest guys at Starfleet are working on this force field thingy. But I’ll just glance at their notes and whip one up out of spare parts.”
Then at the end…
Archer: “What was that all about?”
Doctor: “I dunno.”
Archer: “OK. Let’s go.”
And after all that, I still liked it. Pity me.
-Rue.
I think it would be an interesting bit of character development if Malcolm would hate Phlox (Flox?) guts from now on. Well, if they would at least dislike each other as, say, Quark and Odo.
“stands there in the midddle of the room” I think he just short circuited. “F–k, I can’t kill it. What do I do now?”
Going into the dark alone was standard red shirt, scary movie stuff. Quick-get-the-plot-established.
I think the force field thing was the beginning of the development of “Trek As We Know It”; Federation, phasers, reliable transporters, holo decks (damn) etc.
If Tripp is Wesley writ large, Malcolm is Wesley writ large blowing things up. (Or keeping them at bay so that they may be blown up later.)
I don’t think Malcolm will so much hate Phlox (dunno the spelling either) and sorta respect him yet be really irritated. The scene in this ep might be repeated a couple of times.
Malcolm: Blow it up!
Phlox: As a doctor, I have to keep it healthy.
A good balance, one to the other. (Like Quark and Odo, only a little less.)
And I understand Malcolm “just standing there” from a plot standpoint. Ya gotta show the baddie being bad. But I think his relexes would have to be a little faster than that. “I can’t kill it, I fall back untill I figure something out.” But that would make for bad TV.
A few other things:
Hoshi heard a strange noise from the bulkhead where it wouldn’t normally make noise. She has super-hearing or something. But instead of telling someone “Hey, I hear something in there,” she just shrugs and goes on.
Malcolm was testing the new force field by shooting a phaser through it between two (I’m guessing since the were on the loading cradles) live torpedos! OK, not “live” live, since there’s safeties and stuff, but still, they are torpedoes.
I can’t even hate T’Pol anymore. She’s starting to be nice. For a Vulcan.
-Rue.
Yeah, what was the deal with that? I thought he was using the cradles to support some heavy hardware, but the “emitters” or whatever looked like the limpit mine things they stuck on the time traveling guy’s cabin door.
(Indeed a prequel series. Nomad was also a cloaking device and part of Spock’s Brain, I believe.)
Maybe Malcolm just feels comfy around things that explode.
“Hoshi heard a strange noise from the bulkhead where it wouldn’t normally make noise. She has super-hearing or something. But instead of telling someone ‘Hey, I hear something in there,’ she just shrugs and goes on.”
For this part, I figured she had a) just been stung by (in her eyes) being rebuked for not being good at her job, plus she was exhausted; I thought it was perfectly reasonable that she’d shrug it off as sleepiness or nerves.
However…
Okay, if Hoshi (with the help of T’pol) can figure out how to communicate with a creature who is wholly unlike a human and speaks in a wholly different way…why the hell has there been so much communication trouble over the next couple of hundred years?
In “Star Trek IV,” why the hell couldn’t they figure out a) that the alien transmitter was speaking and b) translate it? (Tark’s answer was, “They didn’t have Hoshi - heeheehee.” My answer: “It was in the script.”)
That was the only thing that really bugged me. Oh, and the heavy handed ABC Afterschool Specialness of “I expect more from you because I believe you’re capable of it,” which is usually said to the depressed high school science student by his physics teacher. Snirk
At which point Hoshi whips a 12 gauge pump out from under her black trench coat…
So kindly Dr. Phlox says “Don’t torture the creature. In an hour with my microscope, I can figure out how to disturb it without harming it.” And you didn’t think of doing that earlier when your crewmates first became trapped in goo because . . .
For the same reason Hoshi doesn’t start to de-cypher the Icky Gooey’s language until after Malcolm can’t shoot it or give it a suntan.
Or why (episodes earlier) they left their big ol’ ship’s phasers in the box until they really needed them.
Dramatic tention bay-bee!
-Rue.
So i managed to miss this episode, because i reverted to St. Louis time with it on at random intervals on Saturday, not 8pm Wed like it is here. From the previews it looked like the ship was attacked by a jizz-covered squid, but maybe it was a jizz-covered octopus.
Oh joy, another mediocre episode.
Aside from all the half-assed plotting noted above, I wanted to point out how incredibly disappointed I was with the ending, again. Just like last week, where they totally disregard the political impact of their prison break on this huge and powerful (and probably never-to-be-mentioned-again empire; how big is the Alpha Quadrant, anyway?), they utterly fail to recognize that they’ve established something really interesting, and walk away from it.
I mean, come on. This little slice of a large mind that’s stuck in their cargo bay shows signs of advanced intelligence, and communicates with complex mathematics. They figure out how to communicate with it, at least on a rudimentary basis. They return the sub-creature to its larger self, a single hive/goo being that apparently covers the majority of this planet. What halfway ambitious exploratory species wouldn’t spend the next week there trying to make friends with this thing and learn everything they could from it?
But no, they do their Boy Scout deed, flip a salute, and jam on out of there. WTF?
I mostly liked the first half of the first season, because it showed signs of possible greatness, though it didn’t actually achieve it. So far, that’s all they’re still showing: potential. They better start actually delivering pretty soon, or I’m going to lose patience.
That would be boring TV. Maybe it ws too yucky to study. Maybe that wrote home for someone else to look at it later, like when another warp vessel is ready in a few decades.
Maybe Malcolm shoved a nuke out the door on the way back.
^:)^