Don’t you remember? I killed him off in the second of my series of ENT teleplays, “Chef’s Revenge,” AKA “Pooch Snuff.” It followed “The Spotted Dick Affair” and preceded “The Day T’Pol Let One and Archer Smelled Something Funny–Again.”
Uh, uh, speaking of Chef…Where the hell is he?
:eek:
I just now got the email notification for this post.
Read the other Enterprise thread for context.
i’d send you email confirmation myself, except i’m burning…stuff to CD and DVD as well as downloading…stuff and it is slowing down my comp enough that i only have one window open. And i’m learning about how to make a dirty bomb on History Channel!
…and just now getting it for this one. Oy.
What is the “phasers cutting phasers” joke aboujt?
athelas:
Back in the last Enterprise thread, the one about “Horizon”, someone or other made a quip about the various kind of phasers, which included “phaser cutting phasers.” It may have been nothing more than a simple grammatical error to begin with, but when I asked what a phaser-cutting phaser was, a certain poster who shall remain nameless except that his initials are carnivorousplant claimed that, in the ST:TOS episode “Devil in the Dark,” Kirk described Phaser II as phaser-cutting phasers.
So, of course, I immediately went to my ST:TOS tape collection to verify this. Lo and behold, “Devil in the Dark” was not among the ST:TOS episodes I had on tape! I rushed out to a DVD store some 20 miles away which I knew had a huge selection. They had several TOS episodes on DVD, but again, “Devil in the Dark” wasn’t among them! Desperate, I ordered the DVD of “Devil in the Dark” from amazon.com (which came with the bonus episode “This Side of Paradise,” by the way), and because I really really really wanted to verify this line right away, I ordered said DVD with next-day shipping which was damn near as expensive as the DVD itself.
Two days later, the DVD was sitting on my doorstep. I ripped the packaging open, popped it in my DVD player, watched the entire “Devil in the Dark” episode all the way through for the first time in years … and, darn it, “phaser-cutting phasers” weren’t mentioned anywhere!!
Of course, maybe that line only appears in the Canadian verison of the episode. :rolleyes:
My mistake.
It wasn’t the last Enterprise thread where phaser-cutting phasers were first mentioned. It was the thread before that, the one about “Judg(e)ment.”
Wearia made a comment that www.phasersareus.com had an impressive selection, including microwave dinner phasers, hair trimming phasers, and, of course, phaser cutting phasers.
The Phlox story was pretty good, as character-development storylines go.
I’ll agree that Tripp’s comment, “I’m gonna get out mah phase pistol and shoot you in the ass” was the best line of the episode. But as for the rest of the Rescue-The-Geologists storyline, I’m just gonna say…
Rock climbing, Joel. Rock climbing…
Oh. Damn. This was a post commenting on the actual episode. I appear to be totally off topic for these threads. -5 points for Monstre… 
Yeah, but the falling and dangling part, Travis holding them up with one foot I found to be riviting. I knew Buffy wouldn’t die, but I enjoyed it.
Wow, are we back to actually discussing the episode? Okay.
As before, not horrifyingly eye-gougingly awful, but not very damn exciting, either. Totally predictable: Here’s where they explain the centuries of hatred. Here’s the scene where they try to get past it and fail. Here’s the scene where Phlox opens up to a crewmember and comes to a realization. Here’s the scene where he goes back to his patient and offers a soul-searing confession. Here’s the scene where said patient demonstrates he’s willing to abandon centuries of indoctrination after a few kind words. And we wrap up with the scene where it’s implied that, as a result of the courageous acts displayed in the central pas de deux, maybe things are going to change.
Yawn.
If the show had any balls, the story would have gone like this:
Set up the ancient hatred the same way, but make the Denobulans some seriously violent mothergrabbers. “Yes, Captain, it’s true — we sterilized one of their planets. Billions died. They surrendered, of course, and we haven’t had open hostilities since then. My people were horrified at what we’d done, but only among ourselves: We never apologized or made amends. Publicly, we were merely the victors. No wonder they still hate us.”
Develop the middle section the same way. Phlox doesn’t like his people’s history, tried to raise his children differently, and so on. He insists to the Antaran that the procedure will work (“you have eight chances in ten for a full recovery”), etc., etc., like in the existing show.
As in the show, the Antaran is affected by Phlox’s sincerity. But rather than just accepting outright, he tells Phlox: “Ask me my name.” (Didja notice that the alien dude was never named? He was always “the Antaran.” The show’s website says his name was “Hudak,” but I’ll be damned if they ever said it out loud. Sort of defeats the point of the show if they never bother to individualize the guy they’re trying to individualize, huh? Anyway…) So Phlox does, and the guy agrees.
And then he dies.
That’s right, that’s what I said. The guy agrees to the procedure, Phlox goes ahead, but because of the separation there are complexities to Antaran physiology that Phlox can’t cope with, and the “eight chances in ten” don’t work out. The patient dies on the table, never having regained consciousness.
Phlox, of course, is devastated. He cannot be comforted by Archer’s efforts: “At least you tried. You did your best. That counts for something.” Even T’Boobs cannot touch him with logic: “He was going to die anyway.”
And then Phlox writes the letter to his wayward son, except now he has some real emotional context for it.
But no, we had to have the wishy-washy, feel-good ending, where everybody goes away all misty-eyed, but not having to pay any serious consequences for their decisions. This can be said for the B plot, also, where lives are supposedly risked but the outcome is never in doubt.
Berman & Braga keep saying they want to go back to classic-era Trek, where Kirk would happily shoot first if he thought it was warranted. But they’ve misunderstood the very nature of that show. Kirk wasn’t a loose cannon: He was tough. The shows were tough. If Berman & Braga were doing “City on the Edge of Forever” today, they’d work it so the Joan Collins character would survive. And that just ain’t right.
I keep saying this: Enterprise needs to go after its characters’ emotional health and their comfortable assumptions. Nobody’s learning anything. Nobody’s changing. Nobody’s being challenged, and nobody’s paying for bad decisions. The show needs to grow some goddamn balls or it’s just going to be the same boring morality play week after week. They had a good hint of this at the beginning, when Phlox casually and unexpectedly fed the cute-n-fuzzy tribble to the reptile. Now they need to do that with the whole show instead of just a throwaway moment.
P.S. If those Denobulan geologists really could spider up the cave walls like that, then why did their homeworld’s science directorate need a bunch of clumsy humans to go down and get them? “Just send a remote-control hover-probe down with a message. They’ll be out in an hour.” :rolleyes:
We need a weekly recap of running gags:
“last week on Enterprise, the Thread: Panda, phaser cutting phasers, shirtless Trip, Shirtless Hoshi, Shirtless Porthos, Salt Vampire, Cyborg Jesus, Dr. Nightmare Attorney at law, mention something on topic and lose 5 points”
The Denobulans had been unable to contact the party to tell them to leave. After he made them aware of the danger, Tripp should indeed have said “Now carry us out of here on your back or I’ll get my phase pistol and shoot you in the ass.”
Well, yeah, but like I said, some sort of drone could easily have buzzed down to them and delivered the message. But then we would have missed all the “Rock climbing, Joel.”
Of course, if they really could maneuver in the caves that easily, they were never in any actual danger from the local militants, either. It might have been kind of fun to have Trip and Reed arguing for them to go, but eventually agreeing on a compromise, “okay, we’ll stay an extra twelve hours and help, they probably won’t find us down here, but then we gotta go,” but of course they are found, and then the Denobulans reveal their mad-Spidey-skillz, disappearing in seconds up a vertical wall before circling back to wipe out the patrol by dropping rocks on their heads, leaving Trip with egg (and cave dust) on his face, having been proved wrong in his casual (and implicitly arrogant) assumption of himself as rescuer.
P.S. Can I just say again how much it bugged me that they didn’t bother to give the Antaran a name?
No.
They didn’t know where to send the drone, and they had to come out sometime, proably after the time limit had expired and the locals would incarcerate or execute them.
His name was g’‘AS’ta’WTq4tQ’@#52$%6h’ERy45’wuyw4y’54yww’hwrW$%^&4’5^&47’45567hgwrHw45
so now you know, and knowing is half the battle…
I always liked Journey To The Centre Of The Earth.
On the way in, the Michael York character finds some previously unknown and delicately beautiful plant. His reaction to it is almost identical to Spock’s reaction to the vibrating leaf plant at the beginning of The Cage.
When done correctly, even rock climbing, Joel can be a decent (descent?) ((Ha ha! Made you look!)) part of an episode.
The recent spate of non-suckiness bodes well for ENT. Even though some of this last half of season 2 have sucked and blown, it seems to be evolving the way it should be. Mostly.
Remember, even TNG’s last 2 seasons had some real loser eps, as did DS-9, though the general calibre of the series was superior to what had been before. (Splitting infinitives? Nope. Just checking.) And VOY had some real winners. So, let’s hope for the best (of both worlds)…
As an aside: TOS was groundbreaking. Even with its weaknesses. Everything else (all the other series and movies) merely expanded or improved on what was lain down. So, enough TOS bashing, eh?
But Michael York’s reaction fades to one of shocked disbelief when he looks at his left palm and discovers that his life-clock crystal is blinking red, meaning that he’s on Lastday!
“But I’m only Red Six!” he protests, inadvertently making a crossover with doomed X-wing pilot Jek Porkins. “I still have four more years!”
:::groan::: Lieutenant, lock phasers onto NoClueBoy and set them to “Eradicate”. Now, one more word out of you, mister…!
Crow: “This movie has more rock climbing than a rock climbing film!”
Still have to stick by my earlier comment. It was an okay episode, but nothing overly exciting. Except for the “shoot you in the ass” comment by Tripp, I was kind of bored by the whole rock climbing thing. Although there was one other ironic moment I enjoyed. Near the start when they are rappelling down the wall… Travis says something like, “Be careful, watch your footing, sir”. And Tripp says, “Okay”, and immediately loses his footing and slips on the rock face.
That cracked me up – I was just waiting for Travis to say, “No, I said do be careful, not don’t, sir!”
And Cervaise, I think I like your version of the Phlox story line better.
Well… next time they make me watch all that rock climbing, they had damn well better have a Hoshi and T’Boobs decon scene!!!
So, if securing their pitons was so difficult, why didn’t they use their phaser-cutting phasers to make the appropriately-shaped holes in the rocks?