 |
|
THE SHORT VERSION: Paramount owns
Star Trek and everything to do with it. I make no money off
this site; it's just for fun. For more details, read the long
version. Live long and prosper.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Trip and Reed are out testing a shuttlepod (which
species of vehicle is apparently better at avoiding total
destruction than shuttlecraft; someone should have told Janeway)
and head back to where Enterprise should be hanging
out mapping asteroids. They fly over one particular chunk
strewn with metal fragments. A familiar registry number winks
at them in the glow of the spotlight probe. They assume the
worst -- T'Pol finally lost it and set the ship to self-destruct
rather than face listening to "Faith of the Heart" once a
week for the next six years. (Anyone else notice Reed's mouth
is awfully pink in these scenes? Maybe they were trying on
lipstick and painting each other's toenails out there too.
After all, they had a few days before they were due back.
How long can it really take to test targeting sensors?)
|
|
 They
figure they've got around ten days of air, and since the shuttlepod
isn't warp-capable, that will get them about a quarter of
the way to nowhere. Trip tells Malcolm to guess where the
Starfleet beacon Echo 3 is and fly thataway, so at least eventually
their corpsicles will be found. Malcolm finds their predicament
awfully depressing, but he's a Brit; their native weather
predisposes them to suffer. So he starts recording his final
statements. All forty-seven of them. Aloud. Which pisses off
Glass-Half-Full All-American Trip, since he knows their names
are in the opening credits and is hoping they're getting out
of this. When Mal gets to the Wasted My Chance To Reconcile
With You letter to his parents, Trip finally snaps, screaming
that if Malcolm doesn't shut up and let him get some sleep,
he's going to be real cranky in the morning, and nobody wants
to deal with a cranky Trip. (My husband understands this phenomenon
intimately, and stays at least fifty feet from me until I've
had my first-thing coffee.)
|
|
|
The next day, they're busy fixing whatever random
bits of machinery are broken when the pod gets walloped again
(by micro-singularities, but they don't know that). Little
itty bitty holes get poked in the walls, and Trip has to sacrifice
the leftover mashed potatoes from last night's dinner as a
temporary seal. They should have used them on the holes in
the plot as well, but I digress. Their air
supply has also been punctured, leaving them about a day
and a half of oxygen rather than the ten they'd previously
had. Trip finds that rerouting power from the heaters to the
oxygen recyclers will buy them another half-day of air.
|
|
Mal returns to dictating goodbye letters to
all the girls he's loved before. He must have dated the
Dionne
Quints, because each letter is nearly identical to the
last. This colossally irritates Trip, who yells at poor Mal
again. The armory officer makes a pitiful speech about finally
finding some kind of personal comfort zone on Enterprise,
which is now slag, and manages to make Trip feel even worse.
|
|
|
|
Now that both of them are completely bummed,
our boys wrap themselves in the Blankets Of The Blues, don
their spiffy NX-01 baseball caps, and proceed to get drunk
on the cap'n's bourbon. (Mal must be wearing Revlon,
since it's not coming off on the bottle.)
|
|
Several pickled hours later, Trip's legs are
so frozen he can't even feel his fists pounding on the flesh.
He looks like he wishes his ears were frozen when Malcolm
starts to go on about T'Pol's bum (hey Reed, she's a former
fashion model; it's ILLEGAL for her to have any kind of bum).
Mercifully, he's interrupted by a shredded message from Hoshi,
and they realize that Enterprise isn't chunky salsa
after all. Unfortunately, their elation is short-lived, as
the new rendezvous is in two days and they don't have enough
air to get there.
|
 |
|
|
Malcolm gets the bright idea of plagiarizing
"The
Galileo Seven" -- look, if you're going to steal, steal
from the best -- and they jettison and FOOM their engine to
act as a kind of last-ditch emergency beacon for Enterprise.
In despair, Trip finally realizes that Berman and Braga have
no intention of respecting the franchise's continuity and
tries to seal himself in the airlock. Okay, he tries to seal
himself in the airlock so Mal will have 20 hours of air instead
of each of them having 10 hours and both of them winding up
dead. Malcolm threatens to stun his sorry arse and orders
him back down into the pod. They huddle together until they
lose consciousness. The camera finds them again in Sickbay,
where Phlox is treating them for hypothermia and lipstick-induced
hallucinations.
|
|
Photos: Joanna Brandt via Trekpulse, StarTrek.com
|
|
|
|
