OEEG: Shuttlepod One

Description: The episode begins with Shuttlepod One racing through an asteroid field. Reed and Tucker are rendezvousing with Enterprise after, what we'll learn, is some weapons testing. Because this is all brand new, pioneering space efforts, caution is thrown to the wind and the warpless shuttlepod is left all alone out here without any remote monitoring or standard communication check-ins to ensure nothing goes wrong. In other words, we have yet another episode that exists solely because our heroes are a bunch of morons - welcome to Enterprise!

So Reed and Tucker are back early, with apparently no way to inform Enterprise of this fact, so the two get down to keeping busy, Tucker poking about the innards of the ship, Reed reading Ulysses. This prompts a bit of friendly continental rivalry between the two men, though I feel that as a North American, that my team is unfairly handicapped by being represented by Trip Catfish Tucker. That's like your state being represented in the Miss America pageant by Melissa Etheridge. Reed starts going on about how British schools have a more well rounded curriculum than North American ones, but that's hardly fair to judge just because Tucker hates Ulysses - I mean, I'd hate to wade through another Hemmingway novel, but that doesn't diminish my enjoyment of his contemporaries like Kafka or Yeats. Then again, the thought of Tucker reading any classics strains the limits of imagination... actually, the thought of Tucker knowing how to read stretches the limits of imagination.

Well before we can get too into that, the two come across a debris field, including a bit of hull that clearly shows it's from the Enterprise. Now not only have we had no monitoring of the shuttlepod's experiment or of regular status reports, we also learn that the sensors have failed so they can't actually scan the debris... so guess what, it's not really the crashed Enterprise, which is established after the title sequence finishes. Turns out there was an accident and the door to a shuttlepod bay was knocked off... wait, so that's all it takes to convince them the ship is destroyed, debris the size of a garage door? What a bunch of gullible buffoons.

So Hoshi fills us in with a briefing on the situation; oh, seems I have to take back my garage door comment, as I guess an alien ship also crashed at the same time... except "there wasn't much left." So much for that failsafe. Archer and T'Pol go out to take a look at the damaged garage door, and then begins something so minor I hate to even call it a B-plot. T'Pol thinks they've found evidence of micro-singularities, but Archer is extremely incredulous on the subject. This plot point exists for absolutely no reason, as nothing happens that requires it, it provides no insight into anyone's character, and as a scientific achievement for the series it's about as sexy as... I'm going to go with Melissa Ethridge again.

Anyway, with that, we're back to idiots in space, led by our chief engineer. His brainstorming session keeps hitting upon the same snag: not realizing how big space is. Unless there's a base within this solar system, they're screwed, because the gap between solar systems is too far to traverse without exceeding light speed, and you'd think the chief engineer would have to know enough about space to grasp this obvious point. However, as this episode goes on we're going to discover how stupid Tucker really is... which might explain the current state of the shuttlepod, as we now learn that navigation is also down... and the distress beacon is down. Seriously, this is not a space ship, it's a f**king Yugo.

Okay, prepare for Tucker stupid moment number one. He wants to head towards Echo Three without navigation: "You come from a long line of Navy men and you got a real good memory. Look hard at those stars, find something that looks familiar and tell me which way to go!"

I really don't know what to say in response to such glaring idiocy. First, on Earth, even someone with the right star gazing tools could tell you latitude, and that's about it beyond knowing which way is north or south based upon a couple of familiar constellations. Out here, in space, with no familiar stars, no tools, and the incredibly vast distances involved, trying to navigate by stars is literally no better than plotting course based on dice rolls.

So Reed, being a dutiful officers, chooses to follow orders no matter how moronic they are, and gives a best guess before flying them off. After that, Reed starts making entries in his personal log while Tucker mopes at the back of the ship. He finds Reed to be a pessimist just because, you know, there's no reasonable scenario possible for them to be rescued before they run out of air. Tucker seems to feel Reed's putting a real dark cloud over this situation when he should be trying to help put together a crazy plan with him to somehow miraculously be saved. Seriously, he has not had one good idea at all this episode; it would actually be more likely to save them if they tried to scoop up the air from the exploded Enterprise than to try any of his cracker schemes. "The possibilities are endless!" The only thing endless, Tucker, is your boundless stupidity.

So they make some food, which immediately raises the question of how that is inevitably going to end. Is there actually a toilet on this thing? Because if there is, well, we know that they can make things out of the waste... couldn't they use it to make air? Actually, couldn't they just convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, that's got to be a lot easier than turning shit into boots. Tucker then tries to sleep and Reed is still at it, this time leaving a letter to his parents. Tucker finally explodes at him, because just saying "I'm trying to sleep, can you do that later?" is far too alien a concept for a man who cleans his ears with a screwdriver.

This leads us into stupid moment number two for Tucker, when he charges over and says: "Mister and Mrs. Reed, I realize that you've just begun a period of mourning and that I'll never get an answer to this question, but I got to ask it anyway. Was Malcolm always this cynical?"

Calling it cynical to think there's no way out of a situation where they have no real engines, no communication, no one knowing they're here, and are little more than a speck of dust in the grand cosmos of the universe is like asking why Swing Low Sweet Chariot isn't more upbeat.

Well, fade into Reed lying on a bed in sickbay, with Tucker (thankfully) out cold in the other bunk. Archer assures him he's a very brave man, which segues into Reed having a wet dream about T'Pol. Yeah, this episode pretty much sinks the idea of Reed being gay. He gets woken up by Tucker, who's fixed the receiver, but there doesn't seem to be any communication. "You know, the range is very limited. It's probably just white noise." Just there luck, stuck out there waiting to die, and the only thing to listen to is N'Sync.

Right after that bad news, they get hit by one of the micro-singularities again and start leaking air, but thankfully Starfleet mashed potatoes doubles as caulk and they manage to patch up the holes, though with diminished air. "Great," says Tucker, "How much closer to oblivion are we?" Hey now, that's starting to sound a bit cynical, Commander Cooter. However, seems even this can't get in the way of his endless optimism, as he again goes back to criticizing Reed's negative attitude. "I'm confident there'll be a Charles Tucker the fourth one day." And I'm confident the child's parents will both have the same last name.

This then leads into the final nail in the coffin for Gay Reed, as he reveals he frequenly slept with Tucker's old girlfriend, Ruby the waitress. There's a lesson learned, hey Tucker: you can't trust the women outside your family. We also have Reed giving six love letters goodbye, all to women, so he's either really trying to fool Tucker into thinking he's not dying with a homosexual, or else there was at least something in North America he really liked sampling. During this time, Tucker's lowered the temperature of the ship, because I guess there's an atmospheric recycler after all, it's just horribly inefficient. He offers to turn the heat way down to channel the power into the recycler, since turning off the gravity would be far too logical.

And this leads us into stupid Tucker moment number three, in response to Reed shaving his beard. Reed, you see, figures he'll stay well preserved after death, so he'll just keep himself looking good and leave behind a handsome corpse. Tucker says: "If I remember my honors biology course correctly, your hair and nails keep growing for quite a while after you're dead. I'm pretty sure that includes your beard."

Wow, well, far be it from me to question the chief engineer. I'm afraid my college science experience didn't include honors biology, just regular biology, anatomy, botany, chemistry, material science, astronomy, geology, physical geography, psychology, and two semesters of honors physics. And yet, while narrow in its sampling, none of these mentioned this fact - all I was taught was the mechanism that caused the onset and overcoming of rigor mortis, that different parts of the body die at different times, the digusting way your body begins digesting itself after death (including the flatulent nature of cadavers), and that after death someone will need to change your pants. Oddly enough, none of that came from the biology class, because we studied biological principles, you know, like cells and DNA, chemical processes that form the foundations of life, the nature of what life is, and so on. Sure we covered other aspects, but a bit of minutia like this seems a bit out of place in a regular biology course... and you'd think an honors course would focus even more on the more complex mechanisms of life, not in trivia. And, of course, the nail in the coffin is that you wouldn't learn it in any course because, guess what, it ain't true. Your hair and nails don't grow after death, because, you know, you're dead. So, take all this together, and the most reasonable explanation for Tucker's remark is: he's an idiot, so he's lying just to get Reed to knock it off. He wouldn't know honors biology if it walked up and offered to shake his endoplasmic reticulum.

Well, after a bit of shivering, there's another fight about Reed being so horribly negative in the face of certain death, so they break out a bottle of Kentucky bourbon that supposedly Archer was going to give to someone, and decided to hide in the shuttlepod. Or, more likely, this is one of several dozen places that street bum has chosen to stash his "medicine" in case he gets the bad feelings again. He also lights a candle because it's not as if they're short on oxygen or anything. How do you manage to be so stupid and live, Tucker?

Still, in my efforts to be fair, I admit that Tucker gets one good line while drunk. As they hear another burst of static, Reed wonders if it's another example of the galaxy giggling at them. "It can giggle all it wants, but the galaxy's not getting any of our bourbon!" But what must inevitably happen, does happen, and that's Drunken Guy Talk. Reed brings up T'Pol again, commenting on how pretty he thinks she is, but Tucker won't have none of that. Reed insists, however, that she's got a nice ass. You cowards. If anyone, anywhere, were to ever comment on T'Pol's body parts, it's going to be her Angelina Jolie lips or her breasts. Come on, they stuck a buxom woman into a skin-tight suit while showing most shots of her from the waist up and we're supposed to believe Reed most noticed her ass? If you're going to do all that and take it a step further and actually comment on a part of her body, have some frickin' balls and talk about her boobs. Really, how is it any more un-PC than talking about her ass?

Before Reed can go into details about his sick fantasies, they pick up a signal from Enterprise, but with no way to respond Enterprise won't know to hurry up and arrive before it's too late. Of course, if anyone was even remotely competent there, they'd take the lack of reply as a sign of a problem and go speeding to the rescue, but counting on competency is a death sentence, so they devise the backup plan of dropping their engine and blowing it up as a signal they're royally f**ked.

We then hit the final instance of Tucker saying something really stupid, as he assesses the timing situation: "A train leaves New York at three a.m. heading west, while another leaves Chicago at four thirty heading east. I never could figure those out."

You never could figure... high school algebra. Seriously. They never required solving 2x=10 in that Honors Biology class of yours? If you actually study engineering, well, guess where you start? Calculus, unless you're really, really bad at math, in which case they'll demote you to College Algebra for the starting point. I knew this guy was stupid, but even I'm impressed with this display - thank you, Trip, for showing me that no matter how low my estimation of you ever gets, you can still find new ways to sink below it.

Speaking of which, here's another insight into Tucker's character. At their projected speed, they figure Enterprise won't show up until about eleven hours after they die unless they speed up. Now, this has jumped their chances for survival from "statistically nil" to "definite possibility," and now he's the one who has the nerve to be negative. He bets on how little oxygen they have, he says it's also probably his last bet ever, and the big triumph, he prepares to put himself out the airlock to give Reed more time. Goddamn, the only thing that can make Tucker cynical is hope!

So after a bit of a tiff about going up into the airlock, Reed gives his empassioned speech, and we have a repeat of the scene in sickbay. This time, however, it's no dream, and that means that T'Pol doesn't take the opportunity to try to hump Reed on the table. But at least he can look at her ass as she walks away, that's something I guess.

Rating: 6

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