Episode Report Card Keckler: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Imzadi Prime
By Keckler | Season 3 | Episode 18 | Aired on 03.02.2004
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.At long last, Quantum and Qrew arrive at the Red Giant that reportedly has the Weapon of Sunday Mass Destruction ferreted away somewhere. After practicing for a few hours in a cargo bay, Trip and Mayweather use the newly-acquired Bug House shuttle to poke around the Red Giant for the WSMD. They find it in an ocean and scan it. Back on the ship, Quantum determines that they will use the Bug House shuttle to go back in and destroy the underwater weapon. However, the resulting explosion will take out everything around it. Quantum decides he's going to be the one to pilot this suicide mission. Daniels, the Future Boy, pulls Quantum onto Enterprise NCC 1701-J and tells him that he can't go on that mission, instead he has to make nice-nice with the Xindi in order to save everyone. Daniels even dangles the Federation tantalizingly in front of Quantum but doesn't tell him too much other than that the Sphere Builders are the Big Bad now and the reason why the Xindi hate humans so much. Quantum decides not to listen to Daniels and continues on with his suicide mission. T'Pol gets upset and cries out the Weight of the World Window that now belongs to her. Quantum's suicide mission is unsuccessful. When he gets reaches the weapon's spider hole, it's gone and he's apprehended and questioned by Snake Eyes. Refusing to talk to anyone except Degra, Quantum bleeds and insults Snake Eyes by telling him that humans eat turtles. Degra is brought in and starts to see Quantum's side of things, but the Snake Eyes have already engaged Enterprise in a crippling battle. And that's the way it ends. No "To be Continued" or anything, just T'Pol's crazed eyes staring out of the darkness and smoke of the massacred Bridge. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Why the title? Because the Evil Dr. Mathra wouldn't SHUT THE HELL UP ABOUT IT! He kept popping out at me and trilling, "Imzadi! Imzadi! Imzaaaadi!" in various tones, vibratos, and foreign accents.I liked this episode well enough when I first watched it, but recapping it was like in-SANE-ly boring. I don't know why. I really don't. Maybe it was all the repetition of not just stuff we learned from other episodes, but stuff we learned in THIS VERY EPISODE! As if we'd forget in less than an hour. Maybe I just couldn't emotionally commit myself to this episode because Bermaga stupidly saw fit to interrupt what could be a nice, suspenseful flow with SIX WEEKS OF RERUNS. Idiots. My god. With the shabby treatment they're giving this series, I've long stopped believing they want to save it.
After the announcement that Enterprise is moving to the nine o'clock timeslot next week -- which will be RERUNS FOR SIX WEEKS -- we jump right into the episode without any previouslies. The ship approaches a glowing red dot. It's a planet. A giant. A red giant, which sparks me to sing, "Yo-ho-ho, Red Giant!" because my mother had a deep and abiding belief in the secret power of frozen vegetables. Here's what we learn: a traffic jam of Xindi ships holds up the beltway between the two interior planets, and there's a detection grid generated by a mess o' satellites. Quantum puts on his Exposition Furrow to say that Degra mentioned Azati Prime would have a security net. They hide behind a planetoid. Ships approach the detection grid, and we get a close-up of a few ships heading toward an Earth-like planet. Quantum wants the lead ship magnified and the warp signature displayed. Two small squares with spirals in them appear in the lower left corner of the viewscreen. I assume that's the warp signature, but we've never seen that feature on the viewscreen before. It's pretty cool. Quantum smiles grimly, "Degra."
That naturally means we need to see the man that makes Quantum smile so very grimly, so we bop on over to Degra's ship, where it's cocktail hour. Degra pours the drinks from this cool glass bottle that has a pewter dragonfly hanging from a chain draped around the bottle's neck. The drinkers receive their cocktail reverently as Degra explains the occasion for such celebration. "It may seem odd to celebrate the completion of a weapon. Particularly one designed to destroy an entire planet. But recall the words of Enarchis, written some fifty years into the Great Diaspora: 'Without a world of our own we are but children lost in the wilderness.'" Yeah, yeah, you have a conscience about this whole thing because you're the Primate Xindi. We got that seventeen episodes ago, you freak. Degra goes on to say that the Xindi will soon emerge from their wilderness, and their work on the weapon will ensure that the Xindi will never be lost again. He toasts the new Xindi era.