Episode Report Card Aaron: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Speaker For The Dead
By Aaron | Season 2 | Episode 3 | Aired on 03.16.2002
Wow. Who knew the Valley was Sector 001? Well, apparently Alice Krige did, because the Borg Queen is conducting her assimilations there. She's up on stage, talking to a frightened looking woman who appears to be of Middle Eastern or Indian descent. The woman tells a story about how her father had a dream that she slept with a man whom she was not promised to. "For that," she continues, "he set me on fire." The audience gasps. I giggle. Scared Lady explains that she had to flee her home country, and that she'll always carry the scars from her experience. She pulls back her hair to reveal a latex scar that was clearly stolen from the Star Trek: First Contact make-up locker, and Ruth is transfixed as the Borg Queen harangues Scarred Lady into inviting her father to America for a visit. "But he won't even speak to me," she replies, and the Queen Alice looks triumphant. "That is your old blueprint," she exclaims, before setting out the tenuous home renovation metaphor upon which the entire "Plan" seems to be based. Then she singles out Ruth from the audience, presumably solely because she knows the show is about the Fisher family, and proceeds to berate her for "tiptoeing around her own house like she's afraid of waking someone up." Alice Krige is really selling her dialogue here, but the writers end the scene with a cheap joke not worthy of repeating, so I'm just going to move on.
School. Claire arrives at George Doyourememberthis's office, and tells him that, other than her "pager exploding" and the presumably unrelated fact that she's got "hydrochloric acid in [her] hair," everything is fine. "Really?" he asks. "No, but I'm incredibly bored with myself," she responds. "Let's talk about you." Let's not, I say. I, for one, could never be bored with Lauren. She quizzes him about his girlfriend (who's a "jewelry designer," by the way), and he quickly realizes that her recent depression is all about Gabe. Claire launches into a giant rant about how Gabe's family situation is "fucking unfair," and how it "sucks to be in love with a guy who's too fucked up for life." Aw. See? She does care about me. "I really just thought he needed…like…I don't know," she says. "You?" fills in George Statestheobvious. "No, but someone, maybe. You know, some person on the planet who gives a fuck about him for once in life. Yeah, I did think that would matter." George Howprofoundisthis reminds her that no one can solve another person's life. "So basically your job is totally pointless," realizes Claire. Heh.