Episode Report Card Keckler: C+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT A Vulcan's Tale
By Keckler | Season 2 | Episode 2 | Aired on 09.24.2002
Intense flurry of mobilization in the mines as the miners' oxygen dwindles. Mestral creeps around, looking suspicious, and scuttles off to a cavern far away from the jackhammering and yelling. His communicator buzzes him; it's T'Nana, giving him precise instructions on where he should begin blasting his particle weapon. Mestral blasts through a wall. "Look out -- a Horta!" Mathra screams, jumping behind the loveseat for cover. T'Nana tells Mestral he's got two more meters. Mestral walks in the dark, his helmet beam lighting the way. "Here! Over here!" a weak cry calls. Mestral finds the miners and starts helping them out.
T'Pol VOs, "After rescuing the twelve miners --" Okay, just stop right there! When he's rummaging around for particle weapons on the abandoned Vulcan ship, Mestral clearly states that there were "at least twenty miners trapped" (believe me, I rewound and checked), and now T'Pol is saying twelve? Not only is she saying twelve, she's saying "the twelve." The use of the definite article gives the indication that those miners Mestral rescued were "the only twelve" and not just "the surviving twelve." You know, I don't ask for much from these people anymore. I really don't. They want to bring in Romulans and Ferengi centuries before humans were scheduled to meet-and-greet? Fine. They feel the need to negate the history telling us the first contact between humans and Klingons was "disastrous" and led to many years of war by making that first contact only minorly problematic? Sure. They've got yet another series with yet another female whose act of fastening on her bra in the morning can single-handedly knock the gravity plating offline? Dandy. But could they PLEASE just hire someone to PROOFREAD THE FREAKING SCRIPTS so that when they say in one part of the episode that they've got twenty miners trapped in a mine, they also say they rescued twenty miners when the twenty miners are indeed rescued later in the episode?! If they really, really want to say "twelve" later, just give us an explanation why EIGHT OF THE MINERS DECIDED THEY'D RATHER LIVE OUT THEIR LIVES AS CANCER-RIDDEN MOLES! Otherwise? These writers and editors are getting paid a Jesus-load to be sloppy, and I just can't abide that -- I really can't. Man!
I'm just so frazzled now that I can't deal with this idiocy much longer. Anyway, T'Pol tells Quantum and Trip that Mestral became a hero to the people of Cripple Creek. "Didn't they wonder how he got them out?" Quantum asks. "I'm sure they did," T'Pol answers. "But no one ever discovered the truth."