Episode Report Card Keckler: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Buggy Dearest
By Keckler | Season 3 | Episode 17 | Aired on 02.24.2004
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.This is the one where Quantum goes totally bug house. For real, y'all. The crew shuttles down to a planet and finds all these cartons full of Bug House eggs just fixing to hatch open. While examining a particularly stinky lot, Quantum gets sprayed with bug juice that makes him go a wee bit crazy. He decides that he no longer wants to be captain of the Enterprise, oh no, instead, he wants to become the newest member of the bug babysitters club and spends all his time reading the egg cartons The Goldbug and Other Tales, setting up the VCR to repeat A Bug's Life, and organizing multiple rounds of an Egg Toss. T'Pol is a bit worried and tells Quantum she thinks he's getting too attached to the little yolks, so Quantum relieves her of duty and locks her up in her room. Trip, Reed, and Phlox get REALLY worried and decide to stage a mutiny, which also means overthrowing the Uh-Ohs, since they're so stupid they decided whatever Quantum does is fine by them. Even when he starts dressing the eggs up in party clothes and gives them names like "Aneggstacia" and "Eggward the Second." After a thoroughly successful mutiny -- during which Trip actually has to shoot Quantum while fully hatched Aneggstacia, Eggward the Second, and Carmen Eleggtra scamper around his shoulders -- Phlox realizes that the bug juice sprayed on Quantum was actually more harmful than he thought. Oops! They get the hell out of there, leaving all the little egglets to take care of themselves until the next Xindi vessel happens by and Hayes apologizes to Reed for being so stupid as to blindly follow a bugged-out captain wherever he wanted to lead them. Which, eventually, was to a ladybugs picnic. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Yesterday's Enterprise: Xindi shot giant loogies, Trip shot Xindi, Hayes and Reed worked out some issues and ordered out for Corned Beef Slash, Quantum set a course for Azati Prime.
Enterprise stalks a planet. They find a ship wrecked on the surface that Reed analyzes as Xindi, although Quantum has architectural issues because suddenly he's Furrow Lloyd Wright: "It doesn't look like a Reptilian or a Primate design." T'Pol finds no atmosphere or bio-signs. They go to take a closer look.
I've become bulimic just so I could purge this song from my system. HWAAAARRRGGGHHHHHHULP! Eh, anyone have a stick of gum?
The away team investigates the ship. They walk with headlights and examine dead Bug Houses. Lots of dead bugs. It would be a good Orkin Man commercial. Quantum wants the carcasses taken back to Phlox for autopsies, and designates teams to different parts of the ship. "Did you know that this is the year of the locust?" Dr. "Virginia" Mathra confides, "I can't believe it's been seventeen years. I might have to make a pilgrimage back home to see them. Did you know that seventeen years before that was when Dylan wrote 'Day of the Locusts'? He got an honorary degree from Princeton when the locusts were in full bloom." See, sometimes I just think it's best to let him go on and on. It gets it out of his system.
More investigation. Steam. Headlights. Investigation. Steam.
Reed and Trip raise a door and shine lights around what looks like a shuttle bay. They walk in, and T'Pol thinks she's found a computer console. "My father'd love to get a look at this place. He's fascinated by insects -- always filling up the house with bugs he's collected," Reed remembers. Dude, that's totally JUST like my mother! Didn't I mention that in a recap somewhere? How the cabin we rented on Long Lake in Michigan was crunchy with bug carcasses and how to this day I am completely scarred by my mother's fixation? She loved the daphnes that the baby dragonflies shed before they emerged blue and glistening. Trip goes up to a wall covered in hexagons. As in compound eyes and honeycombs. "Dude, just because they're insectoids doesn't mean that seventies sci-fi was all about the hexagons," Dr. Mathra interjects. Trip opens a hexagonal door, and the three enter a room. The door closes automatically, and Reed announces that the room is pressurizing to an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Stupidly, in my opinion, Reed and Trip open their helmets. They go to ANOTHER room, from which Reed reads bio-signs.
Elsewhere, Quantum and Hayes investigate a small craft. With all the weaponry, Quantum determines it to be an assault vehicle. Trip comms Quantum to get his furrowing butt over there.