Episode Report Card Keckler: F | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Holier ThanThou
By Keckler | Season 1 | Episode 14 | Aired on 01.29.2002
The Klingon ship fires a torpedo, and Hoshi calculates how far it's going. At three thousand meters, Reed detonates the explosive, and the ship is hit by the backwash. "No effect," Hoshi reports. "We're still sinking." T'Pol says, "The shockwave dissipated before it reached us." Reed tells them they'll need to detonate another one closer to the ship. T'Pol looks around at the groaning ship and says the pressure on the hull is too great as it is. "If you detonate one too close..." she says. "And if I don't?" Reed asks, "We need to generate a large enough shock wave to push us into a higher orbit. To do that, the blast has to be big and it has to be close." He tells Hoshi to load two torpedoes. Hoshi does it.
Shuttle pod. Quantum says, "Sensor resolution's falling off." "This was your plan?" Bu'Kah asks from a seat behind him. "To grope in the darkness and hope to stumble across my ship?" Quantum tells her it worked the first time around. Now, we have Quantum and the Klingon woman here, unescorted in a small shuttle pod, and Quantum has his back to her. What is preventing her from overpowering him, commandeering the shuttle pod, and contacting her Birds of Prey as she did before? The stupidity of this crew is boundless. Picard would have insisted on a security detail, and if he hadn't insisted, Riker most definitely would have. Hell, Worf himself would have gone along to protect his Captain. Maybe Trip's hoping to get rid of Quantum in an unfortunate accident. Bu'Kah asks what some explosion noise was, and Quantum tells her that it's weapons fire below them, about two kilometers.
Klingon ship. Reed asks, "Did it work?" Hoshi says they managed to move two hundred meters. Reed is exasperated by how not far they're getting. He should be thrilled, because this means he gets to explode more things. You might ask why I'm not worried if they'll make it back to the ship. An admirable question, which can be answered in one word: DeCon. We know there's going to be a DeCon skin scene, and we haven't seen it yet, so I see no reason to worry about the safety of the three that are supposed to be in it. How's that for killing the suspense of the moment? Hey, blame UPN, not me. Hoshi reports that certain parts of the ship are disintegrating, and tells Reed they have six more torpedoes. Reed tells her to load two more, but Hoshi argues that it won't be enough. T'Pol agrees with Hoshi: "We'll never reach a safe altitude climbing a few hundred meters at a time." Reed points out that the more they argue about it, the more time they lose. Hoshi suggest detonating all the torpedoes at once. "We may gain enough altitude, but I doubt we'll make it in one piece," T'Pol says. Hoshi says she's willing to risk it. Reed says he'll launch them all and detonate at eight hundred meters. "I was thinking of more like five hundred," Hoshi says. T'Pol and Reed goggle at her. "Look, I didn't come all this way to get crushed in the atmosphere of some anonymous gas giant," she tells them, in the grip of her newfound Vulcan Zen. It's not anonymous, it's Shatner. Hoshi loads the torpedoes, and Reed tells them to brace themselves. Reed hits a button, and more stuff sparks on the bridge.