Episode Report Card Keckler: F | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Holier ThanThou
By Keckler | Season 1 | Episode 14 | Aired on 01.29.2002
Suddenly the Voice of Doom reaches them. "Archer to boarding party, come in!" Hoshi responds, and Quantum asks how they're "holding up." "We're doing okay, sir, it's nice to hear your voice," Hoshi gushes. Quantum asks what their status is, and T'Pol explains that they've tried to ignite the Klingon engines, but "they appear to be offline." Quantum tells them they're on their way to pick them up, and asks Maypole how much farther until they reach them. "Ten thousand meters," Mayday answers, "but I'm having a hard time getting a fix on them. Too much interference." Quantum asks Trip if their probe is still in operation. "Barely," Trip says, bending over Reed's com station. Quantum tells him to use it to "triangulate their position." Bet that was a tough one for him to get out. Trip concentrates as the camera takes us -- hold your noses, now -- deep into the gas giant so that we can see the probe. As it explodes. "The probe's gone," Trip reports. Who else is willing to bet that Trip hit the wrong button and made it self-destruct? Quantum looks startled, and the submarine underwater noise starts happening on Enterprise. "Sir, external pressure's at maximum," MayJune reports. Quantum coms the landing party: "I'm afraid we've got a little hitch in our rescue plan." The camera focuses on Mayfair, who says, "The hull plating's failing!" Quantum does some furrowing and coms the landing party again: "We'll be back for you as soon as we can. In the meantime just sit tight --" Static, fuzz, and lint suffuses the rest of his message. On the Klingon ship, Hoshi tries to tell Quantum they can't hear him, but their com link fails.
Sick bay. The Klingon female (who is called Bu'Kah in the captioning) is strapped to an examining table, and she's not taking too kindly to it. She spews the usual Klingon drivel: "Let me die on my feet!" "Cowards!" "Honor!" You get the general particle drift. Phlox confirms T'Pol's earlier suspicions, diagnosing, "There's a neurotoxin in her blood stream. Untreated, it could kill her within a day or two." Quantum asks if the doc can do something about it, and Phlox says he's working on it. "T'Pol says the Klingons were unconscious -- why is this one so lively?" Trip asks. Can someone explain to me, why is he there, again? Doesn't he have engineering stuff to do? Phlox says the Klingon female is showing the effects of hypothermia. "My guess is she took refuge in a low-temperature environment aboard her ship. The cold would have delayed the effects of the toxin," Phlox says. Bu'Kah demands to see the captain, but as Quantum starts to swagger over, Trip stops him mid-swag and says, "You know, I read if they sense a leader's weak, they'll try to kill him and take command." Trip gives him a clenched fist of support. Mathra complains from around the rim of his Pink Lady, "I'm sorry, but this whole idea they have going where Trip reads stuff is completely implausible." "I'm the captain," Quantum tells her. "I've never seen your kind before, but you have made an enemy of the Klingon empire!" Bu'Kah says. Again, if she's never seen his "kind" before, how was she able to decipher the English characters on the ship's hull?! Quantum says it doesn't seem to take much effort to make enemies with Klingons. "You stranded three of my people down there," he says. "You raided my vessel, infected my crew!" Bu'Kah bellows. Quantum says that they didn't go and infect anyone -- not this week, anyway -- and that they boarded their ship in order to help them. "Liar!" Bu'Kah hisses, and looks away. I note that she's not wearing the costume with the Dinners Window that was such a part of B'Etor and Lursa's personas. Quantum strides around sick bay and rants that they had nothing to do with what happened to her crew, but her ship is going to get smushed soon, so she better help them get his people off it, or else. "If you tell them how to get the engines running, they can fly it out of there," Quantum says. "And fly it where? Back to your world to steal our secrets?" Bu'Kah demands. Now she's just being bumptious. "No," Quantum says, giving her a look stonier than a Biblical execution. "When our Birds of Prey arrive your ship will be destroyed," Bu'Kah says, giving us the first mention of massive Klingon vessels that get dropped into a plotline black hole. Quantum quits trying to reason with her and leaves sick bay, saying to Trip, "Remind me to stop trying to help people." I remind you of that EVERY WEEK. Ass. Trip stifles a smile and follows him out. Because leaving Hoshi, Reed, and T'Pol to die on a Klingon ship is très droll.
Bridge. Maywho displays some Klingon ship graphics for Trip and Quantum to examine. "I found these schematics in the Vulcan database. It's a Raptor Class scout vessel," he tells them. I guess this means T'Pol hasn't studied everything in the Vulcan database if she didn't recognize the ship from the exterior. Quantum asks how long the ship will last under the pressure from Shatner's wind breaking. Maywho tells them the Klingon ship's hull is twice as thick as theirs: "It's reinforced by some sort of coherent molecular alloy." "Yeah, that's a tough little ship," Trip drawls, "but it can't hold up under that pressure forever." Trip then suggests reinforcing their shuttle pod with some technobabble. "It won't look pretty but it might hold up long enough for us to get our people out," he finishes. Maywho says that the only other option is for T'Pol, Reed, and Hoshi to fix the Klingon ship and fly it out of danger themselves. Quantum says they're not going to get any help from their Klingon patient, so he tells Trip to get started on his technobabble reinforcers and instructs Maywho to climb into the crow's nest and watch for approaching Klingon vessels of mass destruction. Mention number two of Klingon ships that slide into a tear in the time-space continuum of this episode.