Episode Report Card Keckler: B+ | 74 USERS: C+ YOU GRADE IT Carpenter Street
By Keckler | Season 3 | Episode 11 | Aired on 2003.11.26
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Quantum's raiding the kitchen one night, giving Porthos some verboten cheese when Daniels shows up and tells him he needs to get his butt to 2004 Detroit, Michigan. Daniels and his time-traveling coterie have no idea what the Xindi are up to but since nothing good happens in Detroit, they know it can't be good. Daniels deputizes Quantum to go to Detroit and stop whatever it is that's going on. Quantum invites T'Pol, and they get some of those funky futuristic clothes everyone will be wearing in 2004 before they step through a doorway and right into the Motor City. With some of Daniels' gadgets on loan, they steal a car and some money from an ATM and trace the Xindi readings to a warehouse on Carpenter Street. Some low-life has been abducting blood bank donor and handing them over to Snake Eyes who are manufacturing a bio-weapon geared to wipe out all the bloodtypes on Earth. Quantum and T'Pol beat the low-life up for information and then take him out for burgers before making him take them to the Xindi's warehouse. Quantum poses as a B negative donor and finds the bio-weapon. He also shoots up all three Snake Eyes right before one of them aerates the deadly virus into the atmosphere. T'Pol and Quantum return to their future with some Snake Eyes souvenirs, leaving the low-life to babble to Detroit cops about creatures with ray guns as they arrest him. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
I promised everyone a kinder, gentler Keckler, and that's what you got. So while a great many of you hated, despised, and continue to vilify this episode, I liked it. Either the California sun is softening my brain, or it was just good. I found it to be quite funny, and, to some extent, I wasn't one hundred percent certain of the resolution. I mean, they blew up Earth, why not release Killer Chicken Pox into the wind to clean up in a later timeline? The fact that the Xindi only had time to modify it for six blood types made me think it was very possible. Sure, I could rant on about the science -- like the stupid comment Daniels made about stuff not yet reaching him in the timeline -- or because Quantum adapted way too quickly to lots of stuff in the twentieth century, but I still liked this episode in spite of those glaring holes. Instead of getting indignant that this was a "rip-off" of "A Piece of the Action," I was charmed by the homage. There are most certainly plenty of other episodes that I viewed as ham-handed, trite, or, worse, boring but this? I enjoyed.
A word on the episode title: it's all the fault of the Evil Dr. Mathra. He went around repeating it over and over until the only way to get him to clam chowder up was to use it. So I did.
It's Wednesday, and it's time for you to rotate your tires.
De-troit. A guy gets out of his car and walks into a shabby building. He really looks like Malcolm with a dead animal on his head, and it took me awhile to disprove that wasn't actually what they were trying to show us. In Not Malcolm's crapulous apartment, crap is lying everywhere. Not Malcolm grabs generic beer from the green fridge and swigs. He goes to the bathroom and pulls a slice of pizza from a box lying on the sink. Because keeping old pizza in the bathroom shows exactly how down-and-out you are, even though we just saw him take beer out of a fridge. Whatever. Maybe he prefers to dampen the crust with the delicate moisture that exudes from shower steam -- it can bring a certain sliminess to the cheese. He's champing on the limp slice when his phone rings. Not Malcolm stares at the phone like, "I know there's a noise. I hear a noise. What the hell IS that noise? It sounds like a phone but that doesn't make sense because even though I OWN a phone, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WHEN IT RINGS!" Finally, the freak decides he'll give answering the phone a go. A voice asks if he's made his "selection." Is that the new thing? Movie Phone actually calling you back in order to give you more time to figure out what you want to see and where you want to see it? Cool. Not Malcolm tells him everything's all set, and confirms that the money is the same as last time. We jump to the Movie Phone guy, but we can only see his legs walking through a dark room. Movie Phone Guy tells to him to be careful with the sedative, since he nearly killed the last one. They say their fond farewells, and we see that Movie Phone Guy is actually Snake Eyes. Hmm. Glad to see he's getting additional work on the side. The revenge business doesn't pay that well.