Episode Report Card Keckler: F | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Mehdalus
By Keckler | Season 4 | Episode 10 | Aired on 01.13.2005
Do you want to know what else I don't care about? I don't care whether this show gets cancelled. Oh, wait, I never really cared about that.
Do you want to know what else I don't care about? I don't care that Porthos is perpetually ignored and, in this episode, disparaged by Quantum. Long ago, I imagined a world where Porthos peed acid on his master's shoes (an interesting side effect from his visit to Utopia Kreetassia) and when Quantum fell down, screaming "oh, god, why me" in pain, Porthos took the opportunity to stuff a cheese-filled waterpolo ball down his trachea.
It's really bad when you've become so disinterested in a show that you begin rooting for the main characters to die in horribly tragic ways just to have the chance of maybe feeling something. Anything. I don't even really see the use in exclamation points any more. I'm dead inside.
In Sickbay, Phlox examines her partially melted hand while T'Pol looks at the scans she got before she was attacked. Without commenting that her hand "looks kinda lak an oil paintin'," Trip takes T'Pol's tricorder and pipes it through one of the screens in Sickbay. It shows the Face-Melting Anomaly That Is Quinn. Quantum furrows and orders Trip to enhance it. And enhance it. And enhance it. Oh, my god -- it's Mayweather! That's where he's been all this time! I fantasize a bit that Mayweather never really was Mayweather, never really existed, but is, instead, a partially-physical manifestation of Quinn and has been only existing on Enterprise because of the tachyon beams that were realigned before being purged, then merged, with the deflector shield. Instead, the prosaic and ALREADY KNOWN reality is that Quantum recognizes the Face-Melting Anomaly That Is Quinn as Quinn. I was about to write a joke about Emery and Quantum's dad getting together over the garden fence (while twenty-one-year-old Quantum chases nine-year-old Dani around the wading pool with a dead mouse he found) to make a pact to give both their sons names that start with "Qu-," but then I realized that I gave Quantum that name and the joke doesn't make sense. I'm really so very bored.
In Quantum's quarters, Emery looks at T'Pol's tricorder playback and gasps over his son, the Face-Melting Anomaly. "He hasn't aged a day!" Emery sighs happily. Yeah, but dude? He's all wavy and anomalied and, you know, NOT OF THIS WORLD. That's not exactly healthy. Emery now readily admits that he's not out there to do tests. It was kind of funny how quickly he ponied up to the truth. As Quantum rasped and stalked stiffly around Emery's room, I came closer than I ever have to smashing my wine glass through the television. He's trying to be all commanding and disappointed and betrayed and crap, but it's all asshole to me. Anyway, Emery's wallowing in his misery. He admits that the sub-quantum transporter -- I guess that's what they're testing? I didn't really pay attention -- is fundamentally flawed and will never work. However, his dumb-ass dead son wanted to test it out. And that's why dead people are stupid. Or stupid people are dead? One of the two. "You LET him go through with the test!" Quantum grits all whirly and accusatory and righteous and grit-teethed. I believe that's what the man just said, freakshow. Try to keep up, will you? We do. Emery gives the Daystrom Excuse for his actions: "I was a relatively young man who had created something that changed Starfleet. After an achievement of that magnitude there was nowhere to go but down. My life just became one long chase to capture past glory."
Quantum doesn't give a shit about his self-pity, and I don't give a shit about Quantum so, let's sum up: Emery seems to think he can get his Face-Melting Anomaly son back in this particular area of space because it's "a subspace node. A bubble of curved space-time. That's why there are no stars. Quinn's transporter signal is trapped here. At certain intervals, there are fluctuations in the node that cause the signal to reappear. If [they] can lock onto one of those intervals, [they] can save him." Yeah, it's a bit too late for this show to start adopting the Cool Because It's Not Fully Explained Science that Farscape pioneered. Quantum continues to berate Emery for his lack of trust in him and for letting one of his nameless crewmembers die. Emery wants Quantum's help, saying that he was like a second son to him. Quantum responds, "And you were like my second father!" I don't even know what he's saying anymore. To say, "You were like a father to me," actually means something. But to say "you were like my second father" means nothing, really. Unless it's that gay marriage is legal in the future and Quantum Has Two Daddies. More guilt-tripping, more remorse. Quantum agrees to help the tear-stained Emery. As we knew he would.