Episode Report Card Keckler: C- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Friendship 2 1/2
By Keckler | Season 1 | Episode 6 | Aired on 10.23.2001
Chris in the Muddy stands firm that they will not leave their caverns, even when Quantum tries to explain what happened when the asteroid hit: "The fallout contained certain poisons. Humans under the age of four or five can usually build an immunity to them; that is why they survived." Phlox explains that the immunity has kept them all alive for the last few generations, but now that the poisons have seeped into their water supply, giving them a lethal little twist, they cannot remain where they are. "You humans tried to gut our Go-Befores when they lived on the Overside. Now you're trying to gut us," Muddy Mum tells them. T'Pol tells her that Phlox saved her life: "Perhaps you should give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, he is not human. Neither am I." Chris in the Muddy starts to pace, saying, "Giant rocks falling from the sky. Shale! It's all shale! Stick us back!" Shaka, when the walls fell! Quantum ignores his gibbering and tells Muddy Mum that he went through a bunch of photographs until he found one she might be really interested in. It's of a family posing outside one of the colony dwellings, and Quantum asks her if she recognizes anything. "It's the Overside, before the poison rain," Muddy Mum bites out and then identifies the people in the picture as humans. Quantum asks what humans were doing in their colony before it was destroyed, but they don't have an answer for that. Quantum tells her to look closer at the picture, and points out that the little girl in it is Muddy Mum sitting on her mother's lap. All the while, her son hops around in his Queen Helene Mint Julep Mud Masque and tells her it's "all shale" and that the medicine is "confusing her path." Considering that mud masque, I don't think her path's the confused one. Recognition begins to yawn, I mean, "dawn" on her face, but Chris in the Muddy hisses, "They're trying to make us leave the Underside," and then turns to Quantum and says, "If we're not back before daybreak, your crewman will be gutted!" Muddy Mum pushes herself away from the photos and closes her mind with a snap. Quantum angrily tells Phlox to finish with his patient and escort them to the shuttle bay. "SubCommander!" Quantum snaps as he leaves. I guess that's his way of nicely asking T'Pol to follow him, because she does.
In his quarters, Quantum rails about how the stubbornness of the Mud Morlocks is going to end up killing the fifty-eight people left in the caverns. Logically, T'Pol tries to reason with him: "Stun grenades." "What?!" Quantum, Mathra, and I all ask together. "Commander Tucker has continued to enhance the sensor resolution of their tunnels. We could transport stun grenades to specific locations, detonate them and use both shuttle pods to bring them back to the ship," T'Pol explains. "And then what?" Quantum asks. "Put them in chains?" T'Pol says that she's certain Reed could invent some "appropriate restraints." Quantum tells her, "What the hell d'you think this is, a slave ship? We can't relocate them by force!" T'Pol reminds him that their alternative is to stay and die. Quantum tells her they have to reason with the Morlocks and make them see that returning to Earth is the right thing to do: "We can't take them by force!" T'Pol asks him if he's certain Earth is the right place for them. Quantum doesn't get it. "When you get them back to Earth, what will you do? Send them to school? Teach them to read and write? Wear human clothing, eat human food? Teach them to live on the surface, enjoy the sunshine?" T'Pragmatic asks. "You're damn straight! They're human beings," Quantum tells her. You're a dork. "It's their birthright. It might take them a little while but they'll adapt. It's a helluva lot better than dying down in those tunnels." Instead of calling him a clot-headed thickie, as I would have, T'Practical reasons with him that they've lived in those tunnels for generations: "You can't just pluck them up, bring them to a strange world and hope they'll learn to conform. You'd be destroying their identity, destroying the Novan culture." So, if she doesn't believe that the Novans should be removed from Terra Nova, was her speechifying about using stun grenades just a devil's advocate thing? T'Pol is T'ricky. Quantum refuses to agree with T'Point Made and coms Trip to bring maps of the tunnel system. Looking at the maps, Trip and T'Pol explain to Quantum that the southern hemisphere of Terra Nova was unaffected by the asteroid radiation clouds. Quantum tells them to put the current map on a "PADD" for him and to find out if there are more underground systems like the ones below the colony site. "And it wouldn't hurt if it was crawling with those -- what do they call them -- Diggers!" Quantum says, before leaving the bridge to join Phlox, Mayweather, and the Harvey Mudd family in the shuttle pod. He makes me tired.