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'Shuttlepod One' - This episode will reportedly air on February 13, 2002. It was originally thought that 'Sleeping Dogs' would air on this date (story), but that episode has moved to January 30, 2002.

In the episode, Tucker and Reed set out on a mission in a shuttlepod, as Enterprise is busy investigating an asteroid field. Disaster strikes while the pair are away, leaving the shuttlepod damaged and the warp drive inoperable. They manage to make it back to the rendezvous coordinates only to discover Enterprise was apparently destroyed when it crashed into an asteroid.

With the ship seemingly no more, the pair are left abandoned in the middle of nowhere with only a few days of air remaining. The episode mostly focuses on the character of Reed, with viewers set to learn further details about the weapons officer, including his romantic life.

Reed's real-life alter ego, Dominic Keating, recently said the lieutenant would be featured more prominently in upcoming episodes (story). "Things got very busy for Malcolm on board the Enterprise," he wrote. "So that's good news. Sadly you'll have to wait 'till the New Year to see quite a bit more of him but at last it would seem that the powers that be are turning around and taking a closer look at the enigmatic Brit."

'Equilibrium' - Expected to air the week after 'Shuttlepod One,' on February 20, the episode reportedly centres around the Vulcans and T'Pol. 'Equilibrium' is also the title of a third season Deep Space Nine episode, so this may still change.

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[ December 15, 2001: Message edited by: Malnurtured Snay ]
 

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Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
 
Err...the shuttlepods have warp drive??

-MMoM
 

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Posted by Malnurtured Snay (Member # 411) on :
 
Apparently, or the information is wrong. And of course, we don't know what speed warp drive they've got ... they might only be able to get to warp one
 

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Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
 
Given the fact that most of TrekToday's news is written in fourth-grade English, it wouldn't surprise me at all if that's just a really poorly-constructed sentence and the reference is to the Enterprise losing warp drive in the course of its asteroid investigation, and thus being unable to make the rendezvous.
 

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Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
 
Let's hope.
 

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Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
 
Maybe they'll rig up a solar sail and use the local tacyon eddies to... *gets shot*
 

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Posted by Vogon Poet (Member # 393) on :
 
It was Beauty what killed the Beast.
 

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Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
 
While neither of the premises really seems to tread new ground, plot premise wise, these could still be very unique episodes as regards their mood.

In TOS and later shows, there was always the chance of survival for the stranded heroes. Even the crew of Galileo 7 had it made - they were on a class M planet, they knew the ship was searching for them, and they could in theory wait for several *years* on that planet until Starfleet could send out a ship to find them.

But with "Shuttlepod One", the odds of survival are zero. Not ten to minus googolplex, but flat out zero. No Starfleet ship can miracuously reach the heroes in time, since no Starfleet deep-space ships apart from the NX-01 even *exist*. No alien ship is going to come to their rescue, either, not when the heroes can't even speak their lingo. One wonders why the guys wouldn't just cut their throats immediately after discovering that NX-01 is no more. This is "Apollo 13" without Houston to speak with or an Earth to return to.

(Of course, a shadowing Vulcan ship would be a welcome sight now, but if none is forthcoming in the first few hours, then it's unlikely one would emerge later, either.)

And "Equilibrium" (which will probably simply become "Balance", like "Wink" became "Blink") sounds like an alien-centric piece. Those are *always* moody. And with a Vulcan theme, we have (in ENT terms) bad guys and badder guys, and the hero chick has to out-bad them on Planet Bad. Something like "Return to Grace" where a Space Terrorist helps a Space Nazi blow up some Space Russkies and everybody cheers. I'm looking forward to something suitably dark.

Timo Saloniemi
 

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
 
Why couldn't an alien ship rescue them? For one thing, if it happened to be an alien who spoke a language that was in the universal translator, there would be no language problem. And, even if they couldn't communicate verbally w/ the aliens, why would the aliens simply ignore them? If the ENT found some aliens they couldn't talk to, but eho seemed to be stranded, wouldn't they rescue them? Do you think humans are the only race who ever help people out?
 

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Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
 
How would a passing alien ship know they were in trouble?

"Excuse me chaps, is everything alright?"

"EEEE EEEE EEEE EEE EEEE!"
 

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Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
 
More word today has "Shuttlepod One" as directed by David Livingston and written by Berman & Braga .

First of all, having Livingston do a show that'll largely be two characters in one small set is a good call. He's always been a great "mood director" and if "Strange New World" is any indication, seems to be willing to experiment a little with handheld cameras and such (the cave scenes in that ep are really well-done, and he's got the coolest-shot-of-the-year award thus far with the low track of Porthos jumping out of the shuttle to get to his tree). Somebody stop me before I turn in Harry Knowles and start expressing my expert opinion on Burton & Rush's lens choice in "Terra Nova."

Anyway, back on topic, I'd actually be far more likely to trust Braga and Berman to not do a script where a shuttlepod gets warp drive than someone else on staff. Now, I hear you guys snickering at that very notion, but these are the guys who wrote the series bible over a two year period that spelled out sublight-only shuttlepods.

Far more likely, in my eyes, is Joe Staff writer arriving in to a meeting with a script about Reed and Tucker stuck on a shuttle together, choosing to strand the shuttle by having it lose its warp drive, and getting it to a fairly advanced stage before someone points out to them that they're endowing the pods with something that they hadn't planned on doing in the bible. In situations when there's a time crunch and half the plot can't be rewritten in order to strand the pair on a sublight-only ship, the bible gets pushed aside and TV realities mean that shuttlepod gets warp drive.

Berman and Braga, on the other hand, made a pretty clear decision however many months ago when they wrote into the bible that the shuttlepods were sublight-only, and would have had to acknowledged then and there that this show's shuttlecraft wouldn't behave in quite the same manner as previous shows. No producer restricts his writing staff without considering the dramatic ramifications (Roddenberry's no-character conflict TNG nonwithstanding .) Trust me, a writer's bible doesn't lay down creative restrictions left, right and centre as an exercise in PR to prove to the fanboys that they know that the tech should be kept more primitive. (After all, were it not for insiders smuggling out the partial version of it we have available, we shouldn't even know that the bible says that shuttlepods are planned to be sublight only.) Taking a shuttle to another star system has been a fixture in the premise book for so long that I'd say Berman and Braga had to make a fairly sober decision to impose a relatively stiff narrative restriction by slicing out the idea of a shuttlepod that can transverse interstellar distances. Six months into production, I imagine they'd be the least likely to want to retcon their own rule out of existence. On the flip side, they're also the ones with the most power to edit the bible on the fly to suit a particular script. Your call. I'm just saying while it certainly isn't inconcievable that they might want to change their own rules for the purposes of this script, I think that the odds of this report actually referring to a warp-capable shuttlepod dropped slightly.

But what do I know, being an apologist and all.

[ December 17, 2001: Message edited by: The_Tom ]
 

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Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
 
I agree.

-MMoM
 

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
 

"How would a passing alien ship know they were in trouble?"

Well, if you saw a sublight shuttle (or one w/ a broken warp drive) floating in space w/ no mothership in sight, and they're sending out a signal you can't understand, but it's being broadcast on every possible frequency (which one would think would be standard practice for a general distress signal), wouldn't you figure they're probably in trouble?
 

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Posted by Malnurtured Snay (Member # 411) on :
 
Uh ... that is assuming that a ship is close enough to the asteroid field to pick up the transmission. Also, that the asteroid field isn't somehow distorting the readings or some other thing. Also assuming the shuttlecraft has the equipment to broadcast a long-range distress call.
 

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Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by TSN:
Well, if you saw a sublight shuttle (or one w/ a broken warp drive) floating in space w/ no mothership in sight, and they're sending out a signal you can't understand, but it's being broadcast on every possible frequency (which one would think would be standard practice for a general distress signal), wouldn't you figure they're probably in trouble?

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Not if they're Klingons.
 

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
 
My point isn't that an alien ship would rescue them. Just that there's no reason to say it's impossible.

[ December 18, 2001: Message edited by: TSN ]
 

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Posted by Vogon Poet (Member # 393) on :
 
I don't want y'all to think I'm becoming an Enterprise apologogist, we got enough of them round here already. But I'm willing to bet that the suggestion about the shuttlepod having warp drive is an error on the part of the person reporting these episode details.

Think about it:

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Tucker and Reed set out on a mission in a shuttlepod, as Enterprise is busy investigating an asteroid field.

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