One thing about bottle shows like this one is that we usually get to see little bits of the ship in question than we have before. This one has lots of 'em, so hold on. Overall, this was an okay episode, and was handled somewhat better than other series' requisite nuts-go-crew episodes ("The Naked Now", "Dramatis Personae", most Voyager episodes...), mostly due to the straightforwardness of the plot.
-Timestamp: August 14, 2152. My 176th birthday!
-The black hole in question is a class four. The Vulcans have surveyed over two thousand of 'em, but none in a trinary system. Anyone know how common black holes are in the first place? I find it odd that the Vulcans, who must not have explored more than few thousand light years, have found so many.
-The BIG thing going on has to do with the Captain's chair. Last year, Bakula told us that he would be consciously NOT using the chair so he can be in the action instead of just overlooking it. Here, we establish that Archer doesn't use it because he's not comfortable in it. He wants Trip to fix it... And plays Home Improvement while he's at it.
-New set: The galley! Chef isn't around, but a convenient crewman in an ill-fitting jumpsuit happens to be there. Also, my kitchen has a pot JUST LIKE THAT.
-Continuity - Phlox examines Mayweather for residual effects from the implants Travis got at the Evil Repair Station. Phlox name-drops the Turellian plague too! It apparently starts with a headache.
-We haven't seen the armory yet this year, and we do now. In it, Reed has invented Reed Alert! Seriously - before, there'd only been "battlestations". Go Reed Alert! Also, the back wall also sports racks for rifles - note the weapons there. Is there more than one kind of rifle?
-Archer's Dad is having a biography written about him, and Jon's writing the preface. The Warp 5 complex was outside of Bozeman, Montana... Have we established this before?
-As promised, the crew eventually starts to go nuts. The obsessive-compulsiveness that characterizes the nuts-going is pretty well-done, and allows lots of itty-bitty details to come out about how stuff is done around ship. Hoshi mentions Kretassan spice! The armory is a restricted area! Reed Alert may be replaced by Tactical Alert! etc..
-More chair stuff - they apparently use the same chairs on Neptune-class surveyors, a warp-two starship in service for over a decade. Trip also wanted to install "inertial micro-dampeners" on it - obstensibly to lessen the tumbling. They can do this in the 22nd century, but not in the 24th? Or can they?
-Crew-count: Hoshi says 83.
-T'pol, who is imprevious to the Nuts-class radiation, cannot pilot the ship alone. Archer can, and uses the trusty steering stick to do so.
-We see the shower again - but no one's nude in it this time. Hey, that should count for something!
-As part of Reed Alert, all the weapons automatically charge and ready (duh). They are used to blow up some debris during the escape from the black hole (where'd it come from, anyway?). Okay, check out the emission points for the phase cannons. Eden FX has goofed again.
Mark
[ November 20, 2002, 09:51: Message edited by: Mark Nguyen ]
Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
quote:Originally posted by Mark Nguyen: ...they apparently use the same chairs on Neptune-class surveyors, a warp-two starship in service for over a decade...
Oooh...do you think it's safe to add an S.S. Neptune to my shiplist, or is the class-name-scheme still too iffy at this point? (What with the presence of letter-combination-prefixes as well.)
-MMoM Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Neptune-class, yes. And yes, it does screw with the whole NX-class thing this series has established. I'd stay away from "S.S." for now, though, since Starfleet so far has no prefixes like that.
Mark
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
I had to do this..
Posted by Vogon Poet (Member # 393) on :
OK, this has been bugging me - what does this phrase "on the Ones" mean?
And, Harry - nice. 8)
Posted by Dukhat (Member # 341) on :
quote:The Warp 5 complex was outside of Bozeman, Montana... Have we established this before?
Wonderful. Yet another reference to Braga's hometown. He's such a little annoying shit.
Posted by Shik (Member # 343) on :
To be fair, though, it IS a good placement for it. I mean, the warp core blows & who gets killed? Cattle. I bet it's even undergorund like Project Starfire or Hellfire or whatever it was from "Andromeda Strain."
Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
"Wildfire," I believe.
At least we now have a "real" reason for the Bozeman from "Cause and Effect," et. al., to have been named for the town.
-MMoM Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
Whoops, double post! Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
We've had that reason since "Desert Crossing," actually.
Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
Really, what was it there? I must have forgotten...
Posted by Spike (Member # 322) on :
Bozeman was the site of the first contact between Humans and Vulcans.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Which was because it was the site of Cochrane's lab. Which is probably the same reason the Warp 5 Complex was there.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
We don't now if it was Cochrane's LAB, but it certainly was the launch site. It's not like NASA does all their research at the Cape.
Mark
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
Something that kind of threw me off at the end was how automated everything was shown to be on the Enterprise in this episode. Obviously computer control on even a relatively primitive starship is going to come into play, but I'm kinda surprised that they managed to run the ship with only two people. Just what do the engineers do down there, anyways? I thought that more primitive technology (especially a prototype warp reactor) would require a more intensive maintenance to run -- even for a few minutes.
Or am we supposed to believe that today's USS Enterprise could take off through a hurricane and its nuclear reactors would run themselves for a few hours?
Time for a little obsessive-compulsive math. The NX-01 currently has 83 people on board. Subtract the senior officers who don't have obvious replacements -- Archer, T'Pol, Phlox, and Tucker, and also Chef, who apparently doesn't have a backup -- you get 78 people. Divide by three (the presumed number of shifts) and we get 26 people running the ship at any one time.
Are these guys just playing tiddlywinks, or what?
Posted by Dr. Phlox (Member # 878) on :
Some of those people might not be maintaining the ship, they could be analysing the info the Enterprise collects on its travels. Sensor logs, cultural watnot, and upgrading or testing new technology.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
"We don't now if it was Cochrane's LAB, but it certainly was the launch site."
By "lab", I meant the place where he built and launched the rocket.
Posted by newark (Member # 888) on :
I am of the opinion that we could have a show with a small scout vessel of seven and have no difference between what we see now with a ship of 82 and this hypothetical ship. It seems the seven leads do all the work of a ship.
The first show and the next two shows, TNG and DS9, had a better represenation of the non-leads aboard a ship. Hell, we got to know some of them. I am thinking of Christine Chapel of the original, Barclay of TNG, and several characters, such as Leeta, Nog, and Rom, on DS9. In Voyager and this series, I can't tell you anything about the other crew members. They are an afterthought crafted for the script as extras.
As for the Neptune class, I would like to see rather than hear about Starfleet ships. We know more of the Vulcan Starfleet than we do the Human Starfleet. I would think we might see human ships sooner or later. The Enterprise has to return for maintenance and supplies to Earth. Or they so resourceful that they never have to return to Earth?
Posted by The359 (Member # 37) on :
You forget Enterprise has its Crewman Cuttler or whatever her name is. I'd bet good money she'll pop up more in the future.
Posted by newark (Member # 888) on :
I hear the actress has other obligations.
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
Aaaanyhow... Having a hyper-automated ship might not jibe with what we saw in TOS, but it certainly helps make ENT more "futuristic" and less likely to be dated by the triumphant progress of automation in the real world.
And having thousands of black holes within the reach of the Vulcans lends more credibility to the idea that one could have snagged Voyager VI (and possibly several other Earth craft). Perhaps most of these are simply very difficult to observe with any of the 20th century techniques.
And it's only logical that we'd know more about the Vulcan starfleet than about the Earth one. The former is the more prominent organization at the time, after all...
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Difficult to observe? Unless stuff is getting sucked in at an appreciable rate, we can't observe them at all. There are theories that there could be a black hole orbiting our own sun, and we can't see it.
[ November 22, 2002, 00:38: Message edited by: TSN ]
Posted by Dukhat (Member # 341) on :
quote:Oooh...do you think it's safe to add an S.S. Neptune to my shiplist, or is the class-name-scheme still too iffy at this point? (What with the presence of letter-combination-prefixes as well.)
Well, the first ship of the NX class isn't the "S.S. NX," is it? It's "Enterprise." For all we know, with B&B's fucked-up registry system, the first ship of the Neptune class is called Yorktown, with a registry of NEPTUNE-01.
quote:I am of the opinion that we could have a show with a small scout vessel of seven and have no difference between what we see now with a ship of 82 and this hypothetical ship. It seems the seven leads do all the work of a ship.
Interesting observation. I remember before ENT debuted, Berman stated in an interview that the ship would be small & cramped like a submarine, with crewmembers bumping into each other all the time for lack of breathing space. Yet the ship's saucer is about as large as the NCC-1701's saucer, but with 83 people instead of 430. Do we see a crew packed in like sardines? Not really. We hardly ever even see other crewmembers in the hallways. They must be in their quarters having sex or something, if what we've seen so far is any indication.
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Overall, this was an okay episode, and was handled somewhat better than other series' requisite nuts-go-crew episodes ("The Naked Now", "Dramatis Personae", most Voyager episodes...), mostly due to the straightforwardness of the plot. ![[Frown]](frown.gif)
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