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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 ]
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
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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.
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.
-------------------- "A film made in 2008 isn't going to look like a TV series from 1966 if it wants to make any money. As long as the characters act the same way, and the spirit of the story remains the same then it's "real" Star Trek. Everything else is window dressing." -StCoop
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
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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."
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We've had that reason since "Desert Crossing," actually.
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Bozeman was the site of the first contact between Humans and Vulcans.
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Which was because it was the site of Cochrane's lab. Which is probably the same reason the Warp 5 Complex was there.
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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?
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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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