84: Daedalus – Star Trek Enterprise Season 4, Episode 10

In today’s episode of Trek in Time, we’re gonna be talking about that great big beam up in the sky, . That’s right. We’re talking about enterprise season four, episode 10 Dataless. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time, where we’re watching every episode of Star Trek and chronological. And we’re also talking about its place in history.

So right now we’re talking about things around enterprise. We are now in the fourth and final season. We’re now more than a third of the way through that final season. So we’re just about to make a bold leap forward. One might say, in. The series that we’re watching and in the era that we’re watching it in.

But until then, we’re still talking about 2004. Now we’re just creeping into 2005. This episode, is that turning point into that new year and who are we doing the talking? Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some stuff for kids, I write some stuff that’s sci-fi. And with me is my brother Matt. He’s the guru and Quizzer behind the YouTube channel, undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.

Matt, how are you doing today?

I’m doing pretty well. How about you?

I’m doing well. I’m curious about today’s discussion because I don’t know this episode, kind of big picture shot before we get into the nitty gritty detail discussion. Did you like this episode?

One word, Sean? Mm. Cue the Homer Simpson.

Boring, boring.

And with that, goodnight, everybody. . Yeah. I think when we have an episode like this that makes us kind of both like turn our head sideways a little bit and squint at it, usually we end up re-reading the episode. So I hope that that’s where we’re headed on this one as well. Yes. Before we get into that, Matt, we usually like to share some of the comments from previous episodes.

Have you pulled out some interesting ones this time? Yes. We,

uh, had a little hot debate about. Are we gonna do this animated series, uh, in the conversation? That’s right. And we both had a disagreement in how we were gonna handle this. Mm-hmm. and a comment from Dan Sims said, just started watching the original animated series.

I’m all for either option, so thanks Dan for not helping. Right. PaleGhost69 wrote, if, if you’re willing to solo the animated series on the. , instead of taking up the Friday slot, I’d be down. Mm-hmm. I don’t think they’re worth expanding the current timeline though. Mm-hmm. I, that’s my attitude. I don’t wanna extend the length of, it’s gonna take us 50 years, Sean, at the rate we’re going.

It’s like I don’t wanna make it 60 cuz we’re including the intimate series in it. It’s like, I would much rather, if it’s a standalone, that’s fine. Yeah. I just don’t want to slow down the pace of the live action TV shows. Mm-hmm. with the animated series. So it’s like, I think doing. together, but as separate, standalone things would probably be the path I’d be most comfortable with.

Right. And it sounds like that’s what PaleGhost would. Down for as well. Thoughts, ,

I’m, I’m, I’m beginning to come around to Pale Ghost’s, uh, view on this. I like the idea of really exploring as much Trek as possible and doing it in the context of when it came out, and I think that by doing little mini episodes around the animated series.

In a stand, in a standalone format might be, yeah. The best way to do it. Yeah. Because I didn’t want them to be, I guess part of me was like folding them into our discussion with original series episodes as one large video just loses them in the shuffle. But I can also understand the pacing of. Adding multiple additional seasons to the original series.

We would be talking about the animated series for roughly a year. So . Yeah, that might be the lower deck. That might be a bit too much. It opens up lower decks. Yeah. .

It’s like, should we be doing lower decks? Should we be doing, um, the other new show Prodigy? So it’s like once you open the door for animation, it’s kinda like, well why are you doing this one and not the other one?

So it’s like there’s a lot of shows we could talk about that are animated for Star Trek that are really fun. Yeah. But it’s like, I don’t think we should be slowing down the live

action rewatch for those Agreed,

agreed. Having standalone discussions on them. I would love to do cuz they’re great shows. So yeah.

I’m on board with. Agreed, so let’s make it official. Let’s say that’s the plan that as we get to the original series, at a certain point we will kick in with the animated series as well. Perhaps we just should plan looking at how many episodes of the animated series there are, and when we are at a point where we have the same number of episodes of the original series left, we will just start doing them then together so that when we finish the original series, we will also finish the animated We’re Done series at the same.

I like that. So that’s the plan. It’s official, we’ll call it the PaleGhost plan. Hashtag PaleGhost. Yeah. If anybody has any problems with that, please write the PaleGhost immediately. He will respond by ignoring you completely. There’s, there’s

one other comment I wanted to bring up from Lonnie Laney. I always mispronounce this every time you bring up your name.

I’m so sorry I’ve caught up with you. The rest of my rewatch will have to be much slower if we wanna see our discussion after each. Thank you for your analysis of the on the Unsettling emotionality of V’Las and T’Pau this was from the last episode. We just talked about both your ideas and how the show, how to show V’Las emotions don’t go unnoticed, and how T’Pau could have argued why she has to take the katra from Archer are incredibly consistent.

Actually, and this is why I brought up this comment. I love this comment. Part of the comment actually, one has to wonder how Surak katra could survive for almost 2000. When the bearer of the Katra walks alone through the dangerous forge with deadly electric storms, what if there was no one there to whom the bearer can pass on the katra in an emergency?

Like what happened in this episode? Yeah. , you’d like to, you’d think they would’ve taken better care of the bearer of Surak’s Katra. Hmm, I, I was like, yes. They just hand wave over the fact of like, this guy died in the forge from an electric storm, and it was only by the grace of God that there were two people that happened to be here, that he was able to pass it on to.

how did this not happen in the past 2000 years? ? Well, it

gets

even like stranger when you think about like, okay, let’s say that Surin has the Katra and one day he’s up on his roof, Resh shingling the roof, and he just kind of slips and whoa and falls over back where, hits his head and somebody comes over later and they’re just like, oh my God, he fell off his roof and he died.

Crap. What happened to that Katra ? Like, yeah, there’s a whole multiverse of alternate storylines of dumb ways that the Katra got lost. Yeah, but we don’t have time for that, Matt, that alarm in the background? Yeah. Mm-hmm. ? Not, not, no, not that one. The other one. Yeah, that one, that alone, that’s the read alert.

It means it’s time for Matt to try to tackle the Wikipedia description for this episode. Dataless Matt, best of luck. Oh boy.

Dataless is the 10th episode of the fourth season of the American Science Fiction television series, star Trek Enterprise set in the 22nd century. The series follows the adventures of the first Starfleet.

Enterprise registration. one. Okay. I’m getting really around cause it’s like, I feel like we just said that. Yeah. In this episode, as the crew of the enterprise help, Dr. Emory e Erickson, bill Cobbs conduct experimental transporter test. A dangerous anomaly is detected on board. I don’t know what it is. The Wikipedia entries that feel like they have to say the same thing at the beginning of every single entry, like it’s the 10th episode of the fourth season of the American science fiction.

It feels like it’s just like a whole bunch of. Passive voice that could be written in the Chortling , it would’ve been much

better anyway. Yes. It also doesn’t leave a lot of room for a summary that actually summarizes this, reads very much no one sentence at the end. This reads very much like a TV guide teaser.

Like or eight o’clock or a student trying to pad his, yeah, . But as Matt just said repeatedly, this was season four, episode 10. This was directed by David Straighten. It’s his second of the season. He also directed one of the earlier episodes in the season where we had the space Nazis. So that was fun. This episode is written by Ken Lanik and Alan Brenner.

It’s a first for both of them, and the original error date of this was January 14th, 2005. Happy New Year Enterprise. You’ve just entered the year 2005 for the first time. Guest appearances in this include Bill Cobbs as Dr. Emory Erickson, Leslie Silva as Danica Ericks. Donovan Knowles as Quinn and Noel Manzano as Burrows, as I mentioned, we are here on January 14th, 2005.

What was the world like? The time of original broadcast? I know everybody here is wondering what was Matt dancing to? We all remember how he ended the year 2004. He was of course, dancing to over and over, over and over. That would be the song by Nelly featuring Tim McGraw, which I’ve already said over and over as we’ve talked about.

The song in previous episodes, but what was Matt dancing along to now? Well, I’m sure everybody will be very excited to. Once again, Matt was dancing to Over and over by Nelly, featuring Tim McGraw. This however, and please pour one out for the song is the last time because next week we’ll have a new number one hit.

In the US and at the movies. What were we lining up to see? We were lining up to see. Believe it or not, Matt meet the Faers, which made 28 million in its opening weekend. Meet The Faers is a 2004 American comedy directed by Jay Roach. It’s the sequel to the 2000 film. Meet the Parents It Stars Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Streisand, Blythe Danner, and Terry.

and it earned mixed reviews, but would go on to make 522 million worldwide and would spawn yet another sequel little Faers in 2010. If anybody’s interested in checking the movie out, you’re gonna have to do your own research because I couldn’t be bothered with this movie because I thought this movie was.

Take that Sean, and on television, what was enterprise up against? As we all will remember at this point in season four, the show has moved permanently to Friday night, so it’s up against the Friday night lineup, which includes eight simple rules and complete savages on abc. Joan of Arcadia, on cbs, which was earning good numbers with 8 million viewers as were eight simple rules and complete savage.

On Phlox, the Bernie Mac show was in a double billing getting about 5 million viewers per episode. Dateline NBC was getting 8 million. And on the wb, what I like about you and Grounded for life, were both getting just under 3 million viewers. Star Trek Enterprise will they earn 3 million viewers with this episode, which is just par for the course.

It feels like that is the constant number. Throughout this season, they didn’t gain any audience. They didn’t lose any audience. It was just 3 million people holding on saying, just please make it star Trek and in the news. Well, this episode focused so much on the attempts by a scientist to hold on to groundbreaking advances in his field of research that I thought it would be interesting to take a look at in 2005.

What were some of the major scientific breakthroughs? And this is a list that was compiled by the Guardian Periodic paper in the uk and among the top stories, the top breakthroughs for 2005 were the following. In 2005, there would be the implanting of a human chromosome into a mouse, and that’s how we will all remember.

That’s how we got. There was also deep impact and hi abusa, which were two asteroids that were the first time that humans actually were able to intercept an asteroid. Hi. Abusa actually included landing on the asteroid, which is a tremendous breakthrough for space exploration. The human embryo was also clone for the first time in the uk.

I’m sorry, Matt seems to be having a breakdown. .

You broke me with the Mickey comment, .

Oh, we all wondered where he came from. Turns out 2005, now know. Now we know human embryo was clone for the first time in the, uh, in the uk. And then there were these two stories. I think that these two just really kind of like create an interesting tone in history.

And who would’ve thought that there would be any need to revisit these two stories? The 1918 Phlox strain was recreated in a lab in October. The story says we learned that one of the most successful killers ever had been resurrected US scientists recreated the Spanish Phlox strain, responsible for the global pandemic of 1918.

Which killed around 50 million people. Researchers showed the strain was a pure bird Phlox strain that had adapted to humans. This suggests worryingly that a few choice mutations could turn the current bird Phlox epidemic into a global human pandemic. Who could have, who could have known. And then there’s this one.

Climate reaches a tipping point. Scientists in Southampton uncovered first evidence that the offshoot of the Gulf Stream, which gives Britain its bombing climate, is slowing down sea ice in the Arctic is now 80% of what it was. When NASA first took pictures from satellites in 1978, the permafrost beneath Siberian Peatlands appears to have reached a tipping point, which could release billions of tons of methane, and it seems that 2005.

Might just top 1998 as the hottest year on record. And this, of course, the year 2005 topping 1998 is such old news because every year since then has continued to top the previous one. So, yep. Here we are with. Worries about Phlox pandemics and climate tipping points in 2005, and it’s really good to know that we were really paying attention and saw those red flags for what?

We got it. All right. We figured it all out and we were just like, we’ve got Mickey Mouse. Now let’s do it . But on to our discussion of dataless. Here we are the first days of 2005 and we’ve just been on a winter break. The show comes. You wanna make a good solid push toward the end of the, the season, maybe making a claim for being able to say like, maybe we need a fifth season.

Maybe we’ve earned that. And what does the show do? Not this one. Well, everybody had cleared out their Christmas trees, they’d put away their menorahs, they’d settled down from their New Year’s celebrations and they, they opened up their doors on a fresh season start for enterprise. and they found this, this is boring, boring.

Not a great episode. I have some notes about the production itself and I usually, I save this stuff toward the end, but I think that this is really important to share at the beginning because I think it is the kind of information that will help us in our analysis of the show. Mm-hmm. , which was Manny Koto, who is at this point, the showrunner.

He’s taken over from the. Berman and Bragga Ko Duo who created the show and Manny Koto set out and said, I want this season to be a bridge between where we are with these characters and where we know Kirk and Spock’s era of Starr will be in the original series. He wanted to be able to connect some dots.

So we’ve been seeing that he did it in the form of. A storyline around the augments, which would arguably be a con storyline where we’ve seen a multi-part storyline there. We’ve saw a multi-part storyline around the Vulcan high command and the fact that there was a misrepresentation of teachings of ceroc.

and a kind of cultural revolution is now taking place on Vulcan, which will lead to the more trustworthy, dependable, and emotionally reserved Vulcans that we know from the original series. So here we are with this episode, which focuses on technology that we’re very, very familiar with. It has to do with transporters, and it has to do with the person who developed transporter technology and he was contemporary of Zaffron Cochrane, and.

Archer’s father and Manny Koto would explain in interviews that he wanted to create an origin episode for the transporter, taking elements of classic star Trek, such as Zephyr, Cochrane, and the ultimate computer as inspiration. Ultimately, he was not happy with the script. or the final episode describing both as flawed.

He felt that the series worked better as a multi episode arc show rather than a standalone episodes. And with the exception of Dataless, he was proud of the season. I think that kind of, sorry, this was his Turkey as well. , this, this shows, this overall episode. It’s, it’s very samey to. and it, oh yeah. It revolves around the transporter as a technology of such mind bending ideas and it teases that that is going to be what the episode is gonna be about.

But ultimately this is just a somewhat of a ghost story and somewhat of a personal family story. But for me, there’s a difficulty in getting into that because these are ultimately characters. We do not. So, yep. To give a big picture summary of what the episode is about, we are introduced to Dr. Emory Erickson and his daughter Danica.

They come aboard the enterprise ostensibly to run tests of new technology that they plan on developing. It has to do with transport transporter technology that they argue would allow for the development of transporters that could transport. Any distance. It’s, as I was watching, I kept thinking, I’m, I’m surprised that there’s no dropping of terminology, like a spooky action at a distance and things like that.

These are actual right quantum mechanical concepts at play where you can tie to two atoms together, two molecules together, and at whatever distance one will respond to the behavior of the other one. , it’s this kind of idea that is leading current research in the idea of long distance communication and potentially even something like.

Transporter technology. That idea of you would have a thing in one place and be able to do something to it, to put it in that other place. They really don’t get too deep into that. They describe it as the transporter would be able to transport people to vast distances so somebody could step onto a pad on Earth and end up on Vulcan.

There would be no more need for ships. Emory Erickson has actually been lying about what the purpose of this trip is, and he has the enterprise take him to a section of space called the Barons where he is going to run his tests. But what he is actually doing there is trying to recreate an environment where he can get a hold of his son who was a part of a research project 15 years earlier, and his son’s transport.

Malfunction effectively left the transporter signal of his son floating in space. So they’ve returned to this area with Erickson’s Hope. With a new development in design on the transporter, he will be able to recapture the transporter signal that is his son. Reincorporate it and have his son back. He has dedicated his life to this, so, so I mean like, I’m willing to let you just like immediately jump off in whatever kind you have about this, because as I just described it, there is a story here.

Yes. It’s just not the one they told.

Right. Um, I think the biggest problem with this, it’s centered on characters. They’ve, they’ve done this before on enterprise, where they focus on characters we have no connection to as the thrust of the story and the emotional arc just isn’t there cause we don’t know them and they don’t do a good enough job making us resonate with those characters immediately.

It’s possible to do it. They just have never done it. Well, and this is another one of those examples, and for me it felt like this episode was focusing too much on the mystery box aspect. Yeah. Of.

What are they

up to and what is, this is a ghost. What’s going on? Spooky. It’s like they were focusing too much on that, where if you had flipped the script, you think what they could have done still had the whole thing of where Erickson’s lying saying that they’re doing this experiment.

They go there, they do the first test, and they get the sun, they get him back immediately, right? And everybody’s like, what the, what? Like you were lying to us and his, the whole thing. Now the son’s there, but what if he has been. Damaged by how long he’s been there that when he, they rematerialize him. He’s basically flawed and, and slowly dying, and he’s gonna be dead in a matter of 48 hours.

He’ll be dead, right? But he’s there, he’s conscious. And then the episode could have focused on how you emotionally grapple with loss because you could have the father. Who is becomes obsessed with, like, I think we can put him back in the transporter and fix the problem and bring him back out again. Yeah.

And he’s completely focused on trying to fix it so he can save his son. The daughter could be just grieving and just wanting to be with hi, uh, her brother. Yeah. In his final days, the captain who’s best, who, who is supposedly this guy’s best friend, could have spent the entire episode. Doing the same thing with the captain, grieving in his own way.

The daughter grieving in her own way and the father in denial, trying to save the son who’s actively there. And because you do it that way, you’d have the captain as an active participant in the storyline because he’s supposed to have this emotional tie to the family and this guy who is his best friend.

Yeah, you could have some really emotional scenes. how everybody’s grappling with this, this loss. And at the end, like the, the basically people telling the father, you gotta stop what you’re doing and be with your son cause it’s not gonna work. Yeah. It could have been a very emotional episode. It could have been really well executed and you, it, it would’ve been dumping the whole mystery box and you just right up front, it could have been the cold open for God’s sake.

You know, like the first 60 seconds, the episode could have been them, have him show up and everybody like, what’s going on here? That would’ve been far more interesting to me. But the way they executed this, it was. Boring. Yeah. We’ve seen it before like, like star Trek examine this in other series where there’s this transporter accident.

You got the one with Will Riker, where we have this clone, and then you have other ones where people end up in some kind of fugue state. Other people that are like, remember the one where’s like a, he starts seeing, I think it’s Barkley starts seeing things that aren’t there and people think it’s just him kind of losing his mind.

But it actually was something in the transporter stream that he came across that was a life form. They’ve explored the transporters so many different ways. Yeah, they have and because. They were just treading on existing ground and telling it in the most boring way they could have told it. Yeah. It was just,

And nothing burger.

I, I just, I, I sometimes put Pluto on Pluto tv on in the background when I’m cooking, washing the dishes, doing odd things around the house. And I’ve been happy. They had, have had for a long time a Star Trek channel. It’s been largely connected entirely to gen, so lots of that. But recently they’ve introduced the original series.

onto the star Trek channel. Mm-hmm. and I just recently happened to catch the episode where Kirk gets duplicated by the transporter and there’s a severing of the good side and the selfish evil side, and they’re both running around the ship and the good Kirk is trying to figure out what’s going on.

While the evil Kirk is acting on every evil manifestation. His prime will drive. So he effectively sexually assaults Yeoman Rand. He’s getting drunk, he’s picking fights, he’s doing all that kind of stuff. It was a 1960s TV show. It’s a lot of scenery, chewing. It’s, but it’s so much more compelling because ultimately, mm-hmm.

The episode revolves around Spock saying like, we have an opportunity here to see what it is that makes a truly great captain. Is it the logical, calm, empathic side? We’re finding that it’s not. He’s becoming indecisive. We see this other side of Kirk that is the drive to be great. The drive to do the right thing and and doing it for his own needs is what helps make a great captain.

That episode, as old as it is, and in some ways as corny as it is, is so much more sophisticated than this. And I liked what you suggested as far as like you, if you just completely flipped it upside down and said they get him back in the first five minutes. This episode has the opener with the captain’s description of star eight, blah, blah, blah, blah, V’Las.

Because we’re doing this special test, we’ve had to run at low power, and that was the entirety of the captain. Starlog and I was just like, yep. What, what? Like, that is such a footnote. That is such a, a footnote to an episode. I’m like, they actually took the time to have Scott Bakula record that line, and I couldn’t help but wonder if what they were doing was using that as a way of explaining something in the show that it, in editing, they were like, why is this episode so.

because yeah, it is a dark episode and it almost felt like they inadvertently felt like, oh, we need to kind of explain why everything looks like it’s dark. It just seemed so silly, right, to have that included at the beginning. You mentioned the emotional connection that we don’t have with characters we’re never seeing for the first time.

It speaks volumes that this episode, the only scenes that stand up as being like, Ooh, this is interesting, are between trip and. They, yep. It’s literally no more than probably five minutes worth of the episode, but the two of them basically having a conversation around to Paul, you’ve been through some shit recently.

Things have really changed. But Trip is basically saying, you know, I’m here for you. And he seems to be really leaving a door open as far as like what that might mean and like, He’s basically saying, I’ve had time to process a lot of stuff, and I’m ready to be here, so if you need to be here with me, let me know.

Very nice moments. Really, really well acted, well constructed, but the rest of the episode. Just leaves you scratching your head as to why am I supposed to be rooting for or against these people, especially when, because they are so one-dimensional. Dr. Emory Erickson comes across as, I mean, he’s done terrible things to his family.

Oh yeah. And it is left largely unexplored and with no sense of any kind of ownership of that. His daughter has completely given up any semblance of her own life in order. Do what I mean, what is she doing for her father? Yeah, she’s literally doing nothing but nursing care For him, it is unclear as to why that is the case.

She couldn’t be a scientist in her own regard. Like what if she had taken over leadership on this and he was effectively advising her and she was the one committed to like, I gotta get my brother back, and if it had been, I gotta get my brother back because my dad screwed up. That could have been a dynamic between the two of them.

That would’ve been more interesting than what we. It could have been, I gotta get my brother back. What if she succeeds in getting him back? And then you have the two days as Matt just proposed of the son slowly dying. And what if she’s the one who can’t let go? What if the father is ready to do it? And she blames him for that?

You lost him once and now you’re ready to give him up again. And that’s a good idea. Cause then you could have the brother basically

saying to the. You know, don’t let dad lose two children in this. Yeah. You know, you could have this whole argument. Yeah. Where they’re trying to the, the father’s having a culpa saying, yes, I screwed up.

Please. I don’t wanna lose you two. Yeah. You could have the son helping to try to bridge that gap to bring the two of them back together. It’s like, There was so much drama that could have been had and they just passed it all up.

You could have had it in this moment where the father could have been saying, why do you think I’ve been willing to assist you on this fool’s errand this much time?

It’s because I saw you were digging a hole for yourself, and I wanted to stay in your life. I already lost my son, but I wanted to stay in your life. And I never thought that we would reach a point where you would. Capture him the way you did. It’s, I thought it was an impossibility, but I needed to be near you because you’re my only child left.

You could have had all sorts of moments like that.

He could. He could have been saying things like, you’ve surpassed even my ability Yes. In what I did. Yeah. Don’t waste it. Yeah. Don’t repeat the, the same problems I created and you could’ve had them

mirroring, had wonderful moments. You could have had the mirroring then where Archer is looking at this man as a second father and saying like, I tried to do everything I did to live up to my.

And have him say to Archer like, you’ve surpassed your father in the same way that my daughter surpassed me. You’re standing on our shoulders, but you’re reaching further than we ever could have. There are so many options for really compelling storytelling. It revolves though this episode around the ghost-like thing that is showing up.

Um, , it’s an enticing image. The idea of this, this in phase, in transporter phase being kind of wandering through the ship and causing damage as it goes, it’s not, it’s not terrible, but it didn’t, it shouldn’t have been the focus, it’s ability to kill one person in the way that they did and damage to Paul in the way that it did.

If our suggested. Revision of how to reverse the story and make it about like, okay, you’ve done it. Now what do you do with the fact that this person is dying? If, if we had done that, it would’ve also resolved. For me, the biggest problem of this episode, which is Archer, is making decisions that make no sense, zero sense?

No. And there is attempts in the writing. The writing is actually kind of sharp in the argument scenes and the. . The acting is really pretty well done as far as like people keeping themselves in control, but they’re very upset with one another. But there was no logical reason why Archer would say, oh, I just lost a crewman, and I just found out this guy’s been lying to me,

So yeah, let’s stay here and keep doing this test. It didn’t make any sense, and I just sat there looking at the screen thinking it’s both boring and up. In this weird , in this weird, weird way, like I both boldly upset, don’t care, and I’m angry at Archer and all these characters, a trip being the only one who seems to be behaving realistically in, and some of the stuff that comes out the, the dialogue is sometimes charming, Tripp and Emory arguing about who’s going to put something into the transporter and tripp’s like, this is my ship.

and Emory’s like it’s my advice and the two of them having this little ownership contest. I thought that that was nice. I understood why Tripp would go to the captain and say like, we gotta get this ship outta here. This isn’t good. What’s happening? That made sense. Archer’s response did not, but I kept waiting for Taul to show up and make a compelling argument for everything that’s happen.

why are we here? Like, I kept waiting for that shoe to drop. It never did. It was apparently just trip was gonna be the one making that argument. So. Well, yeah, go ahead.

I was just gonna say, beyond just the, the, I wanna bring up some nice things I enjoyed, which were, you brought up the Chipol trip stuff. You brought up the, some of the dialogue was really nice between some of the characters.

Mm-hmm. , the science geek of me enjoyed some of the . It wasn’t hand wav. , but they didn’t spend time doing techno babble. But I loved the offhanded remarks that were sprinkled throughout to explain some of the science that was happening. Yeah. Of like the Barron. . It’s like every time they showed it, there was no stars.

It’s like, how is that even possible? And they made this offhanded remark about like, this section of space has this curved space anomaly. Yeah. That makes it warp light so that there’s no light in here. And it was like, that’s kind of cool. Yeah. It’s like they didn’t spend a lot of time explaining it. It was this one sentence offhanded thing.

It was like, oh, that’s neat. And then the comment about how the transporter malfunctioned was neat. The like all, all of like the little sciencey elements they dropped even. Um, Eric, what was his name? Erickson. Yeah. Emory Erickson. Emery Erickson when he was describing the debate around transporters. Yeah.

It was like they were basically address. , all of the fan fiction and the fans having debates about how transporters would actually work and like the whole comment about like the metaphysical aspects at the other side. Yeah. Or is it a clone of you? It’s like, I love the fact that that was answered in like there was like a two sentence like throwaway line that brought that up and it was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Whatever. . Yeah. I love that. It was just those, those little sciencey kind of like fan servicey aspect of it. Yeah. I really enjoyed. Did not, the, the glue they decided to put together for a story that held all thoses together just was not there. But they had pieces that could have turned into a great episode.

Yeah. But it just did, they just didn’t know how to pull

together. Yeah. And it, it ultimately, everything you’re describing could have. Been in our suggested revision. Yeah. And could have even been enhanced like you Yep. Described what if they got a hold of him in the first few minutes. What if the gist of the episode is that the daughter, if, if you go with my version of like her being the lead scientist on.

Give her some, some, uh, proactive elements. What if the research shows that this is a transporter stream that has effectively been able to duplicate itself and is kind of like running rings around this section of space? And she argues I pulled him out. Once I can pull him out again, I can pull another one of him because he is duplicated and then it becomes, What are you talking about?

Like this is him or this is not him. And then you get into that metaphysical issue of what does it all mean to be taken apart and put back together in this way? Would she in fact be taking the same person twice or is what she’s doing just dipping into another degraded aspect of the same individual?

Right. All of that could have been very science informed sci-fi that would’ve felt really, really compelling and really challenging and created some interesting moments, and you could have then also avoided Archer making all sorts of really, really stupid choices as far as like, yeah, things here are killing my people, but I’m fine with that.

This is family. Yeah. Like he’s never done that before. Why would he suddenly do it now? And this. Ultimately the Fast in the Frees movie. Yeah, it’s ultimately, it’s been like four seasons of showing Archer start off as a test pilot and end up being a really strong captain. And this episode felt like a huge step back.

So as far as my experience with Alyssa, um, it’s worth watching just for the DePaul trip sections, and it’s worth seeing it just for. Putting the capstone on the pin syndrome, the stuff with flocks, flocks, talking with with DePaul about her experience and her changes. Flox is always just like everybody’s spaceship dad.

He’s just like, people stop. And he is just like, well, lemme give you a valuable life lesson before you head off. And I also liked it just for the small little reference to the Kir’Shara, which is what Yeah, to Paul is reading. And Tripp makes the reference of like, That’s, you’ve only been consuming that.

That can’t be the entirety of your, of your day now. You can’t make this change in biblical understanding of what it means to be Vulcan, consume all of your time. You need to also take time to digest it. I really like that, and that I wish had been more of the episode. Mm-hmm. . So to all of the listeners or our viewers here on YouTube, let us know, do you agree that this episode just kind of landed flat?

Do you think that there was a story here that could have been unearthed, or do you think that this should have just been beamed up and never seen again? Let us know in the comments as usual, before we sign off. Matt, what do you have coming up on your main channel that you wanted to let our listeners and viewers know?

Oh, this latest video that’s

out is about kind of the top five battery energy storage technologies to keep an eye on. It’s, I get, I put so many battery videos out over the past year that I get a lot of questions of like, How do these all relate to each other? So I put together a video about how they all relate to each other and kind of like how, why I’m keeping my eye on certain ones.

Um, I just wanted to kind of earmark that and kind of give a, a central kind of like thesis around all the

different tech. Yeah. Uh, so that’s what’s out right now. Okay. I always enjoy the battery videos cuz I, I get a big charge out of all of them. Yeah. That’s for me. You can check out my website sean Ferrell dot com.

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