“Shuttlepod One”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by David Livingston
Season 1, Episode 16
Production episode 016
Original air date: February 13, 2002
Date: November 9, 2151
Captain’s star log. Tucker and Reed are in Shuttlepod 1 on a survey mission, but their sensors and communications go out, so they head back early for their rendezvous with Enterprise, which is on a survey mission of its own. However, when they arrive, they find wreckage on one of the asteroids, some of which has Enterprise’s markings.
Unfortunately, they can’t find the black box without sensors, and they can’t call for help with no communications, and they can’t find any evidence of escape pods. They assume that Enterprise crashed with all hands lost. They only have about ten days’ worth of air left, and it’ll take a lot longer than ten days to get to the nearest subspace amplifier. Tucker, however, wants to try everything he can to get rescued, so they toast their deceased shipmates and set a course for Echo Three.
However, their shipmates aren’t deceased! They rescued a ship full of Tesnians whose ship malfunctioned, crashed into Enterprise, and was destroyed. Most of the debris on the asteroid is that ship, but they also trashed one of the NX-01’s launch bays, which accounts for the Enterprise markings they found.
Sato has managed to communicate with the Tesnians, who are devastated, but grateful. Archer is taking them home, though he and T’Pol pause to survey the damage to the launch bay. The captain figures they’ll be back in plenty of time to rendezvous with the shuttle, ha ha ha.
Back on the shuttle, Reed has been recording final letters to his family and to several of his ex-girlfriends. Tucker quickly gets to the end of his rope, partly because there are so many ex-girlfriends (who all get pretty much the same letter, with Tucker thinking he should just cut and paste, as it were), partly because he’s trying to sleep.
Reed finally goes to sleep also and dreams of being rescued by Enterprise and being seduced by T’Pol, and awakens to discover that Tucker has fixed the receiver. Unfortunately, they still can’t transmit, but it’s something.
Buy the Book
Until the Last of Me
Suddenly, there’s an impact, and air starts to escape the shuttle. Unable to find any hull breaches, Tucker blows some nitrogen smoke into the shuttle, which enables them to see where the air is venting. It’s coming out of two very tiny holes, which they temporarily close up with their fingers, and then with mashed potatoes from a ration pack, before they can apply sealant at their leisure.
Unfortunately, whatever hit them also trashed a tank. They now have only two days of air left.
T’Pol reports to Archer that Enterprise and the Tesnian ship were definitely hit by micro-singularities. This is a major find, but Archer is more concerned that Tucker and Reed’s shuttle might also have been hit. They set course for the asteroid field.
Tucker can get them another half-day of air if he turns off the heat, and Reed agrees to freeze for an additional twelve hours of breathing. Their conversation devolves into an argument, mostly Tucker complaining about Reed’s pessimism and Reed complaining about Tucker’s unwillingness to be realistic. They decide to get drunk on a bottle of bourbon that Archer left in the shuttle.
Reed finally explains why he’s being such a stick-in-the-mud—it’s not that he wants to die, it’s that he’s sad that they’ve lost Enterprise. He’s always had trouble making friends and getting on with people, but on Enterprise he’d actually found friends.
The pair of them get progressively drunker. Then they receive a communication from Enterprise, which at once brings them joy and sadness—the former because their friends and comrades are alive and well, the latter because they won’t get there for two days, and Tucker and Reed will be dead by then.
Tucker tries to sacrifice himself by going into the airlock and giving Reed more air to breathe, but Reed refuses to allow that, pulling a phase pistol on Tucker. Reed suggests instead that they blow up their impulse engine as a sort-of flare. Tucker is reluctant to do that—it violates the engineer’s code or something—but he finally does so. Which is a good thing, as Enterprise detects it and increases speed so they get there before the shuttle’s air supply goes away. Tucker and Reed are rescued and all’s right with the world.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Micro-singularities are itty-bitty black holes that can play merry hell with a ship by poking tiny holes in it, no matter how strong their hulls are.
Also mashed potatoes in ration packs can serve as a temporary seal for a hull breach. Which just figures.
The gazelle speech. There’s a deleted scene in which Tucker goes on about how quickly Archer learns new things. In particular, Tucker is cranky that Tucker himself taught Archer how to scuba dive, and Archer was better than Tucker at many aspects of it almost immediately.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol goes on at some length about how big a scientific discovery the micro-singularities are, and is reminded by Archer that the discovery could be a bad thing for the shuttlepod.
Florida Man. Florida Man Refuses To Accept His Imminent Death Or Being Sober.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox has to rotate the Tesnians through the decon chamber to pump them with boron gas, which they need to survive, and later has to rescue Tucker and Reed from hypothermia.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… Archer pooh-poohs the notion of micro-singularities, calling them a Vulcan myth. Since those micro-singularities nearly got his chief engineer and armory officer killed (not to mention destroyed the Tesnian ship), T’Pol would be fully justified in doing an I-told-you-so dance in his face. But she doesn’t. Alas.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Reed dreams of T’Pol coming onto him, and later waxes rhapsodic about how hot she finds her, especially her nice ass. He’s later surprised when the real T’Pol doesn’t respond the same way the T’Pol of his dreams did when they’re rescued.
Also both Tucker and Reed banged the same server at the 602 Club when they were cadets. Wah-hey!
More on this later… Micro-singularities were previously seen in the twenty-fourth century in DS9’s “Past Tense” and Voyager’s “Message in a Bottle.”
I’ve got faith…
“Is that modulated enough for you?”
“Modulated?”
“The radio! Or is it just the galaxy giggling at us again?”
“It can giggle all it wants, but the galaxy’s not gettin’ any of our bourbon!”
–Reed and Tucker, drunk.
Welcome aboard. There are absolutely no guest stars in this episode. Not even a bit part or an extra or a stunt performer or anything like that. Just the seven folks in the opening credits, one of whom (Anthony Montgomery) is only heard over the intercom and not even seen.
Trivial matters: In his letter to his parents, Reed mentions that they told Archer that they didn’t know he was assigned to Enterprise, which happened in “Silent Enemy.” Apparently he did tell them in a previous letter to them, which upsets Reed a bit…
Ruby, the server at the 602 Club that both Tucker and Reed were involved with, will be seen in the flashbacks in “First Flight.”
The bourbon Tucker and Reed get drunk on is called “Dorton’s Best,” named after the show’s art director Louise Dorton. Tucker says that Archer put it on the shuttle intending it as a gift, but he can’t recall who for—it’s possible he intended to bring it to the reception on Coridan that he and T’Pol never made it to because they were kidnapped in “Shadows of P’Jem.”
It’s been a long road… “Friends don’t shoot each other!” There are a couple of minor flaws in this episode, and they both relate to T’Pol. One is Archer once again being a smug asshole when it comes to Vulcans—and this time it’s skepticism about the existence of micro-singularities, which we already know are real. So our captain is a schmuck the minute he opens his mouth.
The other is the really embarrassing fantasy dream Reed has about T’Pol, which mostly just had me rolling my eyes so much they almost fell out my ears, compounded by the drunken leering over her that Reed did later on.
That aside, however, this is a delightful episode. Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating do a superb Odd Couple riff here, the uptight Brit and the laconic Southerner. From the opening when they riff about their different takes on literature to their drunken ramblings at the end, their double-act is comedy gold. I particularly liked their opening argument, with Reed basically gloating that he’s reading Ulysses by James Joyce and then snottily condemning North Americans’ love of comic books and science fiction. Speaking as a guy who writes science fiction and comic books and who found his attempt to read Ulysses to be an exercise in unnecessary masochism, I’m completely on Tucker’s side of the argument…
My favorite element of the episode, though, is Reed’s revelation that he’s not being fatalistic because he’s inherently pessimistic, it’s partly that he’s a realist and partly that he’s incredibly depressed that he’s lost the one place where he’s fit in. This builds nicely on the work “Silent Enemy” did to show Reed’s very stiff-upper-lippy life and how he isn’t really all that close even to the people he should be closest to—his parents and sister and best friend were all incredibly unhelpful when it came to providing information that family and friends generally have. I like that Reed isn’t really that fatalistic, it’s just a reaction to depression.
One of Enterprise’s better character jobs, and a very strong use of the “bottle episode” format, saving the budget by having no guest stars and existing sets and minimal special effects, to provide a wonderful two-person play.
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido is also reviewing the new episodes of Discovery and Picard that are airing side-by-side in these early weeks of March for Tor.com.
Enterprise adds another to its list of actually good episodes. I agree that the fantasy sequence is probably the biggest flaw, but at least it doesn’t take up too much time. And to be fair, as a general proposition I doubt anyone’s daydreams and idle fancies would make for comfortable viewing for others…
I do wonder why they had to set off the engine to get the Enterprise to hurry up. You’d think they’d do that as soon as they didn’t reply…
I’m surprised that you did’t cut the Warp Factor for the two obviously fake risks — neither Tucker and Reed nor the Enterprise would be in real danger in this kind of show. A kind of 4th wall issue, of course, but then I know I’m sitting beyond it.
Was the improvised sealant really that unrealistic? How hard is it to gum a little hole against one atmosphere pressure, from the inside? And it seems to be official now that Shuttlepods don’t carry space suits. That makes me wonder how many of those the Enterprise has. One per person? Or considerably fewer? Are they tailored?
o.m.: That didn’t bother me because they established instantly that Enterprise wasn’t destroyed, and the value in the stuff on the shuttle wasn’t the worry that they were in danger but what we learned about the characters while they believed themselves to be in such great danger.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
While this is the sort of thing I should let slide for the sake of a story, the danger as presented in this episode is kind of unrealistic. It’s implied that their oxygen is stored as a pressurized gas in tanks… but it makes more sense to store it as water and convert that to oxygen and hydrogen with electrolysis. According to some calculations I just looked up and saw elsewhere: one gallon of water contains 210 moles of H2O, thus 105 moles of oxygen O2. According to the Ideal Gas Law, 105 moles of oxygen at 1 atmosphere and a comfortable 20°C works out to 2,609,671 mL of oxygen. People need 5 to 6 mL of oxygen per minute. So one gallon of water produces enough oxygen to last two people over 150 days.
Given that Dominic Keating apparently played Malcolm Reed as a gay man, I can’t help but think that the awkward, unpleasant wet dream about T’Pol was a deliberate bit of “No Homo.”
Apart from that, I quite liked this episode, which firmly secured Reed and Trip as my favourite characters on the series.
That’s interesting, because I was thinking how much better that scene would have been if his dream had been about a male crew member.
Also, it seems like a microscopic black hole would evaporate almost immediately due to Hawking radiation, so I can’t fault Archer’s skepticism, even if it feels a little arbitrary in universe.
One of the few episodes where I remembered most of it as soon as I saw the title. Darn good Star Trek episode
I’m morally certain this episode provides a masterclass in how to stage a Cold Open (and am especially pleased that the episode plays fair with the audience, without any tedious pretence that NX-01 actually is kaput); I’m also particularly delighted that Mr Tucker seems to be a Superman fan (OF COURSE a Star Trek engineer would enjoy following one of the most optimistic depictions of First Contact in fiction).
I’m also torn between amusement at the perennially stoic Mr Reed being something of a romantic who’s not very good at romances, an acknowledgement that Sub-commander T’Pol is rather outlandishly attractive and the impulse to face-palm at the man’s delusions of grandeur/humour throughout his indulgent fantasy segue & rather drunken salute to the Sub-commander’s charms (Hopefully the crew didn’t check Shuttlepod one’s black box or sober Reed might well perish of embarrassment).
So yes, a jolly good show all ’round, with a few minor failings.
IIRC there was a lot of speculation that Reed was a gay character early on in Season 1, and this episode was explicitly meant (in classic Rick Berman fashion) to assure us all that he was a 100% heterosexual red-blooded…Briton.
Despite that, it’s still only one of four Season 1 episodes I’d call genuinely good. If only B&B learned from this that what the show really needed to do was to focus on character, which could help it to escape the “Voyager’s 8th season” vibe. Alas.
Yeah, another of Trek’s solid character-driven bottle shows, in the tradition of “The Drumhead” (which I know Keith didn’t like as much as I did) and “Duet.” It doesn’t get much more bottle-y than trapping two people in a shuttlepod. (I was going to say it didn’t get any more bottle-y, but then I remembered that it’s been done.)
Aside from the ogling of T’Pol, I think my biggest problem is the use of mashed potatoes as a sealant. If mashed potatoes were exposed to vacuum, I’d think the water in them would sublimate quickly and then you’d only have the powdery or flaky solid portion left, and I don’t think that would work as a pressure seal.
Although the bigger implausibility is that a 22nd-century spacecraft hull wouldn’t have the ability to self-seal a rupture, say, by having a layer of fluid sealant that would seep out into any small puncture. Next season, in “Minefield,” we’ll see that Enterprise EVA suits have that capability (making it even more implausible that Worf’s suit in First Contact didn’t have that capability more than 220 years later). At least, the shuttle should have a more easily accessible patch kit.
@6/Iacomina: Wikipedia claims a primordial black hole larger than 10^11 kg could survive to the present, and that would still be microscopic in size.
As usual I don’t have the scientific acumen to say why I felt that wouldn’t have worked. Thank you.
@10/CLB: Maybe Trip already applied the butter to his potatoes—oils have a higher boiling point, and may survive longer when exposed to vacuum.
@9/Karl Zimmerman: “one of four Season 1 episodes I’d call genuinely good”
I assume that “The Andorian Incident” is one of them, but I’m curious about the others.
I believe this is the episode where Tucker claims he is bad at mathematical word problems. Think on that, supposedly Starfleet’s top warp engine field engineer is bad at word problems. The engineering profession is a long string of word problems, especially one who is involved with the design and development of new equipment. As an engineer by profession, this rubbed me the wrong way.
@13/Crusader75: I dunno, I think professionals in a given field often have a low opinion of their own ability in that field. Thomas Mann once said “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” I sometimes feel that way about my own writing ability.
@13 Crusader75,
CLB’s take on it is how I see it. He may see himself as bad at mathematical world problems within the population of SCE starship chief engineers.
It is like a college champion sprinter seeing himself as sort of sslow against a field comprising of the medalists of each of last five World championships and Olympic Games.
@15/Jonellin: No, you’ve completely missed my point. I wasn’t suggesting that Trip actually is a poor engineer compared to other experts. On the contrary — I meant that the most talented people are usually the ones most critical of their own abilities. After all, the people who are most aware of their own inadequacies and limitations are the ones who strive hardest to make themselves better, while people who assume they’re already perfect never do the hard work to improve. So there’s likely to be an inverse correlation between how good someone actually is and how good they think they are.
@@@@@ 13 – Trip is also the engineer who was totally unaware that ever ship had a null-gravity sweet spot until Mayweather pointed it out in Broken Bow.
@12 Lacomia,
Indeed, The Andorian Incident is one of the four. I also like the episode following this, Fusion (largely down to it being the best T’Pol story of the season), and Shockwave Part 1 (not perfect, but the best the Temporal Cold War ever got, and much better than the terrible Shockwave Part 2).
Pretty good episode. I never warmed to Reed, but he was tolerable this time around.
Regarding fictional characters, and their flaws, to me the least believable is Star Wars’ Grand Admiral Thrawn, brilliant in warfare but clueless about politics. Since war is politics by other means, this always struck me as implausible.
With one exception I can think of later in the series when he bonded with a weapons officer of another species, Reed is terribly awkward with the ladies. In that way he reminds me a bit of Geordi. But his backstory indicates he has all these exes and he and Trip plowed the same field at the 602. And we’ve met his cold family and it’s pretty clear very few people really know who he is. I feel for the guy. There’s a lot going on in his life that he deals with alone.
As someone from the physics world, I can say primordial black holes are still highly speculative, so Archer doubting their existence is perfectly reasonable. And besides Reed’s daydream and the Mashed Potato Fiasco (definitely an eye roll moment) I enjoyed this episode. Quandary: wouldn’t it seem, that as the ship’s chief engineer, Tucker should have realized after several passes that the wreckage wasn’t from Enterprise? Sure, there was the hull plating used to identify it in the first place, but Tucker must be familiar with the superstructure of his own ship! I got the impression from the first episode that he supervised or observed the construction of the ship, so he should have noticed the wreckage wasn’t what it appeared to be at first.
@10: To be fair, they might be instant mashed potatoes which, when they dry back out, tend to create a near impossible to remove cement-like substance. Given my experience trying to get them off ceramic, I can entirely believe they’d cover a smaller-than-pin-sized hole, at least for the short period of time needed to grab the sealant. The starches at that point have — essentially — become glue. And it’s entirely possible Reed would learn this fact by being the guy who finally gave up and just did everyone else’s dishes after they left them in the sink for a week. And then filed the knowledge away in the knowledge that battles aren’t necessarily won by superior battle plans, but the guy who realizes that you can put together a fan belt with a strip off a uniform, or a screwdriver can serve as a linchpin for just long enough. It’s not a good fix, or a pretty fix, but good enough for the emergency.
What’s hilarious to me, is they spent all this effort trying to present Tucker as the mad genius engineer (including this episode’s, “I’m no good at word problems”) but it’s consistently the fussy and precise Reed who pulls out the metaphorical chewing gum and baling wire in the tight situations. Or, mashed potatoes as the case may be.
What hit me dead on in the Neurodivergent/RSD feels was the bit about Enterprise being the first place where Reed felt like he could be accepted just as himself. With family, coworkers and even so-called friends who don’t “get” you and can’t seem to remember the smallest detail about you, finding people who just let you be you and don’t require you to constantly mask to be in their presence is life-changing. So, to have that yanked away and to have to spend the rest of your now very short life with someone who wants forced cheerfulness so they can continue not to face reality… and Dominic Keating did a brilliant job of showing that poit where you just end up done with biting down on your own feelings to spare everybody else’s, and done with being the for their anxieties and discomfort.
Also, as someone who keeps being told they’re “too negative” for wanting to have solutions to likely problems before they crop up instrad of just pretending they could never happen, I also identified hard with fact that when there wasn’t realistic hope, he accepted it, but was the first to seize onto real hope and a prayer when it was there. Most TV at that time didn’t tend to show that: the intrepid heroes never lost hope in the first place. Anyone who did show negativity was worthy of dismissal.
So, yeah, apart from the cringe-worthy bits others have mentioned, this might be one of my favorite episodes of the series. It’s a bottle episode done well, which not all shows can pull off. Yes, we as an audience knew there was little chance of them killing off two main cast members mid-season, this still worked where “Sleeping Dogs” failed. In “Sleeping Dogs” there was no sense of urgency, even with the walls literally closing around them. Here, the characters don’t feel urgency: even the hull-breaches are just shortening the time until the inevitable. So here, the character-revealing conversations make sense. And the writers picked the right pair of actors to center it around — both come across as genuine in the doubts and pain they didn’t initially let show. Tucker’s anger at Reed for not letting him have his happy denial, Reed’s pain and betrayal outlined above. In a season full of mediocre and even bad episodes, this one stands out in that, on the whole, it just works.
“None of them worked out because I could never get very close to them. Never got very close to my family either, not that it’s any business of yours. But with the crew of Enterprise, it was different. I was really starting to feel comfortable with them. And now the only one that’s left thinks I’m the bloody Angel of Death!”
Perfect in its simplicity: Stick the buttoned up Brit and the good old Southern boy in a shuttlepod together and watch them slowly drive each other mad, while bonding in spite of it and getting sillier and sillier at the same time. (Reed threatening to stun Tucker to stop him doing a Captain Oates is played almost entirely for laughs. Contrary to the recap, that’s the last beat before the rescue by the way, after they’ve detonated the engine.) We saw back in “Silent Enemy” that not only do we know very little about Malcolm, so do the crew and just about everyone else in his life. As becomes clear here, that’s just him, but maybe being stuck in deep space is causing him to change. It’s all about the moment where Tucker’s caustic sarcasm and Reed’s withering stuffiness finally cancel each other out.
Reed was said in early character bios to be shy around women, which we saw hints of in “Broken Bow” and “Silent Enemy”. This one establishes he has “known” a few women, although that doesn’t stop him having wet dreams about T’Pol. Tucker’s lack of interest in her and insistence that he’ll live to have a family take on a different dimension in light of the events of the last two seasons.
We find out Enterprise wasn’t destroyed very early on, but let’s face it, no-one was really going to be fooled. Interesting to watch the softer relationship between Archer and T’Pol at work. Again, the words are the same as in earlier episodes, but Archer’s exasperation with Vulcan single-mindedness is played a lot lighter and T’Pol gives him a really severe glare when he shows little interest in her major scientific discovery in favour of more practical matters.
Lieutenant Hess is mentioned as being in charge of engineering during this episode: We never see her in this or any other episode, but it’s notable because it’s rare to hear of anyone ranked higher than ensign who isn’t a main character.
@20, Patton was one of the greatest wartime generals in US history, but he was horrible at politics. He was constantly in trouble with Eisenhower for his political comments about the Soviets and Democrats, among others. Thrawn is entirely plausible given historical reality. (see also Grant, who though militarily brilliant was also one of the worst Presidents in US history)
@14 & @15 – It does not come off as Tucker having a touch of Impostor Syndrome. It sounds more like it is coming from an attitude of “Math is hard, and unfun”. It gives the impression that whoever wrote that cannot wrap their head around what makes someone with the mindset to go into engineering tick, much less someone who is in the top tier of their discipline.
@13/Crusader75,
there are those who think that word problems are a way how mathematics educators obfuscate the beauty of the formulas and to play ‘gotcha’ with hapless students …
“A train leaves Chicago Central station at 12:34 traveling at 45 mph. The stoker shovels 67 lbs. of coal per minute. What is the first name of the engineer?”
Assume that you have finally mastered warp field theory, or something like that, and then you are asked to simplify the beautiful, complicated reality into a model that removes every aspect which doesn’t appear in the text. Not because the aspects are useless irrelevant, but because the rules of the ‘gotcha’ say so. A train moving at a constant speed. A planet that is a point mass without atmosphere. A human breathing 600 liters of oxygen per hour.
@17 – Yes, that was silly, too. It may not be a well known fact to people who have not spent much time shipboard, but Tucker should be the last member of the regular cast who knows nothing about that quirk of their technology.
A great episode, even though it’s not at all original. I have really enjoyed how this show spent the first couple of seasons developing (some of) its characters. I have just started season 3, and it seems like that sort of thing is over.
I think the episode could have been a lot better if they’d waited to reveal what really happened to the Enterprise until at least maybe halfway through the episode. I know it can’t be real suspense because its half way through the first season and all, but the audience could have at least shared the isolation with Reed and Tucker by not knowing what exactly happened. I felt it really took the wind out of the drama to show so quickly that they were fine, and it colors your experience of Reed and Tucker’s feelings because you know they’re overreacting.
More episodes like this showcasing the relatively modern-day crew would have been a bonus to the series.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say Shuttlepod One was a very bold experiment, way out of Brannon Braga’s comfort zone. One doesn’t usually associate Braga with pure character oriented storytelling. Seemingly, that was always Ron Moore’s alley. At first glance, one could think Braga never had the chops for more traditional character interplay, especially given he made his Trek career on high concept action/sci-fi/horror set pieces. Of course, he’s still a TV writer, and anyone who’s watched TNG’s Cause and Effect knows just how capable Braga is in crafting the simplest, but still effective character interactions. The poker scenes on that episode have some of the most natural, casual dialogue of any TNG episode
And that’s why Shuttlepod One is not remotely surprising. Braga made some smart choices in this first season, namely hiring writers outside of the usual Trek box like the Jacquemettons who are more used to writing this type of material, but regardless he always had it in him to craft a two person play like this one.
I don’t know how much of it comes from Rick Berman himself, but TNG’s Brothers was a good example of crafting memorable Data/Soong/Lore scenes that elevated well above Datalore, so he clearly knows how to write a truly juicy scene filled with conflict and resentment.
Almost every Trip/Reed scene sparkles and never once the episode feels dull or slowly paced. A lot of that can be attributed to David Livingston, who’s as good with the bottle shows as he is with the big, splashy ones.
Agreed that Reed’s “infatuation” for T’Pol comes across as forced. But it does make sense if we assume Reed was in fact supposed to be gay. That aside, it’s always nice to learn more about the characters, and trapping both in a Shuttlepod is as old a plot as it was when they did Galileo Seven back in the ’60s. And it’s because it works.
I still haven’t seen this episode but I know of it’s generally positive reputation and I know these characters/actors jibe well together so I’ll probably stream it very soon. But I do clearly recall at the time of its airing the rampant online chatter that this could be the episode that Reed would be revealed as gay – a big first for a main cast member on a Star Trek series. There were few regular gay characters on TV at this time (Six Feet Under on HBO being a notable exception), I was in my early 20’s just a few years after coming out myself, and I was a massive Trek fan. So you can imagine my utter disappointment when Reed turned out to be just another (socially awkward) straight dude and what could have been a big milestone in the progressiveness of the franchise was fumbled.
“Also mashed potatoes in ration packs can serve as a temporary seal for a hull breach. Which just figures.”
Obviously, you’ve never eaten MREs!
Yes, a pretty good episode. I wouldn’t have minded Malcom’s dream but it went on too long to be funny or anything but a dream. However, I like that this character who’s so reserved has a sexual side he keeps under wraps. That he talks about her bum is…. TBH, pretty realistic with a drunk man facing his imminent demise.
I also don’t know if we should condemn the show for Archer’s chauvinism towards Vulcans. He’s flawed. I think there’s a curious thing here with terrans feeling like Vulcans don’t trust them enough and hold them back, but then seeing the exact reasons that would be the case.
It’s funny, we watch TV shows all the time in the 2020s where people are so flawed, and it’s part of why we watch them. So it does rankle me so much that it happens here.