Back at the end of season one, we were introduced to Ensign Peanut Hamper, an exocomp who had joined Starfleet. Voiced by the great Kether Donohue, Peanut Hamper—who chose that name because she said it was mathematically perfect as a name—decided to abandon the Cerritos rather than go on a dangerous mission that would save the ship, preferring to save her own life rather than risk hers.
This backfired, as the U.S.S. Titan showed up a bit later and helped rescue Cerritos, and everyone lived happily ever after—except for Peanut Hamper, who was left floating in space.
This week, we find out what happened to her.
SOME MATHEMATICALLY IMPERFECT SPOILERS AHEAD
I really am having a hard time with this episode. As with Peanut Hamper’s original appearance in “No Small Parts” at the end of season one, I tremendously enjoyed Donohue’s voice work on the character. Donohue—who I first encountered on the F/X show You’re the Worst—is perfect for the self-centered Peanut Hamper.
But the story itself left a bad taste in my mouth in the end. Peanut Hamper manages to cobble together a barely-warp-capable engine over the course of her months in the debris field, and also has a Wilson-in-Cast-Away-style companion in “Sophie,” a piece of equipment she painted a face on so she’d have someone to talk to.
A Drookmani scavenger ship shows up, and Peanut Hamper—after declaring that she’d always be there for Sophie—sacrifices her friend so she can make her escape. In retrospect, this was actually foreshadowing.
Peanut Hamper winds up crash-landing on Areolus, a world populated by owl people (and on which all the animal life has wings) who appear to be a pre-warp society. Peanut Hamper is taken in by the locals, eventually winning them over by using her built-in replicator to provide medicine and technology and other nifty stuff that makes their lives easier. She even winds up marrying one of the locals—the son of the leader—and their sex scenes are just ridiculous. Deliberately so, mind you, but still…
(By the way, the planet name is stumbled over by Boimler later on in an attempt to make a vague joke about the name’s similarity to “aureole,” but it doesn’t really land.)
Shortly after that, we see them living in connubial bliss. Peanut Hamper now has replicated a beak so she can assimilate a bit better, which is adorable.
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Then Peanut Hamper finds out that they’re not pre-warp at all—they’re post-warp. They abandoned technology and buried all their spaceships. They know all about alien life, and had many encounters with them. But they hated what they became when they became part of galactic society, so they abandoned all traces of technology, and returned to a more simplistic society.
Not long after that, the Drookmani show up and try to take the buried ships. Peanut Hamper finally does something she was afraid to do sooner: send a distress call to Starfleet. Since she was technically AWOL, she thought it was better to stay on a primitive planet, but now they need help.
Because it’s their show, the Cerritos answers the distress call. Peanut Hamper claims to realize that she’s got to be a proper Starfleet officer and help save the day, and when she does so, Captain Freeman is willing to take her back into Starfleet—and Peanut Hamper tries very hard to convince her new husband that it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to come with her.
Then the Drookmani captain blows the whole thing, because it turns out that Peanut Hamper is the one who told them about the planet and the underground spaceships, and she set the whole thing up to make herself look heroic and be able to get off this crummy planet in a way that would get her accepted back into Starfleet. (The plan was at least partly messed up by the buried ships still functioning, and the Drookmani take possession of one and blow the shit out of the Cerritos with it.)
On the one hand, the title of the episode is misleading, because this isn’t a redemption story. Peanut Hamper is not remotely redeemed and learns nothing. She was a self-centered twit in “No Small Parts,” and everything she goes through in this episode leads to her remaining a self-centered twit.
On the other hand, her redemption is about as convincing as being mathematically perfect as the name “Peanut Hamper” is.
So what was the point of bringing her back? I mean yes, Donohue’s awesome, and the episode provides a lot of laughs as she snarks her way through integrating into the society of the primitive owl people, but ultimately there’s no forward movement here, and the “twist” at the end—that Peanut Hamper is still a self-centered twit—is more disappointing than anything.
In the end, she winds up in the same storage unit for megalomaniacal computers that we saw at the end of “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie,” with Peanut Hamper placed right next to AGIMUS from that episode. The conclusion of has the two of them laughing maniacally at the beginning of their beautiful friendship, though Peanut Hamper is less than enthused when the other evil computers get in on the maniacal-laughter act. Still, the notion of these two teaming up is way more interesting than anything in the episode prior to it… (AGIMUS, when introduced to her, immediately comments that it’s a mathematically perfect name, because of course he does.)
Random thoughts
- Exocomps were originally established in TNG’s “The Quality of Life,” where their being alive and possibly sentient was fought for by Data. Peanut Hamper appeared in “No Small Parts,” and we see the climax of that episode from her POV floating in space, and then fill in the many months since then. Again, there was no evidence, none, in the TNG episode that exocomps were sentient….
- Besides Donohue, two other actors return to reprise their roles. Jeffrey Combs is back as AGIMUS from “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie” at the very end, and J.G. Hertzler returns as the Drookmani captain from “Terminal Provocations.” This is the third Trek show that has had Hertzler and Combs appear as guests in the same episode, after DS9 (where both had recurring roles, Hertzler as Martok, Combs as both Weyoun and Brunt) and Voyager (“Tsunkatse”).
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges folks to support the Kickstarter for Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups. Co-edited by Keith and New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Maberry, this anthology from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers will feature classic characters banding together: Captain Nemo with Frankenstein’s monster; Ace Harlem with the Conjure-Man; Marian of Sherwood with Annie Oakley; Prospero with Don Quixote; Lydia Bennet with Lord Ruthven; and tons more, including stories by Trek scribes Greg Cox, David Mack, Dayton Ward, Kevin J. Anderson, Rigel Ailur, and Derek Tyler Attico, and TNG screenwriter Diana Dru Botsford. Click here to support it.
