* Episode 5 is the mid-point of a series in which less has happened so far than in a TNG two-parter.
* Ok episode 5 opens with the scene RLM tweeted about with Yichem? Icheb? Igor? Ichabod? getting his eye ripped out.
* Apparently this was a recurring character on Voyager but I'm up to the beginning of season 6 and he hasn't appeared yet.
* I'm mostly desensitized to violence and gore in entertainment media but imagine somebody who deliberately passed on all those terrible torture porn movies in the 2000s sitting down to watch the new Star Trek series that's allegedly about an elderly man finding meaning in the twilight of his life and you get some guy awake and screaming as his eye is pulled out of his skull on screen and someone is standing there examining it while it's still connected by the optic nerve and then they snip through the tubes and toss this human eyeball into a little dish and there's a closeup of this dude's bloody gaping eye socket while he's still screaming the whole time and there's not even any dramatic or narrative point to it, you just get rickrolled with almost comically gruesome gore and brutality and then the episode proceeds without a hitch.
* i love star trek!!!
* Seven of Nine burst into the room and shoots the people experimenting on Ichor but he's like "Seven it hurts too much, please kill me!" and she sadly shoots him in the heart with her phaser.
* We don't see anything wrong with him besides his missing eye but maybe he has some fatal internal injury or something.
* But Seven just got there so she should know as much as we do about what's wrong with him.
* Also this is Star Trek where they have miracle technology that can heal like literally any injury.
* So shooting him in the heart without even running a tricorder over him to see what was wrong with him seems a little extreme.
* Maybe all he needed was an eyepatch and he would have been fine.
* Anyway she recounts all this to Picard and his crew and reveals that Ishmael was the victim of a lady crime boss named Bejazzle, who captures ex-Borg's and cuts out their Borg technology without any anesthetic, because she is Evil.
* It's not explained what exactly she does with the Borg technology, and it seems like not sedating your victims before cutting them up would just make it harder for you, but this is a show for dummies.
* It turns out that Seven and Picard have a common enemy because Bejazzle has also captured Bruce Maddox and is trying to sell him to the Jacques-Vash.
* Bruce Maddox if you remember was the antagonist in Measure of a Man who wanted to use Data's brain to create an army of android slaves, and in this show he is responsible for the creation of the organic android twins Soji and Dahj Asha (these fucking shit names).
* They come up with a plan to have Picard pose as an evil French pirate and sell Seven of Nine to Bejazzle.
* Patrick Stewart dons an eyepatch and a ridiculous French accent while Rios dresses like a pimp.
* Agnes Gerardi stays aboard the ship to man the transporter and starts having a panic attack because she's never operated one before, despite being the galaxy's foremost expert on androids.
* I guess the two aren't necessarily related.
* While this nonsense is going on, Raffi goes off to find her son, who is elsewhere on the planet with his pregnant Vulcan (Romulan?) wife and doesn't look more than a decade younger than his "mother."
* Until their relationship was established several minutes into this interminable scene, I assumed they were supposed to be lovers.
* Raffi explains that she's "clean" now, but it's never mentioned what kind of drug she was formerly addicted to, or how chemical addiction is even still possible in Star Trek.
* I'm pretty sure Dr. Crusher could just give you a hypospray and cure that shit in five seconds.
* "Do you know how much it sucked having you as a mom?" Son asks.
* This is very Star Trek dialogue.
* Not at all jarring to hear people from 500 years in the future saying things "suck" and calling one another "dude."
* Son reveals that in addition to being an addict Raffi was also apparently an obsessive conspiracy nut who watched Alex Jones and believed that the android attack on Mars was an inside job.
* She quit space heroin and traveled all this way just to reconnect with her son but she can't keep a lid on her crazy for five minutes and starts ranting about how jet fuel can't melt steel beams.
* Son kicks her out and that's the end of this subplot.
* ...Hopefully.
* Picard delivers Seven to Bejazzle who taunts her about Itchy's death because she is Evil and Seven busts out of her trick handcuffs and grabs Bejazzle by the throat and Picard realizes "Oh no, you never cared about helping us find Bruce Maddox, you were just in this for revenge!"
* He gives her the lamest Picard speech ever about how killing is wrong but Seven relents and they get Bruce Maddox and have Agnes beam them back to the ship.
* An earlier scene revealed that Maddox and Agnes are lovers, as conveyed by having Agnes longingly watch a holo-recording of the two of them baking cookies together.
* Maddox is suffering from exposure and being worked over by Bejazzle's thugs so they have Agnes go with him to sickbay to get patched up.
* Picard is like thanks for your help, Seven, is there anything we can do for you? and Seven says let me borrow these two comically oversized phaser rifles, they might come in handy some day, so Picard gives her the guns and she leaves.
* But she just beams herself right back into Bejazzle's stronghold! Twist!
* "That senile old fool Picard thinks there's still a place for mercy in this galaxy," she says, "but really everything is hate and violent murder. Thanks, Trump."
* She shoots Bejazzle and all her guards and walks out like a Strong Female Character.
* Back in sickbay, Maddox and Agnes reunite. Despite being weak from his injuries, Maddox is excited to tell her about Soji and Douche and how their hard work at android science has finally paid off.
* But Agnes reveals herself to be a secret asshole, tearfully apologizing to Maddox but claiming she has no choice as she turns off the sickbay medical equipment.
* The evil Starfleet Commodore Karen O revealed to her a horrible secret, presumably in such a convincing and inarguable way that Agnes has to murder the man she loves.
* I'm sure.
* The EMH appears and is like "What's going on here! This man is dying!" but Agnes says "Deactivate EMH" and he disappears.
* We've seen previously that he's able to move about the ship at will so this might be a good time for him to materialize on the bridge and warn someone that there's a murder taking place but I guess saying "deactivate EMH" just overrides all his programming.
* Although Maddox's main ailment was apparently just having been beaten up by thugs, for some reason turning off the sickbay equipment makes every vein in his face bulge out and turn black and the capillaries in his eyes burst and he starts seizing and gasping out his last breath for several agonizing minutes while Agnes watches through tears.
* Jesus lady just put a pillow over his face or something.
* You can tell she really loved him because she murdered him on the word of a stranger win the most drawn out and painful way possible.
* The episode began with the gruesome death of a minor character from classic Trek and ended the same way.
* It's like poetry, it rhymes, every stanza sort of rhymes with the last one.
* Hopefully it'll work.
No comments:
Post a Comment