Sunday, January 1, 2012

And what a thing it spawned

TNG: The Mind's Eye
Season 3, Episode 24, #198
Aired 5/27/91, Dated 44885.5
Teleplay by Rene Echevarria, Story by Ken Schafer and Rene Echevarria
Directed by David Livingston

This is Trek's first attempt at a story arc. See, there's this mystery woman in the shadows on the Romulan ship, who captures Geordi and brainwashes him, which is all fine and dandy, but let's go back to the mystery woman in the shadows. See, she's a bad bad person, you can tell, but you don't know who she is until later. That's really a fairly advanced concept for poor Star Trek. Up until that point the closest they'd gotten to a story arc was having the pink claymation alien dudes send a signal that never got answered because the concept was converted into the Borg.

Zero is the Number of our Heartbeats

Enterprise: Zero Hour
#076, Season 3, Episode 24, aired 5/26/04, dated 2/14/2154
Written by  Rick Berman and Brannon Braga
Directed by Allan Kroeker

So this is the one that lost them the gig. Things were looking up. We were finally rid of the Xindi crapola and the stupid Expanse vanished, which solved the "why didn't we ever hear of the Expanse" stuff and also made the whole "T'Pol's addicted to emotions" thing a thing of the past, and also we dealt with the spheres and it is over, and let me tell you at this point I didn't care. I didn't care that there was a giant hole down Florida that no one had ever mentioned before, and that if they'd just blamed it on the Romulans and started a war with them and also picked up some nuclear weapons instead of photonic torpedoes it would have been okay, it would have meshed with "Balance of Terror", but it was over, and sealed and done and done in an okay way, this Coto guy was working out all right, and then it happened. The thing that lost them the gig.

The Nazis were aliens.

In the words of Gunn, "You've lost the mission, Bro."