Demons

Demons

review by persianmouse

Well, yet again, due to people’s never-ending thirst to see grown men hit tiny balls with sticks (Damn you George Steinbrenner, damn you all to Hell!!), and my furthering inability to correctly set my VCR on Saturday evenings, and inadvertently record some vaguely unrealistic Spanish soap opera/game show/midget in a bear suit instead of Star Trek (I’m beginning to suspect that my VCR has a secret vendetta against me, I think it’s still mad about the time I yelled to it that it was about as useful as a Beta-max), I didn’t get to see this episode until Sunday night. And I find it more than a little amusing that I watched this episode on Mother’s day.

I really liked this episode. Oh Manny, I love you, but it does indeed hurt that the show is getting this good, just before the end. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, or why it was going on, most of the time, but I have no doubt that Manny will let us know next week.

So we start out with Robocop walking swiftly down a hallway talking to Standard-Toady Guy (yeah, like HE’S not gonna die). They talk cryptically and the conversation ends cryptically above a cryptic baby, with cryptic, and Fucking HUGE cgi Vulcan ears. She’s cute as hell. And I know, I just know (instinctively, not spoiler-wise) that she’s gonna die. Thanks Manny! Kill all the innocents, why don’t you. Jerk. Why do I love you so?

ANY-whoozle, we get back to Earth, San Francisco to be precise, and no, the San Francisco bridge isn’t getting bombed. The Mayor of Sunnydale is up there, apparently he got elected Earth’s leader. Right. Sure. Uh-Huh. What, was it his charisma? No, it was the hanging chads wasn’t it. It’s always about the hanging chads. Anyway, apparently he is boring in every language and culture, cause all the aliens at the round table are picking their fingernails and balancing their checkbooks. And did anyone else notice that mural behind him? Didn’t it look like a mural of the Earth with a laser beam of death exploding it? I think it was. Nice. Apocalyptic-sheik.

Anyway, Trip is the only one with the balls to call the guy what he is, a boring glory-hounding git. And he gets punished for it, by Archer (natural politician). Silly Trip, learn to eat shit. Anyway, there’s some genial milling about, and the Mayor of Sunnydale calls Archer and the ENT crew heroes, and at least Archer and Trip have the decency to look like they’ve swallowed lemons. Yes, okay we get it, Archer is a great big hero man, who gets first-born sons and second-rate elementary schools named after him, good, great, NEXT! The Mayor wanders off to do some more genial milling about, and we see SubtleVulcanDig!T’pol give a subtle Vulcan dig to Archer, which completely goes over his head. Idiot.

Anyway, this whole little Kum-Bai-Yah gets ruined when some woman stumbles in, gives T’pol a vial with a hair in it, says ‘they’re going to kill her’ and then dies. Doesn’t it always. By the way, Starfleet security, tight as a drum.

We end up back in sickbay, where T’pol reveals Susan Korri had emotional problems, and maybe it was a suicide. No sweetie, it wasn’t, sorry. Phlox then takes for-EVER to tell us that the hair belongs to a baby, Trip and T’pol’s baby (AGAIN!! Geez, you think with all their children these two keep running into, you figure maybe they’d have sex more than once). And seriously Phlox, no need to break the news to TnT separately, give them some privacy, just tell everybody all at once, no sense of decency, I swear to god.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, Travis gets some lines, and some backstory. He seems to have had a fling with this Lindsey Lohan-looking reporter lady, who is also a temporal agent cause she managed to travel forward a few hundred years and swipe one of those Vorta headpieces. Hey Prop Department! They cancelled your show! You don’t have to try and save money by reusing old props, go one build some new ones. Anyway, Go Travis. He’ll nail her later on (In Shuttlepod 1! Or the Pod o’Love, if you will. If the Shuttlepods a-rockin’, well, check the stabilizers, but if it’s not them, then don’t come a-knockin’), but she’ll turn out to be working for Terra Prime (aka The Ku Klux Klan, with slightly relaxed membership standards). Normally, I’d be pissed at having so much time dedicated to a boring, perfunctory romance, taking time away from the things I actually care about, but I just can’t be mad at Travis for finally getting a story. Poor baby. Oh, yeah, and The Mayor of Sunnydale used to be a member of Terra Prime, but that was just a youthful indiscretion. Sure, m’kay, if ya believe that, I’ve gotta bridge outside I’d like to sell you. Of course he hates aliens and is a big ole xenophobe, didn’t you see him try to bore all those ambassadors to death?

Anyway, back to Robocop. Seems he and his little Rainbow Coalition of Bigotry are based on a lunar colony. They are Mooninites, and they are from the Moon, sucka! He has a little chat with Standard Toady Guy, bitching about how Susan Korri started to get a conscience and didn’t want to kill babies, c’mon, who doesn’t want to kill babies? Toady then dies like Kirk, i.e. under some rocks. He then has a little chat with the Pop Star Seal, talking about how great it is to be an insane, xenophobic baby-killing zealot. Seal agrees, and doesn’t die. Robocop than takes some of his crazy pills, and goes back to watching ‘Home Movies with Hitler and Eichmann’.

We then go back to TnT, sitting in T’pol quarters, talking about their second-f#cking child. Trip thinks maybe Phlox got into the spores again, and his science may not be exact. T’pol says she knows that it is true, that they have a baby. Why? “Because I’m Vulcan”

…………………… wha..?

Aside from the fact that I don’t quite get it (next week, next week, Manny’s not this shoddy a writer), I still think it was kinda funny. Kinda like a mom saying to her kids “Because I’m your mother that’s why.” Trip then spends the next ten minutes trying not to pee himself with joy over having a kid. He’s only barely successful at it. And Malcolm meets up with an old flame from Section31 to try and find out about T’Baby. Sigghhhhh, what will Malcolm not do for lo..er, friendship. That’s real friendship right there, rejoining a covert government agency with shady goals just to help your best friend get his kid back. Love you, Mal.

Trip and T’pol then don some kick-ass miner’s jumpsuits (okay, shallow moment-even in dirty shapeless olive jumpsuits, they both are still mui calente), and get snuck into the Mooninites mining colony, let’s call it Moon Unit Zappa, okay? And an old friend of Travis’ sneaks them in there; Travis gets to do two things this episode! Manny must really be trying to make up for lost time. However, they fail to realize that this is a supremely stupid idea, and the reason it is a supremely stupid idea is three-fold. 1.) When trying to infiltrate an alien-hostile mining facility, maybe it wouldn’t be the best idea to bring an alien 2.) Maybe the people who have your daughter, and know that you know they have your daughter, just might be looking for you to show up to Moon Unit Zappa, and 3.) Being that your pictures have been all over the news for years, one or two people just might recognize you, sweetie-darlings. But, they were trying to save their baby, so they probably weren’t thinking rationally, and anyway Archer’s the dumbass who okayed their little doomed adventure of doom, so f#ck him.

Amidst all this doom, TnT still manage to have a fabulous scene where they fight over a map. *sigghhhh* They eventually find their way….and then split up. Trip has some fun with Friendly Neighborhood Klansman, and T’pol…..fixes her hair, or something, I don’t know what’s she’s up to. Later on, T’pol gets shot, and spends some quality time with Pop Star Seal, and Trip gets lured away by Friendly Neighborhood Klansman, who SURPRISE! recognizes him and drags him off to Mooninite headquarters. And T’pol’s laying prone all over it, and looking quite murderous. Trip tries to fight with Pop Star Seal. Robocop comes back in, and tells Romeo to back off. Why exactly do all madman with ulterior motives seem to know about the Love that exists between TnT, but they can’t admit it to themselves. It’s just sad, really. Trip demands to see his baby, but Robocop just laughs him off. Robocop does not like aliens, so he had to prove that aliens and human could produce healthy offspring…..wait, that makes no sense! That’s crazy Troll logic!

I think it’s been brought up in this thread about why so many people seem to know about them, but c’mon, think about our media today (which seems to be similar to ENT-era media). This is just the kind of story they would eat up, and flog to death. I would think any reporter worth their salt should be able to dig this story up. I’m sure other people on the ship must have talked, even if it was only to their families. Loose lips, you know. And even if nobody talked, assumptions could be made when Trip went to Vulcan, which wouldn’t be too hard to find out. And if their missions were declassified, the reporters would know all about Lorian, which would inevitably stoke the fires very muchly.

And a side note about the whole Romeo-and-Juliet-star-crossed-lovers thing in general. No offense to the Bard, but it’s been done to death, literally. It’s standard, it’s unimaginative, and it’s pat, par-for-the-course, expected. Do you know why? Because it’s very easy to write a story where everybody dies in the end, or people who are perfect for each other (even if it’s imperfect) don’t end up together, because it’s very neat story, very romantic that tragic love is. And yes it is soooo tragically romantic, but I am really getting quite sick of it. Done to death. I’m tired of it, it’s so played out, and it’s hard to make it work without making it seem like a plot device. You know what I’d like to see? People who love each other ending up together, buying a house and picking out china, raising kids and zipping up the backs of dresses. People living their lives together, even when it’s a little boring, even when it’s all Cheetos and house slippers. But you don’t see that, because it’s much harder to write something that’s more realistic, and make it not boring. It can be done, but it’s hard, it’s complicated, and it’s a little messy. There is a phrase called ‘Hollywood Ending’, where it’s an ending like an old movie script ending, where everybody ends up happy as the music swells and the curtains close. But lately, Hollywood has fallen in lust with unhappy endings, where our lovers are tragically separated through death, or other sundry reasons, just because. For flaccid, dramatically arbitrary reasons. But they’re just as stupid as the old ridiculously happy endings, because they’re both neat little bows on the end of a film. But what about the mostly happy ending? You know, the kind people actually have. Maybe not ‘and they all lived happily ever after.’ but how about ‘and they all lived.’ How’s that, how does that taste.

Okay, back to the show. Where the hell was I? Oh yeah, the Mooninites. So Robocop orders Pop Star Seal to take Moon Unit Zappa to Mars. And they do. The scenes with Robocop and Pop Star Seal are filled with more vague homoeroticism than an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. “Good flying, Daniel *patpatpat*” “Oh, you haven’t seen anything, yet.” God, you’d think Star Trek would’ve had one openly gay character by now, with all this underlying homosexuality. So, anyway, the Mooninites are on Mars. Looks like there is a big, destructive laser completely unguarded up there, because when you have a big, destructive laser, you want to leave it completely exposed, with no security precautions at all. Wait, do you hear that? Yep, that the sound of all the Reptilian Xindi smacking themselves. Star Fleet security, like a drum. No wonder the red shirts always get killed. The Mooninties then shoot the Moon! That’s right, they shoot the f#cking Moon! With a big old laser beam! Hey, do you think they’ll name that new crater after Robocop?

Robocop then broadcasts his little hate speech over the airways, right in primetime, too, interrupting the 163rd-season of Friends. He is surrounded by the Rainbow Coalition of Bigotry, why he’s got Pop Star Seal, and Friendly Neighborhood Klansman. There’s also Genghis Khan, Old Man River, Bad-Dye-Job-Methadone-Clinic-Mom, and Greasy Unsavory Fellow. He tells all aliens to skedaddle, or he’ll give them corrective eye surgery, by way of his big giant laser, and he has no malpractice insurance, dun-dun-DUN!!

You know, the episodes that are kinda good are a lot harder to mock.

Oh, and don’t get even get me started on the trailer for next week, it was all TaTV, no Terra Prime! I’m sorry, but I just don’t care about Will “I’ve been eating too many replicated tacos” Riker, and Microdermabrasion Troi! I care about the E-N-T-E-R-P-R-I-S-E crew. No, not that Enterprise, the NX-01, the one the shows about, stupid trailer guy. I think I am actually going to have to watch it, just to mock it properly, but I’m not watching it Friday. I’ll tape it, and watch it at some other time, after heavy sedation. Which, coincidently, is the same way they wrote it.

comments