Temporal Culture War
A remembrance of the non-canonical 9/11 West Wing episode
[Music] Hello and welcome to Temporal Culture War, where we dig into what the hell was going on in America in the early 2000s while we watch one of television history's most aligned properties Star Trek Enterprise. I'm Clayton Ashley and I'm Matty Lipchansky. This week we're on to episode four of season one of Enterprise, episode Strange New World. We're going to talk about the week of October 4th to about October 10th 2001. Is there anything you're thinking right off the top? No, I think it's very funny that they titled an episode Strange New World this exactly right at the right at the top. And I'll say this I think it kind of should have been the second or the first episode after the premiere but anyway. Oh, for sure. The top of the the Wikipedia and also I'm sure memory alpha is has to disambiguation not to be confused with a much better TV show that came later. Yeah please don't please do not confuse us with the good show. But in the world of entertainment I think I want to get started here with movies because I want to just bring up that I think the first time I relied on box office mojo I'm not sure if that's also what you relied on. Oh yeah. But because I noticed something when I was just kind of also googling around to get an idea of some things and that was that we had missed training day which apparently ended up being the biggest movie of October. Oh, or at least I was missing it when I was looking on box office mojo. I don't know if they they always have the mojo or if something about their the way they track daily versus weekly or theater's opening. But this time I'm just saying I used the numbers.com. Okay. And yeah, their top movie training day with Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke. His Denzel Washington ever made a bad movie. Um you know not one that I've seen. Yeah. It's a very consistent man. Denzel Washington well he's very good in everything so it's hard to it becomes a possibly a chicken in the egg situation. No I've never seen I've actually never seen training day. Yeah I hadn't either but I was like I'll bet it's good because I can't think of one he said that's bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean people seem to like that film a lot. That's a Fuqua? Is that a Fuqua? Is that a director? Yeah he's the director. You know that he also did all the equalizer movies with Denzel is what I'm from. Okay. And also the movie's the Olympus has fallen movie which is quite bad but. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't remember which White House being attacked movie I saw. You saw there's White House down with Chang Tatum and there's Olympus has fallen with Gerard Butler. But I should have seen that one with Denzel Washington. I don't know if Denzel's in it. Oh sorry no the director sorry the director. Yeah I was like wait a minute I just contradict myself he can't be in a bad movie. That's true possible. Yeah and that one I believe yeah Aaron Eckhart is the president and Morgan Freeman also in that movie. Yeah no Denzel. But uh yeah Training Day was as most of the top what stuff we've already talked about. Yeah you got our Jurassic parks and and American pies but we have bandits with Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton. Is that a real movie that exists? So it's the trailer does a great job of selling it. I definitely want to watch it now. It's about bank robbers Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis. They're bank robbers they're they do a good job and then I think based on the trailer they accidentally kidnap Kate Blanchett and then it's a romantic triangle as well as a comedy heist movie. Gotcha. Really well reviewed at the time. Bruce Willis has a ponytail which is I think super mega important to note at least on my end. I think he got so typecast is the hard-ass action guy that this this is from his era when he was still doing things that were a lot sillier. Yeah he's just like right after he'd done the he'd done the whole nine yards the year previous. Another very goofy sort of like crime comedy. This is a crime movie with a PT Cruiser in it so you know it's really good. They're really dating it well. Yeah get away car PT Cruiser. That would be like an excellent joke for a movie now trying to really place itself in this era. Yeah like yeah. So I love seeing it back then I even thought it was a silly silly car and it was for a silly time. The other one stood out to me. Corky Romano. Corky Romano. Is that the one where Chris Catan plays a mobster's son? Yes. Tremendous. I just want to read this by James Bertinelli. Rated the film a half star out of four. It only takes about three minutes of running time to realize that you have wasted your money. The question is whether you have the stamina to endure all eight minutes. I survived Corky t-shirts should be given out to everyone who stays until the incredible role and could provide proof proof that they didn't take the easy way out of napping. Wow. Brutal. Yeah I feel like Chris Catan a guy that totally was at the absent like a really good sort of sneaky kind of figure for like what was if we talk about like the sort of like sickness of the American brain in the early 2000s. Like the guy everybody loved for comedy like could not get enough of until of course the movies came out. Yeah yeah. Chris Catan was like a huge they were like this is our guy. He was so huge on SNL. That's right. And then they were like yeah we're gonna put you in we're gonna give you like standalone movies and we're also going to put you in. He's got a great performance in the film Monkey Bone later but like I don't know like I feel like everyone just I guess is this late this is I guess late in Chris Catan's career at this point how deep later sort of Catan. Yeah Catan a verse are we? Yeah like when was he on SNL? Yeah another movie in the string of filled SNL cast member movies. So that in a way wasn't surprising. Hey do you know he has a memoir called Baby Don't Hurt Me? Oh boy okay. This is actually early in his career as for his movies go. Okay yeah I feel like oh this is the same year as Monkey Bone. Yes same year. He's definitely on SNL still at this point right. Let's see what does it say? 96 to 2003 is on SNL. So this is like America has mango fever and if you are a younger person listening to this and you don't remember mango I do want you to go google Chris Catan mango and watch some clips because it is a sort of like how would you describe mango? He's like what if um what if like it was like he played like a mail stripper and the gag was that every male host of SNL would fall in love with him. So this I was dissociating a little bit for the sec there because I definitely didn't see this and I had to connect the dots with context clues there but it was really hard. Oh yeah and his catch line was you cannot have a the mango because his name was mango. Okay it's maybe more SNL. And it was like and the joke was that Chris Catan is like not traditionally very attractive or whatever and he was dancing around very stupidly and like a little underwear and then the joke of course is that these like these men ostensibly straight would fall in love with the mango. Mm-hmm. His other big sort of gag on SNL was a I believe a monkey named Mr. Peepers and he would play a monkey. He would play the monkey. He would play like a monkey man named Mr. Peepers and most of it was like him spitting food all over everybody. It was again the thing I think my central one of my big theses here is that America was very sick at the time. Not like now and everything's great but like American culture was diseased and this is the sort of stuff that was like mega popular and your parents were like going to work talking to their coworkers about what Mr. Peepers did on Saturday Night Live. It's making so much more sense to be now seeing the trailer to this and kind of like how was this get made knowing what his shtick was it makes more sense because it he's a very awkward son of a mobster who is like a veterinarian and it feels like there's a lot of gay-bashing kind of humor but also just generally like he's so awkward and weird and that's the whole thing and a lot of gross out humor in the trailer. Yeah he's very small and he's willing to sacrifice his body for the bit and he's like kind of like a feminine I guess on some level or that he is like not traditionally very masculine he's like a tiny guy. Yeah and especially compared to all the mafia. Yeah and he talks about it. It's a humorous take on the mafia. That's right great stuff. One thing I would be remiss if I forgot about Quaker Amano was that according to Wikipedia Robert Pattinson's one of his favorite movies. That's it's bad audio but I was just sort of staring at the screen. Right right right yeah. That's so crazy I just I'm letting that sink in with the he's Robert Pattinson is so fucking I love him he's so fucking strange like I love how weird like you could not predict from watching like the Twilight films. Just how weird him and Kristen Stewart end up being. I know it's such a... I think it's really beautiful on both their be haves. Yeah lightning in a bottle with it just who they happen to capture for two absolutes. Freakazoids. But yes if you're thinking about that horrible era of culture. Yeah and a young Robert Pattinson seeing that broke his brain in a certain way that I think it probably was not helpful to most people. Something about it helped him out and he you know it unlocks something. Yeah I mean yeah Pattinson's about my age. So like yeah he was uh he was right there in the in the feeders seeing Corky Romano all his friends. There's something here there's a real diamond in the rough. So yeah I have to get on the big screen. I have to make my Corky Romano. And so that was number three. Bandits at two. Training day number one. The thing I wanted to get to was Iron Monkey which actually sounds sick. It was a 1993 Hong Kong martial arts film from the same director of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Brought to the theaters by Miramax with Quentin Tarantino's help. That's cool. I like martial arts. It's Donnie Yen who's very good. Iron Monkey cool martial arts. Also we had Joyride at number eight which is just another one of this in this very sub-sub-genre of Trucker horror movies. Got Steve Zahn and Paul Walker in it. Okay wait that sounds that sounds good. Yeah it does and the trailer looks good too. And then I also just throw in throw in here that we also got the very bottom Max Keible's Big Move which is a kids movie that's all pretty much kids and it's directly for kids. And I just to point out that like this top 10 once again the genre spectrum. Just not something you see sadly. No. Martial arts. True Kids movie that's not animated. Action movie about a trucker. Zoolander's in there. You got a romance with Serendipity. You got another romantic thriller I think with Don't Say a Word. It's just you know and that's that's not even the top three movies. You just got Crocopia to choose from. Max Keible's Big Move features cameos from Tony Hawk and Little Romeo. It's a kid who like has to move to a new school. I don't know. They could again Walt Disney could make that for probably like a million and a half. Yep. And you know it quadruples its money easily every day. Yeah for sure. But yeah that's the box office for this the week of uh this is the week ending in October 12th which is why I said the technically I'm capturing a little bit that premiered. But yeah those premieres were so interesting to me. Bandits, Quarkiramano and Iron Monkey all brand new this Friday. Because I think I think of this point in the American cinema. I think a lot of a lot of places sort of cleared the decks for a little while to get a wet so hoping people would get back into the theater uh for like holiday time. Yeah did they do I mean I'm immediately thinking of the last disaster that affected movie releases with COVID of like were releases. How many of them but beyond maybe an accidental terrorist connection had to be delayed just because like oh no we went away till people are actually in theaters again. Yeah like we want to we want people to actually see this movie or we put we want some you know money back on our return return on our money. But yeah okay so music looking at the uh billboard 100 for this week we still have goin' strong Alicia Keys fallen still on top. People listen people love that song. They're uh still falling for fallen. I'm still falling like so many people out of a skyscraper on that beautiful blue Tuesday. The changed America forever. But not their taste in this particular song. No that's I think it reminded them of it pleasantly. Then and I I also because I've been on here so long I kept assuming I must recognize it. I listened to it. I don't recognize this one. But what I did recognize was number two Jennifer Lopez's "I'm Real." Oh great song. I got another to say with that song. Yes just listen I as a as a person of Bronx extraction. I'm very Projalo in general. I think she's like our last. She's like still so nuts did you watch her recent movie? This is me dah dah dah. Yes the astral and the energy gods one. I only bring it up because it is like a real 2000-2001 ass product. That's like it's like all music videos that seem like they're from this era specifically. Yeah like and which I just thought was like so it was so strange to watch. The kind of thing that back then a studio may have been like yeah whatever we'll put a little money into that it's got a star like J.Lo but today could only be made because she was just for some reason driven to make this thing. Yes yes and that's how something like this could happen and it is a trip. I had to put all my cultural and monetary capital into making this thing where I am a worker at the heart factory. I believe is this is the framing device? One of the many astounding framing devices the movie uses. Yeah yeah that's worth trekking to. Yeah that was really wonderful. Also J.Lo fact last week two weeks ago I went to go see the current production of cats calling the Jellicle Ball here in New York City. I have good things. It was Clayton it was incredible. They fixed cats. They fixed cats by removing the cat costumes and then making cat quotes code word for like gay slur. And they said it in like the Harlem ballroom scene. It's great. Anyways J.Lo was sitting directly in front of me. What? It's a very small theater. J.Lo was directly in front of me and she was having a blast and it made me so happy. I'm so happy for you. I'm so happy for you. She was standing up and clapping and dancing around. It was great. It was incredible. Jagged edge featuring Nelly. Where the party at is number three. Don't have anything much to say about that. No. Mary J. Bilch though. Family affair. J. Blige. J. Blige sorry. Mary J. Bilge's the name of her boat captain. Uncle. Please say it again. Mary J. Blige. Mary J. Blige. Did I just type it in wrong? I hope. You might have you might have gotten autocorrected because bilge is a word. It is. That's probably okay. I'll be able to put it on that. Bilge is like the waste water on a boat motor. Uh but family feud and I definitely recognize this is just an ear worm that I just never knew what it was called and you know here I am. Don't know that artist definitely. Yeah. It's it's fine. Yeah. Was that like her comeback time? I would know because I don't know this artist. Obvious. I believe so. That was like her big. Yeah. 2001. This is off no more drama which is her like big. She was big in like the very late 80s early 90s and then she was like in the wilderness for a bit and this is like I recall her big comeback and it was all about for her. There's no more drama. No more drama. She hates drama. She hates it and she doesn't want to encounter it. Mm hmm. I'm honestly for same. Yeah. Yeah. A very a very turbulent time to be releasing your album called No More Drama. But fair enough. Yeah. Just keeping up stains. Still six. Still uh still there. Still a band you know and have heard of. I have heard. Well yes I double checked that one already. When Stefani I just wanted to say let me blow your mind at eight. Ooh. What was let me blow your mind? I don't remember that one. There's I mean another one of these things where it's just like do I recognize that do I? And then I listen to it. It's like oh yeah definitely. That is the Eve track with Gwen Stefani on it. Okay. I remember the music video for this. But this is like before Gwen went solo and then she was like starting to break out. A very insane thing. I was like I do remember the music video really distinctly and I was looking at something about it. And in it they go it's Gwen Stefani and Eve like go crash like a very fancy party. Mm-hmm. And um at the party is a Leona Helmsley look-alike. And actor Udo Keir. Huh. Yeah I can see all you'll never. I I would you forget this party. Why would you forget this music video that has Eve Gwen Stefani and Udo Keir. Just a beautiful a beautiful match up there. So that that's our check in the box office but then TV. Mm-hmm. Still got friends in ER dominating up there at the top. But uh let me see if I can. Now here the third season we have the return because it's what America really needed in this dark these dark times. West Wing season three. Oh god. Ahhh. Is that what this is? Yeah I wasn't sure if you'd recognize the theme but uh. No I thought it was like some little house on the prairie shit. So that sounds like ah are you a waste are you a West Wing guy? Now I will say fully renounced but yes I. Okay. Because I'm still into it this is going to break up the podcast. I know I know. I love friendship. Like honestly it's it is. I have friends that like the West Wing one or two and we've just decided to not talk about it. Not talk. No so it's it's the thing where I it hit at that time when like I was in college uh end of high school I think and going into college. Obama, mania. Sure. Hope was a thing in politics again. And also it had been recommended because of what's his face though the writer um. Aaron Sorkin. Good old Sorkin. I call him Aaron Stankin because he sucks. Yeah I hate him. And it was I was thinking about it actually and it this was a show I watched on Netflix slowly over the course of rental DVDs. Yeah oh wow. And I even remember like at one point finishing up like a season and I was in the hospital and it was like comfort. Sure. Because that's I mean that's the thing what the show is it's a. Yeah. A fantasy that that was fed to people and I'm I'm not alone in this but it was fed to people who then gained political power. Yes. And it was toxic. Yes I will like I will never ever forget. I can't remember where I read it but it's good. It's stuck in my brain forever like a piece of glass in my foot but like there's something on the show where like president what's his face. Bartlett. President Bartlett. President Jed Bartlett gets a second term and all though all of his aides and staffers resign like symbolically so we can rehire them and this is like presented as this is a White House tradition everybody always does this whatever it was made up for the show right it's because it's a fictional show it was made up and I read somewhere that when Obama was reelected in 2012 his mother fucking staffers did or attempted to do this. Or a bunch of them like we're like oh yeah we should do that and they were like it's not a thing it's not a real thing all the you know all the pod johns we're like taking it by this like swindled by this program and thinking this is how the world works and like it's almost responsible for it's not a political show to get into it people know how I feel about politics generally yeah yeah it's so responsible directly yeah it's such an evil object so this is the third season is here so this is the third season and it's also it's such an interesting thing because it's such a response to the like the gore presidency that never happened yes they kind of wished liberals wished worth the time and it and it fed them and gestated the young staffers and campaign volunteers and people who then eventually rose to actually be in congressional incident presidential offices to think that this is how politics works that there are other ones you know earnestly trying to do the right thing yeah yeah like you can you can convince people it's not about like gaining and wielding power to do the things you want to do it's about i don't know like magic bipartisanship yeah magic bipartisans like convincing your republican friends to like go along for the ride or scolding them i remember a scene where he scolds like a conservative christian with bible quotes as though like they're like almost like they're being beaten like in a fighting game by every hit of hypocrisy as though that's a thing um holy moly the uh this episode was special because they did a written post 9/11 episode the show had such a hopeful view yeah i have to think it to some degree like being number three most popular show at the time also influenced the bipartisanship that sprung up after 9/11 yeah that they're very good bipartisanship the very very good bipartisanship itself is a good thing but no problems that's real yeah so i'm not seeing anything about it on the actual wikipedia okay so you are trying to find the episode isek and ishmael a non-canonical episode there we go okay which aired on october 3rd 2001 okay so i'm i'm just trying to put this on the wikipedia here not to do like true crime podcast sorry wikipedia this isn't making sense okay yeah prior to the episode the show's actors directly address the audience they state that the episode is a play outside this show's normal continuity and provide donation hotlines for victims of the september 11th attacks the white house is placed into lockdown after a staffer rakim Ali has found the share in a with the alleys and was suspected terrorists oh my god oh my god it's the same a bunch of high schoolers are stuck on the cafeteria trapped at the white house which is of course the plot of the film white house down there we go it's time is a flat circle so we have because i was like this they can't have done something in response or after something without it being terrorism related so yeah they did actually and it was just they shot it afterwards they shot it really quickly but threw it on there before the actual premiere oh yeah it is season three episode zero and it seems to be a parable about islamophobia which is fine and because they have succession of characters takes the role of teacher or lecture in the cafeteria scene giving long explanations of the nature of terrorism and the way the united states should respond this is his brain on the script page of how he thinks it all works he's going newsroom mode yeah yeah the show where he like takes news events from the previous year and says this is how the media should have covered it and it would have fixed everything idiotic an idiotic man who i who should be in jail for what he's done and and this the the liberal quote unquote administration in the episode uh endorses phone tapping and increased intelligence funding it's a it's an awesome thing to say while the patriot act is like rocketing through congress yeah implicitly supporting it as well god that's awesome thank you erin there we go cool but you know what in the news take me to the news so we'll take you to this something you won't hate as much i think it's gonna be hard uh biker soft we had the anti-trust case was just ongoing yeah i thought that was interesting the way it was getting settled it was not getting like they weren't getting broken oh no no no no we don't use anti-trust a lot of do that anymore no but i thought that was a notable like the film anti-trust yeah from the same year reagan at this time became the oldest living president at age 90 wow he must die shortly after right i thought it was 2004 i thought it was during the election around then um because they made it into a campaign stop kind of stop the news wait but i don't know if he knew when what time it was yeah i don't think he knew what was going on i don't think ron ragan do about 9/11 no i don't think ron ragan is watching the west wing no do you think ron ragan was watching star trick enterprise i mean would they have left w the the up and on is the question what do you channel do they leave i i i i not i need to know whether or not ronald ragan watched any star trek enterprise that's my main question about ronald ragan i didn't kind of forget that he was alive because until i saw this headline and i was like well jimmy carter fucked that record up yeah dude jimmy carter will never die no see official position of the podcast is that jimmy carter will live forever yeah i got nothing to add he's gonna just he's gonna keep going yeah i know i did nothing else say he'll never die he will never die there's nothing else okay also in political news closer to our our hearts uh the democratic run off of the they were doing the new york mayor's race right at night during all this stuff yeah uh mark green won the democratic primary to and he's gonna go on to lose to mike bloomberg yes he will so good old and then mike bloomberg's terrible reign begins yes a fun thing to remember is that september 11th was supposed to be the mayoral primaries i would literally that day hmm or no it was supposed to be the yeah it was the mayoral primaries i think because this i was thinking this seemed a little late considering then november was the actual real deal yeah um so they they pushed it obviously yeah okay and uh this was okay this was another thing that i thought was interesting this headline it was about fbi investigates a high school kids prediction that the world trade center would soon disappear this was a new york post had had confirmation for the fbi so it was like a real story but apparently this kid you know the unfortunate thing is the the heavily implied racism around it was that he was an immigrant recent immigrant but apparently a week beforehand pointed at the twin towers and said in a week they'll be gone or something to that effect and i just bring this up because i do remember this idea of like rumors oh yeah flying around oh i dreamed about this last week or is like that that kind of stuff was just in the my the miasma real messianic sort of time school kids the fact this is this was high school kids made me think about that yeah like it was very like oh you'd get a chain email those like did you know that all jews got an email in the morning of th ember 11th saying that they don't have to go that they shouldn't go to work like this is a real thing that was going around it was like very um yeah there was a real sort of uh just absolute panic and like this weird search for meaning i think that was just born of this uh massive confusion around this thing happening after you know at post history it ended right like we are yeah exactly in like this beautiful time where there's never gonna be any big problems ever again and this catastrophic thing happened then everybody just lost their fucking minds and one of the ways was yeah like teen no stardomists gets arrested by the FBI yeah i have to think that this poor kid was probably investigated like interviewed but like literally the quotes in the articles like yeah we we looked into it and like no comment yeah we looked into it and then we um we looked over at the one guy in the FBI that knows whether or not uh psychics are real and he was shaking his head no again and we said okay never mind you dropped it and then okay last one because i just thought there was this big headline it was in all caps also in the New York Post that just said passes of time simply cannot ease the pain it was written by raw drayer and oh big rod yeah and it's just i mean of course this was just about the fact that you know it's still hurt a month later but there's something about seeing that headline and it's just like she would just run that every once in a while you know just so people know they're not you're not alone out there i don't want his him to write it ever again no but i think that's just like a nice thing to let people understand that stuff hurts and it will for a long time and you just got to find a way to go to keep going i think in this in this instance rod drayer is correct wow the time does not heal all wounds i didn't actually read that like thank you i just scanned it over real quick but yeah i imagine that's what it's about i mean i normally i normally go to his columns for sort of like emotional grounding and um just like advice for my life in every day situations but you know what would bring me some uh some real sucker is what happened on this last episode of enterprise oh boy okay so this one was this episode was sort of a clunker in my opinion so so you raised the point that it should maybe be it maybe should have been the second episode like post-pilot and it certainly seems like that like yeah the whole bit of the episode is that they like they find a planet that looks a lot like earth and they go there and they get and they get stuck and some people from the enterprise get stuck there but it's like the first ever star fleet away mission yeah right like that is the real thing of it and importantly they they go somewhere yes like they leave the ship they only the ship they're not bored yes something happens they go to a planet they go to like an m-class planet or whatever but like the contents of the like we can like run through the plot actually pretty quickly i feel like yeah because it's like okay so like they see the planet everyone on the ship is like let's go they introduce this one character what's her name cutler i think is the name of the woman and no kovitch and nova kovitch no the kovitch uh and they're like we're gonna go down to the and and they're like not officers yeah and it felt a little bit at the top of the episode that they were trying to do a tng lowerdex ass thing they're one very famous episode of enterprise where it's all about non-officers on the ship the the name of the show lowerdex is taken from the name of this tng episode um but it's also like crucially that tng episode was in season seven yeah of tng this is episode four and they're like let's see who else is on the ship we're done with it like yeah that also the the or the implication that like oh we got some red shirts like they're here to die and i guess you know spoiler if you're not watching along but everyone lives yeah um so they're fine out right is you think you're gonna die yeah i guess i guess yeah so they they find this planet that's like an m-class planet minshara that's what it means minshara yeah like oh yeah there's like easter egg it means minshara and it's like that doesn't tell me anything who cares like you just it's like if you heard of the whole time it was the m-class planet and they said yeah it stands for meagledy pigledy and it's like it doesn't mean you didn't assign meaning to it i was just thought m was like a letter of the alphabet which makes more sense i thought it was the star something i thought it was like cataloging the planets by letter which makes sense it's a lot of kinds of planet anyways yeah whatever they go down to the planet archer brings his fucking dog it's just like and the whole time everyone's like shouldn't there be some sort of like oh i don't know a protocol or like a directive for like getting on the planet like it should be like the first the prime maybe director prime directive or maybe the first protocol and they're like no i'm gonna bring my dog and let him run around the woods alone i should yeah it starts it tries to establish to pull as being like very cold and distant by the book about like we take a week with the probes yeah you know before anyone steps foot and it's like screw that we're going camping yeah oh and also before this um what is it cutlers and entomologists and you see her like trying to eat Vulcan food to like impress to pull into pull is like you can't you can't make small talk with me yeah that's not how i i am a Vulcan i thought they were gonna go somewhere more with that like she just keeps trying to impress now they drop it to pull and i was like oh but that that's if this was a more charming show than it that it is that would do something like that a show that understood how like a b and c plots work yeah uh anyways oh but in that first scene i did want to point out that when they land on there they're in a park uh it's actually Griffith Park in LA yeah i was gonna say like this just looks like LA it looks like the most like LA anywhere he's ever looked and they're wearing baseball caps and it's a one you can buy them today i i i was looking at those caps and i was thinking really hard about it i can't buy any more hats at the moment it's fair enough i bought i bought a ball cap at the aforementioned cats call in the jellicle ball the other day it's amazing my hat budget is blown but the hats them all wearing cats really reminded me of our um theoretical guy who's watching this show from his truck that owns members like these are still captains who will wear a ball cap yeah like they're like submarine captains wearing like missions exactly yeah like yes like trucker john it's a big star trek fan who's sitting in like what's that there's that town that's on the exact geographical center of america in Kansas but he like lives he lives there he's watching the show in a one of those little handheld tv's used to get with the big arch antenna um and he's watching it in his truck between between shifts at the machine gun factory uh finally understanding star trek because they're wearing hats they're they're speaking to him they're speaking they're wearing boiler suits they're wearing hats they're going camping they're going camping uh and then immediately everyone gets like goes insane like uh Kramer's ergot style on the planet wait it's like a bunch of the team a team stays behind it's like tucker to pull um Travis Travis and then uh no the kovich and and and cutler stay behind and the horrible storm drives them into a cave that they can't be like transported out they have to wait it out until the morning it's a fun little series of errors where at first everything you know seems fine maybe too perfect and then they find a bug in one of their sleeping bags and i i don't know if i just watched it recently but that bug looked like the mind control bug from tng it very much dead i don't know if that was a reference that they really cheekily put in there because it's not a thing they just like are scared and then quickly run away and it's never a thing again yeah but yeah first there's a bug and they're all like freaking out and then the storm picks up so there's just like gotta get out of here go to the cave yeah uh and then once they're in the cave uh nova kovich goes nuts thinking that he's like seeing like creatures in the rocks right and he loses his mind and tries to run out into the storm and during the storm i think uh archer was like everybody's gonna get back in the ship he goes till he can't land the shuttle and nova kovich like won't get in the ship what why is um the captain piloting a shuttle because the pilot is in the cave because the one other pilot their secondary co-pilot their extra pilot uh-huh in case the pilots got a fever a cold everybody's in the cave the captain's got a fly this is like i feel like they just would constantly fail i mean why does the captain ever go on an away mission there's a bit more of the like i don't know hearkens back to the explorer idea especially with peccard it felt like almost a sense of like he is he literally wants to be an archaeologist so he almost like yeah yeah argued himself onto those away i think that was a little bit of a dynamic with him and yes uh what what's his beard and what's his face how am i forgetting freaks freiker freiker uh that was a little bit their dynamic um here there's not i mean there's the dynamic with teepole i guess that like you should be cautious and he's like fuck that i'm going camping yeah but he doesn't actually he doesn't stay it would have made a lot more sense honestly and i saw some critical reception of this like why don't we get him staying why don't we get a see him kind of like going nuts and trying to hold it together show his fears and whatever i simply i simply don't know but instead he he's a shitty pilot yeah he like can't get everybody in so he uses the experimental transporter on nova kovitch to get him back to the ship because he's outside the cave um which makes sense yeah and then they're back in the cave uh and tucker is like hey to pull you see these aliens and she's like no i i've not gone insane uh i don't see them and then it's like i i think there's like a very sort of like you know there's a classic sort of sci-fi plot line that is like the monsters have come to maple street or who goes there or the thing or any of these things oh we don't know who's real and who's like we suddenly don't trust each other we're all pointing guns at each other we're trying to figure out whatever and this episode bodges it's so bad it's yeah because it's just tucker going insane and to pull is like i'm actually fine it's yeah okay it's it's nova kovitch going insane and running away so not like a like a real dramatic plot for any direction and then yeah otherwise we just have tucker getting crazy but we have to pull just kind of getting a little irritable over the episode like it's affecting everyone but yeah she's just getting a little pissed pissy about it um about how he's waving a gun at her eventually but yeah everyone started to sort of suspect to pull yeah and it's like and everybody just sort of drops out besides tucker yeah pretty at some point and it's just tucker and to pull like pointing guns at each other for a long time and meanwhile back on the ship nova kovitch is like dying and flocks is just like staring at his body in the hospital bed like i don't know man you got any ideas like it's very he's like and he's being like hey have you heard of this he's like name's a new compound he's like i tried this tricolose elite tricolose elite fuck it he loves whatever they love to make up molecules on this show um he's at first he's like no problem he's gonna he's gonna survive and then the next day he's like i'm sorry i fucked up he's gonna die so sorry uh and they're like okay so we actually can't leave them overnight because this like local pollen that drove nova kovitch insane is also killing him so like we got to get already off so yeah so one you got to go uh we we can't pick you up i'm a shitty pilot sorry oops um we think it's pollen so go deeper into the cave that's right and it may also be killing you because it's a toxin that's right and so if from there it's just it's trying to be the thing to kind of like prod this into some something more thrilling yeah but it's just like it's like those like those they never it never feels like any urgency and then it's like oh we uh we synthesize an antidote and we're gonna beam it in a suitcase to the mouth of the cave and then we just have to tell to pollen Vulcan to shoot Tucker with a gun so yeah that ultimately beep is like how they solve this it's like they solve it by shooting him just stunning him hopefully it's like they just like get him to he didn't like archer just convinces Tucker to lower his gun for two seconds and double just fucking blast him with the stun this ray episode hinged on Tucker's gullibility yeah that was the important character development but i love but also like the entire thing was like there was no like clever or anything it was just like Tucker hey man can you lower your gun for like one second and then like hoshi like in Vulcan yells shoot him like yeah so so so this thinking to what you were saying about how this was a pretty classic sort of plot um it's even a pretty classic Star Trek thing is that it's the cave episode where it's like yeah kind of like going nuts in a cave for whatever reason being stuck there they do love to for a show about space they really do love to go into caves and it's a thing again you know speaking of lower decks again i didn't think about it until they literally made an episode called cave episode yeah it's like oh yeah okay yeah that is a thing they do all the freaking time the um the thing here though is with this plot you can kind of decide how much do you let the audience know what's happening is real or fake yeah and it felt like they had no idea what they wanted to do there because i feel like no nova kovich's hallucination he's seeing like other Star Trek people out there like i don't know if that's just who they had on hand to film they didn't care about doing some weird weirder special effect but out in the stormy underbrush he sees human Star Trek fleet officers like oh that's right yeah yeah sorry i don't know to me it's pretty clearly what they are and then later inside the cave you have like stuff that kind of looks cloaked or liquidy it's yeah maybe harkening back to those one aliens we've seen recently in the first in a premiere so you're like gooey stuff maybe this is like is it trying to trick the audience that there's actually something going on or not and it just like doesn't care it's like we don't care if you think they're male or not like at no point are they like like it's an interesting episode if they're trying to convince both of them to calm down yeah but to pull this shit like if it was archer and tucker down there it's interesting yeah exactly and to pull us on the ship trying to convince them to put it i mean like not to make every episode of this show like what we fixed the episode but it's like astonishing how it clearly some small things would have fixed the dynamics like i don't i can't see how it could have been worse if you just did that one yeah i'm developing a sort of theory around how this show was written in which that maybe i think it was just the first draft every time that we're seeing i mean from what i understand again they got that direction from our brand brandon braga yeah not very clearly or well construed they the writers give their best shot at making us a screenplay a teleplay and then i think that gets handed back up the chain and garbled again and it's it's it's definitely not an effective way to write something no i mean yeah like well you know they they hand the script into braga and then he has to fly to Kansas and show the script uh trucker john and if he doesn't understand it you know because because he's stupid um then they've got to read they've got to change it up and they got to make it uh you know if like he's confused like are the monsters real like no you should know the whole time you should know the app like that like by having him consistent between everyone's hallucination or no traumatic's affected dramatically differently and then yeah she you have to be convinced in a different way right and the rest of all the characters are also just like a sleep yeah okay again we did like we had these two characters of something gonna happen to them they slept they sleep here's like Travis is just like a sleep and it's like if they're all going crazy and it's one person with all these crazy people yeah okay there is something i i did miss you reminded me of Travis i think it's tucker refers to him as a boomer and i think it's because of that's like who they call people who grow up in a warp capable spaceship okay because this is in the conversation where he's like ah i can't grow i i something about being on a place where i don't hear the thrum of a warp core it just doesn't feel right to me oh yeah they they get to the planet and tucker is like one of the last time you saw the sky yeah yeah and and tucker trip is just like oh you boomers it's like whoa that sounds so different to me and sure that's funny yeah i don't i don't know how much that comes up but they're then trying to do some like world building but they just never seem to care yeah they just like they they planned all these interesting seeds about oh you grew up on a spaceship and you're like the first kind of person to do that and then they just never really do anything about it or with him it i don't remember it much being a thing discussed by officers on tng or the original series no or voyager i'm presuming uh or yeah i guess you have a little bit more people outside the normal star fleet in ds9 but yeah it was like an opportunity to do something maybe felt different but not a lot going on yet like most of the show oh well oh well i'm just still i'm pining i double checked episode seven is when we get shran it'll go better shran sound the shran countdown the shran countdown and then we're gonna go shran crazy shran is coming shran is coming shran is coming i think that's where we're gonna leave people this week we are shran incoming we're gonna hype shran so much i hope the first episode shran's in like is no shran shran comes in hot if i recall correct yeah i do remember the the very the vague plot of it so i think it's a pretty good one because it's yeah there's a whole aspect to shran and why he's there that's interesting like plot wise outside of him and they actually run a lot with that plot line yeah it's one of the few things they like about enterprise hopefully that'll keep people listening for another three episodes yeah man we'll get there together as a family yeah but uh yeah this has been to poor culture war we'll do this every two weeks uh may or may not be a patreon or something yet uh look into that but uh thank you for listening i am Clayton Ashley and i'm Maddie old chansky bye now punch it what does he say let's go let's go how could you forget sorry (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)