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Typhon Station is a very fastpaced PBeM RPG with skilled, experienced
players and a warm sense of bonding and community. We play at the
turn-of-the-century, 2400, and are located in the Typhon Expanses,
bordering the Neutral Zone, proximate to the Romulan Empire, and near
the Iconian Digs, and are on the first warning route of the original
Borg Incursion.
We have three stations to post from, SB 185, USS Odyssey, and USS
Wraith. They all have general and particular storylines and all
interact. This game is not for the faint of heart! The writing is
superb and comes hot and heavy. We have some open spots and also we
will consider character suggestions. So, longtime RPGers and novices,
check us out. See if you want to make Typhon Station your home away
from home.
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Come join a Star Trek PBeM adventure of a lifetime. Be a part of the crew and family that is the USS Wraith as we seek out new life and new civilizations.
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Posted:
07:37:13 on October 23 2001
By: Steve Krutzler
Dept: ENTERPRISE Reviews | www.stenterprise.com
Reviews Ex Deus
Written for TrekWeb by O. Deus, edited by Steve Krutzler
"Unexpected"
Summary: An alien impregnates the always fascinating Tucker leading to
wacky hijinks.
Unexpected's first problem is that it isn't prepeared to be either a
straight-forward comedy episode or an in-depth exploration of inter-species
contact; instead it tries to be both and fails. Star Trek has
made such errors in creating episodes before, but what is distinctly odd
about Unexpected is that it seems to split the episode in half, with the
first half coming off as an earnest look at inter-species contact in the style
that Enterprise has adopted over the past few episodes; the second half
is a series of fumbled gags in the broad style of Arnold Schwartzenegger's
Junior... without the subtlety.
The result is neither consistently funny, nor consistently enlighting.
It's like a public speaker who spends 30 minutes talking about the global
situation and then begins delivering 30 minutes of jokes about the global
situation. Where "Strange New World" managed to weave comic situations
seamlessly together with the drama of exploration, Unexpected plays like two
different approaches to the same story merged clumsily together with
Frankensteinian precision. This style of switched gears is
unsatisfying and confusing at best and fails to resolve the earlier
material. Up until now, Enterprise has set itself the goal of exploring the
mechanisms of exploration itself. But with Unexpected, Enterprise takes a
look at that mechanism and can't deal with it and resorts to gags that make
the Three Stooges routines seem underplayed.
Part of the problem is that the treatment of the aliens and their ship
is so serious and the treatment of the events on the Enterprise and the
resulting consenquences of that visit is material for broad gags that even
the writers of Junior would have been ashamed of. Neither Archer nor Tucker
or the rest of the crew seem particularly disturbed by the idea of an alien
parasite implanted inside Tucker and its potential chest-busting
consenquences. After all, this is a new lifeform with unknown potential
health impacts. One would expect such a casual attitude from Dr. Phlox, but
considering that such a delivery brings up images from 'Alien', you would
expect the crew to treat it as something other than a joke and that Tucker
would take the threat a little more seriously.
No one seriously seems to consider the idea of just removing this thing
from Tucker's body, presumabely because that would touch off controversial
political arguments the show's producers are not ready to deal with; but
wasn't the whole point of Enterprise to get back to the legacy of TOS and
among other things its political commentary? Instead of resorting to gags
about Tucker's extra nipples and child-proofing engineering, Unexpected
could have actually had the courage to take a stand or look at the issues.
Instead it moves from Phlox's admonition to T'Pol's about trying new things,
Tucker's earnest exploration of the alien holodeck and the wonder of meeting
new and different lifeforms, to the kind of material that has made episodes
like Spock's Brain a byword for the bottom barrel of Star Trek.
Even the plot of Unexpected has striking resemblances to Spock's Brain.
Namely a crewmember whose body has been tampered with by aliens whom they
must find to help that crewmember, a broken piece of technology the aliens
cannot fix and a resolution that involves an accomodation between two
divergent parties. You can almost expect T'Pol to ask at some point, "Brain,
brain, what is brain?"
Unexpected's second problem is, oddly enough, technical. Even at its
lowest points, Star Trek series generally had no shortage of resources for
makeup and set design. Unfortunately something seems to have gone wrong,
resulting in makeup and set design that dates back to the TOS era or an
episode of Andromeda. Broken Bow's Suliban makeup was rather weak, but
Unexpected's alien makeup is Halloween $9.95 dollar mask awful. The sets
continue the retro impression with flat color cardboard walls, a sparky
console raided from a local children's science museum or an old episode of
the Outer Limits and the holodeck's irridescent wall was borrowed from 'Lost in
Space'. They're not just tacky or bad, but mind-bogglingly so. I've seen fan-made Star Trek episodes with better production values.
Even at its worst, Voyager generally had high quality production values, and while production values can't save a bad episode, they can make it more
watchable and by contrast bad production values can make a bad episode even
more unwatchable and highlight its bad points. Unexpected's awful
production values manage to achieve just that, making the Spock's Brain
resemblance all the more acute.
Finally Unexpected's third problem are the Klingons. While the Klingons
generally come off pretty well and they're closing on a clearly hostile note
suggests that they won't be a pushover, nevertheless their in the first place indicates desperation on the part of the producers in
resolving the storyline. Having begun with a straight-forward look at
exploration, continued into male pregnancy gags, their resolution of having
Tucker meet the alien and having him politely ask her to remove the
parasite just doesn't pack the neccesary punch. Hence we have gratitious
Klingon footage: a common solution to problems of plot and story in the
later Star Trek series. But simply bringing in an unrelated Klingon vessel
and Klingon plot in the hopes of covering up the essential weakness of the
resolution, only emphasizes it the essential weakness of
Unexpected itself.
The result is an episode that is a muddle of different sections, none of
which fit properly. A Frankenstein's monster of an episode combined with a
set that looks as if it could have been used for the original Frankenstein
movie.
Next week: A mysterious planet hides a mysterious secret. Find out what
the mysterious solution to the mystery is... next week.
About the Authors
Steve Perry is not the former lead singer of Journey. He is, however, a long time fan of all Trek, yes, even Voyager. He is currently in law school.O. Deus has been a TrekWeb visitor since the site's 1996 inception. Along with being an ardent poster, he is a freelance journalist based in New York City. Deus has written reviews for TrekWeb for over a year and shares the duties with Steve Perry.
TrekWeb Reviews
"Shockwave" (Deus)
"Two Days and Two Nights"
"Fallen Hero" & "Desert Crossing" (Deus)
"Vox Sola" (Deus)
"Detained" (Deus)
"Oasis" (Krutzler)
"Acquisition" (Williams)
"Rogue Planet" (Deus)
"Fusion" (Deus)
"Shuttlepod One" (Deus)
"Shadows of P'Jem" (Deus)
"Sleeping Dogs" (Deus)
"Dear Doctor" (Deus)
"Silent Enemy" (Deus)
Mid-season 1 (Deus)
"Cold Front" (Krutzler)
"Fortunate Son" (Perry)
"Civilization" (Perry)
"Breaking The Ice" (Perry)
"The Andorian Incident" (Perry)
"The Andorian Incident" (Deus)
"Terra Nova" (Deus)
"Unexpected" (Perry)
"Unexpected" (Deus)
"Strange New World" (Perry)
"Fight or Flight" (Perry)
STENTERPRISE.com
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