Thoughts on Aquiel

[GeorgeKirk]

I caught the 6th-season episode "Aquiel" on SyFy last night, and I had a few thoughts:

First of all, the Enterprise crew are pretty incompetent when it comes to investigating crimes. If this were NCIS, Gibbs would have spent the whole episode slapping them on the back of the head. Consider: after the Klingons return Aquiel and the station's shuttlecraft, Picard actually has to tell Riker to examine it. Shouldn't they have done that automatically? Aquiel was already a murder suspect, after all. And when Worf finds the phaser in the shuttlecraft they don't see if her fingerprints are on it or try to determine if it's been fired. Very sloppy police work. And yes, I know they're explorers, not cops, but if you think about it Worf is a cop. Most of the time, though, he just acts like Picard's hired muscle.

Also, this episode has the worst case of Informed Attributes since "The Outrageous Okona". Geordi keeps saying how "complicated" Aquiel is, a conclusion he reached by watching her personal logs. The funny thing is, the audience gets to watch those logs, too, and they sound like the kind of stuff a whiny 13-year-old writes in her LiveJournal.

Finally, wouldn't it have been funny if whatever bumpy-foreheaded race Aquiel belongs to was anatomically different (instead of being just like humans with bumpy foreheads) and that light-up crystalline sculpture that she used to have brain-sex with Geordi was actually a dildo?

[Timo]

And yes, I know they're explorers, not cops, but if you think about it Worf is a cop.

Perhaps he aspires to be. In practice, though, when he tries that line of work in DS9 "Hippocratic Oath", we get a not unexpected fumble.

It would be pretty weird for today's naval vessel to have an NCIS contingent aboard, now wouldn't it? The people in charge of ship security aren't investigative police - they are soldiers and discipliners. I wouldn't expect to find a competent criminal investigator aboard, say, Kirk's or Janeway's small ships.

OTOH, Picard's giant starship might well house such a professional or three. But I can also accept the happenstance that she doesn't.

Finally, the odds that this would even be a crime in the conventional sense are pretty low, now aren't they? Usually, when people disappear in space, the reasons behind this are best unveiled by waiting for the strange alien forces behind them to appear, or by smoking out those forces through general scientific rather than forensic inquiry. Even here, scanning for weird signs that would have suggested the presence of a shapeshifter would have best served our heroes...

Timo Saloniemi

[M]

Ouch!

[THE_FETT]

GeorgeKirk wrote:

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I caught the 6th-season episode "Aquiel" on SyFy last night, and I had a few thoughts:

First of all, the Enterprise crew are pretty incompetent when it comes to investigating crimes.

It's funny that you post this because I also caught that episode and thought the exact same thing, except for a different reason. That being, that once they discover the whole "coalescent organism" thing is out there, they nab the Klingon and Aquiel and confine them to quarters, right?

Then we see Riker informing Geordi of this, "Oh yeah; a being on that station might be a coalescent being ready to strike at any moment, so we nabbed those two and put them in confinment" and Geordi is all, "Cool; nice work."

AND THEY'RE BOTH SITTING THERE PETTING THAT FREAKING DOG-BEAST THAT WAS ON THE STATION!

Hello?! Earth to Riker! Anyone home, Geordi?! Hello USS Enterprise crew?! Houston we have a mental problem. The dog was on the station, too; and is therefore a very logical and completely freaking obvious possibility for the coalescent being, you bufoons! I mean, seriously, talk about you garden-variety fools. Way to drop the ball, guys. Way to drop the ball and have it bounce back up into your face and knock you out cold then you fall face-forward unconsciouss into the pavement and bust your head open and die from bloodloss and blunt force trauma.

[RoJoHen]

Everybody has off days. And let's face it: Geordi pretty much sucks at life whenever he's got a crush.

[Forbin]

I don't know why the hell she had to have a funny forehead at all. At this point in the series I was probably at the point where i was screaming at the screen every time a character had a forehead for no plot reason whatsoever.

[GeorgeKirk]

Forbin wrote:

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I don't know why the hell she had to have a funny forehead at all. At this point in the series I was probably at the point where i was screaming at the screen every time a character had a forehead for no plot reason whatsoever.

Agreed. When she went into her little speech about how the fear she felt in her dream was like the fear she felt when her dad would get angry at her (implying that he was abusive), I thought "Oh, so that's what happened to her forehead."

I wonder how much money the series could have saved on unnecessary forehead appliances?

[KimM]

found her forehead far more interesting than her personal log. had not seen it for a while and was disappointed when I realized she wasn't the coalescent creature . . .

I was also struck how inefficient the phasers were. Geordi had to adjust his with both hands, and Bev Crusher had to do the same in the following episode.

[Marten]

Enterprise doesn't even seem to carry a proper linguist, a forensic team would be quite a surprise.

[Forbin]

Wasn't this the ep where Geordi pulled a phaser out of a random drawer in his quarters? I guess offcers get to do that. Does Ensign Expendable get to keep guns in his room?

[Timo]

In early TNG, phasers were difficult to obtain - in "11001001", top officers had to go to a locked armory for them. Later on, there were lockers for them at sickbay, consistent with the kitchen lockers of ST6, and no doubt at transporter rooms as well even though I don't think we explicitly saw such a storage space in use. But things never got so relaxed that Picard could have gotten a phaser from his cabin drawer or anything like that - he had to go to sickbay in "Starship Mine". And O'Brien had to break into a locker for his suicide attempt in "Hard Time", too.

LaForge's loose phaser is indeed quite an anomaly, then. And wasn't it a Type 2, even? I could shrug away them holding Type 1 units for "personal use" or something. Or Worf having a personal arsenal in his cabin for professional use (or because nobody would tell him not to). Perhaps LaForge had yet failed to return the phaser he had signed up for the duration of the investigation?

Timo Saloniemi

[GeorgeKirk]

Forbin wrote:

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Wasn't this the ep where Geordi pulled a phaser out of a random drawer in his quarters? I guess offcers get to do that. Does Ensign Expendable get to keep guns in his room?

Why not? Worf always seemed to be able to pull one out of his ass whenever an intruder beamed onto the bridge.

[KimM]

but Worf was a security officer - you'd expect head of security to carry a sidearm.

[FormerLurker]

Worf's bridge phaser was in the hidden drawer under the tactical console.

Oh, and this episode was a pedestrian adaptation of the classic film noir "Laura".

[Forbin]

GeorgeKirk wrote:

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Why not? Worf always seemed to be able to pull one out of his ass whenever an intruder beamed onto the bridge.

oldstredshrtevr wrote:

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but Worf was a security officer - you'd expect head of security to carry a sidearm.

In his ass!?