Freedom Convoy 2022 PEI

There comes a time when a man has to stand up and decide what he is standing for. It's one thing to talk about what we're going to do; it's another to actually get up and do something. Today was one of those days, and while we didn't do a lot of standing, we definitely did our part to join in the freedom movement.

Tanner and I joined the slow-rolling convoy (which wasn't going that slow on the highway) near our church. Unfortunately, the Honeybunny was working, or she would have joined us. The oldest boy was at home, watching the youngest. So, it was just the two of us. I was going to crank some Meat Loaf in honor of the drive, but he wanted Weird Al instead. Well, it's father-son bonding time, and that's what matters.

The convoy grew in stages; there were about five gathering points up west before ours. There were about a dozen vehicles at our gathering point, which may not seem like a lot, but Western PEI is not exactly an urban metropolis. The largest towns (both of them) have about a thousand people each. Still, it was exciting to be a part of this, and once the convoy arrived, we followed along and headed for Charlottetown.

The drive to Charlottetown was about an hour and a half, but once we got there, it was a forty-five minute drive to get downtown. According to the people who were watching the convoy, it ended up being ten kilometers long by the time everyone had joined it. Again, tiny island with a population of about 165,000 people. A 10km convoy driving into Charlottetown? That's massive. And that doesn't include all the people who were cheering roadside along the way.

We didn't take as many pictures as I would have liked, but there were plenty of people waving flags and cheering as the convoy rolled by. It was quite the feeling to be a part of that, and Tanner was loving it, waving and holding up his sign out the window as we waited at traffic lights and other delays, getting more cheers from people who were recording the convoy themselves.

It was quite the time. But the best part was when we got downtown, where the bulk of the bystanders were. There were a few hundred people down there, cheering like crazy. It's not Ottawa, but it was fantastic.

What a day to be a Canadian in PEI. Make no mistake: This is no 'fringe minority' movement; we are the majority. I can remember each and every person we saw today who was opposed to the convoy; there were only a dozen or so of them.

Will convoys like this have any real impact on the politicians? I believe it will, because the people are speaking loud and clear. We want the mandates to end; we want our lives and our freedom back, and even the vaccinated people are tired of being cooped up at home.

As I mentioned before, I don't really like talking about politics on the blog. But history? That's my jam. And this is history in the making.

Unexpected: Enterprise Retrospective

And now for something completely...unexpected. Frankly, this isn't a great episode, not only because of the main plot being over-the-top even by Star Trek standards, but because they couldn't get past the fourth episode without bringing in the holodeck. Sigh. At least there's Klingons. Oh, spoiler alert...

So, this episode start out with the Enterprise going through some malfunctions; Archer's floating in the shower, T'Pol's tea turns out to be brown sludge, and so on and so forth. Nothing ship-threatening, but annoying as heck. It turns out that the problems are being caused by a fluctuation in the warp field or something, thanks to a small, cloaked ship that's dragging along behind them. After exposing the passenger ship, they learn that the aliens, called the Xyrillians, have a malfunction in their warp drive and are barnacling their way back home using other ships. Trip volunteers to help them out, and we get the best part of the episode, and something that really should have been done more often in Star Trek.

See, the Xyrillians have a very, very alien ship. So alien that Trip can't just beam across, or even just take a shuttlepod and do a meet-and-greet. No, he has to go through something similar to what deep-sea divers have to do when they surface: He has to stay in their airlock for three hours to give his body a chance to attune to the atmosphere and pressure. This is completely believable; why should all the aliens live under the same atmospheric conditions as Earth? Aside from makeup and budget constraints, that is.

So, Trip gets to fixing the ship, and hangs out with the Xyrllian engineer, a female named Ah'Len. She's attracted to Trip, despite her lizard-like features and his very non-lizardlike features. Looks like Trip gets to be Kirk before Kirk is even born; the alien ladies all want a piece of Trip. The best Kirk ever did was Batgirl in green makeup; Trip's got the lizard-brain working overtime. They spend time in a fully-functional holodeck which runs on 'resequenced photons.' Trekbabble is always fun.

Anyway, Trip finishes his three-day stay and returns to Enterprise. A couple of days later, he has a strange growth on his wrist. He goes to Dr. Phlox to get it checked out, and he finds out that he's...well, pregnant. With, presumably, Ah'Len's kid. Yay?

T'Pol gets to do some first-class snarking, and the whole crew watches as Trip starts acting like an expectant father--er, mother. Yeah, it's cringeworthy at times. The humor just doesn't work all that well, although Connor Trinneer does his level best to make it work. Resolving to find the Xyrillians to get the fetus out of Trip, they find them doing the barnacle thing again, only this time it's on a Klingon Bird-of-Prey. The Klingons are much less agreeable about a parasite ship on their warp field, and before they can destroy them, T'Pol reminds the Klingon commander of Archer's role in the rescue and return of Klaang a couple of months back.

The Klingons graciously agree to not blow up the Xyrillians (or Enterprise), on condition that they get to commandeer the holodeck technology for themselves. Since the Xyrillians are peaceful and don't feel like being blown up, they agree. Trip goes with them, and gets to spend the decompression time in an airlock with two smelly Klingons. Space travel can be rough. The Klingons are suitably impressed with the holodeck, and Ah'Len takes the baby from Trip, and all ends well. Except the Klingons inform Archer that he's used up his one 'Get Out of Sto'vokor Free' card, and next time they meet, things won't go so pleasantly.

So, this episode is one that has been panned over and over by Trek experts and Trekkers of all sorts. And I can't argue with them; the plot is silly, frankly, and the humor falls flat. The Xyrillians themselves are the highlight of the episode, being truly alien beings; they eat food that grows on the walls of the ship, and their atmosphere is very tough to deal with for humans (and Klingons).

But the Xyrillians aren't enough to save the episode. I won't go so far as to say it's the worst episode of the series, but it's definitely the first misstep in the series. I'm giving it a 3 out of 10 because of the alienness of the Xyrillians, and that's it.

Next time, the Enterprise tries to solve the mystery of one of the oldest attempts at interstellar colonialism at Terra Nova.

A Typical PEI Weekend

"Hey, honey, what do you think of moving out to PEI instead of Florida?"

Someday, she might forgive me...

Strange New World - Enterprise Retrospective

This is Enterprise's third aired episode following the bottle-episode, 'Fight or Flight.' This is about as un-bottled as it gets; the Enterprise finds a Class-M planet that even the Vulcans haven't explored, an uninhabited paradise with gorgeous landscapes everywhere. Of course, nothing is ever as it seems in a Star Trek episode, because that would be boring.

I like how the episode starts; instead of focusing on the main cast, we meet some of the crew, who we have to remember are the cream of Starfleet's crop themselves; their names weren't drawn out of hats for this mission, after all. So we meet Crewmen Navokovitch and Cutler, who are in the mess doing small talk when the ship comes into orbit around a new world. Then we cut to the bridge where Archer and T'Pol have another debate on the proper way to explore outer space. Vulcans are methodical and patient, letting probes and ship's instruments do all the work. Archer chooses the more direct method, because this place is bloody gorgeous, and humans are impatient and impulsive.

And thus, we get the first chronological instance of the ship's captain taking his buddy on an away mission that neither of them needs to go on. T'Pol, as the science officer, and Mayweather (piloting the shuttle) are obviously going down to the planet, as well as the two crewmembers I mentioned earlier. Trip and Archer tag along, because rank has its privileges.

As the shuttlepod lands, we find out that another crewmember came down as well: Porthos, the captain's beagle. Trip then says one of my favorite lines of the first season, as Porthos disembarks and runs to the nearest tree: "Where no dog has gone before."

The humans are just awestruck at how incredible this new world is, even though it really doesn't look any different than the opening scene of The Sound of Music, minus Julie Andrews twirling and spinning. T'Pol is pretty much just 'been there, done that' about the whole thing, because Vulcan. She does manage to get some snark going, though.

T'Pol and the two crewmembers are scheduled to stay the night to observe the night life; Trip and Mayweather convince Archer to let them stay as well, because camping on an alien planet is what space exploration is all about. More fun ensues as, during a night-time storm, Trip finds a six-inch-long scorpion-bug in his sleeping bag and yells at Mayweather to get him the phase pistol.

The storm is really bad, forcing the campers to head into some nearby caves for shelter; the shuttlepod will come back in the morning to pick them up. But the stranded crew start seeing strange beings emerging from rock, even hearing voices. One of them, Navokovitch, goes nuts and runs out into the storm, getting lost. Archer locates him from orbit, and the Enteprise uses the transporter to get him up to the ship. That doesn't work out too well, as the storm has been whipping up all kinds of twigs and sand, which get mixed in with the hapless crewman's body, and he collapses in shock on the transporter pad.

It turns out that there's a dangerous hallucinogenic compound in some pollen on the mountains, and the away team is in trouble; they'll die if they don't get the medicine in time. However, Trip and the others are convinced that T'Pol is in league with some mysterious 'rock-people', and that she plans to kill off Enterprise's crew to cripple Starfleet's exploration program. Humans and Vulcans really don't get along too well in this time period, do they?

Archer manages to convince Trip to lower his gun long enough for T'Pol to stun him with her own, and the medicine is delivered in time. T'Pol gets to use the Vulcan neck pinch on a delirious Mayweather. This scene passes right by without comment; my son (who never saw any other Trek, remember) didn't even pick up on it. All's well, and the shuttle returns in the morning and everyone lives happily ever after.

So, that's the basic plot; I tend to ramble, I know. I have to say, I liked this episode quite a bit. It's got a great mix of humor (the dog, the bug in the sleeping bag), but it gets real serious as the pollen affects Trip and turns him into a paranoid lunatic, ready to blow T'Pol's head off at a moment's notice. Navokovitch has a similar reaction, screaming in terror and telling Archer to 'go to hell!' over the communicator, but Cutler and Mayweather just basically pass out, like they got the date-rape drug instead of pollen. I suppose different body chemistry gets a different effect, but it felt like they really didn't know what to do with Mayweather and Cutler while Trip was descending deeper and deeper into paranoia, so they just put them to sleep. A bit disappointing, frankly.

The scenes with Trip ripping on T'Pol show his inner feelings about Vulcans; he really, really doesn't trust them in the slightest, especially her (remember, he thought she was a spy in the pilot). Connor Trineer gets to ham it up with gusto here, and he makes the most of it. It's easily the best performance of the season so far (I know, we're only three episodes in). T'Pol, her mind more resistant to the pollen's effects, nevertheless starts to lose control of her emotions, giving her a chance to show some fire and passion in her growing madness.

It would have been nice to at least give Mayweather something similar to do, something that shows his own inner conflicts; this is a guy who literally grew up in space, to whom solid ground is an anomaly, and they didn't even touch on that aspect of his character. Cutler is one step away from a redshirt, so it's understandable that she doesn't get a lot to do, but Mayweather is a main character; do something more with him. Sadly, this would be a common occurrence with Mayweather throughout the series.

Alright, so how do I rate this episode? I'm going to bump it up a bit from Fight or Flight. This one gets a solid 8 out of 10 from me. The cast did a great job of capturing that sense of wonder at discovering and exploring a planet like this. It's totally understandable how Archer, Trip and Mayweather lose track of time just wandering around. The lack of development for Mayweather in particular, as well as Cutler, bring the score down for me. It was a lost opportunity.

Next up: Unexpected, in which Trip learns the hard way about the unintended consequences of interspecies romance.

And, for those interested in science fiction, please check out my own contribution to the genre, Bard Conley's Adventures Across the Solar System, available at an Amazon website near you. It's got action, it's got adventure, it's got all kinds of pulpy goodness. And you'll be supporting Indie publishing, which is the wave of the future. Cheers!