Sasha: That was so messed up!
Ariel: Do we need to tell everybody to put their spoiler blankets up?
Sasha: Not before we show them this clip. Here, everybody, look at this!
Ariel: Just, like, the first 20 seconds though. The rest is pretty boring.
Sasha: How is this a real part of a Star Trek show?
Ariel: I know, right? It is though!
Sasha: Okay, spoiler blankets now, everybody.
Ariel: Although woooh, we're probably doing you a favor if we spoil this one instead of you watching it yourself!
Sasha: So, like you can see from the episode title on the clip there, this is from the Star Trek: That Not-bald Guy episode, "Lonely Among Us."
Ariel: Biggest spoiler of all here, guys -- NO ONE IS LONELY IN THIS EPISODE!
Sasha: Maybe a little.
Ariel: What? Who?
Sasha: The alien energy thingamajoid. It got torn loose from its electro-spacecloud home and sucked into the Interpretize and felt all alone and scared shitless and confused until it figured things out.
Ariel: I'm feeling like the "scared" and "confused" parts would be a way bigger deal than the "lonely" part, though.
Sasha: Sure, but I don't think they could call an episode "Scared Shitless Among Us" back in those days, and if they called it "Confused Among Us" it wouldn't really be accurate, since they were all confused most of the episode, so there wasn't really an "among" going on.
Ariel: Well, I was among the confused, that's for sure. But even if the "among" didn't fit the episode, they could have just called it "Confused Us" and that would have been way more accurate than "Lonely Among Us."
Sasha: Are you sure you don't just want to start a trend of saying these TNG episodes are all named wrong? You did that with the last one too.
Ariel: Well, but ... I mean ... hey, we watched a lot of episodes in between that one and this one and I didn't complain about their titles.
Sasha: I guess. But how do you know you wouldn't have complained if we had actually done posts for those episodes?
Ariel: Honestly, because I don't remember very much about them.
Sasha: Okay, point to you on that one.
Ariel: I mean, for sure, none of them had a "RRAUURRGH" scene like this one.
Sasha: No, that's definitely true.
Ariel: Maybe they should have called it "RRAUURRGH Among Us."
Sasha: Or "Lonely Among RRAUURRGH" so the RRAUURRGH would catch you by surprise like it did in the episode.
Ariel: I still don't like the "lonely" part.
Sasha: How about "Confused Among RRAUURRGH"? Or just "Confused ... RRAUURRGH"?
Ariel: That one!
Sasha: Do we actually want to talk about the episode, or is the title and the RRAUURRGH bit enough?
Ariel: No! It was way more messed-up than just a bad title and a RRAUURRGH scene! Like, the whole opening is about the ship taking these two sets of diplomats from planets at war to a peace conference. And I'm like, "Oh, interesting! These guys obviously hate each other's guts, and the crew will have to keep them from killing each other before they get to the peace planet, which is a really good concept for an episode!"
Sasha: If only they had made that episode.
Ariel: If only is right! I was all, "How are they going to pull this off? What kind of inspiring message is there going to be in the way they solve this problem?" And the answer was, "Welp, sorry audience, we don't really care. How 'bout if we just keep checking in on them once in a while and there's no progress being made at all and at the end one of them straight-up murders another one and the crew laughs about it?"
Sasha: Yeah, that bit was really effed up.
Ariel: Security Chief Short-hair was all, "Hey, Commander Squareshoulders, one of the diplomats we're supposed to get safely to Peacetopia Planet got totally diced-to-death!" And Squareshoulders basically tells her, "Not now, Short-hair. Can't you see the captain is tired from being possessed by an energy being and then beamed out into space and then beamed back safe and sound?"
Sasha: And Short-hair goes, "Oh, hey, Captain! Good to see you back. Ha-ha, guess I'll go handle this homicide and diplomatic crisis on my own."
Ariel: They're crazy casual about death in this episode! That engineer dude got whacked too, and at the end the energy being just energy-shrugs and says, "Gee, real sorry about killing your dude before I got the whole communicating-with-body-having-aliens thing down."
Sasha: And the crew's like, "Eh, happens all the time. Don't worry about apologizing, we're good."
Ariel: Mind. Blown.
Sasha: Or how about the doctor being too embarrassed to tell anybody about experiencing a full-on blackout and finding herself on the bridge when last thing she knew, she was examining someone in sickbay?
Ariel: Oh ... I just assumed she's some kind of major alcoholic or something and blackouts like that happen to her all the time.
Sasha: That would explain some of her other bizarro decisions. But in this case, Lieutenant Bumpybrow gets zapped by weird-o energy that Lieutenant Visor-Eyes totally sees, and she knows all this, and she goes from "Let's see what's wrong with Bumpybrow" in sickbay to "I'm suddenly on a whole different deck in totally different surroundings with no memory of how I got here" because she's been energy-being-possessed, and instead of warning anybody that something really freaking weird is going on, she just says, "Whoops, silly me, I should really go do my work in sick bay instead of on the bridge."
Ariel: Just plain nuts.
Sasha: Do we want to get into everyone being amused that Commander Facepaint is imitating Sherlock Holmes while these dueling diplomatic parties are trying to kill each other and people are going into walking blackouts and the Interpretize is also having unexplained ship-wide systems failures?
Ariel: What's the opposite of "indubitably"? Is it "unindubitably" or just "dubitably"? I guess what I'm trying to say is, "No, let's not."
Sasha: Fine by me. Ready to call it a wrap, then?
Ariel: Um ... RRAUURRGH?
Sasha: Sure.
Ariel and Sasha: RRAUURRGH, everybody!
