PHLOX: I didn't realise you spoke slug.
HOSHI: Wish I did. She doesn't look any better, does she.
PHLOX: She? We haven't been able to determine its gender yet, if it has one.
HOSHI: I should have left her where I found her. PHLOX: Nonsense. You're on a mission of exploration. There's something to be learned from every lifeform.
HOSHI: She wasn't meant to be in this environment.
PHLOX: I promise to do my best to keep it alive.
HOSHI: He's going to make you all better.
PHLOX: Actually I was thinking more about my pyrithian bat. He won't eat anything once it's dead.
When tasked to create a animal that was a physical manifestation for Hoshi Sato, the writer leaned backed in their chair for a moment, spun it idly back and forth for a moment deep in thought and then leaned forward.
"A pathetic space slug" they said before leaning back again in satisfaction before adding "that's dying" to the knowing nods of their fellow writers.
There's a slug that they abducted from a random planet hanging out in sickbay, but its been doing poorly. It's slowly dying before Hoshi's helicopter pet mom eyes, no matter how much she worries about it. Its a metaphor of course, for how Hoshi is completely unprepared to actually serve aboard a starship. It doesn't help of course that she has a desk job but will be constantly thrown onto away missions so that she can worry about things, fail at things, or worry about how she's failing at things. She has the steadiness and unflappability of a rabbit having a bad trip. She makes Kermit the frog look like Colonel Quaritch. In the first episode she was scared of the actual basic functionality of a ship at warp and it wasn't clear if she was aware that a space ship operates in space. She is the disgusting sluggo in this hamfisted subplot. At the point at which she requests an urgent room swap due to the "stars moving the wrong way", Lt Barclay would have called her neurotic.
The weight and importance of all this is belied by the fact that I consistently erase it from my mind when I'm not actively watching it. Also that they chose to have a main character be represented by a severely ill slug sitting in a lunch box. Dignity was never an option it seems.
So we need a reason for Hoshi to be useful, aside from all the obvious ways a communications officer should be. So enter long suffering Malcolm Reed. They left in such a hurry in the first episode that they never stopped to make sure the weapons worked, to his chagrin. So now he's trying to fix them in transit, but its not going well. Simulated tests show an error of .02% which gets a reaction of "Hey, good enough" from everyone else. Reed has to point out that space is big, you fucking idiots, so that's actually a problem. He in fact has to argue in favor of having a functional weapons system and that they shouldn't go around knocking on doors until they can defend themselves if needed. Its not like they have met precisely two new races recently who are either hostile or have a culture where the weak are just victims waiting to happen. Just fly to Qo'noS without guns, what's the worse that could happen?
Archer authorizes a live fire test. The first torpedo misses completely, sailing off into space to probably wipe out a pre-warp civilization on the cusp of space flight. They fire a second torpedo. It bounces off the target, flips 180, stabilizes its flight and starts heading towards Enterprise, and has to be detonated. Archer is pissed at poor Malcolm, who says he can fix it, they just need to stop for 24 hours while he re-calibrates his systems. Archer naturally declines, telling him they're not going to "sit on their butts" fixing their shit. It's not like they're going to need weapons anytime soon, right?
So later that day they encounter a drifting ship filled with dead bodies that have been strung up to drain them of valuable bodily fluids. Huh, that didn't take long did it? Hoshi has been dragged along on the away team and freaks out at all the dead bodies. T'Pol suggests bailing on the ship because its not their problem and Archer initially agrees. Hoshi goes to check in on Sluggo Hoshi and sulks about freaking out at the sight of butchered corpses. This is entirely god damn fair. Phlox meanwhile suggests she's maybe not suited for life in space, and while I would say that's generally true, this is fucking
insane.
Why is the ships linguist and communications officer, the only linguist they have by the way, on an away team to an unsecured vessel? I mean, sure there might be the chance that they need to communicate with someone inside, but this show pays little attention to non verbal communication, so she can do her job equally well with a radio. She doesn't need to be the first through the door. Hoshi is not a combatant. She's not a trained security officer. Malcolm Reed has people for this he's never allowed to use. MACOs aren't on the ship yet, but this would be a situation for them, rather than Hoshi Sluggo Sato. Stop doing this exact thing Archer.
Speaking of Archer, he has racism derived second thoughts.
ARCHER: What's the matter, the tension bothering you?
T'POL: Not in the least.
ARCHER: Must be great not to let things bother you. No remorse, no guilt. What if they were Vulcans? Think you would have reacted the same way?
T'POL: They weren't Vulcans.
ARCHER: I said, what if they were Vulcans. Would you have just left them there, hanging like slaughtered animals? Don't you think maybe you would have taken them down, tried to figure out who they were, made some effort to contact their families? T'POL: We don't know where they came from. It would be very difficult to locate their families.
ARCHER: We didn't even try. (to Tucker) What about you, what if they were humans? Would you just stick your tail between your legs and run, leave them there to rot? Am I the only one who's having a problem with this?
TUCKER: You said it yourself, sir. Whoever killed those people are probably coming back. ARCHER: So we should avoid confrontation cost, is that what you're saying? Is that what you Vulcans do? Bury your heads in the sand and then just fly on by?
T'POL: We Vulcans would have never gone on board that ship in the first place.
ARCHER: You got an answer for everything, don't you.
T'POL: We have a code of behavior, and we try to obey it.
ARCHER: You may not believe this, but humans have a code of behavior too. It took a few thousand years, but I think we're starting to get it right. I can't believe I almost ignored it.
So they reverse course and head back to the ship. There they find that the unknown aliens that attacked the ship shot several of the crew and euthanized the ones that surrendered before butchering them and setting up pumps to drain them of valuable fluids. Hoshi keeps going on about how because she freaked out at dead bodies she's not fit to serve on the ship. Meanwhile, since its a ship that has actually been cleared this time, she's able to find a distress call in the system and send it out on all the numbers in their address book. Gosh its like, they were completely using her wrong before. Hoshi "Namekuji" Sato is not a space marine or security officer, she's almost some sort of
communications officer.
Meanwhile the baddies show back up and they have to bail back to their ship. The enemy isn't responding to communications and scans the ship to find out what can be harvested from the soon to be dead crew.
So T'Pol is supposed to come off as a real heartless bitch with her "not my problem" attitude. The problem of course is that the text continuously works against this. Yes she's being heartless, but the Enterprise isn't a heavy hitter most of the time and she's hamstrung at the moment. They really should in fact avoid conflict until they're better able to defend themselves. It will work out this time, but only by sheer bloody luck are the crew not shot to death or euthanized and their corpses then processed into alien dick hardening pills. Yes, Phlox theorizes a possible use of the dead bodies is that they're being processed and sold as aphrodisiacs and dick hardeners. What an auspicious end to humanities first foray into long range exploration. Dick hardening pills and\or creams. Archer by the way tries to say that while humans killed animals for this use in the past, they never did it to humans. I think day one of Space Explorer 101 is that aliens may not see us as equals or even as anything else than animals. Plus you know, we did in fact use humans as medicine. In the West, just so we're clear Archer.
Attempts by the Enterprise are laughable of course, because their weapons are in a shit state because of Reed being denied permission multiple times to fix them. Its an amazing scene where both torpedoes they fire completely botch with one bouncing off a decorative feature and the other moving so slow its easily intercepted. Archer of course has one person that he holds responsible for this: Malcolm Reed.
To be Malcolm Reed, is to suffer. That's why he's still here.
Luckily they get saved by the aliens that Hoshi speed dialed after she freaks out for a while to add "drama" to the plot. The crisis averted and Hoshi resolving to stay on the ship, she dumps Sluggo Hoshi onto a random ass world saying that she's going to have to adapt, like she did. I can only presume that it either died immediately due to being unsuited to the environment or it became an invasive species that caused massive ecological damage. The important thing is that its a metaphor. Her dumping it against its choice somewhere is a perfect parallel to her deciding she can adapt to something she chose.
*knowing nod*
