Star Trek: Hidden Frontier – 204 – The Great Starship Robbery

2001 Official Site
Directed by Jennifer Cole

So this episode results in some cast changes, including someone getting blown away, and someone leaving while not saying goodbye. We also get a new guy, who we will make fun of because he is the new guy and that is how we haze here at TarsTarkas.NET.

A fan series where you can’t pay the actors and with a long production schedule will have to accommodate the leaving of actors, and that is a major problem with the first few seasons of Hidden Frontier. So this is them dealing with some of those problems. These make more sense than some real films.

Captain Ian Quincy Knapp (David W. Dial) – Still Angry! His brother was killed by the Dominion, and left Captain Knapp angry! Had a mysterious encounter during the Dominion War (The Dominion who killed his brother) with mystery aliens that made him angry, and now that he commands Deep Space 12 and the USS Excelsior he can take out his anger over his brother’s death with flaming kill-lasers. Did I mention his brother was killed? Commander Elizabeth Shelby (Risha Denney) – Stop standing in Shelby’s way or I’ll kick your butt! Shelby’s back and being Shelby and stuff. Lt. Cmd. Robin Lefler (Joanne Busch) – Chief Engineer, and still dating Wesley Crusher despite the fact he ran off after last season. You may remember Lefler when she was Ashley Judd on the actual The Next Generation show. Has a bunch of laws that she will recite until you pull out a gun and kill yourself. Lefler’s Law Number 244 is “Recite laws until everyone dies!” Ensign Ro Nevin (Arthur Bosserman) – Science officer and Ro Laren’s brother. His hair is now more frosted than tiger-endorsed flakes! Ensign Brad T. Rawling (Tristan Clark) – Ensign Ro’s best friend and lover of alien poontang. Communications officer. Makes bad jokes. Spends a lot of his time hanging out in his quarters with Ensign Ro and getting hammered. Ensign Jenna McFarland (Adrianne Lange) – Half-Trill, Half-Human, all Navigation. I still don’t know if she has a worm in her belly. Is always there if you need the ship steered. Has amusing stories that she never gets to finish due to the plots developing. Her uncle’s name is Rufus. Lt. Toby Witczak (Matt Kruer) – Assistant chief engineer, was on the USS Devonshire during the Grey attack. Still putting it on a pedestal. Witczak enjoys reading The Hobbit and getting shot down for dates by his boss. And getting shot in the chest. Whoops! Lt. Luko (Terence Schoshinski) – Who is this dude? – Luko is the replacement for Lt. John Martinez who is off doing…something…maybe they’ll explain it when he returns later in the series. Luko was on Voyager, so we know he’s used to being on ships run by morons. But he was also in the Maquis, so never trust him. As for a security officer, he gets shot and contributes to the death of a main character in his first appearance. Nowhere to go but up. Luko is a Bre’elian, which is funny because it rhymes with alien. Chief Teb (Angela Hahn) – Transporter Chief Chick in a few episodes, so we might as well introduce her and stuff. I don’t know if she goes on to bigger and better things or if she’s playing “Beam Me Up!” until she retires.

Guest Star Roll Call

Sha’kev (Dan Crout) – Another fabulous Andorian who is overacting and chewing the scenery into little bits o’ chewed green carpet. And he’s AWESOME! We need completely loopy bad guys out of the blue (Andorian blue pun intended!) Just imagine how angry Captain Angry would be if he had to listen to this guy talk! Totally kills Toby, because he can. Vorina (Suzy Kaplan) – Sha’kev’s equally crazy accomplice/girlfriend/green woman. It’s not easy being green, especially when your kids will turn out aquamarine! That’s just the kind of thing to drive a girl into the life of the criminal. She even kills her own men when she wants to. Sadly, she doesn’t kill Luko.

Toby Witczak, Robin Lefler, and the new tactical officer Lt. Luko are returning on a Runabout from assisting a new colony. Witczak seems annoyed as Luko and Lefler chat and semi-set up a date but not set it up. Toby is like “Luko, more like Puke-o!”

A distress call! They go to answer, but there is lots of interference. Luko yells at Witczak when he tries to brings a huge huge gun to beam over to the damaged ship with. Witczak and Lefler beam over to investigate and are instantly captured by an Andorian guy and some other dudes. Maybe if Witczak had that huge huge gun they would be able to escape! Lt. Luko, you are fail.

After the credits, the USS Excelsior and some Nebula-class ship are hanging out, shooting the breeze and all that stuff. Rawling and Ensign Ro discuss the new crew rotations, Wesley Crusher is mentioned as going off to do Slipstream Drive research, so he is off the series forever. He was even supposed to be in this episode, so count your blessings, people! The best part is both of these guys have terrible dyed blonde hair. They should rename the USS Excelsior to the USS Bottled Blonde. Trust me, boys, more than only your hairdresser knows for sure…

The Andorian dude is evil and puts the captives in the brig, while his green Orion girlfriend overacts how evil she is, and she has captured Lt. Luko who is useless. She also shot one of her own crew for being a bad shot, so she is crazy as well as evil. I am sure the sex is great and that’s why the two crazies are together. The baddies fly off before the Excelsior shows up.

The Excelsior investigates the empty Runabout. They determine it is empty. On the Andorian’s ship, the captives bandage up the injured Lt. Luko as a sarcastic guy gives them a medkit. Then right after another guy mocks the Starfleeters for being Starfleet. Luko says he has a Viridium patch, because we gotta go all Star Trek 6 on ya. Too bad everyone in the galaxy is wearing Viridium patches, or at least they should be and thus give out millions of false positives. That’s what I want to see on Star Trek. The best part is the patch never comes in to play or is mentioned again.

The captives were captured to harvest trilithium residue off of a derelict Starfleet ship, the USS Maverik. It is a design I don’t recognize offhand that went missing three years ago after it saw some Dominion ships getting Ketracil White from some Son’a ships. It went swimming with the space fishes or something.

Lefler says she ain’t gonna steal no trilithium, so the Andorian shoots Toby! Toby dies!

TOBY!!!!!!!!!!!

Not Toby. Bastards! We love Toby at TarsTarkas.NET. We love him so much…

Meanwhile, one of the sarcastic evil crewmembers sends a secret message to the USS Excelsior because he is Federation Agent White Knight. White Knight? Look out, it’s Black Pawn! He’s moving to D4! White Knight is taken! The Black Pawn is threatening White Rook now!

Bothering to look at the Hidden Frontier Wiki tells me that White Knight is from the old USS Angeles series, back when that series was about 3D Chess and they were attacked by Care Bears with bubble guns. I think the wiki got vandalized.

Lefler is taken over to collect, while the mocking evil guy beats up Luko. Take that, Luko. The Excelsior arrives, but can’t shoot up the ships because the phasers will ignite some gas in the nebula and blow everything up. Someone beam out some Maalox! They will send a boarding party instead.

The Andorain beams the collected trilithium off of the Maverick and beams over Luko and a bomb. Lefler disables the field preventing their beamout, and the USS Excelsior beams them off just in time, and the Maverik explodes.

So Toby is buried and Lefler is reading him The Hobbit. Shelby beams down and they have girl chat. Now Lefler is regretting not dating him. What rule will that be?

The bad guys got away! Cool!

At the very end, Kizzy beams down, crosses out Toby’s name from the tombstone, and writes “Kunta Kinte”

Rated 7/10 (Cardie baddie, secret V alien baddie, standard alien baddie, sad undercover baddie, giant jerk baddie, let’s pack our bags!, Bubblegum wound)

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