Episode 604: Search For Closure, Special Features

POSTCARDS FROM THE VERSE

Expedition Landing Site

There are several features worth pointing out about the site.

1. There are seven ships and not the six reported.
2. Six are connected by three-line rope bridges while a seventh stands isolated to the side.
3. There is a raised berm for use as a landing pad and the ship nearest it has a crane arm extended over it.
4. The two ships to the right of the landing pad are also connected by a curving line of cargo containers fastened together like a covered walkway/bridge.
5. The covered walkway connects the mid-ships airlocks of the two ships together.
6. In the open area circumscribed by the ships are shallow graves for about 10-12 people, not enough to account for everyone who came to Puck on the ships.
7. The site is deserted with no clue as to the location or fate of survivors, if any exist.

HOW TO SPEAK CHINESE

Part 1:
Tā mā de báichī= 他媽的白痴 = Tah mah duh by-chih = fucking idiot =Sound clip
Tā mā de = 他媽的 = tah mah duh = fucking Sound clip

HOW TO SPEAK RUSSIAN

Part 4:
On chertovski uma? = Он чертовски ума? = On cher-tov-skee oom-mah? = Is he fucking insane? Sound clip

DIALOGUE TO REWIND FOR

Part 1:
Joshua: You didn’t kill them?
Kiera: I didn’t what?
Joshua: You didn’t kill them?
Kiera: Have you lost your goddamned mind? What’s wrong with you? I will kill you if you don’t get your ass up off the floor. What is wrong with you? I’m not standing here. All right fine, you’re a crazy tā mā de báichī.

Nika: “Mom, she’s touchin’ me!”
Arden: “Am not!”

Joshua: It was a kinda weird situation.
Arden: And maybe some unresolved issues. Which unfortunately is outside my purview. I’m a medical doctor, not a mental/brain shrink.
Joshua: If you spend enough time on a ship, you’ll end up with a psychology degree.
Arden: No kidding. Or become committed yourself.

Rina: Captain, can I suggest we charge hazard pay if we have to keep fending off passes from passengers?
Nika: What?!
Rina: Just a thought.

Joshua: This one was crap. (holds up his beer) Get me another.

[of the very drunk Joshua]
Man: So is he the pilot?
Nika and Arden together: No.

[of the very drunk Joshua]
Kiera: (to Rina) Kiss him so he shuts up.
Rina: (to Joshua) C’mere, you.

Man: And did the navigator navigate your course next to that star?
Nika: I did.
Man: You did this yourself? You damaged your own ship?

Arden: This ship has quite a storied history.
Man: Oh, yeah?
Nika: It spent a lot of time in the Black.
Arden: It ran supplies for the Browncoats back in the day. It sat in a junkyard for a while. Some bad people had it. Some good people had it. We’ve inherited it and are trying to do good with it.

Nika: (calmly) It’s a non-issue, since bridge and engineering are always manned.
Arden: The bridge isn’t always manned. Sometimes there’s no one in there.
Nika: Clearly you haven’t been paying attention to the schedule, Arden.
Arden: Apparently not.

Man: Is your Chief Engineer open to some advice about proper engineering protocols. (gestures) Because this is a mess.
Nika: I’m reasonably sure that my Chief Engineer is well aware of the protocols in question but you’re more than welcome to speak with her about it. If you know engines, I’m sure she’d love to talk to you.

Man: Was it intentional or unintentional you went through the chromosphere?
Nika: Intentional.
Man: So you’re used to pushing the limits of this vessel.
Nika: That would be an understatement.

Part 2:
Arden: (to self) This is such a bad idea …

Nika: You know what? Here’s the thing: I could say no.
Arden: But you didn’t!
Nika: I didn’t.
Arden: I noticed!

Joshua: Do you want to sing?
Kiera: No.
Joshua: I thought you liked singing?
Kiera: I do like singing. I just don’t know what language you’re singing in.
Joshua: You can sing and make it up.
Kiera: (eyeroll!) You have lost your mind.

Joshua: The engineer is dragging me away. Why is she dragging me—(gets a hard tug)—okay, dragging me away.
Nika: (waving) Good night!
Joshua: Good night!
Kiera: Say ‘Good night, Gracie’.
Rina: (terse) Good night, Gracie.

Rina: Stay out of trouble.
Joshua: I’m fine.

Joshua: What’s the bad idea? I’m sorry but what’s the bad idea?
Nika: We have a passenger. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. We have a charter.
Kiera: (pleased) Oh!
Joshua: That seems like a—how, how much? How much are they paying?
Nika: A thousand plus fuel.
Kiera: Awesome!
Joshua: For how long? Three weeks?
Nika: A week.
Joshua: What do we have to do? Bend over?

Rina: I’m not sleeping with this whoever-he-is.
Arden: If he gave you the order to, you will.
Rina: No I won’t.

Kiera: But why would she keep assuming that she’s going to be slept with?
Rina: We’re talking about the creepy guy.
Nika: Rina. Time out! (a beat) Love you. Nobody wants you anyway.

Nika: Okay. And the first class cabin needs to be cleaned spic and span cuz I have the feeling he’s a little OCD.
Joshua: Does he now?
Rina: I told you he was creepy.

Nika: (to Rina) He said that your engineering panels are slightly leaking something. I said that you would like to be talked to a little bit about what the adequate protocols for such a thing are. Be polite, Rina.
Kiera: Did you just tell her that—?
Joshua: Oh, God. We’re doomed. So how much did we get paid up front?

Nika: (sweetly) Now, any other questions?
Arden: Should I stay on this ship and get off, rather than get off this ship and get off?
Nika: Maybe if you behave yourself, someday it can happen.

Joshua: I had a great night last night. I got to sample all sorts of really crappy liquor. It was amazing.
Arden: And you don’t have any aftereffects.
Nika: (chuckles) That sucks.
Arden: I hate you.

Rina: We’re not thieves. (looks at the ship we stole) Well, sure we are.

Beglan: Um, what am I doing?
Nika: Helping Rina on the hull.
Beglan: She’s on the … ?
Nika: She’s just about done.
Beglan: She’s not gonna want my help.
Nika: I know she’s not. Go up there and take a nap.

Kiera: There’s chocolate on the pillow. Everything smells lovely. I even ironed the sheets.
Boston: Hmmm. So you do even have an iron?

Part 3:
Joshua: Anytime you say anything you need to take a ten-second pause before you say it. And then think about ‘is this something I really want to say?’

Nika: Wearing rebreathers is not standard procedure. I’m sorry.
Boston: It should be. What if you had a fire on board ship? Would you put on a vac suit to fight a fire? Really? Is that would you do?
Joshua: (to Nika) Ten … nine … eight …

Boston: I hope we don’t have a fire on the way over there.
Nika: (smiling daggers at her console) Let’s hope.
Boston: Try to avoid the sun.

[of Boston's OCD command style]
Arden’s text: I told you so.
Rina’s text: Wasn’t my decision, Arden.
Arden’s text: He is a diplomatic—no, that’s not right … despotic … Captain.

Boston: Oh, specialists. Who needs them? Sometimes you need someone who can see the whole picture.
Joshua: (to Rina) Okay, ten seconds.

Boston: The family’s gone. Took me some time to find them.
Kiera: They … are away?
Boston: My wife and I are … the word is estranged.
(Rina takes a deep breath. Joshua leans over to her and whispers:)
Joshua: Twenty seconds.

Boston: You going to read my mind?
Nika: I don’t know.
Boston: What do you think the answer is?
Nika: I haven’t gotten to the question yet.
Boston: Ah! But if you could read my mind, you wouldn’t need to ask the question.

Nika: So you haven’t seen your youngest child since they were very, very small.
Boston: Some would say it’s a tragedy. Yes. That is a tragedy.
Nika: It is a tragedy.
Boston: One should see their children more often.

Boston: Well, in sometimes I feel like my ships are my children. Because I take care of them and I gave birth to them. Mentally, like Athena from Zeus’s head. But it’s not the same. A ship can’t love you back like a child can. Or so I’m told.

Arden: Can you read my mind?
Nika: No.
Arden: I know you can’t read my mind or you would recognize what I’m thinking. You should listen to me more often.
Nika: If I did that we wouldn’t have any jobs.

Arden: Why won’t you ever listen to me?
Nika: Because if I listened to you we would never have any jobs!
Joshua: That’s not true. I think she’s right on that. Well, we might have had that toy job … but that would have gone bad, too.

[of Boston's estranged wife]
Nika: Did she run away from him?
Arden: Wouldn’t you?

Nika: (to Arden) You’re unusual.
Arden: And I’m crazy too.
Nika: Don’t have a good response to that.
Arden: Crazy about you.
Joshua: I’m going back to my quarters.
Rina: I’ll go with you.

Kiera: But how will he react if we don’t find anyone?
Nika: He seems to have girded himself for that possibility.
Kiera: Then again, we may get him as another charter for another week.
Nika: Thank you, Mercenary Queen.

Boston: Well, if I hope and then I find out that they’re dead, then I’ll just be sadder. Won’t I just be better without hope?
Nika: If you didn’t hope, you wouldn’t be here.
Boston: Well … hm. Wouldn’t I be here? Hm. Perhaps I should see a psychiatrist. That’s what they said to me when they suggested I retire.
Nika: Have you been having problems focusing a little tightly?
Boston: (blinks) What’s that?

Arden: If he comes up here again and asks if we’ve found anything, I’m saying, “Nope. Dead as a doornail.”
Nika: Arden!
Arden: It’d be funny.
Nika: Would you like that if you were looking for your family and someone told you that?
Arden: No. That’s not the point.

Part 4:
Boston: Since we’re really not using our maneuver thrusters very much except to change orbital attitude a little bit, what say that we take the primes off and muck about in there and see if we can clean off some of that gunk.
Rina: (sweetly) No thank you.
Boston: Oh, no, I think it’s a good idea.
Rina: No thank you.

Boston: Are you saying that you cannot disassemble and reassemble the primaries?
Rina: I—
Boston: I bet you could do it one hand tied behind your back. And Beggar’s back.
Rina: I’m saying I’d rather be safe than sorry, sir.

Boston: Why, you should take the rare opportunity to take advantage of where you have a fancy engineer like me with you.
Rina: Rare is the word, sir, yes.
Boston: Yes. Why, here I’m thinking of getting some plastic surgery.
Rina: Now would be good, sir. She’s right down the hall.

Rina: I’ll help you with this.
Boston: You’re not going to clean them at all after seeing all that?
Rina: Now that I know what’s there, I can get at it at my leisure. And my leisure is not now.

Rina: Here’s the thing. Metallurgically speaking, can our equipment take that kind of heat?
Boston: I suppose so. It wasn’t tested for it. It should have …
Rina: Can I quote you on that? When we burn up and die?

Rina: Hmmm. Can you quote me the tolerances?
Boston: I don’t know. Nobody told me the scale of the—
Rina: If you don’t know the tolerances, how do you know if you’re falling inside them?

Rina: And this ship is old and has been fixed with non-standard parts. Can you find every single one of these non-standard parts and then coordinate with the standard parts and then work out the stresses and the allowances and the strengths of the materials down to the last bolt?
Boston: So what you’re saying is that rather than—
Rina: Because you don’t want to have the ship blow up because we had one non-standard part installed by previous owner who I do not know!
Boston: Wouldn’t it be sad if this whole time you could be getting better fuel mileage and greater power—
Rina: I can live with the disappointment. Because I will live.

Joshua: I know it was there. I know it was there but I can’t pick it up again. I’m not good enough on these sensors to pick it up again. I need Rina or somebody to come up here. Mr. Boston? Is Rina busy?
Boston: Oh, she’s not doing even doing any work on repairs. You could probably get her up here.

Nika: How many times have we gone over that spot?
Joshua: 157 maybe? But I may be wrong. I track somewhere in the middle and I had to start over. It was a lot.
Nika: Why didn’t you—never mind. I don’t wanna know.
Joshua: Cuz the last time I woke you up, you yelled at me. So I made sure I waited til you woke up and you found it for me. (with feeling) You’re the best Captain ever.
Nika: Are you drunk again?

Joshua: You totally rock. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
Nika: Not according to Arden.
Joshua: Okay, let’s put this way. See, Arden feels that all Captains, on a scale of one to five, are ones. But you are a two. Which means you are twice as good as everyone else.

Joshua: Why the rope bridges?
Beglan: Perhaps they’ve been living here for a while. Or perhaps not wanting to touch the ground for some reason?
Arden: Didn’t the original terraforming report mention an unstable crust? Maybe they used the bridges to get from ship to ship rather than walk across the ground.
Rina: Like that game, Don’t Touch The Floor.
Joshua: That, I understand.

Joshua: Life’s totally awesome. Life’s always adapting.

[of the wiped ship logs]
Arden: Why would someone do that?
Joshua: Why would we destroy the mule the last time we took it out?
Arden: That’s because someone was chasing us.
Joshua: Maybe somebody was chasing their computer.

Beglan: If the cloud that we saw earlier was at least partially fluorine gas, maybe it was a relatively isolated event. Perhaps small pockets of it float around and …
Rina: So … someone forgot to shut the front door and it just wandered on in?

Part 5:
Nika: Yeah, go. Go. Be careful.
Rina: Yes, Ma’am.
Joshua: When am I not careful?
Nika: Joshua.

Nika: Arden. You were right.
Arden: About what?
Nika: This was a bad idea. I’m not liking this.

Joshua: How widespread is the fire?
Rina: From what little I can see it’s between the hull and the interior bulkhead of the ship. It’s in interstitial space. Think coal seam fire.
Joshua: That means nothing to me. Or to most people.
Rina: The hull is a sandwich. (holds her hands an inch apart) Outside. Space. Inside. This side we see when we’re inside the ship. In the between we run all our power lines and conduits and everything else and so on—that’s where the fire is. Hard to get to.
Joshua: Huh. See? You should have said that in the first place.
Rina: Interstitial says all that. Nice, neat, efficient word. Anyway, I don’t think we can put it out with what we have here.

Joshua: Are we worried about the fire spreading to our ship?
Rina: I would be.

Nika: Oh, I really didn’t want to hear that. Really didn’t want to hear that.

Nika: All right. Finish searching this ship. Then we’ll head back the other way around, pick up our passenger and his family to take back to our ship. And we will get off this planet just in case. Cuz I really don’t want our ship burning up in one of these gas-friggin'-bubbles.

Kiera: Do we care?
Nika: You mean if there’s someone left here?
Kiera: Yeah.
Nika: Not entirely sure, no.
Kiera: No, that’s what I’m thinking. Leave them up here.

Nika: I wonder what the hell happened here.

[on being pinned and trapped inside a burning ship]
Joshua: Wow. This is cool …

[on realizing her friends are trapped inside a burning ship]
Kiera: Oh God …

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

1. Why was Joshua so overwhelmed at seeing the men from United Reclamation? Why did his head wait til now to slam him with the visions?
2. Basil Boston seems rather desirous of maintaining his freedom. He’s declared he doesn’t want to be locked out of any part of the ship.
   1. Given the man’s mental state, is this an indication that he’d been institutionalized and denied his liberty before?
   2. He mentions in passing that it was suggested he see a psychologist when he retired. Why?
   3. Did Boston retire because he was psychologically impaired? Or was he impaired all along and simply retired when he reached a point in his career to do so?
3. Boston says that his wife became estranged and changed her name. Why?
   1. Boston never definitively answered Nika’s question as to his wife’s marital status. Why? Did he not know the answer or was he refusing to acknowledge it?
4. Going through the documentation that Boston had given us, we find that there are six Munroe wagons—Bumblebee class ships—favored by terraformers. They are one-shot/one-way ships meant to travel, land, and then be used to make start-up shelters. When we find their camp, there are SEVEN Bumblebee class ships, not six, and only six of the ships were connected together by rope bridges.
   1. Where did the seventh ship come from?
   2. Is the seventh ship the one not tied to one of the bridges?
5. We find that all but one of the ships investigated had had their logs wiped clean. Why?
   1. Were the logs wiped as the colonists were overcome by the natural disasters?
   2. Or were the logs wiped by another party after everyone had died? If so, who and why?
6. We find that Boston’s family did not survive. The children were drugged before they died.
   1. If they were drugged to spare them pain, why wasn’t their mother likewise drugged?
7. The mother and children are the only bodies we’ve found that weren’t adult and male.
   1. Were there other women and children in this colony? If so, where did they go?
8. Who shot the man we found? Why was he shot? Where is the weapon?
9. Who bludgeoned the other man we found? We found the probable weapon used but why was the man killed?
10. The site is deserted and no survivors were found. Are there survivors? If so, where did they go?

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