One Little Ship

** (2 stars out of 5)
A subspace compression anomaly comes under investigation by Dax, O'Brien and Bashir. In other words, they contract the worrisome medical condition known as 'Shrinkus of the Dinkus'.

Worf was commissioned by his wife to write a poem about the event. Kira has been commissioned by her entire gender to find the entire idea of shrinkage to be HI-Frickin-LARIOUS.

Difficult as it may be to imagine, the Jem'Hadar easily fall prey to animosity. Even amongst themselves! Shocker! In this case, the Alpha Quadrant Newbies versus the Gamma Quadrant Classics. The infighting is nowhere near pronounced enough to stop them seizing Defiant.

The Defiant, if you can believe this, has a hand-sized opening to space called an aft plasma vent with an anti-backflow valve. Which allows an itsy-bitsy ship to fly inside without all the life-giving air whistling out. Or, more importantly, deadly superheated plasma whistling in. I mean, come on! When Red Dwarf did this, at least they started from inside the landing bay. Fine, fine, forcefields, nanites- I don't care what you say, but say something! A fine mesh screen is not going to cut it.

Despite their supposedly excellent eyesight, the New Coke Jem'Hadar do not spot the brightly glowing finger-length runabout buzzing around the engine room.

Beaming into the circuit boards with a batch of miniaturized oxygen, Tiny Bashir and Mini O'Brien help Regularly Pint-Sized Nog release the command codes. Then a mighty wizard waved his magic wand and they were all big again. Or something.

"One Little Ship" is a not-too-terribly fantastic voyage. It takes more than Pym Particles or X Waves to make a great little adventure. But the effects are good, and maybe it was fun to make?

The Terratin Incident

*** (3 stars out of 5)

No, I'm afraid you're thinking of 'The Terrapin Incident'- where that tortoise beat that hare that time.

"The Terratin Incident" is where the Enterprise crew became shrinky-dinks.

Responding to a coded signal where only the unknown word 'terratin' could be discerned, the ship was bombarded by x-waves above the only satellite of the star Cepheus.

McCoy and Chapel report their extremely fragile gossamer mice are fine, which is a big relief to everyone until Scotty reports the dilithium is ruined and Mess Officer Briel reports the whole ship is getting rapidly bigger. Eek!

Or, as Spock points out, the crew could be shrinking, since their uniforms of algae-based xenylon still fit. In 32 minutes they will be too small to push buttons and adjust dials, which they have heretofore been very fond of doing.

Sulu breaks his leg falling off the console, and his rescuers are nearly too small to activate the door's electric eye. While Chapel is fetching the smallest bone-knitting laser for him, she falls into the halo fish aquarium. Kirk rescues her with a sewing needle and thread.

Needle and thread? I guess it's lucky McCoy's got a lot of antiques?

Two-Inch Kirk with Kung-Fu Grip beams down for answers. (It takes three stout men to work the controls.) When the Captain is rematerialized, he's automatically normal sized! Problem SOLVED.

However, when he returns from the erupting world, his whole tiny crew has been kidnapped by the transporters of the surface people! Wait, wait, WHAT? You JUST showed us how the transporter resets size, remember?

The ruling Mendant of the colony Terra Ten, (corrupted to Terratin by a group that retained teleportation technology but apparently not WRITING WORDS DOWN??), is a sixteenth of an inch high because of the natually occurring spiroid epsilon waves. The trait is now a genetic characteristic in these colonists. Simple. (But still doesn't explain why their transporters didn't instantly restore the crew...)

Apparently out of pride, the Terratins never asked for help before (or used their transporters even once in the last two centuries?), but are now under threat from volcanic eruptions.

I don't understand their plan. Their ONLY way to reach Enterprise was to shrink them? What about talking to them on the communicator, as they are doing RIGHT NOW? For that matter, why did they call for help in code in the first place? Next time I'm the size of a water-bug and the magma is rolling my way, I don't think I'll sit down and devise puzzles.

Because they are very forgiving people, our heroes beam up the entire city (it's the size of a single transporter pad) for relocation to planet Verdanis.

I have to imagine the script got shrunk, too. The idea of a rapidly diminishing crew is really very cool, with everyday objects becoming menacing obstacles, but the resolution is too easy and magically inconsistent transporters save the day again.