The Star Traks Reunion Special

Star Traks: The Original Series
Episode name	Please Hold For Oblivion
Season
Episode number
Writer(s)	Alan Decker
Year	2393
Stardate
Chronology
Previous in series	Please Hold For Oblivion [TRK]
Next in series
Previous in timeline
Next in timeline

Eight years after the Forever incident, Alexander Rydell gathers officers and friends from the USS Secondprize for a reunion.

Summary

"The Star Traks Reunion Special" consists of several short stories surrounded by framing material set at the reunion. The stories are...

• Picnic - The Secondprize answers a distress call from a Yynsian ship, the crew of which is acting strangely. After transporting the crew to the Secondprize's sickbay, Commander Travis Dillon and Lieutenant Commander Jaroch beam aboard. Soon Jaroch begins suffering the same symptoms. He attacks Dillon and sends the ship racing away from the Secondprize. Dr. Rebecca Singer determines that a batch of irradiated potato salad is to blame. Rydell is able to contact the battered Dillon and orders him to get rid of the potato salad on the ship. Dillon, running from Jaroch the entire time, puts the potato salad the only place he can, in his stomach. Free of its effects, Jaroch returns to normal, but suffers some nasty digestive after-effects.

• Scenes From An Italian Restaurant - While the Secondprize is on a layover at Earth, Rydell takes Dillon, Patricia Hawkins, Emily Sullivan, Scott Baird, Jaroch, and Dr. Elizabeth Aldridge to dinner at his favorite Italian restaurant...in Italy no less. Sullivan makes a special order and ends up with a drug-laced meal intended for a table of Orion drug dealers. As Sullivan has a drug trip, the dealers attempt to extract their product from her stomach leading to a battle with the Secondprize officers, a battle the crew is unprepared for. As Rydell and Baird destroy the drug lab in the restaurant's kitchen, taking out most of the kitchen in the process, Aldridge forces some the drug remaining on Sullivan's plate into Jaroch. Jaroch's past lives go suitably wild, and he, Hawkins, Dillon, Aldridge, and an equally-loopy Sullivan are able to take down the dealers.

• Uncle Dork - Baird and Sullivan are stuck watching Baird's nephew, Herbert, for a night. The disagreeable child argues about food, presses random buttons on the bridge, and demands to see Engineering, which Baird most definitely will not allow. Herbert gets away from Baird and escapes to Sickbay with Baird in pursuit. The boy manages to inject Baird's leg with a local anesthetic, slowing the engineer considerably. Baird tracks Herbert to Engineering, where the child is able to get the drop on the hobbled Baird, and Baird ends up dangling precariously over the edge of the warp core shaft. Sullivan and Hawkins intervene, rescuing Baird and preventing Baird from killing Herbert until he is picked up by Baird's parents later that day.

• You're the Inspiration - The Secondprize crew have two weeks of leave on Argellus III. While there, Lieutenant Andrea Carr meets one of her idols, the poet Seugio P'lezar. Discovering that she is a fellow poet, P'lezar asks her to dinner and has her read her poetry to him. And then she spends the night. The next morning as she is leaving with P'lezar for another reading, Carr is kidnapped by members of the Uleera Independence Guild, who release her on the condition that she delivers a message to P'lezar. He is to use his influence to push the planet's rulers to free the Uleera Province. P'lezar urges Carr to return to the Secondprize, so that she will be safe. She refuses and insists on going to his next reading with him. She's kidnapped before this one as well. Her captors tell her that she will be killed unless P'lezar does what they have told him to do. Carr escapes and rushes to the reading to let P'lezar know that she is safe. She arrives and discovers that he is reading her poems to the audience and passing them off as his own. P'lezar had been suffering from writer's block since the publication of his last work. He'd become such a success that he had no suffering in his life to use as fuel for his creativity. Carr's poems struck him as being good enough to present to his fans, who were demanding new material. With the help of some friends, he arranged to have Carr "kidnapped," so that she wouldn't know he was reading her poems. The misery he feels at what he's done gets him writing again. He asks Carr to give him another chance. Carr declines.

• The Road to Feruk'Zin - When the Secondprize rushes away from Starbase 163 to try to prevent a civil war on the planet Feruk'Zin, Lieutenant Monica Vaughn and Counselor Claire Webber are accidentally left behind. They are forced to hitch a ride on the USS Ontario, which is also headed to Feruk'Zin to make sure that Captain Rydell doesn't screw things up. The Ontario's captain is not at all pleased to have officers from "that ship" on board his vessel. He's even less pleased when Vaughn and Webber start fraternizing with his crew. The Ontario becomes trapped in a subspace distortion, at which time the Ontario's captain must suffer one final indignity: being rescued by Alexander Rydell.

• Thanks For Your Support - Summary to follow

• We Welcome Your Suggestions - The bridge crew and Commander Baird attend an on-ship training from Mister Bob. The training is so dull that every single person, including Commander Dillon, falls asleep. After the training, the attendees begin exhibiting strange behavior. Rydell sees snakes at every turn. Baird wants nothing to do with anyone and seals every door on the ship, so that no one can get near him. And Dillon can't find his butt. Realizing that something is very wrong, Dr. Aldridge has Monica Vaughn beam her directly to the bridge, where she discovers that the bridge crew have been implanted with subcutaneous transmitters. Mister Bob has planted post-hypnotic suggestions to incapacitate the bridge crew, making the ship ripe for a takeover by Mister Bob's half-brother, an Orion auditioning for a post in the Orion Syndicate. Aldridge is able to free the crew from the effects of the hypnosis, and Mister Bob and his half-brother are taken into custody.

• Viva Lost Vega - Summary to follow

• The Secret Life of Trininan - Over the course of her years on the Secondprize, Trinian saves the ship from threats that the rest of the crew aren't even aware of. The last of these, a horde of psionic parasites, leaves her needing a vacation. She heads off for Betazed, just in time for Rydell to find Forever.

• Experimental Outcomes - Summary to follow

Featuring

• Alexander Rydell
• Travis Dillon
• Jaroch
• Scott Baird
• Patricia Hawkins
• Emily Sullivan
• Andrea Carr
• Monica Vaughn
• Lisa Beck
• Claire Webber
• Elizabeth Aldridge
• Trinian

Also Featuring

• Karina Durham
• Craig Porter
• Kristen Larkin
• Rebecca Singer

Author's Comments

The first thing I wrote for this project was the Prologue, appropriately enough. At that time, I didn't even know it was going to be a project. The conversation between Rydell and Travis just popped into my head, and I typed it up, not sure what it would become. As the idea for the reunion special as a whole formed, I had a a thought of "Am I really going to do this?" I wasn't sure that I wanted to go back to the well, as it were. Did I really want to risk messing up what I'd done in Oblivion and Lost Years? I decided that this was going to be different. I wanted to go back to telling some fairly simple funny stories and to have a good time with the characters. In the end, the reunion special achieved that for me. Your milage will vary. Of course, the end did get a bit more on the sentimental side. Sometimes I just can't resist.

"Picnic" was originally written as a script for a Star Traks comic that never ended up happening. A reader had contacted me about wanting to draw a Traks comic and wanted to know if I would provide a story. I did. Unfortunately the project never took off. The storyline fit in with the type of thing I wanted to do for the Reunion Special, so I rewrote it as a prose story and included it.

Links

The Star Traks Reunion Special (text)

The Star Traks Reunion Special introductory page

The Star Traks: The Original Series web page