seaQuest again

Treasures of the Mind
Originally aired: September 28, 1993.

This one really pissed my Mom off. Seaquest finds the Library of Alexandria, more or less. So all the countries around the Mediterranean want a piece of it. Meanwhile, the UEO dispatches a team of psychics to help Bridger with the negotiations, but really to find a leak on board. They in turn are trying to sabotage the conference so they can retire.

It starts with Ford in one of the minisubs, using a giant hose full of pressurized water to blow away the bottom. This is like extracting fossils with dynamite. They used to do it, but it's a great way to wreck the site. Ford is squealing like a cowboy as he, uh, rides the hose.

The writing is still clunky, but we're getting more character development. Lucas has a thing for Hitchcock, who ends up shoving her breasts in his face. It's one of those scenes where you wonder how many times the actors started laughing and ruined the take. By the way, all the female cast that go over to the library (there's an air pocket) go over in one piece swimsuits. All the men? Shorts and t-shirts. Right. I've got a lot of trouble believing professional women would actually do that in this kind of setting. I could buy it for the scientists, maybe. But none of them actually go over. So again I want to know where they change their clothes. Lucas was in a wetsuit when he went over. Then he's in dry clothes in the library? So is Bridger. If they're in what they wore under wetsuits, it should be drenched. If they came over with clothes in plastic bags or something, they need a place to change. Yet all we ever see of a minisub is a small cockpit and an area with benches for seating.

What the women are doing is actually sort of practical. Swimsuits would dry fast and fit under a wetsuit pretty well. But it's dumb that they have the contrast with the men. It's just naked T&A, like the uniforms they used to paint on Marina Sirtis in TNG. Marketing sexism.

But that aside, it's a pretty decent episode. The guest stars aren't hamming it up like crazy trying to grab every scene from the regular cast. The preaching about emotions is kept under control. It even deals with a real world issue. Museums are full of stolen or otherwise provenance unknown artifacts that, if they belong to anybody living, belong to somebody else. England has the Elgin Marbles, for example. They're named after the guy who took them out of Athens. The Greeks want them back. The guy running the Antiquities department for Egypt has been fairly successful at getting artifacts repatriated. He's a bit loopy on TV but you can at least see where he's coming from.

The main thing is, do the artifacts get split up or kept together? Bridger wants to keep them together and smashes an amphora and threatens to torpedo the site if they don't agree to leave the collection intact. It's good TV and a nice wet Picard moment. It would never actually work, but it's fun to watch.

Oh right. Also on the clothing. It looks like early on they didn't have wetsuits for all the main cast. It's pretty conspicuous how only one or two people are in the blue on black seaQuest wetsuits that show up a lot in season two. Everyone else in the shot wears just about anything else, including Bridger diving in in a shirt and shorts. He'd probably freeze to death at the depths seaQuest is supposed to run at. Heh. I guess that's what you get when you blow the budget on special effects.