The Mysterious Case of Neelix's Lungs
Episode 1x9: "ChuckTrek: They Made Seven Seasons of this Show?" by worffan101
Blatant Parody of "Caretaker" (VOY 1x01)
AN: This is a parody, set in Chuck "SFDebris" Sonnenburg's version of the Voyager continuity. It is pure crackfic, and not meant to be taken seriously. It has no bearing on the main continuity, and springs from the deepest depths of worffan's tormented brain (Three straight hours of rewatching bad VOY episodes...THREE...HOURS!). The bit that has 3 essays to write and is going slowly insane. This contains bitter vindictiveness and occasional outright loathing of certain Voyager characters. Certain characteristics are exaggerated, albeit not by much. Read at your own risk.
Dedicated to Chuck. You are our inspiration.
Main cast:
Captain Kathryn Janeway, Doctor of Mad Science: Kate Mulgrew.
Voice of Shoulder Spider: BRIAN BLESSED.
Chief Religious Experience Officer Chakotay: A fake totem pole. Alternatively, Robert Beltran.
Chakotay's Dice: The SFX generator from Darths & Droids.
Lieutenant Commander Tuvok: Tim Russ.
The Doctor, only decent character on the show: Robert Picardo.
Tom "Ibid" Paris: Robert Duncan McNeill..
Ensign Harry "Dutch Elm Disease" Kim, AKA Poor Dumb Harry: Garrett Wang. He didn't deserve it.
Der Scheißkopf: Ethan Phillips. Poor bastard.
Princess Kes of the Ocampa Fairies: Jennifer Lien
Lieutenant Expendable: Alicia Coppola.
Pathetic BadGuy: Some guy.
Cardassian Appears-For-Three-Seconds: Richard Poe.
"Maquis starship! This is—" a burst of static obscured the man's name "—of the Cardassian Fourth Order! You will surrender your vessel immediately or we will destroy you!"
The fake totem pole disguised as a Human in the pilot's seat punched the console, turning off the comm. "Torres, we need to get out of here!"
"Yeah, I'm plotting a course!" growled a half-Blingon woman in another random chair. "Let me try to remotely fix the warp core before I get angry! Oops…" Something exploded.
The totem pole, Chakotay, looked back at the approximately seventy people packed like sardines in the back of the little raider. Said compartment was an eight-dimensional shape that hurt the eyes to look at, because half the crew (Chakotay included) loved to brood in a corner alone.
"They're gaining on us!" creaked Chakotay in a simulation of emotion. "Let me just tell a story from my people to get us through this!"
"I do not think that that would be very effective," suggested Tuvok, but he was roundly ignored.
But then the space fart hit the ship and it all became irrelevant anyway.
Tom "Ibid" Paris was very confused.
"So...you flew here, from DS9, which is a week or more even at high warp, just to ASK me if I want to be your guide on this extremely time-sensitive mission? Why not just fly me to DS9, give me the choice there, and save yourself a week of return trip?"
Janeway opened her mouth, closed it, and looked irritated.
"Look, they won't let me experiment on you; some bullshit about prisoners having rights; so just come with me, OK? And don't ask questions!"
Tom mulled this over for a moment. Then he shrugged.
"Sure. Might let me test Bryan's theory of everything-hey, Wilson! I'm gonna work off my sentence on a starship for a bit! I'll prove your so-called theory wrong by the end of the week!"
Bryan "Heisenberg" Wilson (IQ: 196) looked up from the exercise bike and laughed. "Bullshit, Paris. The assumptions will hold, and string theory will be testable!"
Michael "Big Mike" Duncan, a towering half-Zulu from America, formerly a professor at Harvard before he got caught hacking Starfleet satellites from a private PADD in an attempt to study Q, set his barbell down with a grunt and shook his bald head. "Wilson, your assumptions are invalid. I'm telling you that the deductions from the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture DO apply to real space…"
"Hey, Paris!" shouted Amanda "Schrodinger" Lee (IQ: 217) as she jogged up. "You won't believe this! "Asshole" Gee just accused "Worf-fan" Garrison of quote mining! They've got their shirts off and everything, this is a grudge match!"
Tom groaned. Mark "Asshole" Gee (so nicknamed because his chronic bowel disease allowed him special privileges and an unending supply of toilet humor) and Ian "Worf-fan" Garrison (an unabashed fanboy of everything Klingon) had been bunkmates until Gee had accused Garrison of plagarism in a scientific paper. The normally mild-mannered Garrison had taken that about as well as could be expected for a man of science, and had promptly tried to strangle Gee.
They'd swapped accusations of academic dishonesty ever since. And Tom was beyond tired of it.
"Oh, man, I don't want to see this fight again. Let's go, Captain."
"Lieutenant Expendable, huh?" Paris asked the red-shirted Betazoid woman in the other seat sympathetically. "Sorry to hear that."
"Yeah, my character gets killed when the Caretaker takes the ship. This matters for the first episode and then we're forgotten, up until season 7 when Harry Kim talks about what a great journey it was and neglects to mention that a few dozen people died in agony to make that journey possible."
"Ouch," Paris winced. "You want to take care of your virginity real fast? I'm not much and this isn't exactly a honeymoon suite but nobody should die a virgin…"
"Sorry, not into men."
"Really? Damn." He paused for a moment. "So you're a decent person with a useful ability—telepathy—and you're getting killed so that Janeway can be Captain Perfect?"
"Pretty much."
"Jesus. Hey, you've obviously snuck a look at the script for at least this episode—who's writing this thing?"
"Michael Piller, Rick Berman, and Jeri Taylor. They have Brannon Braga and Kenneth Biller on the team as well."
Paris winced. "I almost want to get out of this now...but I have an actual name, you know?"
"So do I, just nobody will remember it."
"Alright, I have a first name, then."
"So do I, it'll just only show up in the novelization which only the hardest of hard-core Trekkies will ever read."
"That really sucks," said Paris sincerely. "Hey, you want to trade places? If I can avoid getting written by Kenneth Biller, that's gotta be worth death…"
"Not on your life. No way I'm letting that brain-dead incompetent get a hold over ME!"
Paris nodded sympathetically. "I understand the sentiment. You got letters for your loved ones?"
"Mom and Dad are getting my nonreplicatable assets, such as they are. Just a Tholian silk scarf and a few strips of latinum that I won at Dabo with a Ferengi hustler."
"Good. Well, if you've got to die, I've got a few tricks that I could show you to make it easier and less painful…"
"Sure. But anything would be less painful than sitting through a Kenneth Biller script. I saw the series bible, he's planning this story called 'Twisted'..."
"Through the Badlands!" ordered Captain Janeway, snickering slightly. "Heh, heh, heh...poor dumb Harry…"
"Sir...the ion storms could kill us," said Harry "Dutch Elm Disease" Kim in a flat tone. Not that he minded, he would've welcomed death. It was only a matter of time until he stuck his head in the warp core, after all. But the response was ingrained in him already.
"WHAT? How dare you say something in my presence other than "yes, Mistress" in my presence! Get down and lick my boots, slave!" Kim rushed morosely to comply. Janeway snickered to herself. "Shoulder Spider, what should I do?"
The invisible spider on Janeway's right shoulder, munching on the remains of the devil that had until recently sat on her left, paused to say, "YOOOOU SHOULD EEEEAT HAAAARRY!"
"...good plan, Shoulder Spider, but maybe not right this minute?" Janeway raised her spike-heeled boot onto Poor Dumb Harry's back, and began slapping him with her riding crop. "Hey, Medical, I want an army of flying warrior cobalt tarantulas! Get to work!"
"Captain, maybe that's not a good idea?" asked Commander Redshirt, Janeway's first officer. "I mean, it's tremendously unethical as well as being absurdly impractical…"
Janeway looked at him.
The man stared right back at her until a space fart hit the ship and the Bridge went white.
Janeway pulled herself to her feet, looked down at Redshirt's body, and collapsed back to the ground, cradling the man's corpse.
"NO! Damn you, why did you die, you fool? I wasn't done dismissing and demeaning you! Serves you right, you filthy nameless peon!"
Behind her, Poor Dumb Harry, miraculously only beaten up from the violent transit, hauled himself upright with Lieutenant Expendable's inexplicably dead body. Mercifully, the woman had died quickly and painlessly from a rapid injection of Plot.
"We are seventy thousand light years from home," Poor Dumb Harry intoned flatly. He attempted to put in some tone with the next sentence. "Captain, wha—"
A massive hand holding a pen reached in, inexplicably wound time back a few seconds, and wrote down a note to punish Harry with more sexual shame at some later date. The Director's Hand retracted, and time restarted.
This time, Poor Dumb Harry's delivery was completely flat and devoid of all feeling. But it didn't matter anyway because they all vanished while he was mid-sentence.
Paris grumbled angrily as he slapped on an analgesic. Damn alien experiments...first Expendable dies, poor woman—at least she died quickly—and now Poor Dumb Harry gets kidnapped.
He nodded to Tuvok, the only intelligent person on the Maquis crew, as Janeway tolerated the fake totem pole droid's constant babbling about his people. Paris had gotten fed up with Chakotay after about a month, when Chakotay, ostensibly Mayan, tried to give him an Ojibwe dream catcher and claimed that it was a sacred artifact from his culture. Tuvok had tired of Chakotay when the fake totem pole had tried to get the Vulcan to find his spirit animal in a dream quest. Tuvok had stuck around for his Starfleet Intelligence mission, but still...Chakotay was a racist caricature, and both Tuvok and Paris knew it.
Now both men were waiting around the transporter room as Janeway snickered and the owner of a nearby space garbage scow was beamed aboard. His name was Der Scheißkopf. Tom shuddered at the implications.
Der Scheißkopf faded into existence. He looked like a spotty hedgehog/Human hybrid on serious drugs. His clothing was a disgusting, eye-searing patchwork of agonizingly awful cloth bits, caked with mud and grime, and he reeked like an open sewer.
"WOOOwwooOOO!" exclaimed Der Scheißkopf, looking around in amazement at what was probably the first clean thing he'd ever seen. He saw Tuvok, probably the only person who was MORE disgusted than Tom at the sight, and made a beeline for him, grabbing the Vulcan in a bear hug. "He-rro, Mr. Vulcan! Me am Neelix! Me am smart! We going to be best friends! I will appropriate your most treasured foods, drinks, and childhood memories and corrupt them into perverse monstrosities that make you want to claw your own eyes out to escape! And then I'm going to complain at you when you inevitably revolt."
Tom saw Tuvok's hand sneaking up the odious man's back towards the tal'shaya position. Tom couldn't blame the Vulcan one bit.
But unfortunately, Janeway had weighed the torture potential of Der Scheißkopf to her crew as opposed to the immediate pleasure of seeing Tuvok kill the living sewer, and so pulled him out of Tuvok's grip.
"So glad to have you on board, Scheißkopf," she said with an obviously fake smile. "Just wander around and make yourself at home, I can assign you some quarters…but first, we need to find my whipping boy and some angry girl from the totem pole's crew. Where are they?"
"Well," gurgled Scheißkopf, Tuvok's eyelids twitching behind him, "There's a Kazon troop that forages in this area on the southern continent. Or was it the northern?"
"Janeway to the Bridge. Ensign Nameless, scan for any humanoid life-signs on that planet. Crewman Doomed, take this...living toilet...on a tour of the ship."
"Dur hurr hurr," chuckled Pathetic BadGuy, another unwashed life-form—this one monkey-like and cursed with atrocious hair—that, unfortunately, technically qualified as humanoid by virtue of being mostly bipedal. "Give us water! Or we kill you! We Kazon! We smart! We tough! We Kazon!"
"Be sure to leave one or two alive for me to torture and experiment on," said Janeway in a bored tone. "Open fire."
Tom was surprisingly happy to comply.
The Kazon rushed in in a vague semblance of a charge, a hooting, hollering mob of bodies waving and gesticulating with crude clubs. Tom, who had MACO certification and had passed a commando training course with a record grade, shot them with pinpoint accuracy and lightning speed.
The Kazon didn't even reach the Starfleet officers before they were all incapacitated.
"Hard to believe those guys could even chew their own food," mused Paris. Tuvok raised an eyebrow in agreement.
A buzzing, glowing little woman with a tiara and a ridiculously skimpy outfit flew out of a nearby barn. "Oh, thank goodness! You've saved me from those nasty, smelly Kazon! I don't know what I would have done if not for you brave heroes!"
Tom could feel the "Quest completed!" sign lighting up on his UI.
"Kazon vessels incoming," said "Dutch Elm Disease" Kim flatly.
"Mwahahaahahahahahaaa! Full power to the weapons!" snickered Janeway. "In the name of our Lord Sonnenburg, I'm going to enjoy this! FIRE EVERYTHING!"
Tom, deciding that the misery of serving Janeway was better than the humiliation of being beaten by the Kazon, opened fire. Everything the phasers touched blew up immediately in little rosettes of space flatulence.
"Route weapons controls to my station," ordered Janeway imperiously. Paris wasn't sure whether it was sexist or not to loathe her domineering attitude, but given that he'd reacted the same way to his previous, male CO, he didn't think that his annoyance was a reflection of any underlying discrimination. But he complied, mostly because the other options were more humiliating.
Janeway laughed maniacally and shot a few torpedoes at the space blob's space station, then started riffing on her armrest like a berserk guitar, sending random fire out in every direction and vaporizing Kazon left and right.
"This is so much fun! I gotta try genocide sometime."
Tom decided that in retrospect, he would've preferred to take his chances with the Kazon.
"Don't you ever mess with me!" laughed Janeway. "I looked into the abyss, and the abyss said, 'MOTHER OF GOD!' I'm the craziest, most evil Captain since Archer-and I dream of beating that sacred icon of villainy!"
Personal Log, Doctor Professor Thomas Eugene "Ibid" Paris, MD, PhD, DDS, DVM, MBA, BSE, MA, MS, BA, seventh-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, third dan black belt in karate, kung fu, and akido, former convict, and Acting Ensign.
Told you you were wrong, Bryan! HA! The Caretaker's device CLEARLY violates string theory and your unified mechanics hypothesis!
Um...anyway...
Dear Mum,
On the other side of the galaxy and stranded thanks to the Captain. Looks like textbook narcissism and megalomania. She may be homicidal as well. 37% of the crew is dead, so I'll finally get to use my MD or maybe my PhDs in warp theory and biochemistry.
I'm making new friends—sort of a pity thing with Harry "Dutch Elm Disease" Kim, poor guy. Poor dumb Harry. There's an angry girl in Engineering who I like, as well—Maquis grease monkey called Torres, not terribly competent but good enough.
The first officer is a mobile fake totem pole that cannot convincingly simulate emotion. Gonna have to do something about that.
Tuvok's OK, I guess, for a Vulcan. Reminds me of T'per, you remember, my ex? The one who turned off every replicator in the Federation for six hours as a joke? Tuvok's a little more law-and-order, bit of a stick in the mud, really, but a nice guy.
The holodoc's a cool upgrade, I like him a lot. Might make a few adjustments if he's OK with it.
We met some new aliens. Kes is a fairy, whose species was engineered as sex slaves. I'm about the only person who's angry about that. Her abusive boyfriend, Neelix, is a selfish, arrogant, dim-witted man who looks like a hedgehog on serious drugs. I don't like him, and neither does Tuvok.
There were also these thugs called the Kazon, but they were barely sentient—I mean, being unsophisticated is one thing, but a warp-capable species that cannot perform the pincer maneuver? How did they even get into space?
Anyway, we're stuck here because the Captain's a nut job, the XO's a block of wood, and there was a space blob thing.
Hope Billy's staying in school and Uncle Nick gets out of prison soon. Tell Dad I miss him and love him. I swear I'll make him proud!
Love,
Tommy.
StarSword says: Okay, for everybody who's still here, don't worry if the above isn't your cup of tea. It's not mine, either; that's why I'm not in the byline. And this is just going to be an end-of-season thing. We're not doing all the episodes this way from now on.
That said, we are going to go on hiatus for a couple months. Worfie's coming up on finals season and I've got half a dozen other projects that need finishing. Don't worry, though. We'll be back at some point this summer with our season two premiere, "Elogium".
Until then, keep on trekkin'.
