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STAR TREK: THE CROUTON GENERATION
SEASON TWO
Episode #18
"Deja Kunz"
-----------------------------------
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 90 00:42:40 -0600
From: zecca@tramp (Loqutus of Borg)
To: junk@typhoon.ucar.EDU
Subject: ST:TCG "Deja Kunz"
I think I'll follow Zen's lead for long episodes....
---------
Next time, on an all-new episode of
Staaaaaar Trek: The Crouton Generation
"Deja Kunz"
The evil Q steals Admiral Avenger away from a Twins game and gives him
special powers. Will Star Fleet ever survive the Admiral's sense of
humor or will the Kunz have to intervene?
Find out on the next exciting episode of
Staaaaar Trek: The Crouton Generation!
---------
"Deja Kunz" is a nearly 20k episode, but it is filled with humor in the
tradition of 1st Season TCG and the Admiral's own weird sense of humor.
If you'd like a copy, just email me and I'll send you one.
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Date: Mon, 8 Oct 90 00:46:38 -0600
From: zecca (Loqutus of Borg)
Subject: "Deja Kunz"
[ Exterior shot of the Spacedock in orbit around Earth. We zoom in on a
specific window on the upper deck, to a tiny conference room. ]
Picard: You are all, of course, aware of the budget crunch this year due
to the Borg Invasion. Much of the funding will have to go into rebuilding
the Fleet and assisting the Romulans, but some will be left over for special
projects. We have decided to lay a foothold in both of the Magellanic
Clouds with the remaining funds and discontinue expansion in this galaxy
for the time being.
The various Admirals begin to sputter and murmur and argue among themselves.
Avenger: AS YOU ALL KNOW... [they hush] expansion in the Milky Way is
slowing down anyway. The Federation Grand Alliance and the Romulan Empire
have vast established territories. The Borg and the Hidden Valley Ranch
take up much of the rest, and most of the rest is allocated out to smaller
empires who likewise do not want to give up any ground.
Data: The only logical choice is thus to explore outside the Galaxy.
McCormick: But why now? Why not just hold our own until we have recovered?
Picard: Good question. In order to rebuild ourselves and to assist the
Romulans, additional resources could be of use. We're not going to find
any extras in our own galaxy, so we must look elsewhere. Also, Admiral
Avenger's task force already began the work in the SMC this summer, so
a small task force of Federation ships should easily be able to continue
the work there.
Data: Our scientists hold more promise for the Large Magellanic Cloud,
however, hence our interest there.
More murmuring and arguing.
Avenger: Look, folks, the decisions have already been made. It is YOUR
job to carry out your orders. [They shut up.]
Picard: Thank you, Admiral. Admiral Talbot will be taking over operations
in the SMC and the task force shall be led by Captain Richard Muirden of
the newly commissioned _USS Melbourne_. His previous service as First
Officer of the _Robert April_ in the Romulan Rescue Operation have
warranted this responsibility.
Avenger: I will be in charge of operations in the Large Magellanic Cloud,
once we get set up there. We'll be taking the three _Salad_-class ships
and the _USS Comatose_ along for support.
Picard: All other information will be downloaded to your individual terminals
shortly. If you have any questions, please contact my office.
The Admirals begin to disperse. Avenger slides off his uniform jacket to
reveal a Minnesota Twins T-shirt, then pulls out and doffs his Twins cap.
Avenger: Jean-Luc, Data...I've got one extra ticket...would one of you care
to join me?
Data looks to Picard with enthusiasm.
Picard: Go ahead, Data. I never did much care for the game.
Data: Thank you, Admiral. I would be delighted to join you, Admiral, if I
could actually feel such emotions as delight.
Avenger: Data, I don't doubt for a moment that you DO feel such emotions.
* * * * *
"Deja Kunz"
Written by Admiral Avenger
Guest stars
Vin Scully as Admiral McCormick
Tom Seaver as the Red Sox Announcer
Jim Palmer as Ambassador Setsok
P.D. Kunz as The Kunz
David Mercer as Dr. Smith
Penny Marshall as Dr. Jones
Barbara Bain as Dr. Graves
Clayton Rohmer as Dr. Krom
Special Guest Stars
Patrick Stewart as Admiral Jean-Luc Picard
Brent Spiner as Vice Admiral Data
John de Lancie as "Q"
Directed by Robert Wuhl
* * * * *
[ We begin with a view from the press box of the Kirby Puckett Memorial
Metrodome in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We then move down toward the first
base line, seventh row of box seating. ]
Data and Avenger move down through the crowd to their seats. Data is now
adorned in various pieces of Twins apparel. They sit down and Avenger
hands Data a warm hot dog and a Coke.
Data: What is this, Admiral?
Avenger: It's a hot dog, Data. The classic food for a baseball game.
Data: Ah, I see. And the drink?
Avenger: Well, most people would go for a synthehol beer, but I never did
like those kinds of drinks, synthehol or real. I just stick to good old
caffeine.
Data: But, Admiral, the Coca-Cola bottling company discontinued the use of
caffeine in their drinks in the year 2019 due to the...
Avenger: Data...just watch the game.
* * * * *
Seven innings later, the London Kings have gone up 5-2 over the Twins.
Avenger: Ah, the classic Twins. Blow a lead as quickly as possible.
Data: Is that not "bad baseball," Admiral?
Avenger: Quite, Data. And it is has been typical of the Twins since
their inception in 1961.
Data: But, Admiral, were the Twins not, in fact, the Washington Senators
up until 1961? How did they play then?
A vendor walks down the aisle nearby.
Vendor: Popcorn! Peanuts! Get your popcorn here!
Avenger (leaning over): A popcorn for the android, please.
The vendor turns to Avenger with a mischievous grin, revealing himself as...
Data: Q! What are you doing here?
Q: I have a proposition for Admiral Avenger. (snaps his fingers)
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > Q and Avenger disappear. The box of popcorn remains,
landing in Data's lap.
Data (digs out his communicator and taps it): Admiral Picard please.
* * * * *
"Captain's Log, Stardate 101123.4:
The _Heisenberg_ is currently transporting several important Vulcans
to the Romulan Empire to discuss reconciliation of their two cultures.
So far, so good. In the meantime, I think I'll catch the Sox game."
T'Lilith: I am, of course, supposed to be heading to the LMC in a few
weeks, but I am honored to represent both Vulcan and Kling in these
negotiations, Ambassador.
Setsok: We welcome any assistance you can provide us, Admiral.
Kabeta enters Ten Forward and stops to check in with various parts of the
Vulcan entourage, finally moving to T'Lilith and Setsok.
Kabeta: Hello. I hope everything is going well.
Setsok: We will not know that until we reach the Romulan Empire, Captain.
T'Lilith: Everything is just fine, Kabeta.
Kabeta: Good. I'm going to go take in the Red Sox game with my crew now.
Please join me if you wish.
T'Lilith: I never could stand human sports. They are so...simplistic.
Where is the challenge? Where is the loss of life?
Kabeta: Whatever. (moves to the far corner where several of her crew have
already assembled around the game on holo-viewer)
* * * * *
Q: You have shown yourself to be worthy, Admiral.
Avenger stands in with his arms crossed, tapping his feet, in one of the
empty press boxes at the Kirbydome.
Avenger: Of what, Q?
Q: I can give you your wildest dreams.
Avenger: What the hell are you talking about? Giving me Q powers?
Q (shocked): Of course not! We tried that once with Riker and that was a
big mistake. (pause) No, no...we want to give you KUNZ powers.
Avenger: I can't believe this. Stop bugging me and let me get back to
the game, will you?
Q (smiling): Of course. But the game is only about to begin...
Q snaps his fingers and disappears. Avenger now finds himself floating freely
through a Hilbert space. The whirling vortices and oscillating wave functions
make his head spin.
Q (disembodied voice): All you have to do is believe and you will have the
power. It is your only way to get home and your only way to avoid vomiting.
Avenger: Dammit. (stubbornly resists for a moment) ghuy'cha. (Closes his
eyes tight and snaps his fingers.)
* * * * *
Announcer: And so, after five, it's the Andorian Blue Sox 7, Red Sox 3.
Kabeta: Geez. The Sox bullpen always falls apart.
yaz-pistachio: Red Alert! Captain to the bridge!
Kabeta gets up to leave, but first glances out the large Ten Forward windows.
She sees the unmistakable cube-shape of a Borg vessel.
Kabeta: Ho-boy.
* * * * *
Kleber: The Borg are hailing you by name, Captain.
Kabeta: By name? On screen, please.
The image of a Borg speaker appears before them. Very unusually though,
he is wearing novelty glasses (the kind with the funny nose and moustache).
He also wears a Star Fleet communicator!
jIsaHbe': Kabeta, Captain of the _USS Heisenberg_, NCC-75704. You speak for
the Boston Red Sox.
Kabeta (half-amused): What?
jIsaHbe': I am jIsaHbe' of Borg. You will lower your shields and solve the
Schrodinger wave equation for a set of 323 distinguishable tauons, all in
different excitation states. From this time forward, you will service...
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > jIsaHbe' disappears from the viewscreen and reappears
standing in front of it on the bridge. He removes the funny glasses to
reveal his true identity.
Avenger (maniacal smile): ...the Kunz. HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!
Kabeta: Admiral, I hope this is some new magic trick you've learned.
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > Avenger disappears and reappears at the Tactical Station,
now in the clothes of Anthony Ainley's Master from Dr. Who. His old beard
has now returned to his recently clean-shaven face.
Avenger: Now, THESE are my colors!
Kabeta (tapping communicator): Admiral T'Lilith to the bridge.
Avenger (waving finger): Now, now, Kabeta. Not nice! (he snaps his fingers)
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > 10,000 ping pong balls appear, hovering below the ceiling
of the bridge.
Avenger (to the camera): You know, I've been wanting to do this since high
school. (he snaps his fingers again)
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > The 10,000 ping pong balls fall, bouncing off the floor,
computers, crew, and particularly Captain Kabeta. < FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > Avenger
reappears next to the Captain's Ready Room, dressed in a gaudy replica of
Colin Baker's Dr. Who costume.
Avenger: Sorry, must dash.
He walks into the Captain's Ready Room. A grinding, wheezing noise is heard
from the Ready Room, and then it finally passes. Kabeta goes to sit down in
her chair, but finds it filled with ping pong balls. She tosses some of them
aside, then sits down. Admiral T'Lilith exits the main turbolift, steps on
some ping pong balls, then slides gracefully down the ramp, and lands below
the main viewscreen.
T'Lilith: What the hell happened here?
* * * * *
Captain Crouton takes his root beer and wanders up to a seat by the window,
where Lt. Cdr. Crossfire awaits him. The wondrous blue of Neptune stretches
out below them while three shuttlecraft depart the ship heading toward Triton.
Crouton: I'm glad you decided to stay, Crossfire. You are an excellent
addition to a fine crew.
Crossfire: As I see it, sir, things in the Galaxy are now in fairly good
order. Star Fleet needs me as a troubleshooter, and I see most of the
trouble as coming from your exploration of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Simply put, your mission by its own definition requires my services.
Crouton: Well, whatever the case, welcome aboard. (drinks root beer)
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > The root beer bottle suddenly disappears from Captain
Crouton's hand. < FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > Admiral Avenger, in his Anthony Ainley
outfit again, but with his Borg headpiece (including that nifty He-Ne laser!)
remaining.
Avenger: Tsk tsk tsk. Chris, you've been spending WAY too much time on
that computer of yours lately. You need more than a root beer to loosen
you up. (leans down close to the Captain) Wouldn't you like to roam where
no buffalo has roamed before? *
(* apologies to Hans Bjordahl)
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > Captain Crouton has loosened up severely. As a matter
of fact, he looks quite stoned. He staggers to the bar, where Lt. Frechette
has just picked up his own root beer. Crouton begins to claw wildly at him.
Crouton (slurred speech): Root beer! Gimme root beer!
Crossfire brings up his bow and fires at Avenger in one swift move. Avenger
reaches back, grabs hold of the arrow in mid flight, and turns back around.
Avenger: Silly mortal, tricks are for Kunz!
* * * * *
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > Avenger appears at the Particle Accelerator Control
Station for the Daystrom Institute, dressed the same as he did in Ten Forward.
Avenger: Now to have some real fun. hehehe
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > < FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > < FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > < FWOOOOSSHHHH!! >
Within a few minutes, grad students rush back to their employees with weird
results and the scientists immediately react.
Dr. Jones: What do you mean you measured the mass of a proton to be 35 Tev?!?
Dr. Smith: What do you mean the spin of an electron is 39/48? That sounds
like you've discovered a new type of Crouton, not an electron!
Dr. Graves: There is no such thing as nominally pulsed neutron-beam
generating tauon collapsing phase inducer! How the hell did that get IN
there?
Dr. Krom: You idiot! (Takes out a knife and slices his grad student across
the throat) Klingons do NOT have opposite spin to humans and Kelvins do
not thrive at temperatures well below absolute zero! (Okay, so Klingon
scientists treat their grad students a little more harshly than the rest...)
>From his vantage point across the room, Avenger sighs.
Avenger: Ah, my work here is done. Now what? (pause) Ah!
* * * * *
Captain "Boom-Boom" Loesch crawls into bed (finally) to get a little rest.
Just as he is about to doze off.
(THUMP!) ... (THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!) ... (THUMP! THUMP!)
Loesch: What the f***... (gets up, and goes to the porthole where the noise
was coming from)
Standing outside the porthole is Admiral Avenger, pointing to a box of
donuts in his hand. He then smiles, and snaps his fingers.
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > 1,771,561 jelly donuts drop out of nowhere into
"Boom-Boom"'s quarters, much in the fashion of the 1,771,561 tribbles falling
on Captain Kirk in "The Trouble with Tribbles."
* * * * *
Picard: Now, Data. Explain to me again what happened at the baseball game.
Data: Josephine Fleming led off the first for the London Kings with a sharp
grounder to the Twins' third baseman, George--
Picard: Data! What happened with Admiral Avenger and Q?
Data: The Admiral wished to purchase for me some popcorn, though I do not
entirely understand why. He kept purchasing all of these strange foods
and telling me that they were standard baseball game food. In my efforts
to understand more about humani--
Picard: Data! Please! Stop babbling.
Data: Oh. Sorry, sir. Was I babbling again?
Picard: Yes.
Data: Again, my apologies. What I meant to say was the popcorn vendor was
in fact Q in disguise. He commented on having some proposition for the
Admiral's attention and then they both disappeared. They did leave me
the popcorn, however. It was in fact quite delicious, though a bit on
the salty side.
Picard: Data, I have been receiving strange reports for the last two hours...
ever since the Admiral disappeared. Take a look. (hands a padd to Data)
Data scans the padd in a microsecond and hands it back to Picard.
Data: Intriguing. Do you believe that Q has offered the Admiral the same
powers that he once offered Commander Riker?
Picard: I'm not entirely sure. Kabeta noted that he mentioned the name
"Kunz" at least once.
Data: Hmmph. Perhaps the Q acted as a go-between.
Picard: "Go-between." Data, you ARE learning the language, aren't you?
Data: Quite. What I meant was that perhaps Q offered the Admiral membership
in the Kunz Continuum. It is rumored that the Admiral had certain dealings
with the Kunz long before Captain Crouton and the rest of the crew of the
_Croutonprize_.
Picard: You know, Data, you might just be right.
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > The Kunz appears across the room from the two Admirals,
arms crossed, leaning against the wall.
The Kunz: Exactly right, actually. I'm going to have to do something about
this, I'm afraid.
* * * * *
Back on the _Croutonprize_, Lt. Cdr. Midzor, Lt. Cdr. Ghiasi, Ensign Kindig,
and several other faceless crewmembers are sitting at tiny desks in one of
the ship's classrooms. Avenger stands at the front of the class, writing
at approximately warp speed, filling the chalkboards, erasing, filling them
again in less than a second each time. Avenger is talking much too fast and
with a foreign, perhaps Hindu, accent.
Avenger: So you take this particular constant and plug it into this
particular wave function, the you put that into this particular eigenvalue
equation. Take U-yem and U-yel and normalize, and do not forget that your
lambada is a quaternion, as you already know from your previous courses
on this particular subject.
Midzor: Why are you doing this to us?
Avenger: This is not kindergarten any more! You have to be quiet if we
are going to study this particular subject.
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > The Kunz appears across the room.
The Kunz: Admiral, we have to talk.
Avenger: No, right now I have to finish this particular lecture. I intend
to break K.T.'s particular record by at least two orders of magnitude before
I am done. So now you take this particular wave function--
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > Avenger disappears and reappears, now dressed back in
his uniform and Twins hat. All chalk has been removed from the room.
The Kunz: Q was wrong to give you the power. No mortal can handle the
power of the Kunz, no matter how hard they might try. You certainly were
a good student of Kunz powers at one time, but you are not a Kunz.
Avenger (whimpers): But I was just having fun! I wasn't hurting anyone!
Why won't anyone let me play? It's always work work work. Plasma this
and Atomic and Nuke that and Admiral we need you to sign this requistion
and Admiral we're being invaded by a bloody breakfast cereal!
The Kunz: Well, it may have been therapeutic for a time, but it is only
causing long-term harm. We have to go home now. And then I'm going to
have a little talk with our friend, the Q.
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > The Kunz and Avenger disappear. Midzor, Ghiasi, Kindig,
and the rest reappear at their respective stations. The lights in
Engineering suddenly go out.
Midzor: DAMMIT!!
Avenger (disembodied): hee hee hee
The Kunz (disembodied): Admiral...
* * * * *
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > The Kunz and Admiral Avenger reappear at Star Fleet
Headquarters in Admiral Picard's office. Picard looks up from his
"paperwork."
The Kunz: Sorry about all the trouble. I'll go have a nice chat with Q
now for you.
Picard: Tell him he's still not welcome in my presence.
< FWOOOOSSHHHH!! > The Kunz disappears.
Picard: Good to have you back, Admiral Avenger.
Avenger (looking at the floor, grumbling): Yeah, right. I was just having
a little fun -- that's all. Just a little fun...
Data: Admiral, we could still have some fun today.
Avenger (looks up, curious): Hmm?
Data holds up two tickets and a Cubs hat.
Data: Front row center at New Wrigley Field in less than an hour.
Picard: Data, how DID you manage that?
Data (in his gangster voice): I know the right people, Boss.
* * * * *
We now look out into the vastness of space, as we hear disembodied voices
in the background.
Q: All right...I won't do it again. I don't know for the life of me what
Jean-Luc has against me though. He used to be one of my best friends.
The Kunz: I *did* like that bit with the ping pong balls though.
Q: Yes, that was good. Almost tops some of MY favorite tricks.
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