Please Hold For Oblivion
| Star Traks: The Original Series | |
| Episode name | Please Hold For Oblivion |
|---|---|
| Season | |
| Episode number | |
| Writer(s) | Alan Decker |
| Year | 2385 |
| Stardate | 62004 |
| Chronology | |
| Previous in series | Aftermath [TRK] |
| Next in series | The Star Traks Reunion Special [TRK] |
| Previous in timeline | |
| Next in timeline | |
Ten years after Captain Alexander Rydell and the crew of the USS Secondprize manage to narrowly prevent the destruction of the universe, they are called back into service to finish cleaning up the mess they made a decade earlier. But things have changed. Lives have moved on, and grudges have grown. Can the crew pull it back together long enough to stop the end of everything? Or will one of their own send them all to OBLIVION?
Summary
STARDATE 52014 While Trinian is away on her first vacation ever, the USS Secondprize is sent to investigate the source of some anomalous temporal energy readings. The readings lead them to a moon of Batonis Six, and Lieutenant Commander Jaroch quickly determines that the temporal energy is identical to that produced by the Guardian of Forever. On Betazed, Trinian's vacation is interupted by the voice of Guardian Control in her head telling her that the Secondprize had arrived even though she was supposed to stop it. She is also informed that action has been taken.
Captain Alexander Rydell beams into the moon with Jaroch, Commander Travis Dillon, Lieutenant Patricia Hawkins, and Commander Scott Baird, while Lieutenant Commander Emily Sullivan has command of the Secondprize. As the away team makes contact with Forever, the temporal entity in the moon, the Secondprize is attacked by a far more powerfull ship sent from Guardian Control, the Mitgogae commanded by Morticent with the assistance of Guardian #492, which the Secondprize spends most of the battle running away from. Rydell and company accidentally start the destruction of the universe (Forever is anxious to show them that he can do it) but manage to get Forever to postpone it for ten years. Forever agrees and gives the five officers an access code which they must all say in unison followed by an apt profanity-laced closing statement from Baird. With the crisis temporarily averted, Morticent calls off the attack and decides to use the ten years she has left to live enjoying herself. On Betazed, Trinian comes to pretty much the same conclusion.
Featuring
- Captain Alexander Rydell
- Commander Travis Dillon
- Lieutenant Commander Jaroch
- Commander Scott Baird
- Lieutenant Patricia Hawkins
- Lieutenant Emily Sullivan
- Ensign Andrea Carr
- Lieutenant Monica Vaughn
- Trinian
Also Featuring
Author's Comments
I started writing "Please Hold For Oblivion" in the Fall of 1997, two years after I had graduate from Old Dominion University. At the time I was in graduate school in Louisiana and, if I am honest with myself, feeling a bit lonely. Yes, I was married, and I had made new friends. But the group of people I had spent almost four years with had scattered, and I was definitely feeling the inevitable changes that friendships go through as everyone moves on to new phases of their lives.
That's really what Oblivion is about. I wanted to show that time had actually passed for the Secondprize crew and that they weren't going to stay in the same place forever. Oblivion was written before The Lost Years, so all of the things that happen with the crew at the end of Lost Years were actually dictated by the decisions I made for Oblivion. I knew Rydell would retire young for a while. I'd laid the groundwork for it in Of Gods and First Officers. Actually "Gods" has a bit of dialogue that shaped a lot of Oblivion. Rydell tells Conway, "There are people for whom this is a job and those for whom this is a life. Figure out what kind of Starfleet officer you are now before your entire life passes you by. If it's just a job, stay only until you figure out what you really want to do. Then get the hell out. If it's your life, give it everything you've got." Nothing especially deep there, but it made me think about the Secondprize crew. Which ones were career Starfleet and which ones were just passing through.
And then there's Dillon. But he's another issue entirely.
Morticent came from a friend of mine who wanted to be a character in the series. She's not particularly evil, but I seem to remember that she got a kick out of being the villian. The name is a mix of Morticia Addams from "The Addams Family" and Maleficent from "Sleeping Beauty," two of her favorite characters, and her ship name, the Mitgogae, comes from the jokey name we used for one of our favorite movies (especially hers), "Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil."
I would like to point out that I came up with the profanity filter and used it as a plot point well before a similar idea was used in "South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut." I freely acknowledge when I "borrow" ideas. That one, however, was not cribbed from South Park. (This is not a statement against that movie, which I thought was hysterical. Great soundtrack, too.)