Five-Minute Enterprise S3: The Wrap Party

[Zeke]

Hallowe'en: the day when things long dead suddenly walk the earth. Out of nowhere, when the innocent thought they were safe... Five-Minute Enterprise is back!

Okay, that's not quite fair, believe it or not. 5ME has never actually been dead. But you wouldn't know, because it's just been me chipping away at new content very slowly over the years. (Some of it was on a memory stick I lost. I don't wanna talk about it.) And thus here we are, with ENT S4 having begun 20 years ago this month, and no one can be blamed for thinking more fivers are never coming. Even the Secret Santa featurette was 8 years ago now.

But hey, speaking of featurettes... I was always really proud of how I did with ENT Season 3, and at some point I got the idea of writing a little follow-up piece in the form of a "wrap party". This would be a TJI report interviewing the characters and letting them air their grievances. I had several gags planned out almost immediately, and while I went back and forth on whether the whole thing would be worth doing, I never really gave up on it -- and I always considered this the "next" thing to do for 5ME, since it wouldn't really work to post it after moving into S4.

Now, after all this time, here it is! Welcome to the Five-Minute Enterprise Season 3 Wrap Party. Since it's been so long, you may want to re-read or at least skim the Season 3 fivers themselves, or a lot of this will fail to make even the limited sense that it does.

Enjoy, just don't touch the ham salad sandwiches. Those are mine.

[Nate the Great]

After reading the article, I'm sure I would've found it hilarious if I'd actually watched the whole season or read the fivers. And it'll probably be another nine years before I do.

[Wowbagger]

Sato: There were a couple of Season 2 fivers that suggested it was on the back burner. So I was ready, even if it didn't make a ton of sense to me. Why would my character settle for a non-entity like Travis?

Reporter: Some would argue that Sato is, at best, marginally an entity.

Dis got me good. Immaculate joke construction.

I was pleased very much to remember why Archer's arm hurts so much, and the Hoshi/Travis subplot.

I was equally pleased not to remember (before suddenly remembering) that Samus Aran played a major role in this season.

Slightly ashamed to confess that Phlox's insane claims about a unicode credit got me to actually open the speaker credit in Inspector to see if it was true. (It is not. Billable hours... what a lying scumbag.)

Incredible that this was all written in 20X5. It's not too late for us to get S4 in 20X6!

[Zeke]

Yes! I knew someone would check the Unicode thing.

Btw, I forgot to mention in the newspost that there's a footnote giving the details of the "weird order" Season 3 was published in. Look for an asterisk and float your cursor over it. This style of annotation is something I'm planning to make more use of in the future.

[NAHTMMM]

Very funny as always.

Zeke: Ah. Well, it feels good to be done. This is the fourth full season of fivers I've written so far --

Reporter: You know you're the only one who counts VVS8, right?

Poor Zeke.

That's a sharp-looking hover annotation. Web 2.0 isn't completely useless.