MONDO EXTRAS

And as Kirk starts to figure the whole thing out, I'm passing this over to Sara. Lead on, McRecapper.

Why, thank you, Keckler. I'm glad your eyes have recovered from your last 7th Heaven recapping experience. Sadly, mine have not. I've actually been recapping blind for the last six months.

Kirk asks Uhura to filter out the annoying volleyball noises into what one would hear if one, oh, say, lived in the ocean. And maybe had ears like a whale. A humpback whale, perhaps. Happy to finally have something to do, Uhura accomplishes the task in under two seconds. Well, it was good while it lasted, wasn't it, Uhura? She plays the filtered volleyball noises to the crew, and they're only slightly less aurally unpleasant. Spock calls the sounds "fascinating," because he kind of finds everything fascinating. He says that he has a hunch, and he's going to test it. Kirk follows, instructing Bones to stay behind. McCoy codgers that he's going with them because someone needs to control the madness. And also because he doesn't want to be stuck on the bridge with creepy Sulu for company.

Two screens flash 8-bit Nintendo-style graphics of various whales. Apparently, Klingons have a database of extinct Earth animal species on their ships, which I'm sure has come in useful for them approximately never times. The computer flashes a humpback whale graphic in the two colors it has available to it: orange and white. ["You know, it's a damn good thing this little Klingon scout ship has information on all of Earth's sea creatures downloaded into its computer." -- Keckler] Actually, there may have been some blue in there, too. Maybe those are actually Super-Nintendo-quality graphics. Spock claims that he knew all along that the probe was transmitting humpback whale songs, even though a few minutes ago he didn't even know what a joke was. McCoy is all annoyed, of course, that someone would be crazy enough to send a probe to talk to whales. Spock and Kirk theorize that some random alien culture with nothing better to do than talk to boring whales and the said boring whales have been in contact for a long time, but then when the evil humans killed off the species in the twenty-first century (that means this IS the century where we can finally say goodbye to those giant saltwater displacers, hooray!), and the aliens lost contact with the whales, they sent this probe to find out what happened.