Saffron Burrows

            On Monday after midnight I put fresh carpet tape on the edges of my mattress where it had gotten less sticky. I lint-rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room, the top of my bed and the pillow and didn’t pick up many bedbugs. I shook my sheet and comforter out on the deck, turned the heat on, and went to bed around 1:40. I slept right through to the 5:00 alarm and turned the heat off. After yoga I checked for bedbugs and there were a few below the baseboards and some stuck to the carpet tape. 

            I revised my translation of “Je trouve ça coperchic” (I Find it Super Chic) by Boris Vian and since there’s no audio for the song I didn’t bother to memorize it. I uploaded it to my Christian’s Translations blog and tomorrow I’ll publish it. 

            I worked out the chords for the first verse of “L’île enchanteresses” (The Enchanted Isle) by Serge Gainsbourg. The second verse should have the same chords and then I’ll need to work out the chorus. 

            I weighed 91.05 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice for the first of two sessions and it stayed in tune most of the time. 

            I weighed 92.3 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 91.65 kilos at 18:10. 

            I was a little behind in my journal and worked on catching up. I roasted an Australian beef eye of round and had a slice with a potato and the last of my gravy while watching season 4, episode 1 of Star Trek Strange New Worlds. 

            The Enterprise is sent on a mission to observe a category 10 interplanetary squall. Commander Pelia is the only member of the crew who has seen one before and she says she was in the police box at the time (She is implying that she was once a companion of the Doctor. This is the second time there’s been a hint that Star Trek and Doctor Who are in the same universe. In the last season of Doctor Who someone comments that that the Tardis is like Star Trek and the Doctor says, “We should visit them sometime”). They receive a distress signal from inside the storm and attempt a rescue. The Enterprise gets caught in a vortex and gets thrown to an unknown location. The Enterprise is without power and their warp drive needs iridium to be restarted. They detect some on a nearby planet and so Una, Singh, and Ortega take a shuttle to the planet. But their path to the iridium is blocked by a large life sign they haven’t seen yet. 

            Meanwhile The Enterprise is snagged in an energy field by an alien spacecraft. Pike invites the alien commander aboard the Enterprise. Spock discovers that the phenomenon actually sent them 65, million years in the past and that the planet the shuttle crew landed on is Earth. The large life form the away team detected is a tyrannosaurus rex. The aliens that have captured the Enterprise are Martians.

            Una stuns the T-Rex with her phaser by shooting it in the mouth. They are able to collect the iridium. 

            The Martian commander and her entourage do not have transporters but the Martians have developed the technology of phasing and board the Enterprise by passing through the hull. Commander Cassell says the Martians are at war with the Dol’drm who are insect-like creatures impossible to communicate with. Pike asks for a chance to try to get through to them. It seems that Cassell agrees but later she and her entourage phase into engineering and steal an antimatter storage pod, which she plans to use as a weapon against the Dol’drm. 

            Before the away team can leave prehistoric Earth they are threatened by a large dinosaur but Laan instinctively punches it with incredible strength and it runs away. She breaks her hand but feels no pain. 

           The Enterprise is repaired and pursues Cassell to the fifth planet in the solar system, which is the Dol’drm homeworld between Mars and Jupiter. Cassell fires the antimatter at the planet and Pike is prepared to destroy it but then stops and allows it to be blown up so it won’t exist in our time. 

           The explosion is what they need in order to return to their own time and so the Enterprise enters the blast. 

            Spock calculates that it is the destruction of the Dol’drm homeworld that created the asteroid belt. It is a piece of Dol’drm that hit the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs. Cassell’s actions also shifted the orbit of Mars to take away its ability to support life. In defeating the Dol’drm she doomed her planet. But M’Benga says some of Cassell’s DNA has spread throughout the galaxy. 

            Pike picks up the book A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs from his library. In the story John Carter is also transported to the distant past when Mars was thriving with life. 

            The distress signal the Enterprise investigated was their own from 65 million years ago. They created the storm that they were investigating and that both sent them back and later forward in time.

            Una is promoted to commander. 

            Cassell was played by Saffron Burrows, who was raised by socialists. She sold the Socialist Worker Newsletter for pocket money. She studied drama since she was a child. At 15 she became a successful model. She made her TV debut in Les cinq dernières minutes in 1992. She made her film debut in In the Name of the Father in 1993. He starred in The Loss of Sexual Innocence, Miss Julie, Perfect Creature, The Galindez File, and The Guitar. She co-starred in Circle of Friends, Hotel de Love, Lovelife, Nevada, Timecode, Wing Commander, Deep Blue Sea, Gangster no. 1, Enigma, Tempted, Klimt, Reign Over Me, Shrink, Dangerous Parking, Dangerous Waters, and Canary Black. She co-starred on Boston Legal, My Own Worst Enemy, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Mozart in the Jungle, and You.