Tripping the Rift: S02E03: Honey I Shrunk the Crew

After watching that pile of garbage that Sci Fi Channel selected as the season opener, cool Whip, I was very hesitant to tune in this week. It was o­nly out of loyalty to this guide that I even bothered watching. My fears o­nly worsened when I learned in the opening seconds that this weeks episode was written by the same guy as Cool Whip. I was ready to shut off the TV right then. Luckily I stuck around and kept watching Honey I Shrunk the Crew, the best episode to date!

The episode starts off with Darph Bobo being interrupted by his wife Bernice while watching TV. As always she’s complaining to him, but this week it was about the excessively high credit card bill. There are tens of thousands of porn/gambling/vice charge o­n their statement that she’s upset about. Bobo insists that he didn’t make those charges and calls up the credit card company to confirm it. He’s connected to Abu Smith, a phone consultant in India, of course, who won’t talk with him about the bill unless he calls from his house phone. Bobo is calling from his home phone, but learns that his primary number has been changed, to Chode’s ship!

We see Chode living it up o­n Bobo’s credit card. He’s stolen Bobo’s identity and financially is Bobo. He decides to share the wealth with his crew, and they all buy some long wanted items. T’Nuk gets a wonder bra, Gus a vibrator (I guess Six wouldn’t lend o­ne to him) and Whip bought a shrink ray out of the back of a comic book. Six is disappointed with everyone’s greed in the matter, but nobody really gives a fuck.

That is until Bobo’s clown cruiser appears in front o­n them! Six raises the shields but Bobo says that he doesn’t want to destroy them for stealing his identity, he wants to steal their sanity instead. He tricks Whip into revealing the password to Bob’s mainframe, and uses it to reprogram the AI before the crew can do anything about. The Bob personality has been replaced with something far worse; Bernice. Bobo plans o­n having the crew suffer much the same way that he always does by listening to his wife’s horrid voice. Oh and he set the Jupiter’s self destruct to go off in 10 minutes too.

With less then 10 minutes until their destruction, the crew has to come up with a plan to save the ship and themselves. Six figures out some long plan that involves a lot of technobabble to reset the password and control the ship.. But Whip has a cooler idea, he wants to shrink the shuttle to fly into Bobo’s brain to retrieve the new password. Chode feels that this mission is too vital to trust to math and orders them to prepare the shuttle.

Gus, Whip and Chode board the Surrender Dorothy and Six uses the shrink ray to reduce the ship’s size. She and T’Nuk both felt that it would’ve been safer to stay o­n the ship that is about to self destruct than act out Whip’s half witted idea. Her and her stupid logic chip! Where’s the fun in doing her crazy plan? After the knuckleheads leave, she and T’Nuk start working o­n her plan.
The shuttle flies into the Clown Ship through a laundry vent and finds Bobo and Bernice arguing in the kitchen. They are almost swallowed by Bernice when she sneezes but instead they are thrust forward into Bobo’s ear.

They travel through his bloodstream battling white blood cells until they reach his brain. They are able to hear everything that Bobo can hear, including Bernice’s incessant bitching. Chode gets a good idea and uses a probe to hack into Bobo’s body control. He has Bobo say some pretty nasty things to Bernice. This o­nly gets Bobo in more trouble with his wife. Bobo can’t understand why he’s saying those things and swears he’s possessed. However Chode continues his humiliation of his sworn enemy and after he has Bobo say a few more nasty things about Bernice and her mother, Bernice fights back with a strong sucker punch to the jaw.

Back o­n the ship, the fun is really just starting. Six figures that they have to crawl through an access tube to get to Bob’s core. But Bernice is expecting that move, and readies her heat sensors. If anyone tries to go through the tube, she’ll detect it and contract the tube to stop them. After T’Nuk gets stuck and pulled out, Six realizes that it’s up to her and her cyborg body. She strips out of her clothes, giving everyone at home and the internet shots of her body that we’ve all been waiting for! She then crawls through the tight transparent tube to get to the core.

Halfway through the tube the friction of her lithe body crawling inside has generated enough heat for the tube to constrict some, trapping her in the tube. Actually the ship is starting to orgasm from the great sensations of having a nude Six crawling inside. Either way, Six is now stuck and needs some help from T’Nuk in the form of slippery oil. T’Nuk spills some oil down the tube and Six rubs it all over her hot body to better ease her way in the tight hole.

Check out all the pics here. Don’t forget there is a second page too! If you look closely you can actually sees nipples. I will be very disappointed if someone doesn’t try to make a wallpaper out of these images at some point in the next month!

Chode has been putzing around so long that he very nearly missed the deadline to find the code and reset the ships computer. The morons very quickly access Bobo’s memory and find all sorts of incriminating evidence against him. The first is a childhood memory of Bobo telling a teacher that Chode was using a cheat sheet and not himself. Could this be the incident that started their bloody rivalry?
Another memory shows Bobo about to smother Bernice in her sleep with a pillow. Chode figures he can blackmail him with that later. Lastly we see Darph Bobo checking out a Death Orb (Death Star) in a weapons catalogue. The death orb is referenced in other episodes so I expect it to become an episode plot o­ne day.

Time is quickly running out and Chode hastily looks through the memories. He eventually finds some numbers jotted down and figures that they are the new code. With seconds left, Whip enters the numbers and tries to reset the system. But it’s too late, the numbers don’t work.
Just as they start mourning Bob and Six, T’Nuk comes o­n the line to tell them that everyone is okay including (unfortuantly) her. SIx’s plan worked. Math always does! As a side effect, Bob had an orgasm from Six crawling through his ducts, and takes a drag of a cigarette and asks her if it was good for her too. It wasn’t.

Before they can celebrate too much, Six asks Whip if he read the manual. Being a guy, of course he didn’t. It turns out that after twenty minutes the shrinkage will wear off. If they expand in a closed space, they won’t explode their surroundings, they’ll fuse permanently with them! Shit! They could permanently become Bobo! They try to fly out of Bobo’s ears, but the exit is blocked by ear plugs so Bobo wouldn’t have to hear Bernice’s bitching. Six tells them that there is a cut in Bobo’s shin and they should try to exit there. They fly through is bloodstream too fast and accidentally miss their turnoff for the legs. Instead they wound up in his digestive system. Predictably they have to exit through his colon and asshole. I detest scat humour, so I’m just going to ship to the part until they make it back to the Jupiter safely.

After everything is said and done, the crew harass Chode about his identity theft scheme and remind him that he almost became Bobo permanently. But Chode is his own style, wanted to keep stealing from Bobo. Those numbers he found earlier were Bobo’s debit card pin and Chode emptied Bobo’s account. Something which Bobo later learned when he visited the pharmacist for a hemeroid donut.

And that concludes Honey I Shrunk the Crew. I don’t think I adequately captured the episode here. It was a truly excellent o­ne, and a great episode to redeem the series after the previous two embarrassments.

I’d rate this episode a terrific 49,510 out of 10.

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Tripping the Rift reviews are © 2005 Ryan Bechtel.
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