So, the Borg invasion of the multiverse has begun. Q and Q2 (who is basically there to be annoying) have assembled the first team to start fighting back and sent them to a randomly picked starting point: Coruscant in the Star Wars universe. Do they pick anyone from Star Wars for the team? No. Don't be silly. The team consists of characters from Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, and The Greatest American Hero. Because reasons.

Anyway, somewhere in the underbelly of Coruscant, this conversation happens:

Bill scrutinized the black Vulcan. "I always thought that aliens would look a lot different that humans. I've been around aliens before, but I just never got the opportunity to see one." Bill stepped back and decided to accept the man's claim to being an alien. No human could be that much of a stiff! he decided. "Well, I'm disappointed. I thought there would be more to aliens than pointy ears and slanted eyebrows."

At that Tuvok's eyebrows raised. "Indeed!"

"Actually," perked up Jamie, "Steve and I just saw an alien rowing an old boat across an underground lake. It was a light greenish color with big eyes. Kept muttering about looking for his 'precious'." Jamie paused in her description. "I think it might have been insane, whatever it was."

That's... it... but... what?!

For those who might not be aware, this is clearly Gollum from the Rankin-Bass animated adaptation of The Hobbit:

Why is he on Coruscant? This isn't brought up again for the rest of the part, and I seriously doubt it'll be brought up again in the rest of the story, either. It's so random! Why? {X D

For that matter, I don't know why this part is set on Coruscant at all. The only connection to Star Wars is a droid they rescue (who does almost nothing) and Stormtroopers who show up to provide an extra nuisance (as if the Borg weren't trouble enough), and the action is confined to a walkable area. Seems to me that any sufficiently technological city with a derelict undercity would have worked just fine.

I also could have done without the mangling of the Buffyverse characters, whom I know well enough that I noticed and it bothered me. There's a whole thing where Quark tricks Buffy into oo-mox, and then she finds out what that is and proceeds to throw him to the ground and beat him up to the point of drawing blood. Look, I could understand smacking him once, because ew, but beating him bloody? Nuh-uh. It's brutal, and it's not like Buffy. What's worse, everyone waiting in the wings on Deep Space Nine, who are able to watch thanks to Q-based contrivance, all find this hilarious. It's gross. I know Quark is a cretin most of the time, but he doesn't deserve this. {= /

And then the fic goes and kills off Spike after messing us about over whether he's an evil Vulcan-eating monster or a conflicted antihero with confusing feelings for Buffy somewhat ahead of schedule. It's just weird.

Oh, and there's the bit where Giles sleeps through Q being in his house because he has the flu. I don't remember whether or not Giles actually gets sick at some point in season 4, but even if he does, it feels like a copout, and I Do Not Approve of the copout sidelining of Giles.

~Neshomeh

The fact that the right eclectic selection of canons is involved would probably be enough for me regardless, but the clincher is the publication dates: the reviews for Part 5 show that the second chapter came out in July '02, and so only the first chapter of Tangled Web 5 was out when J&A posted their mission. It can't be a coincidence that the chapter introducing both "Touched by an Angel" and "James Bond" came out, and then Jay saw both of those in the fic.

I don't think you need to worry about not seeing multiple Doctors. Bond doesn't actually appear in person in 5:1, only as a mention, and Xena isn't even in that chapter. I think J&A were just viewing the whole fic as a sort of collapsing spiral of madness. They describe it as a "chaos zone", which doesn't actually describe the events of the chapter - but perfectly describes the feel of the flurry of references. They were just riffing on the entire thing, not writing themselves into a specific scene.

This is some seriously impressive detective work! :D

I'm wondering now if we have any named Untanglers who would have been part of the team who got stuck in there. Looking through the category... turns out yes! There's a bunch of agents who show up around 2008 with unclear start dates (Ketay the Cardassian, for example), but there's also several early ones:

• April Halloway is confirmed to be DIC in 2002, either before or after her partner Dmitri's death.
• Nia and Shelley, both featured in the last Despatch story, are confirmed, because that story took place in May 2002.
• The Disentangler and the Agent are almost confirmed, since Dis is confirmed in the PPC three years earlier, and they have the Doctor Who knowledge to be useful.
• Narto Telyan. He would have to be 14 and very new, but it's possible.
• Random. She recruited Death in 2004, so this would be about right for her to be operating as a solo agent (before partnering with the chameleon). The chameleon is a possible too, but he was transformed for being useless in 2004, so probably hadn't been around for long.
• Most intriguingly of all: Elisabeth, the First Agent. We know she was still active around 1992, and Osbert isn't claiming to be the First Agent (Apart From Makes-Things) until 2009. Could it be that the Tangled Web was what finally drove her out of the PPC?

Chuck in the likes of Ketay, Alan, Allison Brown, Bart Ronson and Canta Enqueo - all of whom fall into the 'not confirmed to have started later' category - and we could actually make up the "some dozen" out of confirmed agents! That's kind of cool, actually.

(No, I do not now have plans to try and write the failed mission. It would have to be a cowrite anyway, and I am abysmal at those.)

hS

I can't believe it's actually real! Holy crud.

I think that the city of Tarsus is mentioned in some of the Greek myths.