Lucretia’s ex-husband shows up as an on-the-run fugitive from the Orchard and its sexy times galore (in her dreams only.)

Kenneth and Eugene discuss Past Lives 

Synopsis:

On Saturn, a man, Eric, is apprehended for outstanding gambling debts.  His debt has been sold to the BioMycron corporation.  They use their debtors as human guinnea pigs, and he is injected, without warning with a substance that will most likely kill him in 48 hours.  In the turn of hair, this bumbling gambling fool becomes lethal killer, killing two of his captors, escaping and stealing a shuttle, the Carpathia.

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Very soon, Rudolfo is assigning Dante and the crew of the Trans-Utopia with his retrieval.  He’s wanted alive and he needs to be delivered within 48 hours.  Dante just happens to be in the area.  Lucretia is shocked to learn that the fugitive is her ex-husband.  This leads to a bit of very awkward and not-entirely-good-natured ribbing.

On the shuttle, Eric is trying to reach the nearest medical facility to find an antidote, he can get there in time, but only if he flies through a meteor storm.  The Trans-Utopia follows, sustaining considerable damage before they are able to retrieve the fugitive’s ship.

Once captured, Eric disputes the story that Dante has been given.  He is not a janitor in the employ of BioMycron, and he did not murder two people, he killed them in self-defense after they injected him with poison.  Dante is seemingly unmoved, but back on the bridge, he does a bit of checking and BioMycron’s story doesn’t entirely hold water.  He asks Carravagio to perform a medical scan, which confirms that Eric has been poisoned and he will die.

Dante tries to get him to the medical facility, but with the engines damaged from the earlier hi jinx they cannot reach the facility in time.  With no qualified, responsible engineer on the crew, he must rely on Percy, as always, to do the job in time.

Dante decides to soliloquize to the audience about his dead wife being a data ghost in the machine, and then goes to ask her to help, since she is a doctor.  I’m not that kind of doctor, I’m a dead kind of doctor who doesn’t really exist.  Tell Carravaggio to do a better job scanning.

Carravagio does a better job scanning and then develops an antidote, which is given to Eric.

While all this is going on, Lucretia and Eric talk a bunch about their failed marriage, plus Lucretia has sexy time flashbacks.

Also, it turns out the antidote didn’t work, Eric will die soon.

Percy gets the engines working, but its too late.  Lucretia discovers a familiar name, Paquette, on the board of directors of BioMycron and sends a nasty voicemail to her dad.  He’d better not be part of this.

Eric convinces, first Dante, then finally Lucretia, to let him go in the shuttle so he can die in space.  They do, and, as the amazingly precise 48 hours elapses, Eric begins to glow… and his shuttle explodes.

Dante tries to talk to Percy, I hope you’re not upset you couldn’t get the engines fixed in time and a man died because of your incompetence.  No.  I’m an emotionally-stunted cripple and that doesn’t bother me.

“Does anything bother you?”

“My parents were killed, that bothers me.”

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