Star Trek: ENT Reviews - From Start to ... well, you know

Seriously?

Yup, it was revealed in the Blu-ray commentary

http://trekcore.com/blog/2013/02/exclusive-roger-lay-jr-interview-part-iv/

I remember the tbbs thread and people giving me shit for not liking the idea at the time.

From that article, it sounds like the network wanted musical acts, and B&B balked. A broken clock is correct twice a day and all, I suppose.

Perhaps Faith of the Heart (and Wherever You Will Go, which featured heavily in S1 launch promos) was the compromise there.

That was UPN's mandate, not theirs. The Beeps fought tooth and nail against that and thankfully won that battle.

EDIT: Whoops, Kyle beat me to it but while there's a lot to hold Bermaga's feet over the fire for, there were more people running the show than just them--the UPN execs wanted a youthful show and Les Moonves wanted to pander to the lowesr common denominator. It's a miracle we got anything resembling Trek at all.

Les Moonves? That explains some of the content

Bickendan is linda park's baby daddy.

No new reviews - haven’t had a lot of time.

I did catch TNG’s Symbiosis, and noticed that ENT’s Dear Doctor cribbed about half of the episode from it.

Two very similar races in a mutually-beneficial marriage. One is dim-witted manual labor, the other keeps them alive and safe. After it’s revealed the situation is more precarious than it appears, the doctor and captain disagree as to how to proceed. The Captain gives a speech about the Prime Directive.

Of course, Dear Doctor didn’t have a William S. Sessions anti-drug PSA jammed in the middle of it. For those who haven’t seen it, Symbiosis is a late S1 episode of TNG - the twist (for this thirty year old episode of TV) was that one of the alien races was a planet of drug dealers who knowingly forced the other aliens to give up all their efforts, labor, and products to get the drugs that they unknowingly got addicted to. Doctor Crusher wanted to violate the Prime Directive to give them space methadone, and Picard refused to let her help. After he discovered the aliens were knowingly keeping the others addicted, he withheld fixing their ships - essentially forcing the planet to go cold turkey. And Wesley and Tasha Yar had an after school special moment where she explains drugs and addiction to him.

It was...very much a product of its time.

Oasis

I don’t know if B&B were holding actors’ residuals checks hostage or something, because this episode has another Trek alum whose talents go wasted as well!

Archer, Trip, and T’Pol are enjoying dinner with a merchant who is persistent enough to hock timeshares from a Vegas kiosk. He doesn’t have anything they want, but he tells them instead about a haunted shipwreck nearby that has what they’re looking for.

They all get turnt on Scooby Snax and head out to investigate. Since nobody on this ship has any damn sense, they don’t bother taking it any security officers. Upon arrival, despite not detecting any life signs, they find a thriving hydroponics installation, and are quickly ambushed by the residents of the shipwreck.

They’re taken to the captain of the vessel, who explains they were shipwrecked a few years back after getting attacked, and they hadn’t sent any distress calls to avoid giving away their position. Trip naturally thinks that Enterprise can fix this ship none of them have ever seen before, so he starts hitting on the daughter of the chief engineer.

Oh, and that chief engineer? It’s Odo. Or at least, it’s Rene Auberjonois. That’s right, for anyone in the audience who has seen DS9 (admittedly, the cross section between DS9 and ENT’s viewership is probably small), it’s painfully obvious something is up. They didn’t even bother trying to disguise him - all the aliens look like humans with psoriasis on their temples.

Anyway, back to Trip being a horndog. T’Pol calls him the fuck out, pointing out that it’s been less than a year since he got knocked up with the last alien woman he tried to bone.

Eventually, some of the crew heads back up to the ship, and Trip somehow convinces Odo to let him take his daughter up with them. Once there, they starts digging in to the mystery of the attack. They realize that there isn’t enough food in the hydroponics bay to support the colony, and they discover from debris that the shipwreck happened a couple decades ago.

Oh, and they find an escape pod with the body of the Captain from the shipwreck. Spoooooky.

Archer is a man of action, so they all go back down to the planet to rescue T’Pol and whoever else they left down there with no support whatsoever. They quickly get in a confrontation with the colonists - when they try to stun one, though, the beam goes right through him. The colonists are holograms.

Well, most of them are. In a move that should surprise no one who is remotely familiar with foreshadowing, Odo pipes up. He and his daughter were the only survivors - not of an alien attack, but of an accident in an ion storm that Odo thinks he could have prevented if he hadn’t been saving his daughter’s life.

So, unable to fix the ship by himself, he set up the hydroponics bay and made a holographic copy of the very dead crew so that his daughter wouldn’t grow up to realize what had happened.

Yes, that’s right - instead of reaching out for help for his daughter, he holed up with a bunch of holograms. His grand plan was to doom his daughter to a life of loneliness, and presumably abandon her to live out her days with a bunch of photons and force fields after he passed away. What a fucking asshole.

Trip calls him out on all of this, even sarcastically asking him if he’d program a holographic Doctor if she got hurt. You know Braga wrote that line and thought it was fucking hilarious.

Anyway, Odo agrees to go back to his people after his ship’s repaired - Enterprise leaves him with what he needs, and Trip kisses the daughter because apparently this is TOS again and we can’t put a blonde on screen without kissing her.

Even Braga would later go on to say this episode was bad. Who am I to disagree?

Rating: *

And, of course, this ep ALSO rips off a past story - featuring Odo in a major role, no less! - DS9's Shadowplay which has almost the exact same premise (except there even the daughter is a hologram and doesn't know it).

Detained

Enterprise premiered at an interesting time in history - a half a month after 9/11. 87 of the series’ episodes were scripted after the terror attacks (Civilization was the last episode entirely written in a pre-9/11 world). While the series would directly address the topic with the Xindi arc, episodes would start touching on more political subjects much earlier. While not directly addressing terrorism, this episode is likely the first produced for Enterprise that would touch on the subject of how we treat cultures we fear.

It does so with the finesse you’d expect of Enterprise.

Jumping right into the action, Mayweather and Archer wake up in a prison after their shuttle is attacked, and it’s entirely populated by Suliban. It’s fairly low-security - the Suliban can move freely in the facility, but it’s fiercely guarded by particularly overzealous alien guards. You can tell they’re aliens because they have a flap of skin between their eyebrows. Emmy-award-winning work there, guys.

They’re brought before the commandant of the prison. And it’s Al! That’s right, Sam Beckett and Al are finally reunited, eight years later, with a guest appearance by Dean Stockwell. Incredibly, the episode resists making Quantum Leap references. He apologizes for attacking their shuttle, and explains that his people are at war with the Suliban. Since they’re not Suliban, they’ll be released, but due to government bureaucracy, they’ll have to wait a few days in the facility before they can be released. He recommends staying away from the Suliban.

Now, do you think Archer is just going to sit still for a few days? Hell no. Instead, he and Mayweather immediately make friends with a Suliban girl and her father (kudos to that child actress who could put up with being a talking avocado for this episode). The father explains that he and his daughter, and everyone else in the facility, did nothing wrong - they were interred simply for being Suliban. The other aliens claim it’s for their own safety - to protect them from the public during their war with the Cabal.

Of course, few Suliban are part of the Cabal, so nobody in the facility can turn into Gumby or survive in space. They are just immigrants who were in the wrong place when war broke out.

Anyway, Al gets a call from Enterprise, who is more than happy to pick up the idiots they lost, and he gives them the line about red tape. He then calls Archer back into his office, and starts pressing him for intelligence about the Suliban. When he refuses to give it up, Al tells him that he’s going to miss his transport. He also tells Enterprise that they’ll be running late, so he tries to pass them off to some diplomats on his home world. Since patience is a virtue they lack, so they naturally mount a rescue. Keep in mind, from all the information they have, there is no indication or evidence that Archer and Mayweather are in trouble other than the fact that Archer basically fucks up everything he does.

They beam a communicator down to Archer, who tells them what’s going on. However, the signal naturally attracts Al’s attention. He has Mayweather beaten, and Enterprise puts together a new plan - to beam Malcolm down in full Suliban plastic surgery.

Archer has a speech wherein he directly compares the situation to Japanese internment camps in WWII, because subtlety is a four-letter word on UPN shows. They confront Al, who screams that they’re only making the situation worse for the Suliban as they break out, steal the shuttlecraft, and rescue the interred Suliban.

I’m willing to give this episode some points. It fleshes out the Suliban possibly more than any other episode of the series. Dean Stockwell gets to hone his scenery chewing for BSG. And, most importantly, I think it was timely, which made it brave - we still struggle today with distinguishing extremist minorities from peaceful majorities, and back in 2002, there wasn’t a lot of sympathy for collateral damage in the war on terror.

But it loses points for being as subtle as a brick to the face. It moves slowly, and is exposition heavy. It has a huge plot hole - they beam down a communicator to chat with Archer (enabling the prison break plot), instead of beaming him and Mayweather up at the first opportunity. And, most importantly, Al has a fucking point. The jailbreak is only going to result in harsher conditions for the Suliban in all the other facilities, and only spurs the aliens’ xenophobia - it’ll probably just be used as propaganda against the Suliban. That would be fine, if Archer was going to deal with it and help resolve the situation for the others. But none of this is ever referenced again.

Rating: **

Vox Sola

Archer fucks up the first contact with the Kreetassans because Hoshi can’t get the universal translator to deal with the fact that they’re a bunch of easily-offended dicks who get mad when dogs piss on trees (yes, that’s right, these guys will show up again for everyone’s favorite episode!). After they storm off the ship, they leave some sort of spiderweb on the ship, and it quickly makes its way inside.

Back on the bridge, T’Pol drags Hoshi for her failure, because we haven’t had enough of T’Pol inexplicably tearing another woman down this season. Archer, frustrated, goes to watch water polo with Trip, because male bonding equals eating pretzels in your pajamas while crowded around a 15” screen with footage so compressed it proves the continued existence of Real Player in the 22nd century.

People who aren’t important, like Mayweather, go to watch Serious French Cinema in the mess hall, but the video glitches out. Engineers are dispatched to fix the problem, but in a scene ripped off from First Contact, they are both quickly dispatched, though one of them manages to get Archer’s attention.

Trip, Archer, His Royal Highness, and a redshirt go to investigate, and promptly get trapped in a giant spiderweb like the engineers. It apparently telepathically links them, because why the fuck not. Reed escapes, taking a tendril of spiderweb with him.

Phlox reveals some odd readings from the tendril, and also notes it’s EM sensitivity. Hoshi thinks it’s trying to communicate, but T’Pol tells her to fuck right off with that noise, because she obviously doesn’t realize this episode is desperately trying to justify her existence in a world with universal translators. She has Reed set up EM emitters.

As they fire them at the spiderweb, their crew mates start screaming in pain - the telepathic link must also extend to transferring pain as well as thoughts. So, T’Pol is forced to let Hoshi try to talk to a spiderweb, while Malcolm jerry-rigs a forcefield to prevent the web from grabbing her.

As they get that put together, Mayweather is inexplicably left in charge of the fucking ship. He fields a call from the Kreetassans, and discovers they stormed off because they saw people eating - apparently the equivalent of watching people fuck in a restaurant. I’m serious - they compare eating in public to sex in public. Because everything on this goddamn show is a fucking sex joke written by a middle schooler. He learns this by talking as slowly as possible, making this scene excruciatingly long.

He also learns that the Kreetassans know where the spiderweb came from, so he sets a course to its home world.

Anyway, does Malcolm succeed in making a forcefield? Does Hoshi talk to cellophane wrap and silly string? Of course! It all works out, she finds out that the spiderweb just wants to go home, and they drop it off on a planet that would inspire any arachnophobe to scream to nuke the site from orbit. Maybe now T’Pol will respect Hoshi. Ha ha, no, she just blames her shitty behavior on trying to inspire Hoshi to work to the level she knows she can.

Maybe gaslighting is a time-honored Vulcan tradition.

Rating: *

Fun fact: around the time Detained aired, my tenth grade English class was reading Farewell to Mazanar (which I think was the specific camp that got name checked) My teacher was brand spanking new and was looking for ways to engage the class so she let me bring the episode in and we all got a free movie day.

Good times.

I also cribbed off of that Holodeck horror story episode from Voyager for a homework assignment for the same class.

Fallen Hero

This episode starts with T’Pol asking Archer and Trip if they want two tickets to boner-town. Yes, T’Pol has decided everyone is horny as fuck, so they need to go to Risa, the Mustang Ranch of space.

And that’s it. That’s the entire teaser for this episode. Sit through a cover of a bad eighties song! Endure commercials where announcers scream UPN at you! And your reward shall be watching the results of a focus group and a 48-year-old destined to lead a CBS procedural try to get their fuck on!

Anyone actually looking forward to this would be sorely disappointed. After Trip (really, really prematurely) changes into a Hawaiian shirt, Starfleet orders them to go pick up a Vulcan ambassador. T’Pol does her best to provide a full state visit, even kicking Hoshi out of her quarters (Hoshi says she volunteered, but we know how their relationship really works).

But when the ambassador, V’Lar, arrives, she’s downright pleasant. She shakes hands. She is appreciative of Hoshi giving up her quarters. She even makes light jokes.

So naturally something’s up. She was ambassador to the Mazarites, and they’ve kicked her out for doing all the crimes. And she doesn’t really deny it. This disturbs T’Pol, because obviously a Vulcan would defend themselves if innocent - never mind that V’Lar is the only tolerable Vulcan they’ve ever encountered that wasn’t a horndog or a rapist.

The Mazarites show up again, and demand that she be returned to them to face judgment for her crimes. When Archer takes exception to the fact that they made them come get her, only to just want her back, they attack. Since the Enterprise is woefully unprepared for virtually any circumstance, they run away.

While on the run, T’Pol talks to V’Lar. She explains that Archer will be willing to help if she actually tells him the truth about what’s going on. And then they talk about a conference they both attended when T’Pol was young and uppity, which would be interesting if it was more than filler exposition.

T’Pol then goes to Archer and explains that the charges against the ambassador are false, but the only way to get her back to Vulcan without arousing suspicion. This is nonsense, because if these clowns are preventing her from going anywhere, they’re obviously not going to just let her go if she trips and falls into a flower box or something, so it seems like she could have just said “I am going to a conference where we debate the tenets of Vulcan logic” and they would have been so fucking bored that they would have given her an expresss ticket.

After the Mazarites force the ship to Warp 4.9, Archer finally convinces V’Lar to explain what’s going on. It’s something that she had absolutely no fucking reason to hide from Archer. Seriously, a third of this episode could have been erased by one sentence. The mafia or something infiltrated the Mazarite government, and she was collecting evidence to oust them. And she needed to go to Vulcan to do this. Or something.

Eventually, the Mazarites force the ship to a full Warp 5. Despite the fact that we’ve been hearing for twenty plus episodes that this is the first Warp 5 ship, it turns out that it practically shakes itself apart if it actually goes that fast. It’s like a speedometer that goes to 140 MPH on a Ford Fiesta - it could go that fast, if it didn’t disintegrate first.

And the Mazarites still catch them anyway. They board the ship, make their way to Sickbay where they’ve been told V’Lar is, and shoots her inside the CT scanner machine thing Phlox has. Except, surprise! They’ve captured them murdering her on video, and she steps out from behind a curtain. The Vulcans that Wnterprise was meeting up with show up and demand the Mazarites surrender - the attempted murder of the ambassador apparently proves the existence of the Mazarite DEEP STATE.

It’s the worst kind of bottle episode - people talking for 45 minutes. The undercover plot didn’t make any sense. V’Lar’s actress did a good job of being a Vulcan who was convincingly in control of her emotions, but obviously still had them, which is impressive for a one-off spot. But still. This is why 20+ episode seasons have gone away. At the very least, after the teaser, it wasn’t actively awful.

Rating: **

Never got the "let's make Enterprise struggle to hit warp 5!" thing, because warp 5, whilst game-changing for a spacefaring species, is fucking slow anyway when it comes to building dramatic tension. But writers don't understand how big space is.

Hypothetical scenario: Enterprise gets a call from a colony 3 light-years away under attack by Klingon raiders.

At warp 5, going by the old TOS warp-cubed formula, it takes them 8.76 days to get there. Better bring a mop and bucket because cleanup is all that's gonna happen. Even under the TNG scale, they'd take 5-ish days.

Well, Enterprise was the same show that decided that Qo’noS was four days away from Earth at Warp 5.

Desert Crossing

I took a break from writing Voyager reviews (among other reasons) because I was stuck on the idea of doing a musical review. I took a break from writing Enterprise reviews (among other reasons) because of Desert Crossing. There’s just no joy in it - it’s a boring, awful episode that had half an interesting idea dragged out over 45 minutes.

Anyway.

Enterprise has resumed course to Bonetown Risa, since T’Pol doesn’t want to have to cancel and end up stuck with a bunch of Expedia credits she’s never going to use. On the way, they pick up a distress call, a situation that Archer is visibly disappointed in having to deal with. Oh captain, my captain. He tells Porthos that a walk on the beach will have to wait.

All the beagles that played Porthos are now dead. The inexorable march of time claims more victims.

They help out Mr. Krabs with, basically, changing his ship’s oil, and he insists on hosting Archer and Trip on his home world, and suggests they join his clan in playing “Geskana,” saying that he doubts “you’ve ever seen anything like it.” When they get there, it is Tatooine. It is basically all desert. Even the buildings look basically the same. Trip isn’t enthusiastic about going and hanging out in the desert, but inexplicably, Archer emotionally blackmails him into going.

Mr. Krabs hosts them to a dinner of Rocky Mountain Oysters in blood soup before the game begins. “Geskana” is Lacrosse. I’m trying to decide whether to give the production credit for calling a sport for rich people alien, or a demerit for being so lazy as to rip it off. Despite not being played in a swimming pool, Archer and Trip strip off their shirts for some classic slow-motion Top Gun flavored athleticism.

Back on Enterprise, T’Pol fields a call from a government official on the planet, telling her that “I hope you’re aware that, most likely, you’ll never see your captain or chief engineer again.” Somehow, she resists replying “Don’t threaten me with a good time,” and hails Archer and tells him to get back to the ship because they’ve Kramered into yet another alien conflict.

Mr. Krabs won’t have any of it, since one of his buddies informed him of the call between the Mos Eisley Spaceport and Enterprise. He insists they hear him out, where he tells them that he heard of them from a Suliban transport captain who had transported some of the prisoners that Archer had helped break out of Al’s custody, and insists that he can help them here - the government had abolished the caste system where he and his clan had languished, officially, but still discriminated against them and basically forced them to live in the desert and play Lacrosse all day.

Archer is hesitant to get involved, but the government starts shelling the camp, so Mr. Krabs sends them down into a bunker to wait it out while they go fight. Now, Enterprise could tell an interesting story about post-9/11 terrorism here, but…they don’t. Instead, as the shelling dies down, Archer and Trip run back to the shuttle, don’t leave because apparently, munitions that can barely destroy some mud buildings are deadly to shuttlepods, and instead set off to go wander off into the desert for twenty miles to a different encampment for…some reason?

Enterprise can’t beam them up or find them because this planet that seems like it has nothing going for it inexplicably has a planetary defense grid, but Mr. Krabs somehow makes it up to them - turns out there’s a brief hole in the grid. After T’Pol chews him out for getting them involved, he agrees to help them take a shuttlepod back to pick up Archer and Trip.

On the planet, they slowly make their way to the encampment. To Enterprise’s credit, they actually shot on location for all the desert scenes, and it shows with some decent cinematography. But all of that is wrapped up in the tropes of “hero badgering companion to drink more water” and “hero badgering companion to stay awake so they don’t get brain damage” for an entire act. Because we didn’t get enough of that bullshit in Shuttlepod One.

Archer and Trip make it to the abandoned encampment, but the government starts shelling it too. Luckily, Mr. Krabs, His Royal Highness, and T’Pol all show up in a different shuttlepod to come save them and destroy the mortar firing on them. Mr. Krabs apologizes for believing Archer was the Last Action Hero based on the words of the Suliban captain before he leaves, and after that, Archer basically shrugs his shoulders and says that Mr. Krabs was probably on the right side of that fight. Does he do anything about that? Nope, he just fucks right out of there for some wacky hijinx on Risa. Presumably someone retrieves the first shuttlepod. They don’t actually mention or depict that, of course. And you’d think the government would be pissy about that since they blew up their military equipment. But all’s well that ends well on this ship of fools.

Fucking awful episode. While Clancy Brown chewing up scenery was fun, and they actually filmed in the desert instead of a green screen, nothing remotely interesting happened in this episode. What a waste of a location shoot.

Rating: *

@Kyle !!!!

Listen, I think Enterprise was given a bad wrap. Over time I think my opinion has changed. Here's a list of things I like about Enterprise now:

Two Days and Two Nights

Risa! Time to fuck.

But this is Enterprise, so what will we be treated to instead? Innuendo that would be clever to middle schoolers, transphobia, and one of the most useless C-plots ever to grace Star Trek.

Half the ship is heading down to Risa. The other half just get to sit on Enterprise, not fucking the locals. I’m sure that will do wonders for morale. Curiously, despite drawing lots, all of the senior staff but T’Pol and Phlox are going, which seems statistically unlikely. Archer is stressing out about leaving the ship in T’Pol’s care, despite the fact that he’s done it dozens of times already and she is the only competent person onboard. Trip has a Hawaiian shirt.

Watching this now, I am realizing that there is no “Skip Intro” button on episodes of Enterprise on Paramount Plus. This maybe the biggest indictment of the streaming service I can offer.

Anyway, as the senior staff and one rando take a shuttlepod down, they’re talking about what they’re planning to do. Mayweather is going to go rock climbing. Hoshi is planning on learning the languages of Risa and its visitors, and she is sharply critical of Trip and Pip-Pip-Cheerio’s plans to, and I quote, “broaden our cultural horizons.” You are talking about fucking rando aliens with your coworkers. None of you are Kirk. None of you are Riker. None of you are, uh…Harry Kim? None of you are suave enough to pull this off.

As they settle in, we shift back to Enterprise, where Cutler (in her last appearance) and T’Pol are helping Phlox hibernate. Because he’s an alien, you see. He has to hibernate. ~~JuSt AlIeN tHiNgS!~~ You know how putting the ship’s only real medical officer under for 48 hours seems like a bad idea, but given that this is Enterprise, also inconsequential? You’re right!

Archer wanders into his villa with Porthos. The door controls are Horga’hn. Even the doors on Risa want you to fuck. Is Archer going to fuck? He is not. He does get a gift from T’Pol - a book on Surak, which belies her obvious intent on getting the entire crew laid as stated in previous episodes. He sees a blonde woman from his balcony, and she has an exceptionally ugly alien dog.

That night, Trip and Stiff Upper Lip hit the club dressed like Space Tubbs and Crockett, to a degree where I think it has to be an intentional homage on the parts of the production staff. They then proceed to engage in circa 2002 situation comedy about dating, which it turns out translates to circa 2022 transphobia. This is a verbatim transcript of part of the scene:

MALCOLM: Now she's interesting.
TRIP: I don’t think “she” is the right pronoun. But if you think it’s worth the risk…
MALCOLM: I don’t know, maybe I should have brought my scanner with me.
A RISAN WAITRESS gives the duo drinks.
TRIP: That’s a she.

What the actual fuck, Enterprise?

While they are busy setting back Star Trek’s commitment to social progress, Hoshi gets chatted up by some alien guy, and the blonde lady’s dog somehow makes it onto Archer’s balcony, where it is obvious that their dogs hate each other. They engage in some light banter where Archer asks her out for dinner, but she declines. Exciting stuff.

Back to the club. Oh boy. Trip and BBC America are chatting about how the Vulcan database suggested that “nobody leaves unhappy” from the club, scoff at it, then go on to speculate whether T’Pol has sex more often than once every seven years. I sincerely hope whoever’s in charge of Starfleet HR is well-paid, or at least a commodore or something. They catch the attention of some Risan club goers, who suggest they head off to some vaguely exotic subterranean caverns. The boys readily follow in eager anticipation of getting laid, but when they get to the basement of the club you fucking morons, it turns out the women are actually male shapeshifters who stun them unconscious and steal their Miami Vice cosplay.

The next morning, Mayweather breaks his leg while rock climbing, and the Risan doctors give him some painkillers he is allergic to. Oh boy. Thrilling science fiction, everyone. Hoshi’s still hanging out with that guy, eating fruit that she claims is Risan, compares to strawberries and kiwis, but is quite obviously just actually strawberries and kiwis. I get that they had to save some money for the season finale, but come on. At least make the strawberries out of blue jello or something. Archer and the blonde are getting breakfast too, and she casually reveals that her entire family was murdered by the Suliban. Just light breakfast conversation with someone you might be romantically interested in that you met yesterday. Sure.

The boys wake up from being stunned, and they are tied up and worried that the captain will find them in their underwear. They are surrounded by wine bottles. Nothing is preventing them from breaking one and cutting the ropes other than poor writing. Speaking of poor writing:

MALCOLM: They were gorgeous.
TRIP: They were male.
MALCOLM: Not at first.

What the actual fuck, Enterprise?

On the ship, T’Pol and Cutler wake Phlox from his hibernation early. Billingsley hams it up, of course, and hilariously, after being informed that Mayweather is ill, he replies with an incredulous “Who?!” Amen, Phlox, amen.

Somehow, bumbling through that scene takes us all the way to the evening. Archer’s lady friend has stepped on a camouflaged turtle and that somehow hurt her foot, but she’s emo about it because it reminds her of how the Suliban were camouflaged too. She starts asking Archer all sorts of questions about the Suliban. He makes an excuse for her to go get a sweater to go on a walk on the beach, and surreptitiously scans her, sending it up to the ship. He discovers she is a cosmetically altered member of the same aliens that Al was back in Detained. Continuity. When she comes back, he confronts her. She knocks him out cold with some sort of injection or something.

The boys, literally half a day later, realize they can break some glass and cut their ropes, and slink out of the club. Everyone is looking at them like they’re weird for being in their underwear, neglecting that two-thirds of the background cast in this episode are walking around in their underwear in this episode because “lol Risa.”

Home stretch, everyone. The next morning, Hoshi wakes up, wrapped in a Broadcast Standards and Practices approved white sheet, and rolls over and chastely kisses the guy she’s been talking up. That’s right, the only person to get laid today is Hoshi. She tells him it’s cool that it was a one-night stand, then gives him a chaste hug. She is every teen boy’s dream come true.

Archer wakes up, and the woman is just gone. That’s it. That’s the resolution to that story line. He kind of flirts with a lady, she is a spy, and then, uh, she leaves. She left the door open, with Archer lying right in front of it, and nobody at the resort questioned that.

On the shuttle ride back, the boys are wrapped in robes that barely cover their underwear, despite the aliens earlier saying that they weren’t going to steal anything from their hotel rooms because it was “too risky.” We know they both had different, non-80s outfits available in the room. Why didn’t they change? What the fuck? Everyone asks what the other did. Hoshi says she “learned several new conjugations.”

Gross.

Rating: *

Shockwave

Enterprise is on the way to check out a mining colony. Trip is bewildered by the idea of a matriarchal society enough to decide that it’s “probably best” to avoid being “flirtatious.” Given that you are the poster child for why it’s a bad idea to chase relationships with random alien women, and that you can’t understand a concept that was even present in some cultures on Earth, yes Trip, that is “probably best.” For everyone. Keep it in your fucking pants.

Anyway, they have Winston Churchill pilot the shuttlepod, and Trip, T’Pol, and Archer head down to…look at a mine. They definitely needed a warp 5 capable ship for a mission of this magnitude and importance. You might wonder why they wouldn’t have Mayweather pilot the shuttle, since he is a pilot. The episode was written by B&B themselves - how foolish of you to expect something vaguely logical.

Apparently, the shuttlepod has to follow an intricate set of protocols to make sure the landing doesn’t ignite the atmosphere due to mining byproducts. Now, I might think “Hmm, one mistake and we incinerate everything in a 50-mile radius? Maybe we should use the transporter for this one.” But that would prevent this obvious Chekov’s Gun from firing immediately, as the shuttle is rocked by an explosion that vaporizes the mining colony.

Everyone’s pretty emo about it. I suspect they didn’t have Mayweather piloting the thing because that would require him to actually act for this part, so it’s just best to avoid that. They report in to Starfleet, who informs the Vulcans, and Enterprise is grounded - do not pass Go, do not collect $200. A Vulcan ship is sent to pick up T’Pol and Phlox for some reason, and Enterprise is to head back home, where the Vulcans will browbeat Starfleet into waiting another couple decades before seeking out new life and new civilizations again.

In a conversation with Hoshi, Mayweather laments that “People back home think that we’re doing nothing out here but getting in trouble,” and to be frank, that’s a pretty fair assessment. Just two episodes ago, they almost started a diplomatic incident over eating some testicles and playing Lacrosse.

After a pep talk from T’Pol, Archer goes to bed, but when he turns on the light, he’s in a very ostentatious apartment on Earth. An audio call from Trip suggests that Enterprise is ready for inspection, and he makes a shirtless FaceTime call to whoever Phlox’s bosses are, who say he’s on his assignment previous to Enterprise. The receptionist does not even bat an eye.

Then Daniels pops up in the apartment and basically explains that he Quantum Leaped Archer into himself, 10 months previous. He reveals that the accident was no accident, and starts describing how Archer can prove it to everyone.

The next morning, back in the present, Archer calls the gang together and starts rattling off a bunch of technobabble. Long story short, the Suliban cloaked a widget that the stuck to the shuttle, that widget makes the atmosphere go boom, and Archer uses knowledge Daniels provided him from the future to develop an anti-cloak. He also heads in to Daniels quarters, pulls up his holo-Rolodex, and gets a bunch of schematics for a Suliban stealth ship.

Now, time for some action - Enterprise returns to the scene of the crime to sneak up on and breach the stealth ship, steal all their sensor logs, then get out. Who should go on this daring, dangerous mission? Archer, of course. His security officer? Nope, he’s got to stay on the ship to press buttons every once in a while, so better take your chief engineer and your science officer.

They make their way through a bunch of red-shirt walking talking avocados, steal the discs, and leave. The entire mission goes off without a hitch, and they quickly find vindicating evidence of the Suliban planting the widget. Starfleet is pleased. However, on their way to rendezvous with the Vulcan ship (for…reasons?), Silik shows up after having gotten his marching orders from the future as well. He demands Archer surrender himself due to the firepower of the Suliban ships he brings.

Archer agrees. He gives a passionate speech, giving command of the ship to T’Pol, asking her to keep an open mind to the impossible. He concludes the speech by making a joke that Hoshi shouldn’t give Porthos cheese. He concludes his dramatic speech with a fart joke. Fuck, you can just imagine Brannon Braga thinking that was clever as fuck.

He starts to head to a docked Suliban ship, but finds himself in a bombed-out office building, surrounded by bombed-out office buildings. It’s suspiciously evocative of 9/11 in the worst possible way. Daniels is there too, expressing shock since he was just eating breakfast. Archer is in the 31st century with him, and it’s a garbage fire now.

This is what happens when you don’t have Burnham around to single-handedly save the day every week.

Overall, it was a decent episode, especially in comparison to a lot of S1, but not anything particularly special. It was very tightly paced, didn’t linger too long to worry about how they eat and breathe and other science facts, and it took advantage of the continuity it had established over the season in a fairly nice way to make it believable that Starfleet would bench the mission after all of this. It had the potential for a very interesting S2 based on that alone - you could almost imagine a protracted STIII setup where they have to get the gang back together and save Archer from the future. But, of course, nothing so interesting was to be. It was just another cliffhanger written where the ground beneath the cliff was a few feet away from the person dangling from it - nothing was really at risk.

Rating: **

Season One
The first season of a lot of Star Trek series is pretty shaky sometimes. Budgets are thin. Plots are rushed. Characters are underdeveloped. But I think it’s rare that they are quite as seemingly focus-tested as Enterprise’s was. Whether it was the decision to omit “Star Trek” from the title, to TV-14 style profanity, to purposefully picking each character to maximize appeal to various demographics, to just blowing up continuity from the first shot of a Klingon in a corn field, they were seemingly aiming for an audience that I’m not entirely convinced was ever there - people who were interested in what Star Trek had to offer, but not interested in Star Trek. The best episodes of the season were TOS pastiches (Strange New World, Civilization), morality plays (Dear Doctor), and expanding the world of Star Trek’s canon in a way that was both entirely authentic and entirely new (Fortunate Son, The Andorian Incident). The worst episodes? Wow. Just mindless teenage humor, inexplicable characterizations, blatant attempts at sex appeal, and questionable 9/11 allusions.

*: Unexpected; Terra Nova; Breaking the Ice; Silent Enemy; Sleeping Dogs; Shuttlepod One; Fusion; Rogue Planet; Acquisition; Oasis; Vox Sola; Desert Crossing; Two Days and Two Nights
**: Broken Bow; Fight or Flight; Cold Front; Shadows of P’Jem; Detained; Fallen Hero; Shockwave
***: Strange New World; Civilization; Fortunate Son
****: The Andorian Incident; Dear Doctor

Total : 20
Total : 5
Average rating: *,

@Kyle I'm very glad you're alive and you haven't gone insane from rewatching Enterprise.

I will have to scroll back through the thread. I don't think I've watched much of Enterprise since its original run. But my memories were that Silent Enemy was pretty good.

Speaking of which, I watched one video that pointed out that out of 98 episodes, Bermaga wrote a whooping 37 of them. In interviews, Braga had mentioned how nearly all the writers had quit or were sacked by season 1 for various reasons, likely because much like Ronald Moore they were sick of the horrendous conditions in the writing room.

That's just....a lot of episodes for exec producers to be penning themselves.

It's also funny to go to r/startrek on Reddit to find people begging to go back to the 26 episode model we had that even for 2001, Enterprise was an outlier--every other show had moved to 22 a season and that's still at least seven too many for most shows IMO. No one old enough to have watched ENT or VOY (and hell, even early TNG or DS9) should want this shit ever fucking again.

Rod Serling wrote 92 of the 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone and was so exhausted by this that he didn't complain too much when CBS canceled the series.

An interesting thing that I noticed in one episode of The Twilight Zone that I recently watched, that Serling wrote. It had a very subtle anti-racist message in it, that I doubt most people would pick up on today. The episode is entitled Mr. Bevis, and the only reason I caught it was because I'd happened to have watched this interview with Serling a few days before I watched the episode


Serling rails against racism in that interview, and in the episode, there's a couple of scenes that nobody would pay particular attention to today, but back in 1960? They might have paid a great deal of attention to them.

Shockwave, Part II

TNG’s The Best of Both Worlds was borne of a dilemma facing the show runners. Patrick Stewart’s contract renewal was up in the air, and it was impossible to tell where he’d land. So, they put together a clever ploy. They lined everything up such that, should Stewart not return, Frakes could step into the captaincy with Elizabeth Dennehy’s Shelby as his first officer and Picard, now Locutus, would go down with the Borg ship. If he did return, Locutus would survive to be saved and re-gifted his humanity - along with a healthy dose of character development, and cash, for Stewart to enjoy.

Thus, the perfect cliffhanger was born, and Star Trek has been chasing that lightening ever since. Unfortunately, like many things with Enterprise, they do so poorly - leaving the audience with bewildering hooks that they can’t hope to deliver upon, because they never actually had a plan other than “make the good numbers go up please”. It’s more The Colbys leaving Dynasty to clean up the mess of an alien abduction.

Anyway.

Aboard the SS Minnow NX-01, Silik has the crew dead to rights, and he insists that Archer is fucking around. T’Pol lets the Sullivan commandeer the ship to prove that Archer has left the building, and Silik is…weirdly skeptical of that. Silik, a man who knows time fuckery is possible.

Taking a quick hop, skip, and jump to the 31st century, Daniels and Archer pick through the wreckage of a decimated Earth. Daniels dances around the non-existence of the Federation on a world that seemed to have stopped in time quite a long while ago. Don’t worry, though - in this alternate timeline, someone had managed to publish a book on the Romulan Star Empire. And, remember how Daniels was eating some Captain Crunch or whatever when Archer showed up? Well, it turns out that, actually, this entire situation is caused because his bosses made him pull Archer to the future, leaving no one in the past to continue to fuck up the Alpha Quadrant.

That’s right - without Archer, the future is garbage. Archer. The guy who concludes speeches with fart jokes. The guy who, in this episode, will argue for humanity’s place in the stars with a tortured gazelle analogy.

On Enterprise, Silik shoves everyone in their quarters and points the ship towards one of their bases, apparently satisfied that Archer is no longer onboard due to a mysterious “temporal signature” in concert with some TV-14 torture of T’Pol. And since they’re dragging a whole armada of lazy CGI with them and missing their rendezvous with the Vulcan ship, the Vulcans decide to pursue because there’s obviously something wrong - T’Pol would never put up with Archer’s shenanigans. Despite a season’s worth of evidence to the contrary.

In the future, Daniels and Archer decide they need to contact the 22nd century, but can’t because shit’s broken. Eventually he realizes that Archer has enough electronics on him to, with other crap they find lying around, build a temporal communicator. Because apparently that’s something you do in 31st century high school. Build a cell phone to call the past.

Silik, meanwhile, needs his own temporal communicator, because his Zoom call is fucked - he keep calling his boss from the future, but there’s no answer. We, the audience, know it’s because there’s no future worth living without Archer, but the Suliban all seem comically convinced that the guy’s just pissed off at them and screening their calls.

After Archer’s floating transparent head makes contact with the past (and how the fuck does that even work? Are they projecting a hologram through time?), the Enterprise crew puts together a daring plot to go steal a widget from Daniels’ quarters. This plot involves Lord British instructing Tucker on how to rewire the comms despite Tucker being the engineer, Hoshi being forced into some proto-Jeffries-tubes that supposedly are too small for adults yet are suspiciously well-lit, and Hoshi losing her shirt after falling out of an air duct.

Because it’s been so long since we’ve had utterly, completely gratuitous nudity on the show.

After the crew gets the widget from Daniels’ quarters that Archer requested, the Suliban promptly take it back after decloaking themselves. Now, the crew has taken out multiple Suliban who were just wandering around uncloaked. If you could cloak yourself and patrol the ship full of enemy combatants, why wouldn’t you? However, the crew engineers a fake warp core breach, leaving Silik, the Suliban, and the future widget thing on their base.

Silik hooks it up like it’s a WiFi router that’s going to let him use the cool backgrounds in his Zoom call, but surprise, it’s a temporal transporter and Archer hops the fuck on out of it, promptly taking him hostage and forcing him to return Archer to Enterprise. It is literally a deus ex machina.

Despite all that and the proof that Enterprise didn’t blow up that mining colony due to their usual incompetence, the Vulcans are wary of letting Enterprise continue its mission. Archer makes a speech contrasting humanity’s journey into the stars to the first steps of a baby gazelle that he watched being born - it quickly found its footing and tore off across the savannah. He notes that humanity isn’t like that, but they get there eventually. The Vulcans aren’t impressed, but accede to letting them continue to fuck around after T’Pol calls them on their bullshit.

Fin.

Remember that reference to Dynasty up at the top of the post? I can’t recall where I heard this, and it might be apocryphal, but supposedly the reason for such an absurd cliffhanger was that the writing staff was getting canned after the Colbys cancellation, and they wanted to relish in making Dynasty’s writers clean up their mess.

What fucking excuse did Enterprise have here?

Rating: *

Carbon Creek

T’Pol has been marooned on Enterprise for a year, and to celebrate that and her breaking the previous 10-day record for a Vulcan enduring the company of humans, Trip and Archer decide to try to get her drunk. That doesn’t work, of course. So Archer decides to mention how he was Facebook stalking her Starfleet records, and asks why she went to a nowhere town in Pennsylvania for leave.

So, she says that she’ll tell them a story, of how her great grandmother made first contact with humans in Carbon Creek almost a century before Zephram Cochrane’s first warp flight.

Luckily, unlike most of the times Enterprise played fast and loose with canon, this pays off.

Trip and Archer are, naturally, skeptical, especially when T’Pol reveals that none of the story is a secret - it’s on public record on Vulcan, but humans never bothered to ask or go look.

She proceeds to tell the story of how her grandmother’s survey ship crashed in the forest outside of Carbon Creek, killing the captain and leaving her in charge of two other Vulcans. After eating through their survival rations, and starting to consider eating meat like savages, one of the other Vulcans insists on going to the town to find supplies.

And that’s good, because that means they leave a really obvious forest set and head to a location shoot. T’Pol’s grandmother and the adventurous Vulcan steal some clothes on the outskirts of town. In what is truly the low point of this episode, bizarre and out of place, it features a silhouette of T’Pol’s grandmother changing where you can obviously see her nipples. Now, nipples are great and all, but in the context of Enterprise, it’s gratuitous titillation in an otherwise solid episode.

They encounter a friendly barkeeper, her twenty something-playing-a-high-schooler son, and a town full of people who are generally friendly, just eking out a quiet existence mining. After hustling pool to make some seed money, the Vulcans too end up eventually finding their place in town, doing small jobs or working in the mine.

T’Pol’s grandmother endures it, but is frustrated their distress call has gone unanswered. The adventurous Vulcan, on the other hand, eagerly starts exploring human culture - learning more about the barkeeper’s son’s college aspirations, going with her on a date to a baseball game, and getting a TV to watch (in a nice nod to Trek’s roots) I Love Lucy.

Naturally, T’Pol’s grandmother and the other Vulcan are aghast, but eventually they’re faced with a choice - help the adventurous Vulcan save miners from a tunnel collapse, or let them die. And they save them, leaving the adventurous Vulcan a town hero. Even T’Pol’s grandmother becomes attached to the barkeeper’s son, who dreams of going to college and lives out of the library, learning.

Finally, their distress call is answered. They start to tie up loose ends - including T’Pol’s grandmother secreting a Vulcan-made Velcro pouch to a patent office to pay for the barkeeper’s son’s college. However, ultimately, the adventurous Vulcan decides he wants to stay. And they let him, faking his death to their rescuers, and leaving Carbon Creek behind.

Of course, Archer and Trip can’t believe that a Vulcan was left on Earth. T’Pol emphasizes that they wanted a story, then excuses herself for the evening back to her quarters, where she opens her storage locker and takes out her great grandmother’s very 50’s vintage purse.

You might notice a lack of profanity, a lack of exclamation, a lack of questioning of the recreational drugs in use, and a lack of anyone but Archer, Trip and T’Pol. And you’d be right. This is a simple story told very well, and its only real failings are production values and someone getting horny with a spotlight.

It’s interesting how it compares to a story like 11:59, where there might be something of an unreliable narrator, and how it enables the (admittedly somewhat filler) story from Picard’s Mercy - it’s a lot easier to tell the story of a kid haunted by a failed mind meld when you’ve established that Vulcans had been showing up to Earth every 20 years or so before the events of First Contact, and it almost makes you wonder if they had included an explicit Carbon Creek reference in an initial draft before getting cut.

Good times. If only more of Enterprise had been of this quality.

Rating: ****

Y'know why it's good?
They ripped off Garamet.

In retrospect I kinda wish we could see what a fully UPN/WB/CW/Dawson's Trek-flavoured Enterprise would have looked like. Maybe it would have been shit, but the last several years have given us Star Trek reimagined as a series of action movies, an animated comedy, an emotional drama, an inspiring kids show, and a knockoff Old Man Logan series, and they've all brought something new to the table.

You could steal half the premise from Other Space, say that the crew is full of young attractive idiots because humanity isn't as excited about exploration after decades of boring ass Warp 2 ships sending back pictures of rocks after several years. Nobody experienced wants an assignment on the first Warp 5 ship in case it breaks down out there and they have to spent decades limping back to the nearest outpost.