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

I wasn't sold on the idea with Bermaga at the helm, but given the bangers nuTrek's been pumping out, I no longer outright hate this concept of Degrassi in Space ™ with the right team. If Trek can pull off getting the fandom mostly united around an adult animated comedy and a series aimed at the Nickelodeon crowd, why not this?

....no modern soundtrack though.

One of my favorite episodes.

Minefield

Archer calls Prince Charles to the Captain’s dining room (again, this seems like an unnecessary indulgence) for a friendly breakfast, and he looks like he’d rather die. Same. Archer tries to get him to open up, but apparently Hoshi is too busy to dig into his medical records this time.

Their breakfast is cut short by T’Pol calling to let Archer know they’ve found an uncharted planet to go pester. Naturally, Archer is very enthusiastic about poking around, but the ship is rocked by a sudden explosion that tears away a good chunk of the hull.

Incredibly, they’ll actually address this instead of just mashing the reset button like on Voyager.

There are injuries (Hoshi gets thrown to the ground, concussed, and dragged around suspiciously carelessly given possible spinal trauma, all for plot reasons), but no deaths (because there are no casualties until Season 3, unless you count Daniels, but he seems pretty alive). They quickly realize the explosion was caused by one of a bazillion cloaked mines (which they reveal with the Suliban anti-cloak), and another one has latched itself onto the hull.

BBC America immediately trundles himself out in an EV suit to try to disarm the mine, despite Trip immediately coming up with a plan to just cut the hull plating away from around the mine, because I guess that would be a problem, but the giant gaping chunk of the saucer missing is A-OK.

Just as Horatio Hornblower starts getting to work on defusing the mine, a ship decloaks. Remember how Spock seemed to find it novel that the Bird of Prey in Balance of Terror had an “invisibility shield?” Well, here are the fucking Romulans, showing up in a ship that looks more like it belongs in TNG than TOS, with a goddamn cloaking device. So, between this - humanity’s first contact with the Romulans - and an entire fucking war with them, somehow Spock seemed to forget that they could do this?

Fucking bullshit.

Oh yeah, they find out that they’re the Romulans because Hoshi insists on translating from Sickbay. Apparently Romulan and Vulcan are so completely diverged that they share no linguistic similarities worth noting. Travis sets about piloting the ship out manually from the minefield, which is filmed as though it’s nerve-wracking, but seems like he’s just playing a really dull six-degrees-of-freedom video game.

Anyway, Doctor Who touches the wrong thing and the mine impales him to the ship, and cutting him free will set off the mine. Despite Trip literally doing nothing to contribute to the backup plan to remove the hull plating, Archer insists on going out instead of Trip.

While out there, Archer has an excruciatingly long heart-to-heart with Hugh Grant while disarming the mine, who reveals that he’s basically got suicidal ideations over sacrificing himself for the crew, and that he wanted to join the Navy, but was afraid of drowning.

Why the fuck do so many people in Star Trek get obsessed with sailing in the damn Navy? It’s a united planetary government - it’s like, fuck, the Harlem Globetrotters of civil service.

He also tells a story of how his uncle had a similar fear, but ended up sacrificing himself to save his crew mates after their ship gets stuck under an ice shelf when hitting a mine left over from a World War. That’s right - not only is the Navy useless in Star Trek, people die from it unnecessarily.

The Romulans show up again, and insist that Enterprise go through with jettisoning the hull and, presumably, Tea and Crumpets with it. And they start getting ready to fuck shit up. But Archer comes up with a plan - he asks Trip if shuttlepod doors could withstand the blast.

Apparently they fucking can. That’s right, this mine blew a giant hole in your goddamn spaceship, but the shuttlepods are apparently A-OK. So Enterprise jettisons the hull plating, Archer cuts Reed free, then they both shield themselves with shuttlepod doors as the mine explodes.

Travis catches them with the shuttle bay, and all is good with the world once more.

OK. This episode. On one hand, it’s got some character development. But on the other hand, it’s character development that will go unreferenced and unused. On one hand, it has consequences that extend beyond the episode. But on the other hand, they’ll hit the reset button on that in the next episode. On one hand, we start introducing a potentially huge foe for Enterprise that slots very nicely into canon. On the other hand, we do so by beating canon with a lead pipe.

Too many fucking hands here.

Rating: ** (though at least they took a break from the gratuitous nudity for a week)

Tevye, is that you?

ANIS is two episodes away from this, so do get comfortable

So you found a character you hate more than Chuckles, I assume

I mean, it’s certainly not as bad for Toad-In-The-Hole to be a blatant stereotype as it was for Chuckles, but it is absolutely bizarre that B&B had the opportunity to make their characters be whoever they wanted to be, thought “a caricature of a British person” was the way to go, and somehow Dominic Keating went along with it.

Keating was just glad to have a steady paycheck and I think he actually believed in the show.

Dead Stop

After the events of Minefield, Enterprise is still fucked. In an inspection pod that they’ve been keeping…somewhere…Archer and Trip survey the damage - and Trip reveals that with the damage to the ship, they’re a decade away from Jupiter Station to make repairs. It’s a shame the crew isn’t full of young attractive idiots. Archer tells Hoshi to put out a distress call.

Always one to be concerned about the important things in life, Archer is more upset that the floor in his ready room is squeaking. However, he’s interrupted by the news that someone’s answered their distress call. Tellarites refer them to a repair station nearby, and they set a course.

Once arriving, hails go unanswered, and the station seems to be too small to accommodate Enterprise. But one shine-a-bright-light-at-all-the-actors later, the ship has been scanned, and the station unfolds itself so that Enterprise can park.

Archer, Trip, and T’Pol head over to the station, only to discover that it’s automated by the ghost of B’Elanna Torres. Archer and Trip marvel at a replicator, while T’Pol demonstrates its use like it’s the most obvious thing in the world with a glass of water. Trip replicates a catfish, because he is a stereotype as well, just a more amusing one.

Archer is pretty skeptical, since the station only requests some spare warp plasma they can part with in exchange for repairs. T’Pol reminds him that “not every culture is based on the acquisition of wealth,” since it doesn’t hurt to twist the knife about humanity’s failings every once in a while.

As repairs commence, Trip marvels at how quickly the station works, replicating replacement parts that are at or above spec. The station even provides medical equipment to borrow to fix Prince Harry’s leg instead of Regulan bloodworms or other options from Phlox’s menagerie of horrors. Archer is still unconvinced, even though the station fixed the squeak in his floor, complaining to T’Pol that “something doesn’t smell right” - and somehow, despite Vulcans on the show repeatedly complaining about the smell of humans, she lets that one go.

Now fully back on his feet, the Duke of Sussex joins Trip to sample the replicator’s fare on the station. They both realize that the station seems way too small to house the computer necessary to do what it does, so they go exploring. Apparently, mysterious alien repair stations in the 22nd century shop at Home Depot for air filters too - they pop one off and go crawling around a vent. The station beams them back to the bridge of Enterprise, where T’Pol gives them a genuinely hilarious look of disdain.

Meanwhile, Travis is shirtless for absolutely no reason other than to give the creators something to point to and say “Look, other people take their clothes off too”. He gets a call from Archer to go to a section under repair. He does so. Next thing we know, Archer is getting a call that Travis is dead.

How sad. Let me cry a single tear for the least important character on this show.

Phlox goes to do the autopsy, only to be interrupted by Hoshi so that she can have something to do this episode. She laments that she thought at first it was all a practical joke, as apparently, Travis is quite the practical joker. Which I might believe had we ever seen him say or do anything remotely funny up until this point. If she had sobbed that he responded to any situation with an “Aw shucks” and demonstrated no development whatsoever, that I would have believed.

Phlox realizes that Travis’ body is actually a replicated copy, thanks to some plot organisms that he had injected everyone with previously - they were dead too. The station had obviously replicated him, and is keeping him somewhere.

Archer enlists Trip and Meghan Markle’s husband to help them devise a way to sneak past the station’s transporter security and come up with a plot to fool the station into thinking they’re going to leave and pay the warp plasma. They succeed, and apparently the station that can scan the fuck out of any ship nearby can’t detect where people are to beam them away once you destroy a small widget in an air duct.

Once Archer and T’Pol make it into the heart of the station, they discover its grim secret - the computer is small because it’s actually powered by a bunch of aliens plugged into it. This notably includes Enterprise’s only Cardassian, as well as other leftover makeup treatments from DS9 and Voyager, despite the latter making little sense at all here.

They find Mayweather, get back to Enterprise, and start to leave, only to have the station grab onto it with its repair arms. They detonate the warp plasma via a booby trap Trip had rigged and escape.

That’s right, they blow the fuck out of the dozens of people strapped into that computer. Phlox later says that their brains were scrambled and beyond saving based on scans, but they didn’t know that at the time.

The episode ends with a foreboding shot of the station reassembling itself.

I appreciate that this episode attempts something creepy, and that they actually managed to retain damage to the ship past the end credits, even if they did hit the reset button on that in the very next episode. However, it has a pretty big flaw - the station scanned the ship, and knew T’Pol was aboard. Why wouldn’t it trick and fake-murder her? Her brain has got to be better than Travis’, right? We even see a Vulcan plugged into the computer, so we know they’re compatible. Even if you go with “well, they had a Vulcan, they needed something unique,” why not go with Phlox, who is obviously intelligent? Or Trip?

Even with that thought, I still kind of like it, even perhaps a little undeservingly so.

Rating: ***

A Night In Sickbay

These goddamn motherfucking assholes. Fuck this and fuck them. It takes a lot to trump episodes like Spock’s Brain, Shades of Gray, Move Along Home, and Threshold, but these fucks did it. They fucking did it. This episode insults the intelligence of everyone watching it. If the Greek gods had to punish a Star Trek fan, they would just force them to watch A Night In Sickbay over and over, on repeat, in one of those Clockwork Orange chairs, and the remote just out of reach. All those not-great episodes of Star Trek mentioned earlier? At least they all tried to make some science fiction. But this is just making the star of the show stomp around like a petulant child that is way too eager to sexually harass his coworkers.

My life is full of regrets.

This goddamn garbage fire opens with Archer complaining that “Starfleet didn’t send us out here to humiliate ourselves” while the only female leads, in their underwear, slather him with gel. I bet Jolene Blalock and Linda Park really appreciated the irony there. But don’t worry - Archer isn’t applying gel to any of the women. He’s slathering his dog with it. Phlox says Porthos has to stay behind, as he’s picked up some kind of pathogen.

Apparently, they were visiting the aliens that were offended by the crew eating in their presence. Knowing that, and knowing that the aliens made them send along their genetic profiles for everyone, including the dog, and knowing that the aliens have a critically important part that the repair station apparently didn’t fix last week so that Trip will stop complaining about the engines, Archer brought the damn dog along with him. And the dog did what dogs do, and it pissed on a tree. A sacred tree. So they’re pissed off, and all Archer can do is fucking yell at anyone who will listen - in this case T’Pol - that they’re the ones who should be apologizing, since they should have figured out that the pathogen would infect his dog. He storms off after being an absolute dick to her, threatening to piss on their trees himself if anything happens to Porthos.

Phlox is apparently an accomplished veterinarian as well as a doctor, with six degrees in veterinary medicine, so he sets the captain at ease that Porthos would be OK in the morning. But Archer can’t leave it alone, so he grabs his pillow and blanket and sets up shop in Sickbay. After he starts to fall asleep, Phlox takes this time to do things like trim his long gross toenails, or scrape his long gross tongue. Who knows what other long gross things he was attending to.

Now awake and grossed out, Archer stomps off to the gym to try to tire himself out. I’ll note here that I think it’s hilarious that the prop folks probably had to rent the gyroscope thing every time they want to redress the shuttle bay to pretend to be the gym. While there, he runs into T’Pol, where they discuss how the aliens are going to send up a detailed explanation of how Archer needs to apologize. The entire time, he can’t deal with T’Pol increasing her pace on the treadmill, so he keeps matching it. She points out the exact same goddamn fact I did earlier, that there was no fucking reason to take the dog on the trip, and that it was only going to end in disaster. Archer flips shit, saying that his dog deserves fresh air. T’Pol points out that he seems to care more about his dog than his ship, but Hoshi calls down to T’Pol, and in the only actual funny line in this fucking train wreck of an episode, comments that Archer’s not going to like it, only to have him overhear and bite her head off.

The apology involves a chain saw, because why the fuck not.

Archer storms back to Sickbay, where he tries to talk to Phlox about his conversation with T’Pol while they try to capture a terrible CGI bat using nets and a papercraft bird. Phlox decides that, really, Archer just needs to fuck.

Sure. Why the fuck not. Archer’s being an asshole to everyone, and obviously the solution to that is for him to go and get laid. That’s a healthy depiction of sexuality, and not at all the fundamentals of the fucking incel movement. And Phlox, through no actual evidence whatsoever, seems to think that Archer wants to fuck T’Pol.

Why? Because he’s a jerk to her the most? I’m pretty sure he’s a jerk to her because he’s basically racist against Vulcans.

Anyway, Hoshi catches the bat in her hand and hands off instructions to Archer on how to not be a fuck-up with the aliens. So instead of really digging into that like a responsible adult that doesn’t want his warp engines to die, he goes back to sleep.

And here we fucking go. This fucking bullshit.

He has a dream that there’s a funeral for Porthos. This is the only time Travis and His Royal Highness show up this episode. Phlox is giving the eulogy, but it’s just him talking about how Archer wants to fuck. Somehow, this shifts to the decon room again, and Phlox says that Archer and T’Pol have to stay instead of Porthos. The next thing Archer knows, T’Pol is naked. They start kissing. It is the least sensual, least passionate, kiss in the Star Trek pantheon. To quote Friends, “it was like cousins having sex up there!”

Anyway, Archer gets woken up again because the dog needs surgery. He’s a jerk to Phlox, and when T’Pol comes in, he stutters through statements like “I’m doing the breast…the best…I can” and “Why don’t you send me your lips…lisp…list.” Eventually, he agrees to let Phlox stick some alien pituitary gland in his dog, and while they’re operating on Porthos, Archer asks Phlox if his opinions on Archer’s need to fuck are based on “professional training or firsthand experience.” What the fuck kind of question is that? “Oh, you have a lot of wives, do you sometimes just need to fuck so that you’re not a jerk to them?”

Blah blah blah, the dog is fine, Archer goes down to the planet and carves up the tree and stomps around with cut pieces of the trunk while making vaguely alien sounds with his shirt off. The aliens are pleased, they give them plenty of spare parts, and Archer goes on to apologize to T’Pol. She basically says its fine, because she’s a Vulcan and doesn’t give a fuck what Archer thinks about her, and gives him a free excuse that people often have conflict when forced to work together for long periods in close quarters.

And then, this motherfucker, he decides what he needs right now is some light sexual harassment. So he replies that it’s even more challenging when it’s between men and women. She quickly shuts that down, or at least, you’d think that from reading the script. But there’s this weird undercurrent that she’s actually encouraging in her delivery it while saying no, which is even more fucking gross and just serves to encourage the worst impulses of the worst sorts of fans of Star Trek.

I recall that this was pitched as a “farce”. It’s farcical that it ever made it out of the writer’s room, that’s for damn sure. They want a farce? Here’s a farce. You can let Archer insult the aliens by letting the dog piss on the tree - I’ll give you that. But then, you have him have to go down to the planet over and over to apologize, each time you don’t actually show the apology, you just show him leaving the room with increasingly bizarre items like chainsaws or tubas or Phlox’s CGI bat or something, and he just goes back to try to be with his sick dog only to be told that he somehow insulted them again in his last apology. Finally he’s fed up and refuses to apologize to them, and it turns out they’re giant dicks who have just been fucking with him and have bets on which of the apologies is going to make him lose it and give him the parts for showing them a good time.

There you go, a farce - spitballed it in five minutes, and that’s better than this fucking absolute shit fucking garbage.

Rating: * (and that’s only because I am too fucking lazy to figure out how deal with a zero to negative rating in the post-season roll up post)

I'd still watch ANIS over "The Big Bang Theory" or "Two And A Half Men" or "2 broke Girls" or "Mom" or any of that shit.
Go ahead and "Clockwork Orange" me, I'd be laughing like Br'er Rabbit in the briar patch.

I can't watch anything with a poorly pup in it.

I don't even like the whines the Nazi dogs make when you kill them in Wolfenstein. They don't know their masters are evil, they just think they're being good boys.

Side note - Kyle needs to pass his Trek-reviewing work ethic back to Jammer, who has managed FOUR Orville reviews whilst procrastinating his arse off as regards the SNW finale.

The Briar Patch, huh?
Well, maybe we’ll let you have some Insurrection too. As a treat.

I mean, the station does make a point of only requesting very minimal compensation compared to the services it provides, so kidnapping the least important crew member is keeping in the spirit of that.

That was my thought as well, the station doesn't need or want the best or the most important compensation available. Maybe it just needs a humanoid form and brain to manipulate the arms on the station. It scans everyone and picks the most useless and replaceable crew member. Or, since it does replace parts and repair ships to better specs, it removes crew that make the ship and crew function worse. Mayweather was definitely replaceable and rather useless, like Captain Dunsel.

Honestly, I had the distinct feeling TIIC we're trying to put feelers out for Archer/T'Pol. Besides all the inherent messiness of a CO and XO dating,TIIC took the most ham-fisted approach right outta the gate to tank that shit

Even sixteen year old me was quickly embarrassed to having my writing compared this that episode and I say that having put a fic called "T'Pol Kills the Enterprise Crew" on the net (it's not available online anymore, sorry trolls )

And truthfully? It's still not nearly as painful to sit through as "Precious Cargo" will be.

Ah, now that's a name I've not heard in a long time...

Glad to see he's still around.