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

This is it. The show that made sure that Star Trek was a movie-only affair for over a decade. I must be a bit of a masochist to take this on, but it's OK, because...

It's been a long road, getting from there to here. It's been a long time, but my time is finally near. And I will see my dream come alive at last - I will touch the sky. And they're not gonna hold me down no more, no they're not gonna change my mind.

Cause I've got faith of the heart - I'm going where my heart will take me. I've got faith to believe I can do anything. I've got strength of the soul, and no one's gonna bend or break me. I can reach any star. I've got faith. I've got faith - faith of the heart.

Broken Bow
We open with a young Jonathan Archer building a model aircraft with his father. And I don't know if Berman and Braga decided to try to be edgy, but he immediately calls a Vulcan a racist nickname, all because he's pissy that they haven't let humans go to Warp 5 yet. We immediately flash-forwad to Enterprise-present, with a Klingon running away from a couple of canteloupe-skinned guys in a cornfield on Earth. A hick with a future shotgun joins the fray, just as the canteloupe guys flatten themselves out to slide beneath a door in a silo the Klingon was hiding in. The Klingon then blows the silo the fuck up, and is promptly shot by the hick.

We're then treated to the opening credits. The first ones in Star Trek to feature real vocals (no, the lady hitting the high notes in the TOS theme doesn't really count) and they're that godawful drivel from above, a cover of a Rod Stewart song from the nineties. Oh, and it's not called Star Trek: Enterprise, it's just called Enterprise. I mean, as long as we're shitting all over a respected franchise's history, we might as well throw the middle finger at the name of it at the same time (they'd reverse course on this in, I think, Season 3). Instead of starships majestically zipping by, we get a montage of nautical, aeronautical, and space imagery interspersed with ships with the name Enterprise. They even crib a shot from First Contact of the Phoenix.

Upon return to the show, we see Archer and his Chief Engineer, Charles "Trip" Tucker III (uhg) inspecting Enterprise. This is a Star Trek where people wear baseball caps and normal fucking clothes in their off-hours. In between technobabble and Archer ejaculating over the color of the hull plating, we hear that it can reach Neptune and back in six minutes. Then Trip promptly drives the inspection pod into the ship.

Archer is pulled away to Starfleet Medical (and I'm sure some purist out there is dying over the consistent use of Starfleet in this show rather than the multitude of different names it was called in TOS). Anyway, the humans and Vulcans get into a pissing match over who gets to take the injured Klingon back to his homeworld. On Enterprise, Vulcans say words like "Farmer" sarcastically. Anyway, Archer immediately bitches out the Vulcans and threatens to knock a Vulcan named T'Pol on her "ass." But his...passion?...convinces Starfleet to take over, and insists that Archer put together his crew quickly. He immediately cribs one of the doctors looking over the Klingon, a Denobulan named Phlox. Keep in mind, Archer is being tasked with assembling a crew for one of the most important missions in humanity's history, and he picks the first doctor that wanders through his field of vision.

Up on Enterprise, armory officer and stogy British stereotype Malcolm Reed and helmsman-as-portrayed-by-awful-actor Travis Mayweather are beaming up equipment, amazed that Starfleet has approved the thing for human transport. All of humanity are McCoys about the thing. We learn that Mayweather is a "boomer" - someone raised on a cargo ship that can maybe pull Warp 1.5 on a good day. This will be relevant like, twice, throughout the entire series. Meanwhile, Trip is running around Engineering in a scene that is worthless in terms of story and plot, and serves only to show off the (admittedly nice) set - the warp core takes up the entire damn room, the doors open and shut like fucking doors that aren't in supermarkets, and there's a comically unsafe elevator. Why the rest of the set design didn't go to great lengths to make the ship feel cramped is fucking unknowable.

Back on Earth, Archer shows up to browbeat his future communications officer, Hoshi Sato, into abandoning her job early by bribing her with some Klingon to translate. Also, Hoshi basically hates space, so it's curious why she is part of fucking Starfleet. He then zips back to Enterprise and lets Trip know that, in exchange for some Vulcan maps, the High Command is requiring an observer on the mission - T'Pol, the Vulcan Archer threatened to goddamn assault. After she arrives, Archer immediately relishes in how bad his beagle, Porthos (yes, a goddamn dog in space) must smell to a Vulcan woman. This is brand fucking new continuity that the show references with stunning frequency.

In Spacedock, Admiral Forrest (a nod to DeForrest Kelley) dedicates Enterprise with archival video from Zephram Cochrane - a cameo from James Cromwell with plenty of old-age makeup in front of a green screen. His speech talks about how the Warp engine they're building will let them boldly go where no man has gone before. I wonder where we've heard that before? Enterprise then sails out of Spacedock and heads to warp.

By the way, this isn't any Enterprise that, say, is backed by any sort of continuity or anything like one might expect of a goddamn prequel to a forty-year-old-franchise. Nah, B&B got distracted by some ship ILM threw together to get shit-kicked by the Borg for two minutes in First Contact and decided to run with that - a saucer with a catamaran and nacelles. And, of course, they've dolled it up with rough-looking hull plating and industrial (wrong) fonts, and it still looks comically out of place. Worst of all, the ship only ever existed as CG, and it shows. Even CG Voyager usually looked better than this (perhaps because it featured a smooth, organic hull design).

We're then formally introduced to the Suliban, the canteloupe-skinned aliens who attacked the Klingon, and Silik, the Suliban liason to a mysterious figure in some sort of holographic Skype room with fucking awful latency. But enough of the plot, let's get back to more useless scenes on Enterprise, like Archer helping Phlox unpack his menagerie of creatures he uses in his treatments. We don't actually see the creatures, but some cages sure shake around! Yes, Phlox is basically the Neelix of Enterprise, right down to the fact that he's played by an actor deserving of a far better role. We also learn that it only takes about a week to get to Qo'noS, which is another fact that is sure to give someone an aneurysm.

Trip finds Mayweather in some weird tube that doesn't have any gravity in it. As the Chief Engineer, it's stunning and fucking unforgivable that he doesn't know this thing is here. We also learn that, as a boomer, Mayweather went to a planet called Dralax where women have "three," and that he "knows from experience." This is Star Trek, not fucking Total Recall, you assholes. Trip then heads off for dinner with the Captain. Even on this tiny-ass ship, Archer gets a whole separate dining room for himself. And, because Archer is an enormous dick, he purposefully orders a giant steak to poke at the vegetarian T'Pol.

Oh, and about T'Pol - she's played by Jolene Blalock in her first starring role. And since she was known more for modeling than acting, B&B naturally put her in a catsuit. A FUCKING CATSUIT. Again, even though she'll later go on to wear a uniform that looks far better on her (see: Troi, Kira, and Seven of Nine), they still put her in a skintight uniform that makes no sense, especially considering how most standard Vulcan attire seen before has been robes and shit (in fact, in her first scene, that's what she was fucking wearing).

On the bridge, Mayweather clicks the cruise control a few times, and Hoshi starts whining about feeling tremors from the acceleration - this inspires T'Pol to act like an utter bitch to her, and Hoshi returns the sentiment. It's like B&B heard that people wanted conflict, so they decided to pretend it was a soap opera for two minutes - it's embarrassing to watch. Archer and Hoshi are then called down to Sickbay, where Hoshi practically has a breakdown over trying to translate Klingon in real time (Hoshi losing her shit over nothing is a common theme in Season 1). Suddenly, the ship drops out of warp, and all the power goes out. The Suliban board the ship, and they can crawl along walls, and ceilings, and see in total darkness, and cloak themselves and their clothing like chameleons (and yes, that makes no fucking sense, but it's explained with throwaway technobabble later).

Anyway, the Suliban storm sickbay and make off with the Klingon, but one gets killed like a bitch. T'Pol immediately declares the mission over in (again) the bitchiest manner possible. Archer bitches her out in the ready room (again, this is General Starship or something), then goes off to Sickbay, where Phlox has done an autopsy on a Suliban killed during the raid - he reveals that the alien has been genetically modified to give him special abilities, including the ability to breath multiple different kinds of air, change colors, and see additional wavelengths of light.

In Engineering, Trip and T'Pol have a fight as well, before they're joined by Archer and Hoshi (who is afraid of standing near the warp core). Hoshi has the results of her translations from the Klingon, and T'Pol reveals one of the words she couldn't translate wasn't due to sheer fucking incompetence, but was actually the name of a star system that the Vulcans retrieved from the Klingon's ship as the last place it had visited. Why T'Pol's first words after the kidnapping weren't "Hey, let's check out this shitty planet" is goddamn unknowable.

Meanwhile, Silik and the Suliban are interrogating the Klingon, and he immediately gives up the name of his courier on the planet, and Silik didn't even need to hurt him. No wonder the Vulcans said that he'd be better off dead, he's a really shitty Klingon.

Enterprise shows up to the planet, and half the senior staff takes a shuttlepod (not a goddamn shuttlecraft we fucking swear) to a trade complex, A.K.A. the sort of place we should have seen every other goddamn week on Voyager. T'Pol warns them that the food and water is OK, but they shouldn't fuck anyone. After a gratuitous scene where Malcom and Mayweather watch dancing girls in body paint eating butterflies (fucking Enterprise) like they're having their first fucking erections, Trip tries to start some shit with a woman who is obviously trying to get her kid to take his fucking inhaler (though T'Pol says that she's trying to wean him onto oxygen or some bullshit like that). Archer and Hoshi wander off to a goddamn space alley or something, where they're immediately caught by Suliban.

A human woman is with them, and she immediately kisses Archer - she quickly morphs back to Suliban form - it turns out they can morph their appearance and tell if someone is lying by making out. She reveals that the Suliban have been trying to foment a civil war on Qo'noS, and that the Suliban have been taking orders from the goddamn motherfucking future. The Klingon has proof of this. It's like Brannon Braga has a contractual obligation to try to work time travel fuckery into every goddamn thing he works on. Anyway, the bad Suliban show up and promptly massacre the good Suliban. The Enterprise crew fight their way back to the shuttlepod. Archer saves T'Pol's ass in the process (rather than kicking it), and gets a shot to the leg for his trouble.

This lets T'Pol take command of Enterprise just in time for Archer to have a flashback to when he flew around his model ship on a beach with his father who tells him that he "can't be afraid of the wind - learn to trust it." Deep shit right there. But back on Enterprise, we're treated to our first scene in the decontamination chamber! That's a room where you turn on some blue mood lighting, strip down to your underwear, and have your two most attractive cast members slather each other up with oil.

WHAT IN THE GODDAMN FUCK.

Like, is this supposed to be sexy to anyone? Anyone at all? Who made this show, a bunch of goddamn twelve year olds? 'Cause I'm pretty sure that's the only audience segment that would find this attractive - once you've figured out the recreational usage of genitals, shit like this is like getting tingly when the J.C. Penney catalog accidentally opens up to the section of mannequins wearing support bras. And apparently they made sure to fire up the AC for this scene, based on the appearance of poor Jolene Blalock's sports bra - you can say what you want about Seven of Nine's catsuits, but at least they didn't support high beams.

Anyway, in Sickbay, Archer awakes to find some sort of eel sucking away at his leg wound. Thanks Phlox. He's surprised to find that the pep talk that Trip gave T'Pol while he was rubbing massage oil under the hem of her panties convinced her to not cancel the mission, but to start tracking the Suliban instead. Archer is pleased, and goes off to his quarters to both record a log and pause it every ten seconds to ask his dog a question.

Back in the holographic Skype room, Silik gets orders to stop Enterprise. Orders from the fuuuuuuutureeeeee. No wonder the latency was shit.

Archer heads up to the bridge, where T'Pol informs him that the Suliban vessel flew through the atmosphere of a gas giant. They all work together to discover that tons of Suliban ships have flown the same path into the atmosphere. They head in, and discover a collection of Suliban ships all linked together into a space station configuration. Hoshi whines about seat belts. They promptly get shot at and retreat, and while they locate the Klingon, they're unwilling to beam him out lest he be Philadelphia Experimented into the hull. Archer has Malcolm bring the "grappler" online, a goddamn grappling hook that he uses to grab one of the Suliban ships.

The crew quickly learns how to fly the Suliban ship as the Suliban try firing depth charges to force Enterprise into less friendly atmosphere. Archer leaves T'Pol in command as he flies off with Trip to storm the space station. Kind of makes you think - wouldn't it have made more sense to take the armory officer who's guaranteed to be good in a ground assault, and leave behind the engineer who's guaranteed to be good at fixing the ship that's being actively fired upon? But who am I to question the orders of Dr. Sam Beckett?

Once Archer and Trip board the space station, they immediately shoot some Suliban and find the Klingon. And because the Klingon won't shut the fuck up, the Suliban immediately find them. Archer sends Trip and the Klingon off to the Suliban pod, then sets off a device that forces the space station to start disassembling itself. Archer gets himself trapped on what's left of the goddamn station like a chump, and wanders off, immediately finding the Skype room. He notices immediately that it's fucking weird, and basically lets him occupy multiple points in space at the same time. He's soon joined by Silik, who offers to let him go, but Archer instead keeps baiting him. Silik finally punches him and shoots Archer's phase pistol at him, but since time's all wobbly, Archer can fucking dodge it, which causes shockwaves as it hits the walls. They fight their way out of the Skype room, and just as Archer is about to get shot again, Enterprise beams him the fuck out.

Yes, we're in the first episode, and we've already established transporters as safe, even in the middle of a shitty atmosphere, during a firefight, next to a room that fucks with time.

Anyway, Enterprise warps away and makes it to Qo'noS. The Klingon offers up his blood to the Klingon High Council, which is encoded with secret data. The blood is red, because Enterprise gives no fucks about continuity. The Klingons then tell Enterprise and company to get the fuck out, and Archer reports in to Starfleet - the orders are to just keep fucking around in space, prompting an exclamation of "Son of a bitch" from Trip. Yes, this is the sort of down-to-earth realism we need in Star Trek. Archer then asks T'Pol to stay behind, and basically apologizes for being a racist dick (though he will continue to be a racist dick in future episodes). And we close with a flashback to young Archer successfully flying his model ship with his dad. How sweet.

It's not the worst, but it's trying so hard. So much harder than it needed to, because they don't seem to understand what a prequel entails. And that's simply not having shit like a fast ship, transporters, top-of-the-line sidearms, etc. It's bad enough that it doesn't look like a prequel to TOS, but technologically speaking, it's not much different from TOS at all. And rather than play in that rather rich world that three seasons of that show created, we've introduced two new species in the pilot alone that seem to have winked out of goddamn existence a mere 100 years later, retconned the Klingon first contact, made the Vulcans out to be enormous dicks, and introduced a famous ship that should have been mentioned by someone, somewhere, but was apparently of no consequence in overall history.

Rating: **

(2001 Diacanu)
It was magnificent, and transcendent.
Also, the theme song doesn't bother me, and fanfic sucks.

I'm not gonna lie. I kinda liked the fan service.

Meh. There are plenty of specialists working for NASA that never expect to go into space themselves.

This. Is. Awesome.

Wow, that was pretty harsh. I get the issues with Enterprise, but I still liked it. It was an improvement over VOY. I thought the last two seasons were pretty good. I think if they gave it another season, it would have been good. I look forward to the rest of the reviews.

Fight or Flight

Hoshi's busy trying to talk to a slug in sickbay - apparently, she swiped it off of some planet. But the slug, named Sluggo, isn't doing well. That's the entire fucking teaser for this episode.

Apparently, space is really fucking boring - Archer is spending his time freaking out over a squeak in his floor that only he can hear, Hoshi is stressing out about the stars "going the wrong way" because her quarters are on the other side of the ship than she's used to, and Malcolm and Mayweather are simulating blowing shit up in the armory. Archer agrees to drop out of warp and let him actually blow some real shit up, but instead, Malcolm ends up ricocheting a nuke off an asteroid and almost blowing up the ship. And Trip and Phlox are eating "resequenced protein" in the mess hall. Yes, they practically have replicators too. Phlox wonders aloud if two crew members will let him watch them fuck.

I fucking swear, it's like they wrote an episode that was ten minutes too short, so they shoved all this shit onto it in the way most likely to get people to change the channel.

Anyway, T'Pol finds a busted-ass ship, and Archer immediately wants to investigate, though she tells him to leave it the fuck alone. Communications with the ship are unsuccessful. T'Pol practically begs Archer to just leave them the fuck alone, but naturally Archer insists on flying over in a shuttlepod. Trip wants to go, but Archer instead decides to take Hoshi and Malcolm, telling him that the "ship's too young to be without her chief engineer" as if he didn't steal Trip away the last fucking episode to mount an assault on a space station.

Oh, and Archer also records a log where he bitches about Vulcans, pausing only to inform Porthos that he can't have any cheese, for obvious reasons. Fart jokes on Star Trek. What a world we live in. He's interrupted by Hoshi begging to not go on the mission because the EV suits make her claustrophobic. What won't she complain about?

Anyway, they head aboard, finding scorch marks all over the hallways and blood-like substances on the walls. They make their way to a cargo bay, where they find a pump of some kind. Hoshi starts screaming as she sees it's hooked up to a bunch of very dead aliens.

Upon returning to the ship, T'Pol tells Archer to get the goddamn fuck out, which he has to be convinced of. After they warp away, Archer starts feeling guilty about just leaving them hooked up to the machines, and he starts being an enormous dick to T'Pol and Trip. He turns the ship around and heads back to tend to the dead.

After five straight minutes of technobabble, linguababble, and medibabble on the alien ship, Hoshi reveals to Trip that she wants Archer to take her back to Earth as she sends off a distress call in the aliens' language. But their time on the ship is interrupted by a ship showing up. The ship is all sorts of sharp and pointy, so they're obviously the bad guys. They start firing and take out the engines. Malcolm fires a torpedo, and it does nothing, bouncing off of the ship's shields. The ship starts scanning them, and Phlox points out that the shit they were pumping out of the aliens is very much like our lymphatic fluid.

Anyway, the aliens show up, and Hoshi fucks up the translation and convinces them that Enterprise had murdered their people. As she loses her shit, Archer convinces her to try to speak their language to tell them to compare the pump to the other ship instead. And despite not even knowing how verbs are conjugated in their languages or anything, she manages to convince him.

After that, the aliens destroy the other ship. It turns out, they're Axanar - a rare TOS reference that actually manages to improve, rather than fuck up, continuity. Hoshi finds a planet to leave Sluggo on (and apparently, Phlox and T'Pol have no qualms about leaving an alien species that will possibly be invasive on some other planet).

I feel sorry for Linda Park - for much of season one, she's basically being asked to play a bad stereotype of a woman who is afraid of almost everything. After that, she kind of disappears behind the Archer-T'Pol-Trip trifecta - her character doesn't really advance, but she's just given less to do.

As for the rest of the episode, there's a lot of filler. Had they made the Axanar ship more mysterious, they probably could have done quite a bit more with it and had less time with beagles and squeaks and Malcolm getting boners over blowing shit up (a year later, Firefly practically remakes this episode with Bushwhacked, and does a far better job of it).

Rating: **

In retrospect, I think I prefer Voyager. Neither series was especially great, but VOY set the bar lower and settled into a comfortable rut. The characters were also somewhat less interchangeable, with recognizable "voices."

Which is infuriating. You'd think Starfleet would have a huge backlog of places they're itching to explore that were too far away pre-warp 5.

In a weird way these reviews are making me want to revisit Enterprise.

Voyager is only slightly more enjoyable because it had more seasons. More episodes to actually tell engaging stories. Year of Hell is probably my favorite episode.

I wonder how long it will take for @Kyle to require treatment for depression, having put himself through this.

Still, good job.

Remember when the other choices besides a prequel were a Section 31 show, and a Borg show?
I still maintain that Enterprise, decon gel, trellium addictions, asshole Vulcans and all, was 100 times better than either of those festering turds would have been.
Especially produced by the killer Bs.
This was the best show we were gonna get.
That's just the morbid reality.

Of course, Enterprise would go on to fuck up both Section 31 and the Borg, so B&B truly had the best of both worlds.

Holy shit, I could have written better dreck than what you're describing

I still think the show, for the most part, was an improvement on Voyager.

ENT had a smorgasbord of pre-existing history to hang stories on, and an opportunity to explain why humanity ended up being the glue of the Federation (we know from a series-making perspective it was budget, but good writers make budget-restrictions into plot points.) VOY was new ground, so fucking that up is understandable, fucking up a rich history to play with? Not so much.

ENT's better episodes were marginally better than VOY's better episodes, but as a whole, looking back, it was a much lesser series. Especially as Bakula was not very good, even in comparison to Janeway. I used to think he was woefully miscast, but Dwayne Pride proves can play the kind of character you'd expect to captain a vessel, so it's either how the character was written and directed, he had 4 years of mostly off-days, or he's taken up some acting lessons. I'm thinking box number 1.

Please remember that on the TrekBBS before Enterprise even began I pointed out that Bakula was miscast in the role of Captain Archer.

But of course nobody listened to Dayton3.........

I've never had a problem with the ship design. It's no Connie refit, but it looks pretty nice. It looks kinda like a ship design from the TNG era? Who cares? Retro is a thing. And good for TPTB, drawing from a design that the fanbase liked. (That -J from the future was ugly, though.)

The visuals of the intro are the best of any series. I don't care for the singing, but you know what? The underlying spirit of it, of building upon others' work and of having the drive to boldly go, goes with the visuals and should have gone with the series. If the whole show had reflected that spirit, maybe people wouldn't hate the song as much, and maybe they would have made seven seasons.

Written, directed, and played. I remember reading a quote from Bakula that seemed to suggest that he took it upon himself to put a little more cluelessness into the character than he was told to do, with the expectation of becoming more competent in later seasons. Sometimes a capable actor simply makes a poor choice.

Are people seriously debating whether Enterprise was better than Voyager or vice versa?

Holy shit.

...Star Trek would have been finished for good. We'd never have seen another movie or television series thanks to the horrific abortion that would have been the fifth season of Enterprise.

At least when Enterprise raped us up the ass, it gave a reach around, and a kiss on the neck.

The show was improving by the third season and the fourth season was pretty good. Had they stayed on that path, I see no reason why Star Trek would be dead.

The show reached Trek's lowest point ever in the third season. But yes, 4 got better.

It's the internet, picking which polished turd is the shiniest has been going on forever!

I stopped watching it at the end of the second. You mean it got worse in the third?

I caught a couple of glimpses of the Xindi in passing. They did look like CGI abominations.

Actually, there is fan fic that was better written than the actual show. Kind of sad when you think of that.

Actually, I think the show improved with the third season, primarily because it wasn't just random wandering about anymore.

I've only ever seen it once....but for me it improved in terms of storytelling, but the season long arc just felt less and less like Trek and more like cheesy 90s/ early naughties sci-fi. I literally remember very little about about, it was that generic and forgettable.

They kept telling us they weren't wandering around anymore, but nothing they or their antagonists did made any sense. At all.