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

You'd think that'd help. What better way to rate ENT episodes than by the amount of baby shit, rattles and screams of boredom cast towards the screen?

Right, torturing himself for their entertainment probably takes precedence.

‘Sup bitches, I’m back.

Well, every once and a while, anyway. I was folding an absurd amount of laundry, and thought, “I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Star Trek: Discovery. I should watch something awful to keep me grounded.”

So, I fired up...

Cold Front

The masters of subtlety in the Enterprise writing room bring us the next exciting part in the saga of the Temporal Cold War, a story nobody wants.

Anyway, Silik’s in the Skype room, where the jerk from the future is giving him a new order while ripping the enhanced vision out of his eyeballs. And on the Love Boat, Archer is having his Starfleet-assigned bitch bring him breakfast in his personal dining room.

Now, you might think that on a tiny, purpose-built ship, Starfleet might skimp on private dining rooms and Space Interns, but you’d be wrong.

Anyway, Archer is dragged up to the bridge to chat with some asshole they found near the anomaly of the week - a freighter captain who is ferrying a bunch of monks to watch the anomaly, since they somehow attributed spiritual significance to it even after discovering FTL travel. It’s a new, totally legit religion, I’m sure. Right up there with Scientology.

Anyway, Archer invites the monks to come over for a visit, and they do. They give them a tour of the ship, where they discover that the monks basically already know all about their technology and shit, so it’s interesting that they have to pay some grump to drive them around.

Guess what? One of them pulls some Gumby shit and disconnects some cable in the engine room, and when the anomaly tries to fuck up the ship, that somehow saves the ship. Archer’s thrilled they aren’t all dead, but Trip informs him that he can say with confidence that none of his staff did anything useful.

Upon...realizing that they didn’t die a fiery death, Archer’s slave goes and chases him down. His name is Daniels, and he tells Archer that the Suliban are up to some bullshit. He proves it by taking Archer to his quarters and firing up a laser light show and revealing he’s from the 31st century. When Archer asks to know how he can trust him, Daniels reminds him that he’s never fucked up his eggs.

Apparently convinced, he runs off to talk to Trip and T’Pol, and then immediately dismisses all their concerns and orders them to work with Daniels to scan for Silik. He uses a gadget to walk through some walls, and replies to any question about what something is like in the future by saying it’s nothing like what it is now. He says this about Illinois, so you know he’s just being a dick.

I’m sure the lines would be fine if said by a character with charisma, but the actor playing Daniels seemed to have taken direction from a teenage girl who just can’t even.

Anyway, Silik ambushes Archer in his quarters, stuns him, then runs off to Engineering and kills Daniels by...zapping him out of time? Or something?

Fuck if I know.

Phlox revives Archer, who join Trip and T’Pol in trying to track down Silik. The King’s English seems to be useless in this effort. They discover that Silik’s made off with the laser light show, and Archer uses Daniels’ gadget to walk through a wall and chase after him after he slithered through some conduits. They get into a fight, and while Archer could have just used the gadget to phase shift his hand through Silik and pull his heart out Indy 2 style, there’s no way This show has the balls for that.

Archer shoots up the laser light show, and Silik decompressed the shuttlebay and jumps out, floating down to a ship he’s summoned to make his escape. Bakula does his finest miming of fighting decompression, but he doesn’t seem to be at all affected by the fact that he is now in a vacuum.

Archer wanders back up to the bridge and has Lord British lock down Daniels’ quarters. Foreshadowing! Spooky!

Rating: **

I admire your commitment to masochism.

Why not both?

Kyle!!

Silent Enemy

We are in the golden age of television. Our best shows are neat little twelve-hour arcs, hitting a beat like a drum.

But in the halcyon days of 2002, seasons were twice the length. So you inevitably had episodes that took up space. Series like The X-Files arguably took these episodes and shined. Unfortunately, John Shiban only joined the staff in Season 2.

Anyway, Archer and company are busy setting up subspace cell phone towers. Archer’s first order of business? Ordering the least-senior female member of his senior staff to plan Johnny English’s birthday party and call his parents to find out his favorite food. Hoshi protests since she has actual work to do, but Archer insists. Apparently there is no HR department in Starfleet, so she relents.

Some aliens show up, ignore Archer’s pathetic attempts at diplomacy, then warp away.

Remember how I hinted that this episode was filler? It can literally be summed up like this:

Aliens show up and are increasingly antagonistic, then Hoshi talks to someone to try to complete Archer’s sexist order. Wash, rinse, repeat, over and fucking over. To save us all some time, here’s what we learn:

• Malcolm’s parents are dicks who are mad he didn’t join the literal fucking navy.
• Malcolm does not like fish, but likes chasing waitresses at their places of employment.
• Phlox is more than happy to reveal Malcolm’s entire medical record to Hoshi, including prescriptions.
• After Archer directs the ship back towards Earth so that they can literally install the fucking weapons, Trip is mopey that some girl in Florida broke up with him over a text message.
• The aliens are CG beanstalks that somehow look like even more obvious CG than Species 8472, and their eyes look like miniature dicks.

Anyway, Malcolm and Trip install the totally-not-phasers-honest themselves, test them by blowing up a mountain on a moon, then use them to convince the aliens to stop fucking with them.

This is one of those episodes that’s supposed to illustrate just how scary the final frontier is. T’Pol even states that things are more dangerous now than when the Vulcans set out to explore the stars, due to the proliferation of warp drive. But the bad guys are so lame that they can be chased off by a couple “phase cannon” blasts, and we never see them again.

Oh, and Hoshi shows up with a pineapple cake, because Malcolm has a prescription to address his allergy to it, which must mean it’s his most guilty of pleasures. Thanks for violating doctor-patient confidentiality for something so trivial, Phlox! The cake looked like something I would make, so I guess she baked the cake too instead of having the ship’s chef make it. I’m glad Starfleet is so progressive.

Rating: *

What a horrible episode, I figured the whole point of the episode was to simply show off the phase cannons. “See, it’s a prequel because they don’t have phasers yet.”

kinda gives context that in fifty short years, a bunch of teenagers can come up with more convincing sets than 60s TV.
Likely better dialogue, too.

"the writing and storytelling are generally so good that you don't care"

Bullshit.
Both run from hamfisted to horrible and we spent decades ripping on just how bad it could get.
For all that TOS spawned/inspired so much, it was simplistic pulp that glaringly reflects it's era.

A Night in Sickbay

When considering an ontological review of the Richard Berman/Brannon Braga masterwork Enterprise, one must consider the sociological ramifications of symbiotic relationships between sentient and asentient organisms in interstellar travel.

In this episode of the work, series co-creators R. Berman and B. Braga recognize the ultimate importance of the topic at hand, penning the fraught medical emergency the stalwart Jonathan Archer confronts.

Archer is forced to abandon his faithful companion Porthos, a young beagle, to the tender ministrations of the ship’s doctor Phlox after the animal contracts an exotic pathogen that cannot be cleansed using the ship’s decontamination gel (1). Complicating matters aboard the ship is a first contact with a new alien race that is going poorly due to the race’s idiosyncratic social practices.

Opening diplomatic relations with the alien race is vital to the ship’s continued operation; Chief Engineer Charles Tucker III requires a plasma injector that is not readily available due to the pseudo-scarcity economics of 22nd century Earth (2).

Upon learning that his canine companion may be ill due to the negligence of their hosts, Captain Archer is outraged. His I’ll humor is only made all the worse after learning that his first officer, Sub-Commander T’Pol, has apologized for the perceived slight of the animal urinating on a tree the alien culture considers sacred. Captain Archer angrily implies that he will urinate on their tree should anything happen to his dog.

The Captain returns to offer consolation to his companion, but is disturbed by the nighttime machinations of his chief medical officer and his menagerie of strange alien creatures. To dispel his latent aggression, he attempts a workout, only to be interrupted by his first officer, who informs him that he put his ship at risk due to his desire to permit Porthos to have a more typical outdoor canine life.

After returning to Sickbay in frustration, Captain Archer is awoken by the distressing sound of an alarm warning the dog has gone into shock. The ever-capable Doctor Phlox resuscitates the dog, then evaluates Captain Archer out of concern that he may be utilizing the dog as a surrogate for emotional intimacy. His inquiry as to the last time the Captain has been intimate may, at first blush, seem to be an overly personal question about Captain Archer’s sexuality, but a more nuanced viewing of the scene plainly reveals that Doctor Phlox’s concern is not that of titillation, but the noble assurance that his captain’s emotional needs are being met.

After falling back asleep and being awoken by an escaped winged mammal, Captain Archer is unpleased to find that Doctor Phlox has resumed his line of questioning, in the process suggesting that Captain Archer may in fact be sexually attracted to his first officer. As per G. McNamara et. al., we can understand that Doctor Phlox is attempting a classic exploration of Jonathan Archer’s psyche - by supplying the intimation of a sexual fantasy (and in doing so with Subcommander T’Pol, who would have undoubtedly been familiar with this technique and, as a Vulcan, had no emotional response to being utilized in such a manner), Captain Archer can now explore the sexuality he has subconsciously suppressed due to the rigors of command.

After returning to sleep, Captain Archer does indeed do so - after dreaming of the death of Porthos, symbolic of the end of the inappropriate emotional surrogacy Captain Archer has projected on his companion, he dreams of a sexual encounter with Subcommander T’Pol. This may seem like a strange connection, given that Subcommander T’Pol is incapable of providing emotional intimacy, but close consideration of the scene notes that they are in the decontamination chamber, rather than a bed or sonic shower - a room where everyone must willingly display vulnerability in the application of the decontamination gel.

After waking one last time, Captain Archer displays this vulnerability when discussing the ongoing diplomatic situation with his first officer - Freudian slips of “lips” and “breasts” belie his new consideration of Subcommander T’Pol as a sexual creature. This enables Captain Archer to also make the difficult decision to permit Doctor Phlox to operate on Porthos, providing the dog with a donor organ from one of the doctor’s menagerie. Jonathan Archer would have been unwilling to make this choice, and risk losing his single source of emotional support, before Doctor Phlox’s psychotherapy.

Finally, he admits to Doctor Phlox that he can view Subcommander T’Pol sexually, even though he knows pursuing a physical relationship with her or any member of his crew would be a gross violation of the trust placed in him. Instead, he can rely on her and other members of the crew for purely emotional support, instead of resting this heavy burden on his small pup.

Having achieved this emotional clarity, Captain Archer is willing to display vulnerability to his alien hosts, removing his shirt to ritualistically destroy the three his dog desecrated, earning Charles Tucker III his plasma injectors.

As any astute reader of the above synopsis can gather, this seminal work from R. Berman and B. Braga deconstructs the complicated, guarded figure of Captain Jonathan Archer, allowing him catharsis and development necessary of any spacefaring command officer (3).

1) This gel was based on the work of NASA’s S. Richards and W. Anthony, who considered that any exposure to an alien biome that could support human life would, as a matter of course, also support organisms compatible with human life.
2) While Earth has reached a state of post-scarcity for all socioeconomic purposes due to advanced protein synthesis and subatomic manipulation (See K. Kesselman’s preeminent work regarding the implications of so-called “transporter” technology, On Short-Range Nonvehicular Travel), certain exotic parts and materiel must be produced by those with technical competence that remains in short supply as Earth shifts from a post-war agrarian lifestyle.











3) April Fools! This isn’t even the right episode!

review raijinn.

Honestly, go away.

Ah, the appropriately named ANIS. When you want to watch an episode that makes even Threshold look good.

Dear Doctor
Or, Data’s Day II: Electric Boogaloo

Only on Enterprise could you sustain an entire teaser with John Billingsley puttering around a set, pretending to interact with nonexistent animals, and eating pet food.

It sets the mood, though. After FAITH. OF THE HEART., Hoshi hand-delivers a message to Phlox, because email was apparently lost in WWIII. It’s a message from Phlox’s counterpart in the alien exchange doctor program, Jeremy Lucas. He goes on to turn the Klingons into humans, but with vaguely racist facial hair!

Anyway, Lucas is having a hard time adjusting to life on Denobula due to “mating season,” so Phlox decides to write him back, seeming to suggest that he find a Denobulan friend and go to some sex clubs. It would make sense if he was busy due to the results of mating season, but I’m wildly concerned why Denobulans need a Doctor to help them fuck.

Anyway, Phlox continues to dictate his letter, noting that human relationships are giving him some trouble - namely, he seems to have attracted a crush from Cutler (the lucky bastard).

Up on the Bridge to Nowhere, the rest of the merry band of idiots has stumbled across a damaged spaceship from a prewarp civilization. T’Pol’s cool with them helping out, and they bring them aboard.

Archer soon learns that the aliens know about warp travel after having been visited by the fucking Ferengi, and they have a terrible disease that is ripping through one of the planet’s two sentient species. Incredibly, the Ferengi were apparently unable to sell them a warp drive.

Since their species’ development is already fucked to hell, T’Pol OKs a mission for Archer and Phlox to try to help with the plague. Before that, though, Phlox apparently needs to eat - what are a few plague-ridden lives lost when the good doctor is hungry, after all! He hits up the mess hall with Hoshi, who is learning Denobulan, and as the aliens are wasting away, they discuss crewman Cutler’s infatuation with him.

Once they finally get to the planet, they meet the indigenous population. The Valakians are at a roughly 21st century development, but they share the planet with the Menk, a docile race of agrarians. Phlox quickly notes that the Menk are immune to the disease. Upon further research, he makes a troubling discovery - without a cure, the Valakians won’t be around to appreciate the musical stylings of Worf singing Gilbert & Sullivan.

Given the Menk are immune, he takes Hoshi as a translator and Cutler as a...nurse...to the planet to collect blood samples. While there, they discover the Menk have started to pick up English, even without the help of the universal translator, and one in particular creates an elaborate organizational system for their blood vials - the Menk are clearly more advanced than they first appear. Cutler is uncomfortable with their circumstances - the Valakians seem to be exploiting them as cheap labor. Phlox points out that their arrangement favors both races - the Valakians get skilled manual labor, and in return, the Menk are well-treated, well-fed, and kept safe and healthy.

When Cutler persists on questioning just how fair it is, Phlox decides to rip off the band-aid about her crush. He asks if she’s married - when she says no, he points out that he has three wives, who each have three husbands. He notes their customs are relatively novel to humans, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t what’s best for his species. He then asks if she would be happy with having his species’ customs applied to her - would she be content with being wife number four? Getting the point, she demurs, and suggests a friendship for now.

Archer meets with the Valakians, and they’re getting antsy - Phlox still hasn’t found a cure. So they start pressing him to give them warp drive instead, so they can find someone who can help them.

Archer’s hesitant, pointing out that virtually everyone else they’ve encountered have been dicks, but agrees to think on it. He goes to T’Pol, and notes their options. They can’t give them warp drive - they aren’t advanced enough to even maintain one. They could leave them with palliative care from Phlox. Or they could stay and help. T’Pol pointedly notes that “the Vulcans stayed to help Earth 90 years ago. We’re still there.” I guess we know where Vulcans stand on interventionism and colonization.

Archer then presses Phlox for a solution. Phlox tells him that he’s discovered more - the Menk are evolving as a species, and the Valakian disease is hereditary - in other words, the natural course of evolution on the planet would be for the Valakians to die, and the Menk to thrive. Phlox has also figured out a cure - but won’t administer it himself unless so ordered by the Captain, since it would be completely changing the course of their development.

As Phlox notes in his letter, he assumes Archer will go through with the cure. Instead, he shows up in Sickbay and tells him that he’s going to withhold it - in the process, giving a speech that directly describes the Prime Directive. He goes down to the surface, and gives the Valakians enough medicine to at least let them live to see what Picard’s up to post-Nemesis. Phlox mopes about being indirectly responsible for the death of a species, and asks Cutler if she’d go to the mess hall with him - he needs a friend.

Despite a rocky beginning, I think this episode ended up being a real gem - almost entirely because of Billingsley’s performance. He lends it a nuance that you don’t get from the doctors of the other Treks, who would lean towards melodrama (McCoy, the EMH, and especially Bashir, who had a similar episode of his own). Probably most similar to Crusher - a somewhat cool realist. Apparently, Phlox was originally supposed to withhold the cure from Archer altogether, and UPN made them change it. I actually think it was the right call - not from the network’s perspective of everyone playing nice with Archer, but because it allowed the characters of both Archer and Phlox to grow. The letter format is a little hokey, but perhaps a little more natural a way to present Phlox’s internal monologue than a bunch of logs.

Rating: ****

I really have to disagree with the contrived PD episode in a series that wasn't even supposed to have it to begin with. I found it rather appalling, personally, and feel that both Phlox and Archer have both well earned the Twenty Dollar Bill Award for their actions in this episode.

People give Dear Doctor shit, but I actually think it’s one of the best Enterprise episodes.

Enterprise, in a nutshell:

As for Cutler, it's a shame the actress died, I think there was a lot of potential for the character.

Man, Kyle's reviews really highly just how sexist and racist Berman-era Trek had really become by the end

Just wait, the next episode has T’Pol and Hoshi acting catty for no reason at all!

Oh God, it's "Sleeping Dogs," isn't it?

Sleeping Dogs
A scant 10 episodes after Trip had a spontaneous orgasm over holodecks before getting knocked up, Hoshi is training on the phase pistol using a drone that seems to materialize from an emitter. I guess Starfleet just has the Nontindo Vii knockoff version of holograms now. Malcolm mansplains why she’s so damn bad at shooting the drone, and then they’re both called to the bridge so they can survey a bigass super-Jupiter.

Their survey probe soon finds a ship maxing and relaxing in the upper atmosphere, so archer directs T’Pol to put together a mission to go say hello. Because obviously, if there’s a ship refusing to talk to you, hiding in the sky of an inhospitable planet, the best thing to do is go knock on the door. It’s like the sci-fi version of going and staying in an abandoned cabin in the fucking woods.

Hoshi skips over talking to the relevant person and goes to Archer to request to be on the mission - she’s declared that she’s now over screaming like a teenage girl in an abandoned cabin in the fucking woods, and she’s ready for a more dangerous mission. Ignore the fact that five minutes ago, we saw her fail to hit a target even half the time, and we’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that she’s grown otherwise.

Archer tells her that T’Pol had already asked that she be part of the away team. So what happens? They go out to the bridge, and T’Pol and Hoshi are assholes to each other. They gear up in EV suits, and they are assholes to each other. They ride to the ship, and they are assholes to each other. Captain Britain, the other poor soul on this mission, ignores all of it like it’s a daily occurrence.

They get to the ship, and discover that it’s Klingon, and the crew appears to be incapacitated, but not dead. As they bicker over whether or not Klingons would find it honorable to be saved from dying of space dysentery, a Klingon woman jumps from a fridge (yes, really), takes out Malcolm, and jacks their ride.

Archer and company tether the shuttlepod and sedate the woman in Sickbay, whole T’Pol, Hoshi, and Cheap Colin Firth try to fix the Klingon ship so they don’t get crushed in the planet’s atmosphere. They naturally do this while yelling and bitching each other out, forcing Hoshi to read every label in the one damn time Star Trek has decided to be realistic about alien computer interfaces, and Archer blunders his way through trying to get to the Klingon ship.

Finally, he comes up with a workable plan - reinforce a shuttlepod from the inside as though building a jungle gym in the thing will prevent it from being crushed, study enough of the Vulcan database to learn that you can get Klingons to do anything if you imply they’re dishonorable, and convince the Klingon woman who happens to be an engineer to come and help get the Klingon ship out of the planet.

On that ship, Malcolm is the only person keeping the thing from falling apart, so he quickly gets dehydrated. T’Pol and Hoshi go to find some water, and after Hoshi gets frightened by some Targ in a fridge, she and T’Pol have a vaguely homoerotic meditation session. From that point on, they are now the best of friends, because why not drag the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants out of the closet one last time.

Hoshi convinces Malcolm to blow up all the Klingon torpedos to push the ship up (the photon torpedoes, ooh, ahh). Malcolm says they’ll get blown up, and T’Pol is doubtful, but she backs Hoshi. Surprise of surprises, she’s right, and they’re all saved. Hooray.

Oh, and Phlox figured out that the Klingons all got sick after drinking a bunch of liquor they stole from some people they murdered, so they give them the antidote, and after some posturing, they head out. T’Pol, Hoshi, and Malcolm enjoy some time in their underwear together in the second chamber, which apparently doubles as a sauna or something.

Virtually every one of Hoshi and T’Pol’s actions in this episode read like the writer’s sole experience with women is Dynasty, Mean Girls, and the beginning of a low budget PornHub original. The CG looks like a PlayStation 2 cutscene - blurry and brown. The entire episode would have been solved if they just brought an engineer along on the away mission to the busted ass ship. And instead of being threatening, which they should be during this point in the canon, the Klingons are, much like this episode, comically weak.

Rating: *

Shadows of P’Jem

Continuity? In my B&B helmed Star Trek?

The Vulcans are pissed off that Archer and T’Pol helped the spy outpost on P’Jem. The Andorians destroyed both the outpost and the monastery, and though no one was hurt, they destroyed a bunch of old shit that it would be illogical to be attached to anyway.

Since Starfleet won’t rein in Archer, the Vulcans take their ball and go home, and demand that T’Pol go with them - apparently planning to blame all that shit on her.

Archer’s pissed off she won’t fight it, so he drags her on a milk run mission to a planet he found on Vulcan Wikipedia, Coridan. And naturally they get shot out of the sky and kidnapped.

It turns out that while the Coridan government was happy to have visitors, they and the Vulcans have been studiously ignoring the Coridan version of Tibet and the dissidents trying to break free of the government’s rule.

Those insurgents were the ones who captured Archer and T’Pol, and tie them up in the same pockmarked shed that Malcolm and Wash were locked up in during War Stories. And unlike that excellent episode of Firefly, Enterprise uses the opportunity to have Archer, tied to T’Pol, fall over and slam his face into her chest.

And Enterprise is even more ill-equipped to stage a rescue than Serenity too - after the rebels call and offer to exchange Archer and T’Pol for forty phase pistols, we discover that they have fifteen for the entire fucking ship. There’s like 90 people aboard - apparently only one in six gets to defend themselves from whichever alien takes over the ship every week. They call the Vulcans, on their way to pick up T’Pol for help.

They tell them not to fuck anything up or try any bullshit, and the Coridan government lets the Vulcans take over the whole situation. Trip and Her Majesty’s Secret Service naturally ignore the Vulcans, fly off to stage a rescue, and get immediately captured.

Luckily for them, they’re captured by Shran and the Andorians, who are secretly fomenting the battle between the Coridans and the rebels largely to fuck over the Vulcans. While chewing the scenery like only Jeffrey’s Coombs can, Shran agreed to help to repay Archer for helping on P’Jem. They get a transmitter to Archer via a spy they have with the rebels, who inconspicuously wears parachute pants.

Together, Trip, Malcom, and the Andorians mount a rescue, but it goes sideways when the Vulcans show up and start firing phaser bazookas like the pacifists they are. One of the rebels tries to take a shot at the Vulcan captain, and T’Pol jumps in front of him and takes the bullet.

After the fight is broken up, Archer takes T’Pol back to Enterprise. The Andorians...just leave, I guess? They never really say. The Vulcans go to Enterprise as well, but Archer and Phlox lie to the Vulcan Captain, take T’Pol’s agency of choice while she’s unconscious, and convince him to go talk up her bravery to the High Command so she can retain her post.

The bones of this episode were decent, and Coombs is always fun to have around, but it was so poorly paced, and so much of the plot was unnecessary.

Rating: **, like what Archer faceplants into.

Shuttlepod One
Trip and Prince Charles are in the eponymous shuttle, doing a survey of an asteroid belt. You might think that a engineer and a security officer would be the wrong choice to do a scientific survey of a bunch of space rocks, but that’s because you’re not part of the B&B brain trust.

Malcolm is happily deriding Trip for his “North American” love of science fiction and Superman comics (apparently DC makes it to the 22nd century - no word if Marvel does too). Good to know that bad British, ahem, “European”, cultural superiority complex cliches exist in the future!

Trip is busy fixing the shuttle, which apparently fell apart during their survey - they lost sensors and communications. This is awkward when they fly past a big asteroid that has a bunch of Enterprise smeared across its surface.

Are they dead? Is our long national nightmare finally at an end? No. Apparently Enterprise rescued a bunch of boron-breathing aliens whose ship exploded while it was docking with Enterprise’s shuttlebay, thus littering the asteroid with conveniently-labeled hunks of metal. Since Phlox apparently can’t just fill a room with boron so they can wait and pick up the boys, Enterprise fucked off to their planet to drop them off.

Back on the shuttlepod, Trip and Malcolm start to come to terms with the fact that their impulse-only shuttle will never be able to reach help before they die. So they set off towards civilization, intending to leave a record of what they think happened to Enterprise. Or at least, Malcolm does, leaving morose goodbye notes to virtually everyone he knows, including every random girl he ever met. Trip just fucks around and bitches about Malcolm being grim, insisting they will be saved.

On Enterprise, T’Pol realizes that the destruction of the alien ship was caused by a micro-black hole. Their ship wasn’t shielded, but Enterprise was hit multiple times and shrugged it off. Archer notes that these would probably fuck up the shuttlepod, but doesn’t really do anything to help them.

And in the time honored tradition of lazy storytelling, one of those black holes tears through the shuttle, venting 80% of their oxygen and forcing them to repair the ship with mashed potatoes from an MRE.

Faced with imminent death, Malcolm naps and has a dream. And it’s obviously a dream, because people are happy that he’s been rescued. No one is more thrilled than T’Pol, who is ready to bone down in Sickbay while giggling about how he’d like to be called “Stinky” from now on. Trip wakes him from his wet dream as they hear Hoshi on the newly-repaired radio. They still (conveniently) can’t send messages, but they get to work on a last-ditch effort to get convince Archer to actually come get them, since they’re apparently still days away, and they only have 48 hours of oxygen left.

So the jettison the impulse engine and turn off some technobabble that apparently uses oxygen to keep the ship warm. And then they get totally wasted on a bottle of bourbon Archer has apparently left lying around in the shuttlepod since they left Earth.

While drunk, Trip tries to sacrifice himself so there’s be more air for Malcolm, Malcolm whines about how he can’t ever get close to anyone while also informing Trip that he had closed the deal with the waitress mentioned a few episodes ago that Trip apparently had a crush on, and then they both talk about how great T’Pol’s ass is. Yes, they are hours from death, so they choose to have a misogynist conversation about how much they’d like to fuck one of their coworkers.

Anyway, they pass out, and rather than us mercifully dying along with them, Enterprise rescues them, having seen the exploding impulse drive on sensors and realizing they should probably stop fucking around. Malcolm tries to flirt with T’Pol. She shuts him the fuck down.

Apparently, this is the only episode of Star Trek to have no guest or supporting cast. Hell, Mayweather doesn’t even show up. It was written as a bottle episode to save money for the rest of the season. And that’s what you don’t get anymore now that 12-hour seasons are so common - entire episodes of throwaway filler garbage written by sexists in which the entire plot could have been solved with Enterprise just picking up the damn shuttle before they left on a gas-based misadventure.

Rating: *

Uh, excuse me, but boron's a metal.

How do you breathe metal?

That would explain why he couldn’t fill a room with it, I suppose!

Funny thing, "Shuttlepod One" is actually a fan favorite...at least on TBBS where all the fans were horny for Tucker's Southern fried pickle

And fandom loooooooved pairing him with Reed after this episode.

Bonus fact I read somewhere: this script was originally supposed to feature Mayweather and supposed to be a ham-fisted attempt at commentary on black/white relations. Montgomery's rock stiff acting aside, I'm glad I didn't have to sit through that.

Archer's faceplant into T'pol's cleavage is so cringy.

FTFY

Also:it's funny seeing the same types of people who howled about Enterprise being written for the lowest common denominator (which it was) now bitching that Discovery is "too progressive."

I mean, TOS has Kirk being blatantly pro-choice in 1969, Picard was quick to lay down negotiation and the show was created by a man with Jewish origins iirc. If they wanted a Trek that validated white men as the default hero who was robbed because he has to play nice with other races,, Enterprise was right there the entire time.

You should do dexter and game of thrones reviews.