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

Sadly, Baba, I have no interest in GoT, and I’m certain that rewatching Dexter to review it would just make me depressed at how much I liked something that ended up being so bad.

Understatement of the eon.

My cat could act better than that stiff, though he apparently keeps getting work.

Fusion

Oh boy. On a very special episode of Enterprise...

Archer has dragged 82 other people off to go look at a nebula that was on the cover of his grade school science book. Upon arrival, they’re hailed by an old Vulcan ship. The Vulcan Captain (played by a Chris Pine’s Dad, hilariously) isn’t immediately an unreasonable asshole, so everyone knows something’s up.

He leads a ship full of Vulcan hippies, who do something other than grumping around bitching about logic all the time. Apparently, and I quote our illustrious Captain, “Vulcans aren’t that interested in exploring.” A race of scientists obviously hate that shit.

Their engines are shot to hell, so Archer invites the Vulcans aboard. In addition to the Captain, henceforth referred to as Daddy Vulcan, Skeevy Vulcan and Horny Vulcan come aboard for dinner. T’Pol explains that they’re v’tosh ka’tur - Vulcans without logic. And while you’d think that this would tie into, say, the Romulans, or Sybok, or literally anything else, the only continuity porn we get is that Vulcans like this have “failed before.”

Anyway, they all pair off - Archer with Daddy Vulcan, T’Pol with Skeevy Vulcan, and Trip with Horny Vulcan.

As Trip shows Horny Vulcan, their engineer, around, all the Vulcan does is ask about human sex. He seems amazed by the fact that humans just fuck whenever. He gets a subplot of his own where Archer and Trip convince him to reconcile with his dad, who treated him like the gay son of a Westboro Baptist parishioner, but somehow, including a bunch of sex gags was relevant! This show is a fucking garbage fire.

The real meat and potatoes is with T’Pol and Skeevy Vulcan. He basically leers at her and skulls and puts himself in her personal space and drools over the latent emotion that T’Pol represses. Archer forces T’Pol to work with this sleazeball despite her being obviously uncomfortable with working with any of these clowns, so she does so.

Skeevy Vulcan keeps prodding at T’Pol, eventually convincing her to not meditate before sleeping to better understand the emotions she suppresses. She has a wet dream about him filled with free jazz, so it is basically a hideous fucking nightmare. She wakes up with a headache over it, so apparently the only thing holding Vulcans together is mindfulness.

Skeevy Vulcan convinces her to try something else instead - a mind meld. Apparently, mind melds are only done by logic deviants in the 22nd century, because the best way to stay in canon is to technically stay in canon. He brings her back to the night club with the free jazz, and he refuses to let her break the mind meld as he practically jizzes himself over the emotions she’s experiencing. She finally forces himself free, and she forces him to leave her quarters.

Later, Archer asks Skeevy Vulcan to his ready room, and confronts him about having basically mind-raped T’Pol and tricks him into throwing Archer across the room in anger. And instead of, y’know, forcing Skeevy Vulcan to deal with Vulcan Justice, he just tells them all to leave.

I don’t even know what the fuck to do with this episode. It essentially deals with rape, but the rapist gets away with it because the star of the show lets him go. They revisit it later in the series, but it was largely just more consequences for the victim (spoilers, she basically gets Vulcan HIV as part of a Viacom marketing campaign. Yes, seriously). Jolene Blalock does admirably with the material, but the guy who played Skeevy Vulcan basically played him as a slimeball the entire time - there was no question that he was going to assault her other than how. And then they toss in a bunch of sex jokes and off screen character development for some other guy on top of it?

Just gross. They were wholly unprepared to write an episode dealing with this subject matter - they shouldn’t have tried.

Rating: *

Netflix is turning witcher books into a series.

FWIW, the follow-up Stigma was considerably better, but still...major yikes for this.

He's the grandson of jazz musician Wes, so I'm sure that's opened a few doors that should've stayed firmly shut.

I mentioned in the Voyager thread that this guy had a major reoccurring role in a show I watched religiously the season before Enterprise premiered and I only noticed after falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole.

It just puzzles me that of all the black actors in Los Angeles, they cast this boring lameass. I mean, there were plenty of black actors in daytime TV. If they wanted the black demographic that was already watching UPN on Monday day night, they could've cast Shemar Moore from The Young and the Restless and gone gangbusters. Imagine THOSE slash fics!

Shame because the actress died, but the character was pretty good.

Rogue Planet

For each review, I usually take a few notes for points that I want to make sure I hit. The notes for some episodes are...more interesting than others:

• Trip implies the alien ship’s crew are fucking.
• THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME.
• The damn liberals took away their guns so they can’t hunt anymore.
• “I promise I won’t kill anything, sir.”
• T’Pol accuses Archer of trying to find the woman because he’s horny.
• Giant talking amoeba

Some idiot at Starfleet has decided to commemorate Archer with a painting to be hung at Starfleet Command, so Trip is trying to get a stately picture of him for some admiral’s disappointing art major child to paint. Archer is thus thrilled when they run across a planet just out in the middle of nowhere. No sun, no star system, but habitable due to the geothermal activity of the planet.

We’ll ignore that it seems...unlikely...that the planet is covered in foliage that is somehow not photosynthetic.

They find a single ship on the planet, but it doesn’t respond. Trip suggests they might be “honeymooning,” so naturally Archer, T’Pol, Hoshi, and Sherlock Holmes fly on down to harass them. They soon run across a hunting party, who sneak up on them because Archer and company aren’t wearing safety orange and the hunters briefly think them to be prey.

Anyway, they seem like pretty chill guys - their planet grants a select few hunters the right to come and hunt on the planet, which is apparently hone to some unique prey. Foreshadowing! Meghan Markle’s husband explains that nobody hunts on Earth anymore because they’re all liberal socialists with competent free healthcare, but wants to learn more about how they track their game, so he begs Archer to let them tag along. He even promises not to kill anything in exactly the sort of way someone planning to kill something would promise it.

As the hunters and crew bunk down to prepare for the morning’s hunt, Archer stays up by the fire. He hears a woman’s voice. He chases after it, and sees her briefly before she disappears.

He naturally goes and tells everyone. One of the hunters asks him if he really thinks a half-naked blonde girl was calling for him in a jungle. During the hunt the next morning though, Archer was drawn away after seeing her again. He catches up to her, and she claims he’s different before she disappears. Different is a very kind way of putting it, lady.

Back on the hunt, one of the hunters gets attacked by a giant flowing amoeba. They take him back to the ship, where Phlox points out the wound had strange DNA that had shifting chromosomes in it. After they return to the planet, Archer sets out to find the woman again after T'Pol basically accuses him of chasing a wet dream.

He soon finds her, though, and manages to get the truth out of her. She’s one of the glowing amoebas, and they’re sentient shapeshifters that can mine their target’s subconscious to take form. That’s where we store DNA after all - the subconscious. She begs Archer for help. But the aliens are unconvinced - believing that the amoeba’s are just dumbly emulating intelligence psychically.

The crew is flummoxed - they can’t make the aliens stop the hunt. Malcolm, for once in his damn life, is useful and has the solution - give the amoebas the ability to mask their chemical signals that the hunters have been tracking. So they do. And they save the day. Hooray.

This was such a nothing of an episode. Instead of exploring the concept of what a rogue planet would be like, they just trample around a Lowes garden center and the cave set. The aliens don’t make any damn sense - being able to read peoples thoughts wouldn’t let them actually replicate DNA, so it seems like they should have gone Talosian and just said that’s how they’re representing themselves via psychic projection. There are still infantile sex jokes every damn week. And the solution is anything but - they’ll just keep hunting them, but it will be more challenging. It would have been interesting if they had convinced the hunting party to try to get through to their people as well, but we know damn well that B&B don’t have a Picard speech in them to save their fucking lives.

The worst part? This could have been a S1 episode of any contemporary Trek. It had nothing to do with Enterprise itself.

Rating: *

Acquisition

When you make a prequel to a show created 36 years ago, you are signing up to carry 36 years of baggage in the form of canon. Canon like “Phasers were invented in the 23rd century” and “First contact with the Ferengi was in the 24th century, except a apocryphal rumor surrounding Roswell.”

Well, fuck that garbage, because this is Enterprise, so we’re going to do whatever the fuck we want.

And what we want are four Ferengi to knock out the entire crew of the Enterprise and steal everything that isn’t bolted down (and shit that is) for 11 minutes with no English or subtitles dialog.

Yes, a quarter of the running time of this episode is devoted to four actors babbling nonsense.

Luckily for the increasingly bored viewer, Trip was spared the fate of the rest of the cruise because he was enjoying a fucking decon chamber sauna. He starts Die Harding around the ship in his underwear (why he couldn’t have grabbed his uniform on his way out of the sauna an exercise left for the viewer), but accomplishes nothing.

One of the Ferengi wakes up Archer, having somehow identified him as the one in charge. They insist he tell them where the shop’s safe is. They mention gold-pressed latinum, but when Archer lies about having thousands of bars of gold, not a single one of them calls it out as worthless.

Since he won’t tell them where the nonexistent safe is, the Ferengi captain’s cousin is left in charge of making Archer load their ship. Archer develops a rapport with him, inflating his ego with delusions of competence and bribes of women and gold. Trip wakes up T’Pol, who promptly suspects he’s up to hijinx because she finds herself in a room with a bunch of unconscious women and Trip in his underwear.

After interrogating Porthos for the location of the safe, T’Pol sows dissent in the ranks by stealing back items from the Ferengi stash, making them think they’re stealing from each other. They raid every one of Enterprise’s fourteen weapons lockers (each apparently filled with one phase pistol, according to a shadows of P’Jem), and accuse each other of being a Menk. Ah, continuity.

Anyway, they finally end up in the cargo bay, where the Ferengi find Trip and T’Pol. Trip engineers a fight with Archer to prevent him from giving the Ferengi his wife, Hoshi. He then says he’ll give them all the gold if they leave the women. He leads them on a wild goose chase through the bowels of the ship, and then he and T’Pol trap them in a closet and stun them.

Archer, the brilliant tactician that he is, then lets the cousin have the Ferengi ship, the rest of the Ferengi as prisoners, and never asks them who the fuck they are.

And that’s a grand tradition for Archer. A crew member gets mentally raped? Let the rapist go. Aliens drug the crew intending to sell the women into sexual slavery? Let them go! Over and over and over.

And that’s the most infuriating part about Enterprise. Think it was bad when the crew followed the prime directive when it didn’t exist? Well, here, let’s stay in canon on a technicality. We’ll do whatever the fuck we want, and you needs have to suck it up because we aren’t breaking any of your rules.

And if that wasn’t enough, two thirds of the cast has no lines, we wasted Ethan Phillips and Jeffrey Combs, we made Clint Howard endure literal minutes of makeup. And the episode is incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t familiar with the Ferengi. It’s an episode made for the fans that is guaranteed to annoy the fans. It’s a hell of a thing.

Rating: *

Guess I'll pull a Baba and make a couple of suggestions of my own:

Shiki


Berserk (1997)

Talk about not knowing an audience...the DS9 writers on the DVDs mentioned that Trek fans consistently hated Ferengi episodes, and most of them had more going for them than this shit did.

Who the hell was this episode made for?

Some of the Ferengi episodes were good, some were bad. Little Green Men is one of my favorite DS9 episodes.

FTFY.

I mean I'd be lying if I said I would have ever watched an episode of any other Trek series if I hadn't gotten into ENT, but not even nostalgia is enough to sustain me for most of these episodes in rewatch.

At least DS9 had some solid stories to make up for some truly horrid sexism.

I'll admit I enjoyed watching a good number of Enterprise episodes, others I really didn't care for. By enjoyed I don't mean they were good episodes, just that I enjoyed them. They could be cheesy, somewhat ridiculous, or just plain bad, but still enjoyable.

There were also some terrible episodes that I don't care for. They were just that terrible.

And there were also some good episodes here and there.

To frame it, I enjoy watching "Dune", "Battlefield Earth", "The Core", among other "bad" movies. Bad, but still entertaining.

I’d say ENT at least occasionally did something with its premise, which is more than what Voyager had going for it

Which Dune -- David Lynch or the SciFi miniseries?

David Lynch

"Starship Troopers " is another one I enjoy.

I'm not gonna lie, I enjoyed both the Lynch and the Harrison Dune for their own merits. In fact, it may be time to put on the Lynch version for a rewatch.

Also: Denise Richards was hot when I first saw Starship Troopers. On further viewings, Dina Meyer

If you like pancake titties.

I've slept with a gal with pancake titties. I don't consider Dina's to be that.

Waffles at best.

I was going to post the same thing.

Or maybe @Bickendan thought he had pancakes but they were really crepes.

Was the girl’s name Suzette, by chance?

Whatever they were, they were sliding down the plate

I got it.

Just a reminder that B&B wanted this show to have a pop song interlude in every episode.

Coldplay Station 12?
Shakira'Shara?
The Kanye?
Eminem^2?

Oh. HELL. Yeah.