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.

Marauders
Stop me if you've heard this one before. Bargain-basement versions of The Guy From TNG's Conspiracy Who Gets Chest-Bursted, Michael Shannon, and Andie MacDowell fight the least menacing Klingons ever over $80,000 worth of fancy hydrogen. No? No one? Well, OK.

Anyway, the teaser is that a bunch of aliens of a race so unimportant that they are never named labor in the deuterium fields of some shitty planet where they live in yurts and re-used sci-fi set dressing amongst derricks obviously made out of painted plywood or something, and they see a shuttlepod show up. That's it.

Turns out that Enterprise has figured out that they've got tons of deuterium, and they send Archer, Trip, and T'Pol in a blindingly-white "desert theme" catsuit down to negotiate, but the aliens aren't interested - they've already got a buyer. Archer hardballs them into giving up what would have been like a thousand dollars worth of deuterium in 2002 in exchange for getting their derricks and equipment back in working order and medical supplies. And the medical supplies they ask for are suspicious - while Andie MacDowell lady knowingly avoids Phlox's menagerie of horrors, she does want plenty of medication for plasma burns.

As the crew gets ready to depart after fixing all their shit, the "buyers" show up ahead of schedule. On the ship, they realize they're Klingons, and immediately assume they've arrived to start shit instead of just doing literally the same thing Enterprise did and buy some deuterium. Archer and co. watch Conspiracy guy get bullied by the Klingons, and it's revealed that they basically show up every year to rob them blind. However, they're not interested in Enterprise's help dealing with the Klingons, so everyone heads back to the ship and prepares to leave.

Never one to leave shit alone though, Archer heads back in the middle of the night to chat with Conspiracy guy, and they are Manly Men, getting greasy repairing heavy equipment and talking serious shit. Even though the guy reveals the Klingons basically slaughtered a dozen of them the last time they showed a hint of backbone, Archer convinces him to stand up to the Klingons. Everyone has a job to do (except for Phlox, probably because he's too deadly or something). Archer and Trip come up with a plan to trick the Klingons into beaming into the middle of the volatile deuterium field by moving the camp 150 feet, in a move that you'd think whoever was operating the Klingon's transporter would pick up on. T'Pol teaches folks self-defense and how to avoid getting murdered with a bat'leth while Mayweather is obviously deathly afraid of touching her. And Malcolm and Hoshi give a crash course on weapons operation - apparently, Hoshi has been taking lessons from Horatio Hornblower and he is very obviously suppressing a hard-on while he watches her shoot the shit out of the holo-pigeon.

Finally, the Klingons show up to collect. The crew's in civilian clothes (and, uh, T'Pol is dressed like she's Rambo or something for some reason) to make sure they don't realize Starfleet is up to their usual bullshit, and they immediately antagonize the Klingons into attacking. Everyone takes non-lethal pot-shots with their weapons and bobs and rolls, and eventually lure the Klingons into their trap, igniting the deuterium field and surrounding the Klingons. They tell them to fuck off, and they do, yelling that they "can find deuterium anywhere" just to prove that the writers don't actually know what deuterium is. And they inexplicably just leave instead of nuking the site from orbit or something.

Their, uh, "hard won" victory in hand, the aliens give Enterprise a couple grand of deuterium and they hit the road, content in the knowledge that, uh, being surrounded by flames is scary enough to Klingons that they won't come back. Or something. Oh, and there was an obnoxious kid that really wanted to learn about shuttles and starships and Trip was nice to him. I mean, I kind of get what they were going for - self defense gymnastics and trickery of a bunch of cookie-cutter bad guy Klingons feels very TOS-y in a way. But confusing nostalgia for quality isn't helping anyone.

Rating: **

"!"

I preferred this episode when it was called Seven Samurai and A Bug's Life.

The Seventh
T'Pol receives a late-night FaceTime call from a Vulcan lady who sits way too close to the camera, inadvertently confirming that old people don't know how to use webcams even back then. They want some guy named "Menos". This is apparently enough to convince any reasonable viewer to stay tuned in to the channel that once aired Shasta McNasty, so roll credits.

The next morning, T'Pol resists Archer's offer of, uh, toast, and informs him that he'll be getting a call about some bullshit from the Vulcan High Council. And she refuses to say anything else about it. After Archer finally gets this call, it turns out that T'Pol is going on a secret mission at the behest of the Vulcans, and she'll be taking, uh, Mayweather with her. Good luck, T'Pol. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew are pissed off that their jobs are to just chill in orbit of a planet and catch up on all the work they don't get finished because they're too busy teaching aliens to stand up for themselves in exchange for an isotope found in seawater.

Later, T'Pol goes to Archer's quarters, and he's pissy with her because of the secretive mission. Still. This grown-ass man. To prove that she needs to talk, she stands in front of the RealPlayer water polo match he's got on an LCD screen the production staff bought from Fry's, and she explains that the Vulcans were, shockingly, up to their usual cloak and dagger fuckery and trying to stabilize a planetary alliance by playing all the planet's mobsters against each other, and did that by sending a bunch of Vulcans, fairly infamously known for being pretty fucking easy to clock, in undercover. However, not all of them wanted to come back in from the cold, and T'Pol's last job before, uh, hanging out on earth and getting threatened by racists was to try to catch them. Menos is the last one, she wasn't able to catch him before because he was just too damn slick, he's trying to sell space drugs, and she wants Archer to come along, since she trusts him.

Does this mean Mayweather is out? Nope, despite Archer being literally a test pilot in his own past life, Mayweather's still around to drive. They head off, and leave Trip in charge as "acting Captain," a role that immediately goes to his head. He hosts a dinner with Phlox and Malcom, who immediately ask him to actually make Captain-y decisions and he demurs. There's also a crewman serving them, prompting my son to ask, and I quote, "Is that literally just their job?" Yes, my child - apparently, they need to dedicate one of the eighty-odd bunks aboard to someone dedicated to serving the Captain his food.

Anyway, back to the, uh, plot. Archer, T'Pol, and Mayweather fly off to a shitty moon with a roadside bar on it that, apparently, this guy has been hanging out on. For a really long time. Because he's too damn slick. They poke around the bar, conveniently filled only with aliens we've seen before, and immediately find this guy, and Travis Motherfucking Mayweather knocks him on his ass and takes him into custody. However, seeing this guy is giving T'Pol some "mind meld rape free jazz" flashbacks of when she tried to apprehend him. They're stuck at the bar because the owner is busy deicing the parking lot with acid or something (seriously), so Menos tries to appeal to T'Pol and Archer - claiming that since the skullduggery, his life's been pretty shit. He hauls used parts that are killing him like a Malon or something, and the only thing he has to look forward to is his wife and kids. He doesn't want to go back to Vulcan to be brainwashed.

T'Pol can't stop having flashbacks though, and in a moment alone with him, he helps her catch up - she didn't just fail to apprehend him, she failed to apprehend "the seventh" remaining undercover Vulcan as well, killing him in the process. She couldn't deal with that emotionally, so she went back to Vulcan and got her mind wiped by a really fucking old guy. But she can't believe that he's just a long-haul garbage truck driver and that she killed a guy for the crime of not wanting to go back to Vulcan, so she straps some duct tape to her shoes (again, seriously - if this was an option, why didn't they all just wrap up their shoes and walk to the shuttled) and runs to his shuttle, where she just finds the used parts.

She goes back to the bar, and she and Archer chat it out, with Archer pointing out that her job isn't to decide if he's guilty, but to just bring him in. And in the space of like five minutes, Menos manages to light the bar on fire. The acid's apparently done, because folks start leaving, and Menos makes a run for his ship. Our heroes can't find him, until they inadvertently turn off a holoemitter he has in his ship (because, uh, they are just that common now, I guess). They get in another fight, and he almost escapes. T'Pol wrestles with whether or not to capture him, Archer reminds her of what she's there for, and she stuns him and brings him in.

And then they discover that he was hiding the space drugs all along so T'Pol was morally in the right no matter what. The end. I didn't remember this episode at all, and I know based on re-viewings that this had to be the fourth time I've seen it. I don't know if this was supposed to be an homage to something, or an attempt at DS9ing the fuck out of things, or what, but it was…not successful at its task. The only benefit of the episode is that, at least in my opinion, it proved that they lucked out when they hired Jolene Blalock. Because she wasn't handed anything great here, but she tried the best with what she had, I'll give her that.

Rating: *

This episode exists for Bruce Davison to be in to six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon Trek to "Mame" "Willard" and "Lathe Of Heaven".

Regarding the serving food but, if Trek is anything like the Navy, we had a thing called Food Service Attendant, which is a thing that goes back to the 1800s where you'd have seamen rotate in and out of the kitchen to help with cooking in the galley. Nowadays, it's there for "character building" or whatever, but it's the rare thing on this show that Bermaga didn't pull from their collective asses.

Although speaking of them, how the fuck did I live to see Trek fan start embracing Braga back into the fold?! Cuz I swear back in the day he got as much hate as Berman did when I was a kid on TBBS

When did Trek fans welcome Braga back? What is he doing? He was doing stuff on The Orville IIRC. Was that enough to rehabilitate him rather than to get him shunned for killing a second franchise?

I’d guess you probably just gave it more thought than they ever did!

I suspect The Orville earned him credit amongst the subset of the fan base that pretends that the last Star Trek production was TATV, and he seems amenable to at least acknowledging mistakes were made in his post-Trek fan appearances.

Meanwhile, Berman’s been so low-profile that he only ever seems to come up when it’s a series regular providing a new anecdote about how he was personally shitty to them or, uh, a backyard barbecue with the only cast members from TNG that liked him.

Imagine recreating the NX-01 on the holodeck to work out your angst and you get stuck playing the guy who serves dinner to Acting Captain Tucker and the dweebs.

The Communicator
The funny thing about science fiction is that reality can sometimes outpace it. For example, Find My iPhone can track my phone to fifty feet, and I can use that phone Tricorder-style to track the AirTag on my cat's collar to a tenth of that. And if someone nefarious makes off with my phone, I can brick it to the point where's it's basically a paperweight. Why do I bring all this up? No reason…

Archer, Tea & Crumpets, and Hoshi are back from cosplaying aliens. And Reed comes to an unfortunate conclusion - he lost his phone.

Well, his communicator. And since the aliens are, like, 1970s-level, that's a problem. The three of them tear the shuttlepod and launch bay apart, including going through a wastebasket full of the paper they never seem to use. No luck. Hoshi's able to eventually track it down to like a five-block radius where they had visited a bar, so Archer and Reed break out the stage makeup and head back down to the planet. The barkeep makes a gross joke about Hoshi being "difficult to forget," and they start surreptitiously scanning for the communicator.

They trace it to a back room, but it turns out the entire thing was a trap - the military came into possession of the communicator, and Archer and the ship's tactical officer promptly lose a fistfight with "three undercover soldiers in a bar." So, instead of these aliens having a magic rectangle that just makes sad chirping noises when they open and shut it and is so unbelievably complex that they're probably a couple hundred years away from being able to understand it at all, they now have that magic rectangle, different magic rectangles that make swirly scanny noises, guns with functionally unlimited ammunition more powerful than any other handheld weapon on the planet, and two guys who theoretically know how to use it all. It's almost like they should have cut their losses on the communicator.

And naturally, the aliens assume Archer and Reed are just spies from a foreign power or resistance movement or terrorist cell or, fuck, whatever prewarp aliens on Star Trek always assume when they encounter our heroes. And that's like the current US government finding some Vulcans and assuming they're from Ukraine or ANTIFA or something, it doesn't make any damn sense. It keeps getting worse - they get x-rayed and when their insides are all jacked up compared to the aliens' physiology, they assume…they're genetically modified mutants. Yeah, and the pointed ears are from a mechanical rice-picker accident.

Wondered what our fine feathered fuckups on Enterprise have been up to while Archer and Reed have been shitting everything up? Well, they've been coming up with a plan to retrieve them. And it involves the Suliban cell ship that they've been toting around in their launch bay. The aliens have biwing jets that are capable of taking out shuttle pods, so the plan is that Trip and Mayweather get the cloak up and running so they can fly in and pick them up. In the process, Trip manages to cloak his hand using, fuck, radiation or some shit. Mayweather makes a joke that he should use it to feel up a date on movie night, which is just proof of why the Federation needs to be restricted by the Treaty of Algeron.

Planetside, the aliens have moved on to deciding to hang and dissect Archer and Reed to discover the magic of their squishy innards or something. They take them up to the platform, wrap nooses around their necks, and…the day is saved by Trip, Mayweather, and T'Pol, storming out of the cloaked cell ship. They quickly incapacitate everyone and take their technology back and head out, biwing fighter jets in hot pursuit in PS2 cutscene CGI. Wrapping things up, T'Pol basically justified plunging the alien world into an inevitable Cold War where one side thinks the other are a bunch of genetically altered tech toting super soldiers with invisible Wonder Woman jets by saying that, no matter what, the culture had been contaminated. And what the fuck is that bullshit? They could have just left it at the fucking communicator, but they fucked every goddamn thing up.

Rating: *

WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?

Exactly. They left behind what's essentially a walkie-talkie. At most maybe the aliens could learn to improve their batteries/power cells or something, but that's about the extent of it?

And as much as people rightfully bag on Anthony Montgomery's acting ability as wooden post Travis Mayweather, Dominic Keating isn't a whole lot better. Even in 2002 him talking about Churchill and such at the beginning of this episode was pretty cringe-worthy.

Not really. The same premise was the ending joke of A Piece Of The Action in TOS - and while Kirk and Co laughed off McCoy leaving his communicator behind, Spock pointed out that it has a component that is the basis for any Federation tech.

Doctor Who had a similar scene where Ace loses her ghetto blaster (semi-portable tape deck and speakers) fighting Daleks. The Doctor is pleased, as if she HAD left the device behind, it could have sparked the microchip revolution 20 years early, with incredible ramifications for the course of human history.

At the time of ENT the Federation doesn't yet exist and Reed's communicator could be a much dumber piece of tech than McCoy's seeing as it's a hundred years older.