Disclaimer:  These little reviews are my opinions and not those of paramount, the enterprise writers, staff, whatever, etc.

These reviews will contain spoilers (count on it), so don't read them if you don't want to know the dirty little twists.  Ratings are out of a perfect five stars; this is perfect for Enterprise, you understand, and thusly a five star rating in these reviews may not be equal to one for, say, Deep Space Nine.  Now, on to the reviews....
 

5/26/04--Review for:  "Zero Hour" (Archer and company stop the Xindi from blowing up Earth while Trip and T'Pol destroy the sphere network)

Yet again, I hardly know where to start.  In many ways, this episode was a direct continuation of the previous ones, and many of the major events were entirely predictable (the weapon was stopped, Dolan was killed, Trip and T'Pol nuked the spheres).  But there were several things that I, for one, did not anticipate...some of which made me practically jump out of my seat with excitement, and others which made me blink at the screen and say "Uh...okay...."

I will begin with what is most likely the more important of the two branches of ths episode--that is, Trip and T'Pol's plan to destroy the spheres.  After all, if the Guardians gain a foothold in this dimension, many more planets than just Earth will suffer.  The action of this sequence ended up being quite choppy, given that the climaxes of the two stories were rapidly intercut with each other what seemed like every 10 seconds (if anyone thought The Two Towers was at all choppy, I submit this in its defense).  No, actually, I didn't mind the switching between the plots, and it was necessary to synchronize the climactic action.

When Phlox warned that his little miracle drug wouldn't protect the skin of the crew, I expected something more gruesome, rather than just a bunch of cracks (yeah, I know, they were probably painful).  The whole thing with the anomaly causing damage was obviously intended to impose a strict time limit on how long Trip had to do his deflector beam thing before the exposure was fatal to the crew.  The fact that the skin lesions started happening before that point added to the tension, though I suspect they were also there so that Trip and T'Pol could have that tender moment near the end of the show, where he says she looks like an old oil painting, and where he takes her hand (seemingly to inspect her lesions, but actually as a rather sweet gesture of friendship and/or intimacy).  A side note...I'm not sure Phlox should have been so nit-picky about staying strictly to that time limit.  You have to realize that this mission is incredibly important and will end up saving many, many lives.  If the crew of the Enterprise must die, then so be it--isn't it worth that cost?  But in the end, we got to have our cake and eat it too (and in the nick of time).

I'll just briefly mention the characterization here.  T'Pol at the beginning of the episode was acting less like last time and more like the episodes before--i.e. coming apart at the seams (as Trip claims the Enterprise is doing).  But she held herself together as the episode wore on, and the aforementioned scene at the end with Trip was quite tender and held several nice moments, including the one where she indignantly tells him her age (at last), and informs him that for Vulcans that information is considered intimate (thus indicating certain things about where their relationship has progressed lately).  Let me say this:  if the writers don't bugger this up, this relationship will rock.

Now to the other side of the episode, the one with perhaps more emotional impact, since it dealt with saving Earth directly.  Perhaps that is an Earth-centric attitude.  As T'Pol rightly pointed out at one point in this episode, it is no longer just Earth that is at stake, but Vulcan and other planets as well.  But saving Earth has been the stated goal of the season from the beginnning--the one we've known about all along.  The stuff with the spheres and the Guardians and the threat to the Xindi came later, and though they are just as important, the 'Save Earth' message still carries the weight, at least with the characters.

The raiding of the weapon goes pretty much as I expected, with one or two exceptions (definitely one major one--see next paragraph).  Despite Reed's protests that Hoshi is barely conscious, Archer prods her into decrypting codes and stuff when she should be recuperating.  Hoshi is understandably quite confused, still not sure where she is or even that Archer is Archer and not a Reptilian.  But despite this, she manages to press on and do her job admirably, and once they're on the weapon itself she has enough presence of mind to remember the sequence of things even after her PADD is blown out of her hand by Reptilian weapons fire.  While on the weapon, we get to see Reptilians and MACOs alike hurled over the edge into the abyss...the one Hoshi had earlier regretted not falling into, showing her very real guilt complex to Archer while still in recovery.  I'm clamboring to see the aftermath of Hoshi's experiences next season (with Reed as the 'friend to talk to', please).  Speaking of Reed, he got to be a hero on the weapon as well, taking out the last of the Reptilians who was firing at Archer and Sato.  And speaking of heroes....

Believe me, there is great virtue in staying away from spoilers...and also in typing on your laptop while the cast credits are coming up and therefore not paying attention to the names.  This is why I was completely and utterly shocked when Shran showed up like Han Solo on the Death Star run and managed to even the odds.  Maybe I will refrain from looking at the guest cast credits from now on...it certainly makes things a bit less predictable!  Needless to say, I, an avid Jeff Combs fan, was thrilled beyond belief to see Shran's face and to hear that voice.  A small part, in terms of time spent on screen, but his presence invigorated the final showdown wonderfully, and added a sense of camaraderie between races.  It was one thing for Daniels to stand there preaching about the birth of the Federation and various races coming together in peace and solidarity...it was entirely another thing to see Shran and his crew risking their own necks to aid Archer in saving Earth.  And ultimately, the latter of the two was a more powerful moment, perhaps because it seemed more real and less like a history lesson.

The final moments aboard the sphere were perhaps more predictable than Shran coming to the rescue (at least for me, who didn't see his name in the credits).  It was quite obvious that Archer was going to send Malcolm, Hoshi, and the surviving MACOs back to "Degra's ship" (they really need to start calling it something else), and that Archer himself was going to be staying behind.  It makes sense--just as in Galaxy Quest, the captain gets all the glory (though Archer didn't lose very much of his shirt this time).  The final physical fight between Archer and Dolan was very Kirkish, although for some reason it reminded me also of the fight between Picard and F. Murry Abraham (was it Ru'Afo or something?) aboard the collector at the end of Insurrection.  The fight sequence was okay, though personally I was neither impressed by Archer's battle skills nor worried about his safety.  You have to realize, I have never quite gotten around to liking Scott Bakula's acting style, though I will admit that at times it has improved during this season (I'm not counting the numerous instances of Darth Vader channeling).  Speaking of which, those unfortunate blips in Archer's characterization may have been partially wiped out by recent events in the final few episodes...but I'm not letting him off that easy.  The guy went from a homicidal maniac to an understanding negotiator in the space of a few weeks--mainly because he developed a good personal relationship with Degra--and we're supposed to feel okay about this?  Personally, I think he needs some medication--either that, or he is unfit for duty as a Starfleet captain.

Er, back to the fight sequence.  Yes, it was kind of nice that Dolan met a sticky end as befits his disgusting behavior.  His decision last time to destroy the Insectoid ship may have come back to haunt him, making it easier for Archer and company to succeed in destroying the weapon.  The contrast between the two leaders is obvious:  Archer's previous dealings with Shran helped to persuade the Andorian to bring his own ship into the fray, thus helping Archer; meanwhile, Dolan stands alone, having destroyed his last ally for merely beginning to question their mission, and now he is alone against a united front.  His decision to destroy the Yosemite research station before deploying the weapon may be stupid, although there was apparently a needed delay before the weapon could be launched anyway.  But if destroying that station in any way helped to cost him his victory, he has only his own arrogance to blame.  It is also quite remarkable how long it takes the Reptilians to realize that Archer and his team have beamed aboard the weapon.  Wouldn't you think that would be the first place they'd want to be watching for intruders?  If their sensors can detect that they were no longer aboard "Degra's Ship", why didn't they do so right after beam-in?

Dolan's character was a given, and we pretty much knew he would be the 'bad guy' to the end.  Nevertheless, I was still disappointed that it was all 'Reptiles are bad, everyone else is at least reasonable' all the way through, with barely a peep of opposition to Dolan's assertions that all was proceeding as it should.  We learned from the 'good' Xindi that the council was convening again, with even the Insectoids agreeing to attend, and a mention that the Reptilians will eventually have to see reason and join as well, now that the Guardians are gone.  *Sigh*  I suppose this may be the last we hear of any of them.  But you never know.

When the weapon blew up with Archer still aboard, I was considering several solutions.  First of all, you see ships getting blown up with our heroes still aboard all the time in Trek--it's just that usually someone manages to lock on and transport them out at the last nanosecond (or often even after the explosion--go figure).  Since they cut away to 'meanwhile, on the Enterprise' directly afterward, it was entirely possible that the Xindi somehow managed to transport him off.  My mom was convinced that Shran had rescued him somehow, though I'm fairly certain the Andorians don't have transporter technology.  Then there was the Daniels option, which I thought was probably the most likely:  Daniels would snatch Archer out of the timeline to prevent him from being killed and spoiling the future of the Federation.  Well, I'd like to say that was what ended up happening..but to be honest I'm not entirely sure.  The ending of this threw me for a loop, completely.  At first, when Hoshi was failing to get a response from Starfleet, I was wondering if the timeline up until that point had somehow been altered by Archer's absense (which didn't make any sense at all).  I was thinking it was similar to what had happened in DS9's "Past Tense", in which the Defiant was protected from shifts in the timeline but Earth was changed drastically (that didn't make sense either, by the way).  Then we had WWII era planes shooting at the shuttlepod, and it was obvious that somehow everyone had been thrown back in time.  Then the thought was, aha, I bet Archer's there too.  And guess what?  He was!  Entirely predictable, except for that alien Nazi at the end.  At that point I was wondering if we had somehow been transported to the end of Tim Burton's re-make of Planet of the Apes.  It was just about that weird.

The ending of the episode had more strength in its character moments, with the crew reacting to Archer's apparent demise.  I particularly liked the scene where T'Pol was comforting Porthos, perhaps showing her 'humanity' poking through, though in reality her words were as much meant to reassure herself as the captain's dog.  Despite her emotional performance, T'Pol seems to have mastered her emotions to a greater extent than before--certainly better than her insane breakdown at the end of "Azati Prime", when she admittedly was still taking Trellium D.

So, with all that in mind, I shall make a few predictions and/or entries to my wish list about Season 4.  First and foremost, and with the paragraph above the previous one in mind...the TCW is still raging, and we're in for plenty more (let's hear an unenthusiastic cheer).  Either Daniels, Future Guy, or the Guardians sent Archer back in time, and his crew along with them.  How will they get out of this one?  I will now cast my vote for the 'slingshot around the sun' method, made famous in Star Trek IV:  The Voyage Home.  It would just be cool.

Another prediction is that we'll be getting plenty more of Trip and T'Pol, and I am looking forward to it.  If their relationship continues in the vein of the last few episodes, it should be a memorable one...on the other hand, if it degenerates back into decon chambers and neuropressure, it could be infamous instead.  Since the writers and producers seem reluctant to show a homosexual relationship among the crew, there is only one other woman to pair up with one of the other four men.  I hate to do this, but you *know* that by the end they won't have been able to resist pairing Hoshi with someone.  So, which one will they put her with?  Assuming Trip's taken, that leaves Archer, Reed, Phlox, and Mayweather.  I doubt beyond all doubts that they would ever pair an ensign (or even a lieutenant, if she's promoted) with the captain...so Archer's out.  I also doubt that they'll pair her with Phlox; even though Phlox and Hoshi have a certain degree of chemistry as friends, I have a hard time seeing anything more involved.  So that leaves just Reed and Mayweather.  Mayweather might work, and we've certainly seen them interacting lots of times as friends.  But one must ask:  how interesting would that be?  I just don't see much potential for character development in that relationship, especially since I and many other fans of the series are quite dubious about Mayweather's usefulness and/or level of complexity as a character at all.  Reed, on the other hand, has that potential, IMHO.  His personality and Hoshi's are different enough to create conflict and interest, and yet they have some surprising things in common as well (such as loneliness or isolation from other people--see "Exile"), which could help them relate to each other and the rest of the ship.  I have thought from the beginning of the series that if ever they paired up two sets of characters, it should be Tucker and T'Pol, and Reed and Sato.  One of those has at least temporarily come true, and now I'm waiting for the second.

Let's see, any other predictions?  More Daniels, most likely.  More Shran, most hopefully.  More Romulans, most possibly.  We might also be seeing the Tellarites (sp?), judging by their mention as founding members of the Federation.  But I think what I would most like to see next year are more episodes devoted to characters other than the Big Three.  It was really hard, this year, to work other stories in, and I have mixed feelings about the whole concept of arc-based television.  I think the idea of plot arcs which dominate the season can work well if we get a break sometimes.  We got precious few non-Xindi arc diversions this season, mostly having to do with either groping prostitutes or neuropressure, but only a couple of episodes which didn't key directly into the whole plot of the arc.  I'm not sure there was a single episode where the Xindi and/or Archer's mission were not at least mentioned.  This is understandable, considering the ship and crew were stuck in the middle of the Expanse with such a great weight on their heads for a whole season.  But perhaps next season, it would be better to have a few three or four episode arcs and the rest be stand-alones.  I did like the focus of Season 3 as opposed to the scatter-brainedness of Season 2, but perhaps it was just a bit too much, and it naturally stifled a lot of potential character stories in favor of Archer foaming at the mouth and Trip and T'Pol steaming up the screen.

Some notes:

Yes, the Reptilians weren't nasty enough; they had to show them chowing down on live rodents like Return to Oz's Gnome King dangling Jack Pumpkinhead above his gob.  No wonder the other Xindi don't like these guys.

According to Daniels, the Federation will be founded just over 7 years from the 'present' (which is February 14th, 2152, according to T'Pol).  For some strange reason, Archer is absolutely vital to the survival of this version of history, and it will be messed up if he dies in this Xindi conflict.  The founding members who sign the initial Federation charter are apparently the humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites--all four of which are canon within the realm of the original series, so that's fine.  I do have a couple of questions, though.  The first is, if the founding of the Federation is 7 years away, are we going to get to see it (other than the snippet we saw tonight)?  I guess I always had the impression that if the series ended up surviving 7 years, the founding of the Federation would be at or near the end.  But as it stands, 7 years is well past the end of the series even under the best of circumstances.  Unless they skip some time somewhere (which is possible, I suppose), we won't get to see it.  The second question is, why is Archer so danged vital?  We've heard this line before, of course, and the simplest answer is that even a tiny alteration to the timeline can have drastic consequences.  But that can't be the only reason, because Daniels clearly states that Reed and Sato are not vital to the timeline, as Archer is (I guess this means Reed won't be inventing anything else and Sato's job really is unnecessary--in any case, I find it hard to believe that there won't be some circumstance down the line where either one of these two either directly or indirectly saves Archer's butt from something, thus preserving the timeline).  But anyway, Archer will probably make first contact with the Tellarites, for instance.  He certainly did with the Andorians (though rather painfully).  Perhaps it is the way Archer decides to explore the galaxy, or some personal relationship he has built with a character like Shran, perhaps, which makes him so vital.  Finally, I can't help but wonder if this whole thing was shoved in there in case the series ended up being cancelled, as was widely rumored for awhile.  If so, they really put an odd ending on it, though!  Which brings us back to Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes....

The little touches are often overlooked, but they add atmosphere.  For instance, I liked the orangish lighting on the bridge after the Enterprise flies into the orange anomaly thing.

I know I complained a bit about it earlier, but I actually liked the skin lesions on the Enterprise crew.  But why didn't Phlox get them?  Are Denobulans just immune to that as well as so many other things, or did he have a secret antidote he wasn't sharing?

It's nice to see that the Guardians have superpowers, but I'm not sure if they were really trying to mess up the Enterprise.  All those distortions and fireworks and they still failed?  This is a ship, if you'll recall, which was described by its Chief Engineer as ready to 'come apart at the seams' at the beginning of this episode.  Yet under the assault of these supervillain Guardians, Main Engineering held up better than if ever has before.

Aboard "Degra's ship" (don't even get me started), the Reptilian sensors detected 8 Primates, 3 Arboreals, and 7 humans.  Were there really seven humans?  Archer, Reed, and Sato, plus three MACOs...was there another Starfleet security officer?  Or did MacKenzie come along after all?

Finally!  T'Pol will be 66 years old on her next birthday.  The next question has to be, are those human years or Vulcan years?

At the end, when the Aquatics emerge from the vortex and let the Enterprise go, we don't get to see any communication between them.  I suspect this had as much to do with lowering the effects budget as anything else.

I realize this might be explained later, but why on Earth would Mayweather say San Francisco looked 'normal' from the air when they're in the wrong time period?  Surely it's changed from the 1940s to 2152!  Perhaps it's because they're not really in the 40s, but in some weird altered reality?  I guess we'll see.
 

"Your world is no longer the only one in jeopardy." -T'pol to Trip.

"Remember, no heroics.  Just get us in and then keep them off your ass." --Archer to the 'good' Xindi before he beams over to the weapon.

"Go!  And tell Archer we're not even anymore.  He owes me!" --Shran to the 'good' Xindi.

"You look nice like this, kind of like an old oil painting." -Trip to T'Pol, concerning the crackle-glaze scars which still remain on parts of her skin.  Laugh if you want; I found it sweet.

"Your captain's sacrifice will not be forgotten." --Primate 2 to T'Pol.

"You should be in your quarters."
"With all due respect to Phlox, I wouldn't miss this for the world." --T'Pol and a recovering Hoshi.
 

Rating:  ****3/4  I cannot give this episode as high a score as the two previous ones for the simple reason that I don't know what the frick they're going to do with the whole alien Nazi thing next season.  Who knows, the ending might end up making perfect sense, once explained.  But until then, this imperfect rating stands.  The action and tension was the main thrust of this episode, though there was still room for a few nice character moments, particularly between Trip and T'Pol near the end.  So, that was Season 3 of Enterprise; I may be doing a write-up of my overall thoughts for the season in another file, but otherwise, I'll be seeing you next fall.
 
 

5/19/04--Review for:  "Countdown"  (Archer convinces the Aquatics to help, the Reptilians escape with the weapon, and the Enterprise crew splits up to achieve their goals)

Truly, I do not know where to start.  This week took off from where "The Council" left off, and to my eyes, nothing slowed down at all.  I praised the directing last week, and here I shall do so again; I never cared for Robert Duncan MacNeill's acting, but the man can direct with the best of them.  The pace was great, the writing excellent, and the acting superb.

After months (or perhaps years) of clamboring for more Hoshi, this episode gave less than many would have hoped, but it was nonetheless encouraging.  This Xindi arc has not, in general, favored the two ensigns, Hoshi and Travis (especially Travis).  True, Hoshi got an episode earlier this year with "Exile", but one show a year is still pretty skimpy, and for the remainder of the season, she seemed to be fading into little more than the 'Uhura' role of saying "Yes, sir" two or three times each episode.  Hoshi as a character did not necessarily grow or develop very much with this week's episode, but it was nice to see her in action once again (she even got to spit in Dolan's face).  Despite the obviously painful proceedure of having some weird Xindi mind-altering parasites injected into her head, Hoshi still had enough willpower to trick the Reptilians--pretending to be decrypting the codes when in fact she was adding another layer of encryptions.  Then she bolted and almost threw herself over the edge of an abyss in order to keep them from using her to decrypt anything.  But the Reptilians caught her before she could go over.  The second procedure they put her through apparently worked better, and in the end, they got what they wanted from her.  But the important thing is that Hoshi was able to delay them significantly, allowing Archer and friends to get things sorted out at the other end.

The Trip/T'Pol saga continues, and initially it seems they're still in the same vein they've been in--uncomfortable around each other and each stubbornly refusing to give the other an inch.  At one point T'Pol seemed a bit jealous when Trip was talking about Hoshi, and I'll tell you--at that point I was thinking about how petty the woman can be sometimes.  But in the end they actually started acting like adults, as T'Pol admitted to Trip that she has a problem with her emotions and Trip said he's willing to talk with her about it after this is all over.  I did notice that T'Pol didn't say *why* she's been having trouble with her emotions, but perhaps she'll tell him in the future, eh?  One more thing...is this the first time, other than Old T'Pol from E2, that she's called him 'Trip'?  Not sure about that...but in any case, it was a nice touch to the scene.

I took note last time of how relieved I was that the "Aquatics as the swing vote" plot device wasn't used as the predictable solution.  Guess what?  It's back.  But I can handle the concept in this context; it's not as though the Aquatics changing their minds saved the day for everyone, since we've still got major problems that they apparently can't help with.  Here, I think the Aquatics and their swing votes were used very well.  Oh yes, and I liked their UT--although it was rather convenient that they got it up and running just after Archer's translator was captured, don't you think?

Forgive my ignorance, but I did not catch the name of Degra's second in command...so I'll just call him Primate 2 for now.  Anyway, he had a good little piece of dialogue with Archer, wherein the good captain asks a question I've been asking for awhile now:  even if this weapon is destroyed, what's to stop the Xindi from just building another one?  As Primate 2 touches on, the answer is, of course, that real solution is to make peace with the Xindi (or some of them, at least).  Simply destroying weapons and swaggering around like a bully doesn't stop the threat; making friends does.  Are you listening, Dubya?

The episode featured a small dinner scene with the 'Big Three' (Archer, T'Pol, and Trip).  It strikes me that it seems like a long time since we've seen this--I can't place the last episode where these three had dinner together.  It's nice to see it again.  The discussion about the future seems to be placed at a time when the future of the series is still uncertain (we might know soon); let's just say I found the timing interesting.  T'Pol's comment about considering a career in Starfleet is sure to rouse the ire of a lot of fans (I believe it's accepted in canon that Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet).  On this subject I have two things to say:  (1) she said considering, which means it might not actually happen, and (2) in view of Archer's comments about waiving the academy requirements for T'Pol, maybe Spock was just the first Vulcan to graduate from the academy, and that is his distinction.  I'm not well-enough versed in the actual quotes and/or conventional wisdom to know if this second explanation would hold up, but I'll watch and wait with the rest.  I will say this, however:  if T'Pol does join Starfleet, the good side is that she will be wearing a real uniform, like Hoshi.  In other words, no more catsuits.  Of course, that probably wouldn't stop her from taking off everything except her underwear and parading around the decon room or doing neuropressure (or other things) with Trip.

Beyond the interesting character stories, this episode featured fairly large action sequences.  Although the battles here didn't compare to the big space battles of DS9 in terms of volume or duration, they were still exciting.  When the Guardians interfered by using the spheres to create anomalies around the weapon, part of me was screaming "why didn't they use this ability before?!"  But I suppose they have their reasons, and it was, after all, an anomaly which was responsible for the terrific effect of the lead Aquatic ship being destroyed.  The water splashing out into space was great (although I'm sad that so many Aquatics lost their lives).

Speaking of losing lives...Degra was stabbed by Dolan, the leader of the Aquatics appears to have been killed when her ship was destroyed, the Instectoid leader's ship was destroyed by Dolan.....so that leaves us with only two members of the original Xindi council alive, does it not?  Only Dolan and the Arboreal (can't remember his name) remain.

I did not expect Dolan to destroy the Insectoid's ship, although given his suspicious nature and desire for absolute power, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.  What did surprise me was what the Insectoid said.  He seemed to wake up and realize that Dolan didn't have the best interests of all of the Xindi at heart.  Dolan, with a statement about no longer needing the Insectoids because he already has their command codes, orders his crew to destroy the Insectoid ship.  I found it interesting that the Insectoid leader was finally painted in a slightly more favorable light than Dolan (actually, perhaps he was all along, since we saw less of both him and his species altogether).  In hindsight, it seems clear that although both the Insectoids and Reptilians were painted as dangerous enemies, it was the Reptilians who were the more prominent of the two and perhaps the most power-hungry.

I'm still not quite clear on the Insectoid leader's motivations; was he so vehemently in favor of building the weapon simply because he had been told Earth was a threat?  Or was he, like Dolan, more interested in acquiring power over others?  The brief dialogue just before Dolan gave the order to destroy the Insectoids seemed to indicate that the turning point for the Insectoid leader was when the anomalies showed up to help them with the battle.  It corroborated Archer's testimony at the council that the Guardians controlled the spheres, and it caused the Insectoid to ask questions.  Unfortunately for him, it was too late when he finally questioned Dolan's motives; there was no way to turn back at that point, and the Insectoid ship was blasted backward and smashed upon the Xindi weapon as water upon rock.  We may never know the full story of this Insectoid and his motivations, and I'm sorry we didn't get to see more.  I would *still* like to see a Reptilian defy Dolan to help end this.  I never like it when an entire alien race is painted as villainous and one-sided.  But even if that doesn't happen, I would love to see some Insectoids showing up to avenge the death of their leader.

This episode, in continuing last week's story, cleared up a few things.  I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the shuttlepod being sent to the Death Star last time was only a plot contrivance for a couple of reasons.  First, it killed a MACO (Corporal Hawkins), which set into motion a really beautiful set of scenes involving Reed and Hayes (which I will discuss in a moment).  Second, it allowed Trip to give the news of Sato's abduction to T'Pol, Mayweather, and Reed at the beginning of this episode.  This ties in to the first point, in that Sato now becomes to Reed what Hawkins had been to Hayes (in a sense).  Hayes did not appreciate the fact that Hawkins died on Reed's watch--like all commanding officers, he prefers to look after his own people.  In similar fashion, Reed expresses the desire to lead the team to rescue Sato, whom he describes as a friend.  Hayes promises to bring her back home safely; though Reed believes him, it doesn't take away his own guilt that he still feels about allowing Hawkins to die.  Hayes claims that the MACOs no longer feel like outsiders on the ship; perhaps he is right, but in any case, time is short for the Major.

From the moment I heard that Hayes was going to head the rescue party to get Hoshi, I was thinking "Oh dear, the guest star in distress again."  This device was used very effectively last week, with the death of a prominent recurring character--Degra.  Major Hayes is another such character, and I increasingly suspected that he wouldn't outlive this episode as the obstacles piled up.  As soon as Trip said he could only beam in two at a time, I pretty much knew that not only would Hayes be the last to be beamed out, but he was likely not to make it.  The suspense was used to great effect, and I absolutely loved the effect of the energy weapon's beam going through his form just as he dematerialized.  I have always argued that if someone is shot during transport, bad things could and would happen--Trek often goes with the idea that as soon as you start to beam out you're safe (see Star Trek VI:  The Undiscovered Country for one example).  But here, it's obvious that at least in the case of Reptilian Xindi weapons, getting shot during transport does nasty things to you.

The scene between Reed and Hayes in Sickbay was very poignant.  I loved the moment when Malcolm suddenly realizes that Hayes is dying--the look of pain and anguish on his face.  These two characters have come a long way in their relationship, from the rocky beginning to the rocky middle to the (let's face it) pretty rocky end.  Their mutual respect was not on a strictly linear course, and that's part of what I loved so much.  Too often in television, we get a nice, smooth resolution to differences between two people, and I find that rather unrealistic.  I still don't find Major Hayes to be one of my favorite characters, but paired with Reed he was fantastic, and I will miss their banter.  The 'guest star in distress' was, indeed, used for the second time in as many episodes; both times, it was used to great effect.

This episode ends with more than just the death of Hayes; it ends with a parting of the ways--a 'breaking of the fellowship', if you will (yes, you might be able to tell that I'm looking forward with baited breath to ROTK coming out on DVD; please excuse me).  The Reptilians have escaped into a vortex with the weapon and are only 10 hours away from Earth.  The Enterprise no longer has the Aquatic ship to hitchhike in, and in any case, has another mission to complete--the disruption of the sphere network, as they had promised the Aquatics.  Trip and T'Pol, along with Phlox, Mayweather, and the majority of the crew remain aboard the Enterprise to carry out this mission.  Archer, Reed, three MACOs, and the unconscious Sato board Degra's ship (it's not Degra's anymore, but they keep calling it that) to chase after the Reptilians (Humanoid ships are fast enough to catch up).  The idea is that when Hoshi wakes up, she'll be able to tell Reed and his strike team enough about the interior of the weapon that they'll be able to find and exploit a weakness.  Because otherwise, Degra's ship is absolutely no match for Dolan and friends.

I've told you the direction the plot seems to be headed in.  I'll now tell you a few other things I'd like to see happen.  First of all, I'd like to get the news that Enterprise is not only renewed for a fourth season, but guaranteed for another three after that.  The show's just hitting its stride, and canceling it now would be a travesty.  Second, I'd like to see that promised dialogue between Trip and T'Pol (even though they said 'we'll wait until this is all over').  The fact that they're off on the same mission after the Breaking of the Fellowship is promising.  Third, I think that some dialogue between Hoshi and Malcolm is in order, perhaps as a sort of continuation of Reed's feelings about the deaths of Hawkins and Hayes in the two previous episodes.  There's a lot of potential material there for the writer who sees it, and Hoshi is the best person to be Reed's confidante in this, since she was somewhat involved with this subplot in "Countdown" (and yes, I caught that line about Phlox showing Malcolm how to apply the stimulant to Hoshi).  Fourth (and I've already mentioned this), I would like to see a Reptilian do something to foil Dolan's plans, rather than having it be a completely external assault.  Failing that, some vengeful Insectoids could come in handy too.

Some notes:

The spheres are all connected by a subspace energy grid; four of the spheres are more important than the rest, and somehow control or coordinate the others--disabling one of them might disrupt the whole grid.  Sphere 41 is the one Trip and T'Pol ultimately decide to target.

Reptilian and Insectoid ships are more heavily armed than either Arboreal or Humanoid Xindi, although the Aquatics also have very powerful ships (and they're cool).  Aquatic ships are slower than Reptilian or Insectoid ships, but Degra's ship is faster than the Reps or Insects.

Arboreal Xindi dislike water.

A slight quibble; on board the weapon, the Reptilians force Hoshi to decrypt one of the three remaining codes to start the launch sequence.  It is mentioned that the code they're trying to get is that of the Aquatics.  Now, is there a *reason* why they're trying to get that particular code, and not either the Arboreal or Humanoid codes?  Are the Aquatics not especially good at encrypting their codes?  Or did the writers feel that, since the Aquatics were the swing vote in the diplomatic side of the plot, it would be simpler for the audience if their code was the one the Reptiles were trying to get, in a situation where in reality any one of the remaining three codes was as good as the others?  But I digress.

A second quibble, this time concerning the rescue of Sato.  It is clear from the episode that the location where Sato was held was too shielded or something to transport into or out of; the MACOs have to be beamed in elsewhere on the ship and make their way to her.  It is also clear from the previous episode that the Reptilians possess transporter technology.  In the rescue, Hayes and company beam aboard and proceed to Sato's location.  Hayes finds that he can't even communicate with the Enterprise from there, and therefore decides to return with Sato to the beam in point.  They do so, and must then wait for Trip to fix the transporter before they can start beaming out.  During this time, the Reptilians engage the MACOs in a firefight, and it is clear that Dolan (on the bridge) is aware of the situation, and he is informed that the intruders are 'contained'.  Is there a reason why Dolan does not simply lock onto Hayes and company with his transporter and beam them into a holding cell?  Or better yet, into space?  He doesn't seem to have any further use for Sato, so why bother trying to kill them with energy weapons when he could just decimate the lot with that very powerful weapon known as the transporter beam?  It's true that the transporter could have been damaged in the battle or something (just like the Enterprise's), but if that was true, there should have been a throwaway line indicating it in the show.  Okay, I realize that if I start complaining about minor points like this, there's not much wrong with this show.

And not to be a really dirty nit-picker, but isn't the plural of 'vortex' 'vortices'?  Someone said 'vortexes' in this show, and I don't think that's correct.

I liked the moment when the Enterprise popped out of the Aquatic mother ship--when they said the Aquatics were going to help them get through the vortex, I didn't expect it to be quite like that (I was expecting the old 'modify the warp engines' thing).

Right before he dies, Hayes tells Reed to use Mackenzie, since she knows the team.  I assume he means to put her in command of the MACOs, although he could have just meant for the upcoming mission (if he had some idea of what that was).  Speaking of female MACOs, someone was missing from the meeting near the end when Reed gives the MACOs the news of Hayes's death.  What happened to Amanda Cole?  You know, Trip's former neuropressure partner and possibly Phlox's erstwhile future wife?  (Sorry about that combo of words, but that about describes it--see "E2").  Did T'Pol finally crack and throw poor Amanda out an airlock?

One wonders why osmotic eels are never seen in later incarnations of Trek.  They really are remarkable creatures--in "Broken Bow", Phlox's osmotic eel helped to heal Archer's leg wound, which was sustained from an energy weapon.  In "Countdown", this creature can apparently destroy all the parasites in Hoshi's brain.  One might ask, how would that critter do this?  If you remember from BB, this thing looked sort of like a three-legged starfish with slimy skin, and it attached itself to the skin of the patient like a leech.  What did it do, lure the parasites out to the surface and slurp them up?  Or perhaps the eel has a long tongue which it inserted into Hoshi's skull and used to seek out and devour the parasites one by one.  Or did it secrete some sort of enzyme which killed all of the parasites and then either dissolved them or left them in Hoshi's brain?  Whatever the answer to this question...all I can say is, poor Hoshi.
 

"Help me save my people, and I can help you save yours." --Archer to the Aquatics.

"You would sacrifice yourself to stop us.  Don't worry; you won't have to live with your guilt for long." --Dolan to Sato, after she tries to jump.

"They're gone." --Reed, after the Reptilians and the weapon disappear into the vortex headed for Earth.

"Thank you, for bringing her home."
"All in a day's work." --Reed and Hayes, regarding Sato's rescue.

"The Humans didn't kill Degra.  You did."
"Degra was a traitor."
"I'm no longer certain of that."
"Then it's a good thing we already have your launch codes." --the Insectoid leader and Dolan.
 

Rating:  *****  In my opinion, every bit as good as the previous episode, and in some ways a little stronger.  The character work was good all around, and I especially liked Reed's.  I also like the direction they seem to be taking Trip and T'Pol (at the moment).  The dialogue was good, the action compelling, and the ending left me almost hopping up and down, ready for more.  I almost can't wait until next week (and not just because that's when Return of the King comes out, *wink*).
 
 

5/12/04--Review for:  "The Council"  (Archer presents his evidence to the Xindi Council; some are willing to listen and others aren't)

It has been a long time since I have seen an episode of Trek which had such excellent pacing, quick-shooting action, and wonderful, sweeping events.  I'm not sure Enterprise has ever reached this level before, in terms of the combination of such strengths.  "The Council" seemed to have a little bit of everything, and a lot happened in this episode.  In many episodes with these qualities, the overall feel ends up collapsing in on itself, muddling together everything and softening the overall emotional impact.  Not so here.  Perhaps it was David Livingston's wonderful directing; perhaps it was the snap of the writing.  Or perhaps it was the brilliant acting from all involved.  More likely it was a combination of all of the above which made this episode one of the best episodes of Enterprise to date.

We were given a lot of Xindi information to absorb here.  I'll mention specifics in my notes below, but I found all the little tidbits fascinating and well delivered.  The location of the council in the former Avian city was cool, and I loved the visuals surrounding it.  Little details such as the Reptilian sun-room or the Avian skull made the whole story more interesting.

Archer's entrance to the council chamber was dramatic, and I was pleased that Hoshi came along to translate for the Insectoids and Aquatics, who usually get the subtitle treatment.  Prior to this episode, with all the insinuations about the Aquatics being the swing vote on the council, I was afraid that we would get exactly that.  I was proven wrong, and rarely have I been more pleased to have been so.  Rather than a bland council meeting in which the Humanoids and Arboreals help Archer to convince the Aquatics to do the right thing and delay the weapon, we got the delicious deception of the Reptilians, who had been promised domination by the Guardian female.

The murder of Degra was something that could have been forseen, but it still had emotional impact.  Degra, who has been developed as a semi-regular this season, has grown from just 'one of the bad guys' to a nuanced, thinking character who has begun to challenge everything that has been fed to him.  He has become one of what I like to call the 'guest stars in jeopardy'--a plot device that actually works.  Let me explain; in most circumstances, we know the writers aren't going to kill off a regular, at least not permanently.  So it's hard to get really worried when a regular is in mortal peril.  Not so with the guest stars, and Degra's fate follows in the path of Dukat, Weyoun, Damar, Seska, Ziyal, Gowron, K'Ehleyr, and Eddington, just to name a few.  Degra has paralleled Damar in particular in more ways than death; he has played the role of the questioning turncoat who ultimately dies for turning his back on his former allies.  Degra's death was particularly poignant and distressing as Dolan (sp?) assured him that his wife and children would die in the same way.  This is *not* the last thing he wants to hear before checking out, especially since Degra has been worried that his actions would result in just such an outcome.

This was the optimum time for Degra's death to deal the biggest blow, in terms of drama.  Not long before his death, we saw Degra and Trip finally reconciling their differences, each seeming to realize that the other was not all he seemed.  Trip admitted that he had trouble getting past the fact that Degra was responsible for his sister's death, and Degra responded that he understood.  Both agreed that they must work toward a better future for all involved.  In another conversation, Archer told Degra about the Xindi and humans serving together aboard the Enterprise 400 years in the future, and that it was a future worth fighting for.

But for me, that wasn't the most interesting part.  Degra did not just question and defy the actions of his own people--he did not just oppose the Reptilians and Insectoids.  He questioned things that he had been taught since he was a child, things that all Xindi were indoctrinated with for generations.  He questioned his faith.

In fact, faith was in a large way the core of this episode.  Apparently, these sphere-builders not only deceived the council; they have been influencing the Xindi for a long time.  They have helped the Xindi to find new homes, and acted as friends to them when no others would.  The Xindi, grateful for the assistance, began to worship these sphere-builders, calling them 'Guardians'.  Blind faith was what led Degra and the others to construct the first probe and kill 7 million people.  Blind faith was what led them to construct the second, more powerful weapon.  It was only when Archer gave Degra direct evidence to the contrary that Degra began to question his faith that the Guardians were only trying to help the Xindi.  The Arboreals and Aquatics seemed to be similarly convinced, once the evidence was presented to them.  The Reptilians and Insectoids either refused to question their faith or simply didn't care, in light of the female Guardian's new offer of domination over the other Xindi.  But whatever their motivations, all of the Xindi took the Guardians' claims on faith at one point, with no outside evidence to corroborate the supposition that Earth was going to destroy them.  This is a direct analogy to what is happening right now in the hearts and minds of many people in the Arab and Muslim world today.  And it illustrates very clearly why blind faith is so dangerous.  Anything can be justified by it, and those who follow blindly refuse to look for proof of the truth from other sources.  If the wrong person is preaching the message, we're all in trouble.

To look at it from Dolan's perspective, Degra's a dirty rat.  Degra did, after all, destroy a Reptilian ship.  This would be like Colin Powell blowing up an aircraft carrier to keep them from getting to Iraq--even Americans who disliked the war would turn their ire upon him.  In addition, Degra has defied everything that Dolan believes in, and is a threat to his cause.  The Guardians have succeeded in splitting the Xindi Council, and ironically, have done a better job of convincing the Aquatics, Arboreals, and Humanoids of Archer's credibility than Archer or Degra ever would have.

The Guardians seem to be almost a perversion of another race of Trek aliens which were taken for gods:  the 'Prophets' of DS9.  But the Prophets, the aliens who dwelt in the Bajoran Wormhole and did a fair bit of meddling in outside affairs themselves, were never portrayed as deceptive or 'evil'.  The Guardians' sole purpose in preaching to the Xindi has been to destablize the whole area and destroy not only Earth, but the Xindi as well, so that the Guardians can 'move in'.  Which is more realistic?  Well, shoot me, a staunch Niner, but I'd have to say that the Guardians are far more convincing.  If you're wondering what provoked this paragraph, look to the sequence of Guardians speaking to each other in the teaser; does that seem rather familiar to anyone else?  I won't comment too much on similarities between the Guardians and DS9's other godly race, the Founders.  Let's just say:  "Female Founder vs. Female Guardian, anyone?"

The events of "Chosen Realm", the episode with the suicide bombers who worship the spheres, deserve a brief mention.  That race of aliens does not know who the builders were, but worship the spheres nevertheless.  The Xindi, who worship the Guardians, apparently had no idea that the Guardians built the spheres.  We have two groups worshipping two halves of the same puzzle, and I find it quite amusing.

I must admit, this episode was pleasantly surprising in several ways.  For one thing, I was convinced from the moment I heard the words 'pod', 'modify', and 'visual record', that Archer and Degra were going to fabricate some piece of evidence to sway the Aquatics.  As it turned out, they used some holographic technology to show the council what the alien in the pod looked like (since the Xindi holographic technology seems rather limited, I won't throw a hissy fit about it).  That didn't stop some of the council from suspecting a fabrication, which reminded me of a similar occasion when a Starfleet officer did fabricate evidence ("It's a faaaake!" --Senator Vreenak, in DS9's excellent "In the Pale Moonlight").

Another pleasant surprise was that there is at least one Reptilian who doesn't fit the stereotypical 'blindly faithful and/or power-hungry bad guy'.  I am speaking, of course, of Dolan's lieutenant, who received a nasty threat for his trouble (see the quotes at the end of this review).  I can't help wondering if this guy might possibly emerge as a Damar-type character in his own right.  I think it would be fabulous if the ultimate foiling of the Reptilian and Insectoid plans came not from Archer or anyone else on the Enterprise, but from a Reptilian (the ultimate irony).  Or maybe it could come from Hoshi.  I guess we'll wait and see.

Speaking of Hoshi, I was pleased to see that she got a somewhat meaningful role this week, and it seems we're in store for even more, since she's the one taken hostage on the Xindi ship at the end.  She might have something to do with those activation codes that were mentioned.  We also don't know how T'Pol, Reed, and Mayweather are going to factor into this--is Archer going to just leave them on that shuttlepod?  Are they going to get picked up by another 'friendly' Xindi ship, perhaps?  In any case, I enjoyed their part in this episode, particularly when Reed despairs about another lost crewmember and T'Pol rolls out the old 'needs of the many, needs of the few' quote we all know so well.

Trip's character, as I mentioned above, was treated well here.  After his making up with Degra, he told Phlox that he'd gotten so used to hating the Xindi, that losing that anger was like losing an old friend.  Beautiful dialogue.  Then we got a bit of humor with Phlox and his surefire weight loss plan:  a tapeworm.  No, seriously, I know that some professor at our local university actually swallowed a tapeworm cyst on purpose to see what would happen...but when he wished to conclude that experiment, he had trouble getting rid of it.  I'm not sure what happened to him--it could be that he still has it.  I guess Phlox has his methods, though.

T'Pol had relatively little to do in this episode, but she seemed to have retreated back to her former character, at least on the surface.  Despite Phlox's assertion that the Trellium D is completely gone from her system, T'Pol still seemed on the fast track to whining more about her emotionalism at the beginning of this episode.  There was a hint of the previous episode's excellent themes when Trip walked into Sickbay--both he and T'Pol seemed uncomfortable.  But in the remainder of the episode, T'Pol seemed to have reached a temporary focus which allowed her to remain calm and collected on her mission.  Don't get me wrong...I don't expect this to last.  But it was nice.

And one more thing.  In the past, I have often made snide remarks about Archer's resemblance to our current president...not so as of late.  Archer has chosen the diplomatic path, and his Dubya role has been taken over by Dolan when he said, in effect, that either you're with us or against us.  Does that sound at all familiar?  Hmmn?
 

Some notes:

I should have noted this previously, but does it seem to anyone else that the female Guardian looks like a cross between Salome Jens and the Borg Queen?

When the Xindi homeworld was destroyed, the Guardians helped them to find new places to settle.

The Aquatic Xindi council representative is a female.

Insectoid names get longer (and consequently more difficult to pronounce) as they get older.

Aquatics take a long time to reach a decision; Insectoids tend to reach decisions quickly.

The Reptilian representative's name is Commander Dolan (sp?).  According to a story Degra heard, Dolan's daughter's son was born with a deformity which, though not severe enough to keep him from enjoying life, would have prevented him from joining the military.  Dolan had him poisoned.

There are 67 dialects in the Insectoid language, and the Aquatics switch to sonar when speaking in the past tense.  Aquatics prefer you to speak in a bold voice, but Insectoids see loud speech as a challenge (it's a fine line, Archer boy).

The Avian city in which the Council chamber rests is over 4000 years old.

For the record, Hoshi was never sent to the principal's office, but Archer was (for passing notes in class).

Okay, I know I've been over this so many times already, but....  An exhaust vent?  In the Death Star?  I know, I know, the similarities are entirely a coincidence.  And by the way, I agree with Reed--T'Pol should have mentioned something about that holographic plating being an illusion as they hurtled toward it.  Maybe she just likes giving people a scare.

Aquatics have little trust in the spoken word, and prefer to see visual proof.  The Guardians used visual 'evidence' to convince the Aquatics to build the weapon (they were the last Xindi race to agree to this).

The Avian skull was cool, though frankly it looked less like a bird and more like a cervid or something (deer and moose are examples of cervids).  Moose skulls have front teeth only on the lower jaw; both upper and lower jaws have molars in the back, just as this Avian skull did.  Except for the front teeth, it was of very similar design to that of a moose (with a few changed proportions, of course).  I would have thought that Avians would either have uniform small pointed teeth like Archaeopteryx, or would be entirely toothless and have a beak.  But expanding upon this rationale, I suppose the dentition of the Arboreals is probably off as well (sloths don't have teeth like that).  All this is just me whining, though; the 'nicknames' of some of the Xindi races are rather sloppy, if you ask me.  But I still had to point out that the Avian skull didn't look like it belonged to any sort of Avian I've ever encountered.

Degra called the holographic technology a 'biometric hologram', and claimed that his people used it to train physicians.

A section of the mess hall is up and running again; so much for field rations.

According to Reed, 23 men and women have died on the Enterprise's mission so far.  That is over 20 percent of the crew compliment, which is more than the acceptable traditional limit for military casualties.

The MACO who got squished/zapped/disintegrated by the mechanical arm thing was Corporal Hawkins.

Five insectoid ships protected the Xindi probe as it was launched from the under the planet's surface; I found the launch to be slightly fake looking, but hey, it's just a TV show.  They made up for it with the cool space battle which followed.
 

"You've turned away from us.  Come back."
"I can't." --the female Guardian and Degra.

"You are destined to become a great civilization, and now it's all in jeopardy because of you." --the female Guardian to Degra.

"How I'm remembered isn't for you to decide."
"What have we done to lose your faith?"
"You never deserved my faith!" --Degra and the female Guardian.

"I'll see you in the Council chamber."
"I look forward to it." --Dolan and Degra.

"If you ever question the Guardians again, your skin will adorn the bow of this ship!" --Dolan admonishing his lieutenant.

"The crew of that ship are the last Xindi you'll every betray." --Dolan rubbing it in as he kills Degra.

"There's a Vulcan axiom:  the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." --T'Pol to Reed.

"Either you stand with us or you stand against us." --Dolan to the council, sounding eerily familiar....
 

Rating:  *****  This is only the third or fourth time I've given an episode of Enterprise a perfect score, possibly because it's only the third or fourth time that I haven't either found the episode less than stellar or found something major to gripe about.  This episode was beautifully directed, with exciting action and great dialogue which was both snappy and profound.  The drama card was played with the death of Degra, and we even got a good cliffhanger, with the weapon being launched and Hoshi being kidnapped.  Everything flowed together seemlessly in this episode; I would say that this was an excellent effort all around, and I hope to see more episodes of this caliber in the future.
 
 

5/5/04--Review for:  "E2" (the Enterprise crewmembers encounter their descendants)

Note:  the 2 in the title is an exponent, as in 'squared', but I don't know how to do that in html--sorry.

Last week we were promised a romp in a nebula and a subspace corridor in order to meet with Degra in time.  Well, we did get that, but with a big twist.  You know the story: Enterprise goes into corridor; Enterprise is thrown back in time; Enterprise decides to stay in the Expanse and have a bunch of kids; Enterprise tries to stop Xindi; Enterprise almost nukes itself in trying to do so.....Enterprise hasn't thought a few things out.

I'm going to spend the next few paragraphs talking about the time travel aspect of this story; if you start to get a headache, please feel free to skip ahead.

Okay, first of all, let me deal with all this temporal causality junk.  Now, realize that this stuff used to make sense, back in episodes such as "Yesterday's Enterprise" or "City on the Edge of Forever".  I love time travel episodes when they're done right, but I'll be honest with you...I am not a fan of twisted time travel that does not make sense.  The recent trend (well, okay, more like the last ten years' trend) in Trek has been tilted in this direction.  I can't be certain, but I think Brannon Braga has something to do with this.  In any case, time travel has a different set of rules than it used to...but in most cases, these new rules are still followed.  What I saw tonight conformed, for the most part, to these new rules.  In fact, it followed them in almost the same way as one specific episode from the third Trek series, Deep Space Nine--a fifth season outing called "Children of Time".  It wasn't much of a stretch to follow the same set of rules, since the episodes were very, very similar in several ways.  In fact, if one were a bit on the cynical side, one might speculate that the writers got the idea for this Enterprise episode from that DS9 episode.  It's not exactly the first time Enterprise has 'borrowed' material from another place (see "Terra Nova", "Oasis", "Judgment", and "Exile", for example).

But I'm not going to waste anyone's time, not least my own, complaining about episode-copying, which is an all-too-common practice.  I'd much rather waste everyone's time complaining about temporal mechanics.  As I was saying above, the trend has been for things to not make sense.  When you change time, you change time.  Everything after this change is affected instantly--not the delayed drama that we sometimes see.  In this particular case, we have the Enterprise being thrown back in time because they're spewing too much exhaust or something while going through a subspace corridor (and for the life of me, I don't know why they don't just call it a wormhole and be done with it--sure looks and sounds like a wormhole to me).  Anyway, the crew realizes that they're 117 years out of whack, and our gallant people decide to take it upon themselves to remain in the Expanse, having kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, until the time is right for them to try to affect the Xindis' plans.  They take pains not to affect history (though to be honest, interacting with anything at all could change history, whether it's in the Expanse or not), but despite not wanting to affect history in general, they are willing to affect it by destroying the first Xindi probe (the one that raked across Florida, killed Trip's sister and 7 million others, and started the entire plot of this season).

Now, realize that if they had done this, they would have hit a HUGE reset button--the entire third season and the second season finale would never have happened the way they did.  No attack, no mission in the Expanse, no Enterprise to travel back in time and start the whole cycle.  This is the whole problem with changing time in such a way that you alter yourself--it creates a temporal paradox.  I'm not saying that science fiction never creates paradoxes, but I never understood how this could happen.  If the time-traveling Enterprise prevents the attacks, the present-day Enterprise would never have gone into the Expanse or the subspace corridor--in other words, it would never have gone back in time in the first place.  See what I mean?  Paradox.

But paradoxes are almost invariably part of a time-travel show.  The real problem I had with this one was what happened at the end.  Let me set the scene:  Archer's Enterprise and E2, having shot at each other for a few minutes, go into the nebula together.  A couple of times, comments are made by both Archer and Lorian that seem to suggest that Lorian's ship is going to follow Archer's ship into the subspace corridor--and everyone seems to expect both ships to emerge on the other side.  Archer's ship makes it; Lorian's is nowhere to be seen.  After waiting several hours, Archer finally ponders that maybe now that they're through the corridor, the other ship has ceased to exist--in fact, that after Archer's ship went through the corridor, E2 never existed at all, since the Enterprise didn't actually go into the past and was therefore never able to become E2.

There are a few problems with this sequence of events.  First of all, I question Lorian's motives when it comes to the fire fight.  At one point, Archer's descendant puts her foot down and claims that she won't kill her own ancestors.  Well, yes...that seems like a sound policy to me.  That kind of begs the question:  was Lorian really going to kill them?  Apparently his first officer thought so.  If he was going to actually kill them, wouldn't that, er, kind of wipe his own ship out of existence?  You'd think that Lorian, being the super combination of Trip's and T'Pol's genes that he is, would realize this!

Of course, I might question if Lorian knows anything at all about causality.  Surely, he must have known that his ship would cease to exist as soon as Archer's ship made it safely through the anomaly.  I can understand why Archer only picks up on this after a few hours of serious contemplation (he never was that bright), but wouldn't you think that, after decades of thinking about this very problem, someone on E2 would have realized what would happen?  Perhaps they all knew it, but chose not to tell Archer?  I suppose that could be reasonable; if Lorian wanted Archer to succeed, he would want Archer not to go back in time...but as we saw in "Children of Time", when Sisko and his crew learned that their descendants would cease to exist after things were put right, they ultimately chose to go back in time so the descendants would exist!  (In fact, it was only Odo's meddling that prevented them from doing this).  Lorian might not trust Archer's dedication to the cause of stopping the Xindi, and therefore might choose to keep him in the dark.  If this is the case, those guys aboard the E2 really are the most dedicated group of people I've ever seen--if they really knew they were about to be wiped out, they sure were being smooth about it!  Imagine living your whole life knowing that, if all goes well, you were going to cease to exist on a certain day.  But this is all blind speculation.

In any case, whether the writers meant it that way or not, Lorian and company should have known that the moment they succeeded in diverting Enterprise from its tragic destiny, they would no longer exist.  Therefore, in theory, they should have had absolutely no hesitation about ramming their ship into the Xindi weapon if they thought it would change the timeline, since they're doomed to be wiped from existence in any case!  On the other hand, maybe Lorian hesitated because he realized that his ship would never exist if he stopped the first Xindi weapon, since Archer wouldn't have entered the Expanse.  But this all ignores one interesting fact:  if they had derailed the first weapon, who's to say that history would have been any better?!  How long does it take to build one of these things?  Let's be generous and say it would take as much as a few years.  That's a few more years for the Xindi to perhaps build something more ambitious--something better.  And who is to say that history would be any kinder in this reality?  A few years later, and Earth would still have no idea, in the meantime, of the danger they're in.  Things might go even worse than they did before.  Is this the real reason why Lorian hesitated?

Okay, I realize if you're still reading this you're probably sick to death of the time travel stuff in this review, but bear with me--this is a good one.  Suppose, for a moment, that the events at the end of this episode are different and Archer gets thrown back in time again, after experiencing the events of this episode (i.e. suppose their plan of avoiding the time travel was unsuccessful).  Now we have Archer and the Enterprise back 117 years, just as before.  Or is it?  Remember, these people know the future of their own actions now; there is no indication from anyone on the E2 that they knew these things when they were thrown back.  Since the interaction between the two ships took place, Archer and his crew now have a different set of experiences.  For one thing, they know certain things that E2 did or didn't do--such as the failure to destroy the first Xindi probe.  The various crewmembers also know certain things about their personal lives.

Suppose, for example, that after hearing Reed's very sad story of not being able to find a mate, Hoshi takes pity on him and without realizing it, starts looking at him in a new way.  Suppose that she ends up marrying him instead of the anonymous guy she was 'supposed' to.  You might say that this would not affect things much, but don't be so sure.  It would affect the gene pool of the ship, for instance--what kids there were, who ended up marrying whom in future generations, etc.  The future could be drastically affected by just one different person on the ship (we all know how it goes on these shows).  What I'm trying to say is that once you 'know' what is going to happen, you might find yourself taking a different path, either consciously or subconsciously.  So in other words, this version of E2 could be quite different from the one we saw in this episode.  And guess what?  The same thing could happen again.  We could keep cycling over and over and over until someone gets it right and avoids the time travel.  In fact (and this is just my wild theory), it's perfectly possible that this episode is the result of such a repetition.  There could have been hundreds of cycles wherein the Enterprise kept going back in time...and we wouldn't know about it, because the universe is now altered and the only stopping point would be in the loop when the Enterprise did not go back in time!  Which, of course, is what happened in this episode!  Wouldn't that be something?

You know what?  I think it's time for a quote from my favorite chief of operations, Miles O'Brien:  "I hate temporal mechanics!".  Fortunately, there was a lot more to this story than just quirky time travel.

Apparently, T'Pol cares more about Trip than she's willing to let on.  From the moment I saw the older T'Pol talking to Lorian, I was thinking:  pointed ears and a Trip-shaped head...let me guess....  This episode deals quite a bit with the idea of Trip and T'Pol getting married and having a son.  Unfortunately for those Trip fans out there, our favorite engineer doesn't live to see his son's 15th birthday.  Indeed, Lorian may have Trip's genes, but he seems to have gotten a lot of his ideas of ethics and morality from Archer (the stealing of the injectors sounds eerily familiar, don't you think?).

In the last couple of reviews, I expressed the desire to see Trip trying to help T'Pol through this difficult time.  It's nice to see that he's making that attempt, even though she is being rather stubborn about letting him help her.  Indeed, it is a nice echo of T'Pol helping Trip to get over his sister's death in the previous episode, and I'm glad the writers have gone this way (you never know what these guys will do sometimes).  Their scenes together had the usual sparkle that comes from their exquisite chemistry, and I liked the writing.

The one problem I had with Trip's lines was when he claimed she'd been avoiding him ever since they, erm, had intimate relations.  That just does not jive with what we saw in the previous episode, when several times T'Pol went out of her way to be in Trip's company (the mess hall scene, for one).  I suppose they just put that line in there to make T'Pol look more uncomfortable around Trip, but if you ask me they could have done this differently.  If they had just altered it to say that she'd been avoiding him since the previous episode, it woud have made sense (their relationship underwent a change in that episode and her behavior might have as well).  But there the problem would be that the previous episode was not very long ago.  Remember, it was 3 days until they were supposed to meet Degra on the other side of the corridor, and that means it was a lot less than 3 days at the beginning of this episode when Trip said that line.

Old T'Pol is played as a wisened old woman with a touch of Vulcan-ness about her...but who is very human as well.  For the most part I thought she was played okay, but it seemed like Blalock was trying a bit too hard to speak in an old woman's voice.  The character tells her younger self that she will never be rid of her emotions; this seems to solidify, without a doubt, the direction the writers are going with this.  She also tells young T'Pol that her relationship with Trip can help her deal with the emotions, and that if the time-travel thing had never happened, it's likely that she would never have married Trip.  This gives the young T'Pol an interesting thing to ponder, at the very least, and I'll be interested to see where they go with this.

I must admit, there was one scene that I really, really wanted to see:  Old T'Pol and Young Trip.  No, not like that--you know what I mean!  Old T'Pol's conversation with Young T'Pol gave Young T'Pol a lot to think about, but can you imagine Old T'Pol talking to Young Trip?  Sure, it would have been awkward, but awkward situations make good drama!  Let Old T'Pol see her long lost husband once again...and let Trip tell her how he really feels about the present T'Pol.  Let's face it, Trip is having a hard time talking to Young T'Pol.  But with Old T'Pol, he can talk all he wants about his feelings, because she already knows what they are and has accepted them.  I just think it could have been a great scene, and I'm sorry that we didn't get to see it.

The character of Lorian was somewhat intriguing, but again, sort of stolen from "Children of Time".  In that episode, Jadzia Dax blamed herself for the accident that stranded the crew in the past--her curiosity about the planet was what got them into trouble in the first place.  This guilt was passed down to those of her descendants who hosted the Dax symbiont, the latest of which played a major part in the episode itself, interacting with Sisko's present-day crew.  This Dax's judgment was affected by the guilt he carried.  In "E2", Lorian has a simiar guilt complex which affects his judgment as well--but this time the guilt comes from failing to ram the first Xindi probe as he had promised Archer, and allowing 7 million people to die.  As I mentioned a few paragraphs above, I question his reasoning in trying to stop this probe, but I've already argued that enough.  As far as Lorian's character is concerned, I suppose one might criticize his stark differences from Spock--who like Lorian is half human.  The simplest answer is the one Lorian gave:  he was raised around humans.  I would also add that his mother, who was never very Vulcan in the first place, had lost control of her emotions, and as a result became very human-like in her character (or maybe more Romulan-like, but let's not get into that).

Apart from the questionable temporal mechanics, I thought the story flowed quite nicely from the personal stories to the furthering of the plot.  That trick of beaming off essential components of E2 was quite clever...some might ask why this isn't done more often, since a lot of enemies on Enterprise don't have shields yet.  I would say that the reason they were able to do this so effectively was that they knew the layout of the ship, but this explanation might have problems too.  Remember that E2 has been upgraded substantially over the years, including the addition of a tractor beam...it's a bit of a gamble to assume that everything's still in the same place.  But maybe they checked this with their sensors...which begs the question, once again, of why they don't do this more often.  I mean, even if they weren't sure of what everything on the ship did, they could still score major points in a battle by beaming things off.  Forget telling Reed to target their weapon systems--why not just beam their guns or torpedo launchers away from their ship?!  Sure, something could go wrong, but things also could go wrong if you fired on them.  I would say that, from a story-telling point of view, this is a good reason why transporters should not be around before shields (yes, I know the Andorians and some others have shields, but a lot of others still *don't*).

But for the most part, the little touches in this episode were on the mark.  The space battle between the two Enterprises was cool to see, and I loved the trick of E2 posing as the Enterprise's reflection in the nebula (though I'm not sure some of the earlier shots of the Enterprise flying alone made sense).  Trip's comments about his son's facial features (the ears are your mother's) made me smile, and it was mildly interesting to see what romantic matches various crewmembers would or would not make.  I thought Hoshi was very smart not to find out her future husband's name--in contrast, Mayweather might have quite a complex on his hands now that he knows certain facts.  Reed seems to have missed out on all the fun, and as a fan of his character, I had the "Aw...poor Malcolm" reaction.  We also learn the interesting fact that only a third of the Enterprise's crew is female.  We've always known that the ratio on the senior staff is even less than that (only 2/7 of the main cast is female, and if you take the non-starfleets out of the mix, it's only 1/5), but I was a bit surprised to learn about the shipwide ratio.  I guess women in the 22nd century aren't very emancipated yet.  As a female, I am a bit indignant, to say the least.

About the honeymoon in cargo bay 3...is that supposed to be a joke?  Sand carted in from an asteroid...and a manufactured palm tree?!  I guess stranger things have happened.  And then there was the scene with Lorian in the brig and Archer staring him down.  I wonder if the guy knew how much danger he was in (cue Darth Vader breathing).

Some notes:

So, exactly how old is T'Pol in the present?  Old T'Pol is 117 years older than Young T'Pol, and I'm not sure she should look quite that decrepit.  Sarek was looking better than that at over 200, even with that syndrome he had.  But let's be generous and assume that T'Pol doesn't age quite as well as Sarek, and say that Old T'Pol is 200.  This would mean that Young T'Pol is 83.  I was under the impression that she was more like 60 (not sure if that impression is justified, but I think I heard it somewhere).  Maybe I'll have to watch all the old episodes again to find out.

The NX-02 is not yet completed, and is to be commissioned as the Columbia.  No doubt, this is a tribute by the writers to the doomed space shuttle of the same name.

The Enterprise is thrown back 117 years, which is 26 years before Cochrane's warp flight.  Just think...if B&B had been on their game, they could have worked another Borg episode in there (I'm glad they didn't).

The corridor covers 11.6 light years of distance, in both versions of the timeline.

Again, only 1/3 of the Enterprise's crew are women.  *Sigh*

Okay, here we go with the 'children of time':  Lorian is the captain of E2, and is the son of T'Pol and Trip.  Karen Archer is the great-granddaughter of Archer and Aselia (sp?); Aselia is an Ekarian (sp?).  Karen Archer is not only Lorian's first officer, but apparently serves as the helmswoman as well--at least at times.  Phlox marries someone called Amanda (that wouldn't be Amanda Cole of "Harbinger" fame, by any chance?), and there are apparently a lot of little Denobulans running around E2 now.  Mayweather married Corporal Mackenzie, one of the MACOs.  Hoshi purposefully avoided obtaining the name of her husband (wise choice), but her kids were named Toto and Yoshiko.  Reed didn't marry anybody, since all the girls were snatched up before he could make his move.

While we're on the subject of the E2 descendants...something bothered me about that scene in sickbay when Phlox is confirming the ancestry of Lorian and Karen Archer.  He says that T'Pol is Lorian's mother (one would think this much would be obvious), and then Archer asks who the father was.  Let me say that again:  Archer asks who the father was.  Forgive me, but isn't that sort of an invasion of T'Pol's privacy?  But not to be outdone by his fellow ethically questionably crewmember, Phlox trumps him by giving him the answer!  Isn't that kind of like a third and uninvolved party asking about the results of a paternity test, and the doctor giving him the answer without the mother's permission?  It's not like Phlox shooed Archer out of the room, then told T'Pol.  It's not even like Phlox asked T'Pol if she minded if he told Archer.  He just blurts it out, without T'Pol having any say in the matter!

And one other thing about that scene.  T'Pol claims that humans and Vulcans can't reproduce, and Phlox responds that his counterpart found a way to successfully combine the two genomes.  It sounds to me as if he's suggesting that human-Vulcan reproduction is impossible without scientific intervention.  I guess this doesn't exactly contradict anything we'd heard before, but I didn't really expect it.  It's a far cry from Worf and Dax needing help to conceive--there's got to be more of a difference between Klingons and Trills than between humans and Vulcans.  Again, I just found it surprising.

Trip died when Lorian was 14.

Unless Reed or someone else on the ship knows how to manufacture phase pistols, those babies sure have a long shelf life.  At least, I assume Lorian and company were using their own phase pistols when they stormed Engineering and sabotaged the ship.  If so, those pistols are about 120 years old and still working perfectly.

Among E2's upgrades over the years is a tractor beam.  Looks pretty cool too.  So do their blue phasers.
 

"Some things are better left to mystery." --Sato to Mayweather, regarding the identity of her future husband.  Wise words.

"This seat's available."  --Reed, inviting a female crewmember to sit at his table.  Obviously he's planning ahead now, trying not to repeat his mistake!

"Only in the Expanse could I have a son nearly three times my age." --Trip to T'Pol; yes, a very good Trek quote.

"You know all the other women on board must have been taken.  Because I can't imagine any other reason why I would have married someone as stubborn as you." --Trip to T'Pol, after she complains about him having an emotional attachment to her after their intimate encounter.

"I took the only logical course of action."
"Attacking your ancestors doesn't sound very logical to me." --Lorian and Archer.

"You'll never fully recover.  The emotions you've accessed will be with you the rest of your life." --Old T'Pol to Young T'Pol.

"I suppose there's another possibility.  Since we weren't thrown into the past, maybe history somehow corrected itself."
"Are you suggesting that the other Enterprise never existed?  If you're right, then why would we remember them?" --Archer and T'Pol.  Yes, good question.  The DS9 people remembered their wiped-out descendants too.  Not sure if that part of it makes sense...but at least Archer finally figured out what really happened.

"Captain, you're early." --Degra to Archer; the irony speaks for itself, and the look on Archer's face is priceless.
 

Rating:  ****1/2  I take off points for the temporal headache and also for what I will generously call 'a few similarities' to a DS9 episode.  But I enjoyed the story, in particular as it related to the characters of T'Pol and Trip.  There was even a small scene for the 'little guys', in which Sato, Reed, and Mayweather got a bit of real dialogue (as opposed to the Uhura-Chekov-Sulu dialogue they usually get).  Here's to next week and hopefully the Xindi Council (wildcard Aquatics, anyone?).
 
 

4/28/04--Review for:  "The Forgotten"(Archer and Degra grow to trust each other even more; meanwhile, Trip doesn't get enough sleep)

Before I say anything else, let me vent my frustration about the satellite problems my local station had during the teaser of this episode.  Here was Archer, giving a speech about the sacrifices the crew has made and all that junk, and what I get on my end is like a bad cell phone connection.  How am I supposed to get all choked up with emotion by listening to Archer's words when I only get pieces of the dialogue interspersed with frozen blurred shots of the crew looking awed or Archer looking constipated?  Anyway, on to the review.

A clue to this episode's content came with the 'previously on Enterprise' segment, where we saw not only the usual stuff, but also a clip of Trip's nightmare about his sister getting incinerated in Florida.  I think anyone could guess that this episode would in some way be dealing with Trip's lingering pain and/or his personal hatred of the Xindi.  Yep.

But I'll get to Trip's story in a minute.  First, the primary plot-moving story--the furthering of the Xindi arc.  This episode spent a lot of time on Archer trying to convince Degra and his sloth friend (well, mainly his sloth friend, actually) of two things:  (1) that the Reptilians broke the rules and tried to build a bioweapon, and (2) that a group of trans-dimensional aliens (including 'She') tricked the Xindi into starting the conflict so that the Xindi themselves would end up being the victims.  I don't blame the sloth for being skeptical.  Heck, if someone came up and told me all this stuff and offered a couple of Reptilian bodies and a few potentially doctored scans as proof, I'm not sure I'd believe him.  But good guys on Enterprise tend to be a bit naive (and villains tend to be inflexible).  So I guess Degra's definitely in the 'good guy' column at this point, and his sloth friend is still on the fence.  *Sigh*  Does anyone else think Degra has been convinced a little too fast?  This happened with Shran a couple of times too.  It's just something about Archer--that personal magnetism, that charm...that intangible quality that says "I'm trustworthy!"  Well, these guys are seeing something I'm not, I guess.

Degra, as I said, seems firmly in the 'good guy' column, and I doubt that's going to change.  But I still find his character to have some interest.  His blowing up of the Reptilian ship reminded me of Dukat blowing up the Klingon BoP in DS9's "Apocalypse Rising" (could be because I just watched that episode yesterday on DVD).  Never mind the puzzling discrepancy within Degra's own character (a few minutes before he blew up the ship, he was whining about not wanting to attack fellow Xindi at all!).  The reasons were basically the same in both cases:  blow up the enemy so he can't go off and tell his buddies what we're up to.  The fact that Degra did this shows that he's not all fluffy-bunny these days...in fact, he reminded me a bit of Archer.  Archer and Degra are the equivalents on two sides of a conflict (well, at least, they used to be on two different sides).  Both men have done things they have come to regret.  Now, supposedly, both are trying to work toward a better solution than the one they originally envisioned.  Good luck.  Maybe at the end of this arc, Archer and Degra are going to have a big bear hug, both sobbing:  "I know I did some bad things--we both did--but we've learned our lessons now, right?  We're both going to be good boys from now on, and not compromise our sense of ethics to achieve our goals.  We promise!"  Can't you just see that?

So now the setup for the next episode (or few episodes) is this:  the Enterprise is taking a shortcut to the Xindi Council--a shortcut through a nebula and into a subspace corridor.  But watch out!  There's a 'hostile species' lurking in or near the nebula, and it's ready to do bad things to the Enterprise!  Heh, I can't wait.  Oh yes, and once we make it to the Council, Degra seems to think that the Aquatics will be the 'swing vote'.  Gee, I never would have guessed that (notice the sarcasm).  Let me just predict here and now that the Aquatics, Sloths, and Primates will rule in favor of Archer, with the Insectoids and Reptilians dissenting...and the latter two will consequently take the law into their own hands and try to complete their mission on their own, forcing Archer and the three 'good guy' Xindi species to do battle with the Xindi baddies.  That's my guess; we'll see if it holds up.

But enough about Degra and company--let's get to the others.

T'Pol.  Her little arc continues in this episode, and T'Pol's story on its own is basically an extension of the scene in the previous episode where she and Phlox speculated that her emotions might not go away.  Indeed, we see this time that the writers seem to have decided to keep T'Pol's emotionalism, rather than have her return to the traditional Vulcan.  Did I say 'return'?  Ah, sorry...I guess to return to something you have to have been there at some point before.  Well, as I said before, at least now there is a canon explanation for T'Pol displaying her emotions.

Such a 'change' in a main character is not a new thing in Trek.  In TNG, Troi briefly lost her empathic abilities (in the appropriately named "The Loss"), and had to learn to do her job without them (even though they were back in the end of the episode--in my book, TNG was notorious for completely self-contained episodes that had no consequences for the future).  In DS9, Odo's shapeshifting abilities were taken from him (in the season 4 finale "Broken Link"), and he remained a 'solid' for a good half season before the writers finally decided to make him a shapeshifter again.  In both cases, the characters had to deal with a fundemental change in their abilities, and supposedly they grew from the experience.  But perhaps the strongest analogy to T'Pol's case is that of Data.  Remember Generations?  Remember that emotion chip which became fused with his positronic matrix so that it could not be removed?  Remember Data whining that he could not deal with the new emotions and wanted to be rid of them, and remember his friends telling him that he had to learn how to deal with them?  Does this sound at all familiar?  There's one more thing to remember about Data and his emotion chip...starting with First Contact, he was suddenly able to deactivate it at will.  T'Pol, presumably, won't be having that ability.  Not that she would need it, as the writiers don't seem to like to write emotionless Vulcans into their scripts.

Another character who was having trouble with emotions this week was Trip.  In many ways, this was Trip's episode; his reactions to Degra tied him directly into the main plot, and there was also the matter of his lost crewmember (Taylor) tying into his feelings for his lost sister Elizabeth--a loss he hasn't gotten over yet.  Trip's scenes were all well-played; I especially liked the ones where he was trying (and often failing) to complete the letter to Taylor's parents.  Trip's confrontations with Degra were to be expected, though I'm not sure T'Pol did enough to restrain him, considering how important Degra's good will was to their cause.  Considering how sleep-deprived Trip must have been at that point, I guess he could have done worse than taunt and yell at the guy--I kept expecting it to come to blows.

My favorite scenes of the show were the ones with Trip and T'Pol.  This is back to the Trip and T'Pol I liked to see together.  Forget all the neuropressure stuff--that's not where their chemistry lies.  It lies, instead, in their characters, their interactions, and the way they always seem to end up with opposing viewpoints which complement each other beautifully, emphasizing each argument and/or character trait as contrasted with the other.  I loved the scene in the mess hall where he told her to pick the pepperoni off her pizza--very cute.  And finally, we get a scene with Trip pouring his heart out to T'Pol--not Archer or Reed, but T'Pol.  T'Pol reacts with her new unfettered emotions, and what we have is a moment of very human (pardon the word) bonding.  This is Trip/T'Pol at its best.  After Trip has talked it out with T'Pol, he is finally able to complete the letter to Taylor's parents and to some extent put Elizabeth behind him--showing that talking with T'Pol did some good.  Now, what I would like to see in some episode coming up is the opposite:  Trip talking it through with T'Pol about her new challenge of how to handle her emotions.  We saw a glimpse of that here--although the focus was on Trip's problems, T'Pol's own story was woven into the dialogue and acting quite nicely.  Now we need to see the full story.  Here's hoping....

I do have a few criticisms of the show, as usual.  I realize the sensors weren't working, but are there really no windows on the ship that would have offered a view of that plasma leak (or whatever it was)?  I realize it wasn't always the green monster it grew into, but it was a fairly visible thing even when it was new.  Well, I guess everyone was too busy to look out a window.

And also (and I hate to be this nitpicky, but...) when Archer shows Degra and his sloth friend that top secret Reptilian virus container, he unlocks the door...but when they leave, Archer doesn't appear to lock it up again.  Is there an ensign standing by to do these kinds of things, or is Archer past caring at this point?

The episode as a whole was a few plots mashed together...and surprisingly, it came out quite nicely.  Even Reed got a chance to be a hero (something I always enjoy watching), even if that whole sequence was there basically to give Trip an excuse to yell at Degra again.  Hoshi got a couple of concerned lines, telling us how hot Malcolm was getting (as if we didn't know...*wink*).  I don't even remember if Travis said anything (he must have, I just don't remember what it was).

Some notes:

The total number of crewmen lost is now 18.  I got that much out of the teaser between the satellite hiccups.

Not to complain or anything, but what is with Hoshi's hair?  I know the ship and crew are in 'damaged' mode, but you'd think she'd be able to keep it tied back and out of the way somehow.  Can't she find a barrette or something?  I know, I know...they were all blown out in the hull breaches.

Degra claims that the weapon won't be launched for several days; he tells Archer, at the end of this episode, to meet him at the Xindi Council in 3 days.

The green fire was caused by a ruptured warp plasma conduit or something, right?  If so, didn't they burn a lot of plasma?  I mean, that fire was huge!  Does this mean they're low on plasma now?  Or will we never hear about this again?  Take your pick.

Malcolm's internal suit temperature, according to the accomplished Ms. Sato, reached at least 46 degrees celcius before the end.  Let's see, that's pretty hot, but how hot?  Just doing my handy C-F conversion with my computer program...114.8 degrees Fahrenheit.  Yeah, that is hot...but I think saunas are hotter.  Mind you, Hoshi said that number a couple of minutes before Malcolm's mission was done, so it probably got even hotter.

Archer says there's at least 59 spheres; Degra says they've found 78.  I'll go with Degra.

Taylor's first name was Jane.

According to Trip, it's been 9 months since the attack on Earth (at least, I assume that's what he was saying).
 

"Has it occurred to you that we'll be far worse off if you collapse from exhaustion?" -Phlox telling Trip to get some sleep.

"Boy, you must have been pretty damn excited.  I mean, that beam cut one hell of a swath through Florida.  That's the name of one of the places you destroyed.  Florida." -Trip to Degra, rubbing it in.

"...and I realize that I'm not thinking about Taylor at all.  I'm thinking about Elizabeth.  So many people dead.  I tried not to see her any differently than the other seven million.  So I spent the last nine months trying to pretend she was just another victim.  But she's my sister, T'Pol.  My baby sister...  I envy you Vulcans."
"You think that the loss of a colleague or a friend doesn't affect us?  It does.  But if we give in to those emotions, they overwhelm us.  You're the ones to be envied." -Trip and T'Pol; truly, my favorite piece of dialogue in this episode.
 

Rating:  ****1/2  Not outstanding, since it did have a slightly muddled feel overall, but it had some really good moments.  The Trip/T'Pol dialogue was my favorite, and I really enjoyed Connor Trinneer's acting throughout.  I found the rest of the episode to be good as well.  Episodes that are part of an arc can often seem to lack definition and individuality (for instance, I still have problems sorting out, from memory, most of the episodes in DS9's final arc, since most of them involved the same few threads which continued from one to the next...and this from an avid DS9 fan).  This episode suffers from that to some extent, but Tucker's subplot adds something different to the usual mix.  At least I'm still looking forward to future Enterprise episodes.  That's always a good sign.
 
 

4/21/04--Review for:  "Damage" (T'Pol's addiction to Trellium D is revealed; Archer misplaces his ethics...again)

After a break, Enterprise is back, picking up right where "Azati Prime" left off.  Now then, first things first...I can't believe that I missed Casey Biggs's name in the opening credits!  When I saw him on screen as the alien captain and heard that voice, I was like, "That's Damar!"  Well, all I can say is, cool.  Damar gets to be the latest victim of Captain Archer's raging lack of ethics and morality!  That's a prime part, that is.  But not a rare one.

Yes, the good captain is at it again.  In the name of upping the drama and tension, the writers are once again driving Archer's character to the limits.  It's not that I don't find it plausible that Archer could be driven to this extreme by the situation...but I'm having a hard time seeing how, after all this Xindi stuff is over, they're going to take Archer's character back to a reasonable level.  How is this single-minded maniac going to be reconciled as a responsible leader once again?  In my book, he may have crossed the line one too many times, all in the name of defending Earth (it's Dubya and his pal Ashcroft rolled into one).  Archer is leaving his humanity behind, all right, and T'Pol was correct to point that out to him--to throw his earlier quote back in his face.

Okay, I must admit, for a few minutes I was absolutely convinced that Archer was a replicant.  I mean, one minute we see him on an Aquatic ship (very cool, btw), and the next we get what looks like Archer arriving in a pod.  Here I was, ready for Degra or someone to show up as the pod's sole occupant, and we get Archer.  And I was convinced it wasn't really Archer.

Then I realized that if this was a replicant, the Xindi had gone to great lengths to have him tell the Enterprise crew things that really happened to Archer, but they couldn't possibly have known about.  See the problem?  Anyway, I soon saw the opportunity to prove, once and for all, whether this was the real Archer or a replicant Archer.  When we find out that Damar (or whoever) has a warp coil and Archer wants it, I started talking to the screen, warning Damar to watch out, because Archer's ethics were about to be tested, and he usually fails these kinds of tests.  Then I made a prediction:  if Archer decided to go after the warp coil, taking it without Damar's permission, then we'd know it was our Archer.  And guess what?  He did!  Hrmph...well, I guess I was wrong about all that replicant business.  Never mind.

I suppose I should be glad that the rest of the senior staff was looking at Archer strangely again.  Reed was suitably taken aback when Archer ordered him to get the boarding party together.  During the meeting in the situation room, the senior officers were all either looking down at the floor or sending looks at each other.  I can just imagine the conversation on the bridge after T'Pol and Archer go off to spar in his office:

Sato: "Uh...d'ya think we should mutiny now?"
Mayweather: "I don't know, we did that a few weeks ago, right?  It might start to look old."
Sato: "But that was entirely different, right?  I mean, that was the egg spit, remember?"
Mayweather: "Oh yeah, right.  I forgot all about the egg spit..."
Trip: "What egg spit?"
Reed: "You know, when the captain was acting like a broody hen and protecting the Insectoid eggs over the lives of his crew?"
Trip: "That was egg spit?  Hell, I thought that was just the cap'n's third season Darth Vader impression showin' up again."
Sato: "An easy mistake to make."

And then there was the T'Pol story.  Yes.  Well, I for one am glad that this has turned out to be the reason for her behavior over the last few episodes.  She has managed to addict herself to Trellium D, and it appears that there is no easy way out (just like real addictions).  The line near the end--where Phlox tells her that her emotionalism might or might not be temporary--is very convenient for the writers, isn't it?  Now they'll have an excuse whenever they want T'Pol to act emotional.  I guess we should be glad that now they're at least providing an excuse.  I shall have to see where they go with this...but at least T'Pol's character is partially restored in my eyes.

And feel free to kick me, but I kind of enjoyed the shower scene.  The fact that it was a dream in the mind of an emotional Vulcan made it okay, though I could see the end coming (it was still cool).  Since it was with Trip, we know one of two things:  either T'Pol still has a candle burning for Trip, or she has a deep desire to strangle him.  Take your pick.

And one more thing before I get off the T'Pol subject...as someone who thinks Trip and T'Pol have good chemistry, but also as someone who thinks all the neuropressure stuff was really below them, I'd like to see, perhaps in the course of the next couple of episodes, Trip helping and supporting her while she's getting off this addiction.  I'm not saying there has to be anything romantic or physical, but it would be cool if he was just there for her.  I realize the chief engineer's a busy man, but surely she needs someone other than Phlox to help her through this?  The captain sure isn't going to be any help, as he's more off-balance than she is.

"Damage"...definitely a good title for this episode.  The Enterprise is damaged, Damar's ship is damaged, Archer's face is damaged, Archer's brain is damaged (but to be fair, that happened awhile back), T'Pol's brain is damaged (that's been happening for three months, apparently), the senior officers' confidence in their captain is damaged (well, I certainly hope so)...and so on.

Overall, I found this episode to be quite interesting...it was well-paced, exciting, and it tied up some loose ends (mainly having to do with T'Pol, but also clearing up some questions I had about Reptilian time travel back in "Carpender Street").  The atmosphere of "Damage" was first rate--everything from the charred ruins of the corridors to the hollow-sounding comm lines added to the feel of a ship that's really in trouble, and isn't going to get out of it in a hurry.  The makeup people deserve a hand as well, especially for T'Pol (not the zombie thing in the shower; I'm talking about her whole look in this episode--looking decidedly green around the gills).

Unfortunately, in addition to the glaring blemish of Archer's behavior, there were a few instances of some rather sloppy writing.  Maybe this one isn't warranted, but I would not have been quite so quick to trust that the 'damaged ship' wasn't a Xindi trick.  Archer was adamant about hiding from the Xindi, was he not?  Might it not stand to reason that some clever reptile or insect might have a non-Xindi ship on hand to act the part of the Trojan horse?

Another thing that bothered me, particularly in this episode, was that for a long time no one seemed to notice T'Pol's strange behavior!  The woman was speaking in slurred tones, practically fainting on the bridge, and generally reeling from the emotional effects of this addiction...and it only came out when she herself went to Phlox about it!  Sure, Archer looked at her a bit strangely and took note of her behavior when she smashed that padd on his desk, but he didn't seem to follow up on it--just told her that she should meditate some more and that he wanted her to be on the bridge during the attack.  No one else even lifts an eyebrow at the way she's acting.  Even Trip, who was yelling "What the hell's wrong with you?" at the end of the previous episode, seems oblivious to her current behavior (I bet he would have noticed if he'd gotten a peek at that shower scene).  In all, we seem to have a lot of unobservant officers here.

Are you ready for a third thing that bothered me?  Here it is:  why, exactly, are these completely alien warp coils compatible with the Enterprise's system?  Sure, Trip mentioned that he had to tweak the stolen warp coil a bit to get it to work, but I still have a hard time believing in this degree of compatibility.  But I suppose there's nothing like a good plot contrivance to give Archer the opportunity of abandoning his ethics once again.

And one more thing, related to the one above...given the fact that these warp coils seem to be vital parts of the warp drive, and if you lose one you're dead in the water, wouldn't you think that Starfleet would give you a few spares to take with you?  I mean, granted, it's possible they did have some spares that got blown out in a hull breach or something, but there's nothing to indicate that's true.  All it would have taken was a throw-away line somewhere, but no, we didn't get it, did we?

In the grand scope of the arc, we see the 'good' and 'bad' Xindi solidifying even more than they did in the previous episode.  Now Degra has led the Primates and the Sloths into direct opposition to the Reptillians...and they seem to have convinced the Aquatics to go along with them as well.  In addition, we are given our first look at the mysterious woman referred to as 'she' in the previous episode.  As I suspected, it isn't Sheelob.  At first I thought she looked kind of like Salome Jens (the 'Female Founder' on DS9), but I realized I probably couldn't have missed two DS9 cast names in the credits.  Once I got a closer look, I realized that the resemblance was superficial, and it seems she is one of those fluidic aliens or whatever--the ones who built the spheres.  Well, well...that makes sense; she's the original informant, and now she's denying the truth to try to get Degra and company to continue to construct the weapon.  More on this as the arc continues.
 

Some notes:

The casualty reports on the Enterprise were updated during the show, from at least five dead and dozens wounded at the beginning to 14 lost and three unaccounted for later.  I hope this satisfies all those fans who wanted more crewmembers to die.  Now all we have to do is wait for Mayweather to snuff it, right?  (Sorry, I seem to be kind of obsessed with that).

The Aquatics' ship was cool, but it's too bad we didn't get to see more of it.  It's almost as if the creators just showed us that shot for the sake of showing it.  Hmmn.  But I suppose it also made the Aquatics show their cards.

Ya gotta hand it to those folks in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers...the Enterprise is in tatters--hull breaches on multiple decks, exploding consoles, downed bulkheads, no viewscreen, and a multitude of other problems....  But the gravity plating is still functioning perfectly--and so is the plumbing!  My question is, if the gravity plating is this fool-proof, why was Reed having problems with it at the beginning of "Unexpected"?  You know, the teaser when Archer was taking a shower and he suddenly found himself floating amongst a bunch of water droplets?  It's like I said at the time; Reed was pulling a bit of a prank on the captain!

While we're on the subject of equipment failing or not failing, I think someone needs to design the connections for the airhoses on the environmental suits to take a bit more of a pounding.  Those things come off way too easily.

Kudos to the writers for giving Travis and Hoshi more than five words apiece this week.  Not that I'm satisfied, but it's a start.

Two pieces of information from the above:  Hoshi's mother always wanted her to take piano lessons...and Travis has a very strange idea of what can be classified as music.

Phlox claims he's been a doctor for nearly 40 years.  He also claims that in all those years, he's only done something ethically questionable twice.  Let me say that again:  Twice.  He does not, however, tell us what those two things were.  I'll leave you to come to your own conclusions.

T'Pol claims she's been experimenting with the Trellium D injections for three months.

The idea of a stun grenade is pretty cool.  I guess my question would be, why don't we see this used more often in Trek?  I mean, if the MACOs had them back in those days, they should have had them in the 23rd and 24th centuries, surely.  They would have come in useful in a heck of a lot of situations in the other Trek series.  Perhaps they found out that the stun grenades cause cancer or something, and they were declared to be unethical weapons at some point?

Is it just me, or does Damar's race look like a cross between the Romulans, the Cardassians, and 'future' Daniels?  That goes for the haircut too.

So now the Enterprise has Damar's warp coil.  Do you think that maybe, when the Xindi mission is completed and Earth is out of danger, Archer and company will fly back, find Damar's ship as it limps toward home, and give them back their warp coil?  How many takers?  Aw, come on, I mean, the only reason Archer needs that coil is to complete the Xindi mission, right?  After that's done, and Fanatical Archer turns back into Friendly Archer, they should give the thing back.  At the very least, after their mission is completed they should fly back to Earth, get their own replacement warp coil, then fly back into the Expanse and find Damar's ship (which will still have about two and a half years to to go before they get home), and give them back their coil.  So, anyone want to place a wager?
 

"How long have you been a doctor?"
"Nearly 40 years."
"And in all that time, did you ever do anything you thought was unethical?"
"Twice.  Why?" -Archer and Phlox.  Hack, hack, cough, cough, wheeze.....sorry about that.  I'll recover.

"I'm about to step over a line...a line I thought I would never cross.  And given the nature of our mission, it probably won't be the last."
"Probably not."  -Archer and Phlox.  Right.  And by the way, it won't be the first either, Archer boy.

"We're no different than the marauders who attacked us when we entered the expanse!" -T'Pol, giving Archer the plain and simple truth.

"We've had our share of disagreements, but you've never taken it out on my desk before." -Archer, finally realizing that something's wrong with T'Pol.
 

Rating:  ****1/2  In most ways, I found the episode to be well done.  I was particularly impressed with the whole atmosphere the production team created for the Enterprise and its people--very dark, and very real.  I was also satisfied with the way T'Pol's story was developed, since it explained a lot of her un-Vulcan-like behavior.  However, the continuing trend of having Archer break the rules of ethics--having the ends justify the means--flies in the face of what it means to be a Starfleet officer...and indeed, a decent human being.  Sure, they're in a dire situation, but T'Pol was right:  they are behaving exactly like the marauders who attacked them at the beginning of their journey into the expanse.  I realize that the writers are probably hoping to turn this around and have Archer learn a valuable lesson from all of this...but the problem is, I believe there may be a point of no return, as far as being a Starfleet captain.  They may have crossed that point, and going back to the same old jovial explorer we knew in the first two seasons may be impossible.  This is all well and fine...but I do not, at this point, have enough confidence in the writers to believe that they will keep Archer as a changed and flawed man.  My guess is, they'll have his decisions weighing heavily on him for a few episodes after the Xindi arc is complete, and then forget about it and act as if nothing has happened.  I hope I am wrong, and given the writers' attention to internal continuity in this series so far, I may well be.  But this all remains to be seen, and I am fairly certain that it won't be answered this season.
 
 

3/3/04--Review for:  "Azati Prime" (the Enterprise reaches Azati Prime at last; Archer snubs Daniels, Degra listens to Archer, and T'Pol goes nuts)

Well...interesting.  Let me start by saying that I have mixed feelings about this episode; though I liked it for the most part, I was a little thrown by T'Pol's behavior and Archer's bone-headed reluctance to do the right thing until forced to.  But we'll get to that in time....

This episode was well-paced, exciting, and for the most part well-scripted.  Although the twists were foreseeable, the manner in which they were presented may not have been.  I was caught off guard by the return of Daniels, and delighted to see the background schematic of the Enterprise J.  I was equally delighted to hear about the Xindi crew members (bet you they weren't insectoids or reptiles, though).  Daniels managed not to annoy me this time, but Archer was doing such a good job of it he didn't need any help.  Our good captain's refusal to trust Daniels is a human response, to some extent...but I'm still amazed at how stubborn the guy can be.  Of course, once Archer is backed into a wall, being beat up by Xindi, he's perfectly willing to put forward the very argument that he himself had refused to accept.  Ironic.  Degra and company are quite right to be a bit skeptical when listening to this guy who obviously has no other option but to make up a totally bogus story.  But I guess that little medal thing and Archer's knowing about Degra's third child helped.

I'll have to admit, sometimes Archer's characterization stumps me.  It's mainly the inconsistencies between episodes (absolutely horrible so far this season).  T'Pol is very possibly worse, by the way, but I'll get to her later.  In this episode, we see Archer hesitate for a full five seconds before telling Reed to blow up the little Xindi guys on the moon.  Now then, understand that normally Reed gets this silly little smirk on his face when asked to blow something up; this time, he looked a bit uncomfortable.  It probably had something to do with the shocked look Hoshi gave Archer...or maybe it was the objection and wide-eyed expression from T'Pol.  But no, nothing sways Archer.  No, captain, don't go down there and take them prisoner or disable their communications array...just blow them up.  Yes, the only solution.

But later on, just when I think they're about to kill off Travis in a heroic manner, Archer insists on going on the suicide mission himself.  Believe me, I was cheering him on--personally, I wouldn't mind a new captain at all.  But everyone else was upset, especially (and I mean especially) T'Pol.  I was just about to commend the writers for keeping T'Pol's emotions subtle this time around...but that was before she started crying.  Her little lovers' spats with Trip were downright embarrassing--especially the one in the shuttle bay.  The fact that she was on her way to commit suicide so she would die with her captain/friend/sweetheart/whatever didn't help.  Don't tell me you believed that 'diplomatic solution' stuff she was talking about, or even Trip saying she was trying to rescue the captain.  She knew she was gonna die.

I mean, what is wrong with the woman?!  A few weeks ago she was 'exploring human sexuality' with Trip after an episode of sending deadly glances at the competition, and now she's back to pining after Archer again.  Maybe she was disappointed with Trip's performance.  In any case, I would advise Malcolm, Travis, Hayes, Phlox, Porthos, and the rest of the ship's male population to watch out, because there's a hormonally hyper-active Vulcan on board and I doubt anyone is safe (actually, in view of what happened in "Rajiin", Hoshi and the rest of the gals had better watch out too).

I seriously, seriously hope that what is about to be revealed is that T'Pol is suffering from some sort of disease (maybe related to her mind-melds) that is degrading her ability to control her emotions.  Because from where I'm standing, the woman is out of control--and not just for a Vulcan.  Her behavior this episode was not only illogical, but dangerous to both herself and her crew.  And I do not appreciate the return of the Archer/T'Pol spectre, which, it seems, is destined to be the predominant pairing of the series.  Oh joy.  The return of the pairing with the least amount of chemistry since Worf/Troi.  My apoligies to all those Worf/Troi shippers out there--I meant no insult.  My point is, Archer and T'Pol do not sizzle on screen together.  They're lucky if they fizzle.

And to be frank, anyone out there who continues to insist that Jolene Blalock is a superb actress...please, get real.  In my view, she's just okay...most of the time.  She's good at rolling her eyes sideways in a tragic manner, good at sobbing and yelling, and good at waggling her hips when she walks.  She has good chemistry with Trip for some reason, which is why I'm an advocate for that pairing over the other one.  But to be fair, most of what I find to complain about is probably not Blalock's fault, exactly.  It's the fault of the writers who like to play kickball with her character, passing her from emotion to emotion and from man to man as the whim suits them.  I used to be quite fond of T'Pol as a character, but unless something changes, they've played the 'hyper-emotional Vulcan' card one too many times for me.

Sorry about that.  Let's move on.

Despite what you might think from reading the previous paragraphs, I actually enjoyed the vast majority of this episode.  Scenes that stood out included Archer's farewell speech to his crew (the 'we used to be explorers' one), and Degra arguing with the sloth Xindi about the ethics of the weapon (playing back to his concerns in "Stratagem").  Those two scenes contained most of my favorite lines of the show.  Later on, we see Archer harking back to his old 'punching bag' role (makes you a bit nostalgic just thinking about it, doesn't it?), and then (wisely) asking to talk to Degra instead of the reptiles.  Degra, as one might suspect, is the one who is willing to listen to what Archer is saying, and he and his friends become our only hope as the reptiles close in on Archer again.  But honestly, would you believe this desperate guy who is telling you a story about time travel and fluidic aliens (or whatever)?  As I noted way up near the beginning, Archer himself wasn't believing in that argument until his hand was forced.  Doesn't quite seem right, somehow.

And then there is the big question.  She.  Who is this 'she' that Degra and company were talking about?  "...She could do it!"  "Yes, precious...she could."  No, I don't think it's Sheelob.  But I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to see who it is.

Anyway, this part of the story ends, for this week, with Degra and the other Mammalian Xindi openly  and directly at odds with the Reptilians with regard to Archer's fate.  The Reptilians have the sympathetic Xindi forcibly removed and inform them that Archer is going to a detention center.  Meanwhile, on the Enterprise....

With the news that the Xindi have come to blow up the ship, T'Pol decides that she doesn't need to leave the ship to commit suicide--she can die right here, along with everyone else.  So she comes to the bridge, and we see what I would call one of the coolest space battles I've ever seen on Trek.  Maybe the coolest since the great ones of DS9.  For me, most Trek battles aren't very exciting anymore.  But this time, there was real damage that made you feel like the crew was really in jeopardy:  a crewmember on fire, the coolant leaks and evacuation of Enginneering, consoles exploding, support struts falling, the starboard nacelle being taken out (dead in the water), hull breaches all over the place, bulkheads failing to close off the breaches (venting atmosphere), crewmembers being blown out into space (cool shot), and the icing on the cake--the bridge dome falling on Mayweather.  Great stuff!  But Mayweather survived...oh well.  That's the second time this episode that I thought maybe they were going to kill him off.  Anyway, the lighting on the bridge fails, the camera zooms in on T'Pol's for-once-Vulcan-like eyes, and we see our beautiful Enterprise drifting along, mortally wounded and probably about to get blown up...and then the episode ends.  Dang!  (I wasn't looking at the clock).  Well, I guess that means I'll be back next week.
 

Some notes:

The special effects were up to the usual standard, for the most part--the inital shot of the underwater facility and the exterior shots of the space battle were great.  I did find the splash as Archer's shuttle entered the water to be rather fake, though.

For the record, the Enterprise J was 400 years in the future.  Let's see, that's about the 2550s, right?

In that version of the future timeline, the fluidic space stuff spanned 50,000 light years and growing.

Daniels finally spilled the beans completely on the composition of the Federation...Archer looked slightly surprised to hear about Andorians and Vulcans working together, I guess.

This fluidic species has the technology to observe alternate timelines (a useful ability in sci-fi), and since they didn't like the way the future turned out, decided to contact the Xindi, tell their little lie about Earch destroying them, and therefore start the whole conflict.

A Reptilian Xindi piloted the first weapon.

And by the way, Jonathan, not all dinosaurs had brains the size of walnuts, and in any case, small brain size is not why they 'died out' with the asteroid hit.  And you have heard of birds, right?  You know, avians?  The last dinosaurs, my friend...and arguably one of the most successful groups of animals on the planet.
 

"Without a world of our own, we are but children lost in the wilderness." -Degra, quoting from a great Xindi philosopher.

"Patience is for the dead." -a wascally weptile; yes, we missed you guys.

"I think I found reverse."
"Great.  But unless we plan to fly in ass-first we better figure out how to make it go forward." -Travis and Trip figuring out how to fly the insectoid shuttle.

"Commander Tucker is going to need time to install the translation matrix."
"If Commander Tucker wants to speak insectoid I have to get this right first." -T'Pol and Hoshi; yeah you tell her, Hoshi!

"Their flight path is similar to erratic." -T'Pol, commenting on Trip's and Travis's flying.

"Sorry!"
"No problem; I'll send you the bill." -Trip and Archer after Travis bumps the insectoid shuttle into the ship (yes, more like Galaxy Quest all the time).

"You did say that most of this thing's power was routed to structural integrity..."
"...And you said we could probably fly it inside a gas giant.  ...  Hell, it's only water!" -Travis and Trip before they dive in; nice reference to a conversation they had in the previous episode.

"Someone once said that dealing with Reptilians is like bargaining with the sun; you make no progress, and you come away burned."
"It's not him."
"The last time I saw you like this was when you delivered the first weapon."
"That one only killed 7 million; this one will destroy an entire world."
"Better their world than ours."
"That's what I keep telling myself.  But the reality is a good number of the dead will be innocents...and children."
"It's best not to think about it."
"That's difficult when you have children of your own."
"What we do is for them.  For our childrens' future.  Remember that."
"I wonder how they'll remember us." -the Sloth and Degra; the last two lines are my favorite from this episode.

"I know these controls aren't exactly intuitive."
"I think they were built for someone with compound eyes." -Mayweather and Archer; no, really, you think?

"I hate to add to this menagerie of yours, Doc."
"Nonsense. What's, er, one more mouth to feed?"
"Just don't harvest any part of him."
"Oh, I doubt that will be necessary." -Archer and Phlox.  Gaaahhh!!  No, Jon, don't!  Don't leave little Porthos with Dr. Death!  Leave him with Hoshi or someone....Augghhhh!!!

"But I'm going to ask all of you to think back to the day when this ship was first launched.  We were explorers, then.  When all this is over...when Earth is safe...I want you to get back to that job.  There are 400 billion stars in our galaxy; we've only explored a tiny fraction.  You have a lot of work to do.  Of all the captains that will sit in this chair, I can't imagine any of them being more proud than I am right now." -Archer, in his non-farewell address to the senior staff.  Aw, it brings a tear to the eye....

"All of this collusion is dangerous; the council is fracturing.  We can't forget who the real enemy is."
"We may not know who the real enemy is." -the other primate and Degra.

"What the hell's wrong with you?!" -Trip to T'Pol as she tries to board the shuttlepod.  Yeah, that's what I'd like to know, too.
 

Rating:  ****1/2  Yes.  I rate this fairly highly because I was very entertained, but believe me, it wasn't perfect.  It's a pity, because the episode had a lot of great dialogue, particularly among the Xindi and between them and Archer.  But I was somewhat concerned by the continued dodgy characterization of Archer, and downright disturbed by the even dodgier characterization of T'Pol.  Major points added for making the space battle look much more dire than these things usually do, and also major points to Degra and friends, who seem to show more willingness to listen and negotiate than Archer himself.  Ironic, isn't it?
 
 

2/25/04--Review for:  "Hatchery" (an insectoid egg spits on Archer; when he starts acting wacko, the crew mutinies and the MACOs don't)

I could tell from the "Previously on Enterprise" bit that this week would feature both insectoids and more Reed/Hayes stuff.  Well, there goes my hopes for a discovery of the last of the Avian Xindi (the title gave me hope).  (Sigh)  Oh well, on to the review.

The point of this episode didn't show up for the first part...I was sitting there watching Archer getting spit on and starting to obsess about Xindi eggs, and I was wondering for a moment where exactly this was going.  It was obvious fairly quickly that the egg spit had messed with his brain (yeah, I know:  there wasn't much to mess with...but bear with me).  But after a few minutes of Archer putting the safety of a bunch of eggs over his mission, I was just about to get irate.  I mean, this is worse than the anti-abortion argument--save a few unborn eggs and who cares if Earth gets blown up as a result!  Of course, it was around the time I was beginning to form this argument when I realized that the real story was starting to come to the fore.

I suppose this episode was about 'smart loyalty' vs. 'blind loyalty', more than anything else.  Let's start with the 'smart loyalty', which is (naturally) exhibited by T'Pol and the Starfleet crew.  I'll admit that I thought T'Pol should have figured the truth out a bit earlier than she did, but that's okay.  In any case, when she questions Archer, he locks her up.  When Reed blows up a Xindi ship (using Hayes's idea) to keep them from escaping and giving away their position, Archer locks him up too.  And he pulls Major Hayes in as his new security chief, first officer, confidante, and (for all we know) his tennis partner.  Oh, sorry.  Water polo.  Team.  Never mind.

Once T'Pol convinces Trip that Archer has gone a bit wacko, he acts on her advice and convinces Phlox to play the 'Chief Medical Officer' card (in other words, 'Submit to my will or I'll take you out, you so-called captain!  For I am the SHIP'S DOCTOR...and I control the destiny of AAALLLL....BWAAHHHAAAHAAHH!!!').  Ahem, anyway...this is used a lot in Star Trek, in case you haven't noticed.  It is done somewhat cleverly here; even as Trip and Phlox aren't very good at tricking Archer into coming to Sickbay, Phlox is secretly running scans on the captain during the conversation.  Unfortunately, this doesn't get us anywhere, as the scans don't show anything wrong with him.  We'd better go to Plan B.

Mutiny.  This is another thing that's been used in Trek before, but this time it was more effective than most, mainly because of the contrast between the Starfleet officers and the MACOs.  Here we come to the 'blind loyalty', headliined by Hayes and his complete lack of initiative when it comes to disobeying orders issued by an obviously psycho captain.  I never had a terrific amount of respect for either Hayes or any of his MACOs, but this episode took it down another couple of notches, I must admit.  Yes, it's true that the Starfleet crew had known and worked with Archer for two years longer than Hayes, and as a result might be better able to spot wacko behavior.  And admittedly, given Archer's erratic and often contradictory behavior this season, I suppose it might be difficult for Hayes to tell when Archer's really gone off the rails....

But still, doesn't the man have any common sense?  He did, after all, give Archer a couple of what were, at the very least, rather bemused looks, which would suggest that he was having a few doubts about the captain's behavior himself.  But what did he do with those doubts?  Nothing.  Even at the end of the episode, when he knows that Archer was being influenced by the egg spit, he states to Reed that he probably would have continued following Archer's orders even if he had known at the time about the egg spit.  Now, loyalty and following the chain of command is one thing, but sheer stupidity is another.  I suppose if Archer was on acid, Hayes would still follow his orders just as blindly.  Pitiful.

One thing I would have been interested to see is how Amanda Cole could have played into this.  We could have had her and Trip pointing weapons at one another, forced into opposition--they easily could have had her on the bridge with Hayes at the end.  But no.  I'm guessing that either the actress was busy elsewhere, or the writers simply aren't taking that thread any further.  Well, good riddance then.  If they didn't have the courage to write a good confrontation into this, the relationship is better off dead.

Now then, having said all of that, there was a bit more to this episode than just showing how good the Starfleet officers were at using their brains as opposed to the MACOs, who didn't appear to have brains.  Archer may have been suffering from severe egg spit complications at the time, but as he makes his points about why they should save the eggs before going on to Azati Prime, the reactions of the other officers are telling.  Trip, who is back in his original character after some evidence of softening on this matter, is back with his old 'all Xindi are evil' mantra.  He uses that argument to say that they should just torch the eggs and get on with their mission.  T'Pol says nothing to contradict his reasoning, and indeed, seems to be entirely on Trip's side on this one, staring down Archer with an air of subtle disbelief.  On the other hand, a few scenes down the road we see Trip making Archer's case to Reed and Mayweather, but using the excuse that this will give them time to study the insectoid tactical systems.  He has a point, I suppose, but I wonder if this change of heart was intentional on the writers' part, or if it was just them being a bit sloppy.

This episode had a lot of little touches that I liked....
-The information about Reed's insect-collecting father
-Trip using the neuropressure excuse to get Chang to let him into T'Pol's quarters
-Trip trying the same excuse later, and though it doesn't work, buying enough time for Reed and company to overwhelm Chang
-Right after Archer relieves Reed of duty--that little look Reed exchanges with Hoshi (worried and bewildered are the words, I think), and the shot of Travis, facing away from them but also looking a bit worried, to say the least
-During the mutiny, T'Pol (in a Starfleet uniform and Enterprise 'baseball cap') nerve pinching a MACO, and Reed saying 'sorry' before shooting the other one
-The little insectoids scurrying around on the floor...and later on a very motherly Archer
-The stand-off on the bridge ending in Travis lunging into Hayes and saving the day

But before I give my grade, I'd like to point out that I did have a major gripe with this episode.  And yes, you guessed it:  it has to do with science.  I know, I know...why do I bother?  Anyway, it's about that comment Phlox made about the insectoids being 'a genderless species'.  Now, I was a bit suspicious of this remark from the start, but my mind was racing to the many examples of hermaphrodites in the animal kingdom.  Yes, it's certainly possible to say that the insectoids are 'genderless', in the sense that they possess both male and female sex organs--in other words, they're hermaphrodites.

Then the other shoe drops:  Phlox claims that they 'reproduce asexually.  Forgive me, but that is utterly ridiculous.  While it's true that many simple organisms (such as bacteria) as well as many plants (using vegetative reproduction) are capable of this, very few animals reproduce asexually.  In fact, right off-hand, I can only think of a couple:  certain species of hymenoptera (ants, bees, etc.), and an obscure species of salamander, I believe (I'll get back to them in a minute).  The problem is, even hermaphrodites who can fertilize themselves in dire circumstances (when there's no one else from their species around) do not reproduce asexually.  The process is still very much sexual, with eggs and sperm involved--it's just that a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite has both of those necessary ingredients and is able to go through reproduction without a partner.  This may sound disgusting or appealing to you, but that's the way it is....  Anyway, the eggs and sperm go through meiosis as usual, and combine as usual...which means it's a sexual process.

But perhaps the writers didn't mean that the insectoids are hermaphroditic.  Perhaps they meant that they are akin to those bees or salamanders I mentioned earlier, which actually do reproduce asexually, with only eggs and no sperm involved.  The problem is, those bees and salamanders are not a 'genderless species'.  In fact, the salamanders are all female.  Yes, that's right, every last one.  They even (and I swear I am not making this up) engage in lesbian-like behavior around the time of 'conception', I suppose because that stimulates them to start the process of reproduction.  With bees (for example), it's a bit more complicated, but basically the same if you're talking about producing workers.  Worker bees are produced asexually by the queen (who is, you guessed, female).  The workers are also female, and are sterile.  Drones (male bees) are only involved in producing more drones and queens.  But both in the case of the salamanders and the case of producing worker bees, there is no 'sex' involved, at least insofar as the exchange of genetic material.

This method of reproduction is called parthenogenesis, and despite what a literal reading of the bible might tell you, the only thing it can ever produce in any species is a female...and in the vast majority of species, it is a freak occurence, not the usual thing.  The salamanders and hymenoptera are rare exceptions, and the reason they are so rare is that in complicated organisms other than plants, failing to exchange genetic material is not really a good strategy.  The reason is that the lower the genetic diversity in a species, the more susceptible the whole species is to being wiped out by a disease, or perhaps failing to adapt to a new environment.  Low genetic diversity is why cheetahs are in such trouble, as I'm sure you've heard.  That's why that species of salamanders is such a rarity.  With the bees and other hymenoptera, there is not loss of diversity, since the individuals which are produced asexually do not contribute to the future gene pool...only the queen and her drones do that, and that is still a sexual process.

Have I lost you yet?  Sorry if I have--I went off on a bit of a tangent, there.  My point is that Phlox made two statements, and each one taken by itself could make sense.  Either the insectoids are genderless, or they reproduce asexually...but not both.  Either they're hermaphrodites which reproduce sexually, or they're females who produce asexually.

There, have I ranted enough about horrific science this week?  Mind you, it could have been worse.  At least Archer had to ask for Hoshi to find out about the burial customs of the insectoids; if this had beeen "Similitude" or "Extinction", Archer would have had that information injected into his brain with the egg spit.
 

Some notes:

As noted above, Reed's father is fascinated with insects, and it drives his mother crazy.  I'm not sure if, as Reed suggests, he really would want to get a look at that place, though.

There were originally 31 viable eggs.  One episode and a few short circuits later, 19 of the hatchlings are expected to survive until they're rescued by another insectoid ship.

(The following is paraphrased and not necessarily accurate)...Archer's great-grandfather was fighting in North Africa during the Eugenics Wars, and managed to get the other side to hold their fire long enough to evacuate a school caught in the middle...well, it's still a far cry from saving a bunch of eggs, if you ask me.

The non-stardate of this episode is January 8, 2154.  Just FYI.
 

"The egg probably considered you a threat."
"Humans seem to have that effect on the Xindi." --Phlox and Archer.

"I don't think this ship likes us very much." --Mayweather to Trip, regarding the insectoid ship.

"I don't know much about Vulcan ethics, but humans don't throw morality out the window when things start getting rough." --Archer to T'Pol; I am choking with laughter at the moment....

"I think it's time we throw the rulebook out the window." --Trip to Phlox; yes, it is about that time.  And that's the second time the phrase 'out the window' has been used, if you've noticed....

"Until the captain says otherwise, I give the orders on this bridge." --Hayes, proving that maybe bringing in the military wasn't such a good idea.
 

Rating:  ****1/2  It would be higher, but I docked points for the scientific conundrum I mentioned at length above.  I enjoyed this episode a great deal, and it was nice to see the Starfleet officers shine at the MACOs' expense.  I still would like to have seen the Avian Xindi back from the dead, though....
 
 

2/18/04--Review for:  "Doctor's Orders" (Dr. Death loses it, a bit)

An understatement, really.  First of all, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a Voyager episode where the whole crew was put to sleep except the Doc and the Catsuit?  Since the Catsuit was a hallucination this time, never mind.

Frankly, I wouldn't care if they stole an idea from Voyager, as long as the episode turns out to be either intellectually challenging, ethically interesting, character developing, or at least just entertaining.  In my humble opinion, this episode was none of these things.  It may have barely grazed Phlox's character, but given the fact that he was distinctly out-of-character for the vast majority of the episode, even that is mostly useless.

The role of the T'Pol apparition was mildly interesting at first, though even that disintegrated as Blalock's over-acting started to get on my nerves.  Surprise, surprise...T'Pol is even more emotional than usual this week.  I am so sick of Vulcans losing their control of emotions and wimpering all over the place...it seems like we get this all the time in modern Trek.  It is no longer a novelty.

Of course, this was not really T'Pol, but an apparition of T'Pol from the dingy depths of Phlox's imagination.  The revelation of this at the end did surprise me, I admit...but instead of it giving a new dimension to the episode, I felt that it made it even more pointless.

There's no getting around it:  I simply did not like this episode (can you tell?).  I have not become a fan of Enterprise because I like to watch Phlox making small talk with Porthos and T'Pol for 40 minutes--oh, all right, I suppose there was the 'bogeyman' stuff too, but I found this even less entertaining than the rest of it, and it wasn't even suitably creepy.  The only moment in the episode where I was even remotely worried was when Phlox almost shot poor little Porthos.

Two interesting facts I learned about Phlox are that he likes to sing and that he walks around Sickbay in the nude when no one else is around.  Except for the nude part, this reminds me (quite unpleasantly) of one of the more annoying aspects of one of Phlox's fellow doctors, if you know what I mean.  Except that Phlox's singing is more interesting, since he's singing in Denobulan (I assume).

Did I mention that I didn't like the over-acting?  Yes...this goes for both Phlox and T'Pol, mind you.  But Porthos was right on.

I'd like to spend the remainder of this review ranting about the fate of the rest of this gallant crew.  What I'd like to say is...WHEN ARE YOU IDIOTS OF TPTB GOING TO GIVE ANYTHING TO HOSHI, TRAVIS, OR EVEN REED?!?  Yes, I realize that Malcolm got a third of a show last week, but he needs MORE.  Hoshi has gotten basically one show this season, and NOTHING ELSE.  Well, except for one brief cameo in this episode, where she got to wear some cool psycho makeup.  Heck, even after having a whole episode devoted to him, Phlox still comes off without much so far this year.  That leaves Archer, T'Pol, and Trip with the vast majority of the action this season, and while I have enjoyed many of the stories which involved one or all of these three, I hunger for more of the other characters.  Malcolm Reed, though he has fared better than the others, still has not gotten what he deserves.  The man has a lot of interesting stories to tell, but the writers aren't giving him enough.  Hoshi Sato has a huge amount of potential for character development and exploration, but remains almost entirely unexploited.  Travis Mayweather has had so little to do over the course of the series that he has become little more than a joke to me.  But even our helmsman must have some stories left in him, if only someone would try to tell them.

If the writers would give even the slightest amount of consideration they'd begin to see the gold mine that these so-called minor characters represent.  They've virtually mined out T'Pol already, and I've seen enough of Archer and his so-called 'ethical conflicts' to last me a lifetime.  Trip still has some potential left, though I'm not sure they'll explore it in the best way.  But Reed, Sato, Phlox, and even Mayweather still have life in them.  Maybe it's time for a coup on the Enterprise:  Captain Reed, Science Officer Sato, Chief Engineer Mayweather, and, er, Phlox the Captain's dog.  Do you think they'd get more dialogue and action that way?  Eh, probably not....

Some notes:

Phlox's pen pal (as we've heard before) is Dr. Lucas.

Two weeks to go around the disturbance.  Less than an hour at Warp 4.  Four days at impulse.  I really have no idea if these times are at all consistent with the warp charts, but they don't seem quite right to me, somehow.

Remind me never to let Phlox feed me anything that looks even remotely like a leech.  I don't care if it does cleanse my system.

I'm not sure about this, but this might be the first time we've seen an Enterprise crew member watching something in color.

Phlox, while in varying degrees of confusion, related several 'fun facts' about his homeworld.  I think it's safe to say that these are true:  Denobula's cities are crowded by choice and are full of a vibrant and communal atmosphere; Denobulans are highly sociable people, and two aren't even enough for a Denobulan marriage (we sort of knew this).  I'm not sure what to make of Phlox's whinging about wanting to get back among his own kind, since he was obviously under the influence of the trans-dimensional anomalies by that time and getting increasingly emotional.  But it could well be that this desire is at least partly true.

Did I mention that the major take-home message is that if Trip tells you not to do something, don't do it?
 

"Commander Tucker was not too keen on my plan, but I was able to convince Captain Archer."  -Phlox in his letter to Dr. Lucas.  Yeah, what else is new?...And if you want my opinion, Archer should stop trusting Phlox.
 

Rating:  ****  Not one of the best (nor one of the worst, but we won't go there).  Episodes in Trek can be (and often have been) driven entirely by one or two characters, with varying degrees of success.  But the writing has to be superb for this to work...and the writing of this episode was far from superb.  Sometimes, good acting can save bad writing to some degree, but over-acting rarely saves anything, as far as I'm concerned.  It certainly doesn't save an episode with precious little plot, and being subjected to this kind of acting and writing for a good half hour started to get on my nerves, at the least.  This episode becomes a footnote in my book, as it doesn't even advance the plot of the Xindi arc except to flash some more trans-dimensional stuff in front of our eyes.  Here's hoping next week's is better....
 
 

2/11/04--Review for:  "Harbinger" (Trip gets a new girlfriend; T'Pol gets jealous...meanwhile, Hayes struts his stuff; Reed gets jealous)

"Last 50 episodes on Enterprise"...and we see a montage of everything from the basic arc principles to the religious nuts in "Chosen Realm" to Reed complaining about Hayes to Sim's declaration of his feelings to T'Pol in "Similitude".  What this somewhat confusing jumble of information suggested to me was that this week, we were going to see a story which encompassed several sub-plots, involving (somehow) each of these elements in some way.  That's exactly what happened.

There were three major stories in this week's episode, and though they were somewhat interconnected through certain scenes and dialogue, they were largely separate.  I'll start with the one that has the least amount of direct effect on the characters--that is, the furthering of the Xindi arc.  Though it superficially centers around a large glob of jello and an alien who would be at home in "The Next Phase", this subplot drops a huge revelation at the end:  that the alien's people are not only connected with the whole plot of the Xindi arc, but appear to be the instigators of the arc.  In other words, it appears at this point that his people were probably the ones who told the Xindi that Earth was going to attack them, thus beginning the cycle of violence we have been witnessing for the past season.  We suspected that something like this was going to be revealed eventually, but I was actually taken by surprise that it was this particular alien.  Maybe I shouldn't have been.  But no matter; the fruits of this revelation will be played out in the episodes to come, and I'll wait until then to comment on it further.  This episode had two other subplots, which to me were infinitely more interesting than this one.

I have been waiting for a very, very long time to see...Reed punching Hayes's lights out.  Aha, you thought I was going to say something about Trip and T'Pol, didn't you?  Well, I'll get to that in a minute.  But the fact is, I loved the Reed/Hayes subplot.  I really have been waiting for an episode devoted to having these two at each others' throats, and here it is.  Reed was on the defensive as Hayes seemed to be throwing his weight around a bit (no pun intended, I swear).  Reed's frustration was understandable, especially given Hayes's less-than-diplomatic attitude, and his point that the MACOs' experience is all (or mostly) simulated rings true.  The drills were entertaining to watch, mainly because they seemed to be showing repeatedly that the Enterprise senior staff (including Travis, Trip, Hoshi, and T'Pol) seemed to be kicking the MACOs' collective butts.  This would seem to suggest that Reed's a better trainer, though I'm not sure he could take credit for T'Pol's performance (I'll mention this in the third section, below).

The other shoe dropped when a MACO creamed poor Travis (hey, at least he got a part this week), and Reed called foul for the excessive violence, which included the drawing of blood.  This is the setup for the later sparring scene, in which Reed and Hayes bash each others' brains out, though fortunately Reed still has enough brains afterward to figure out how to stop the alien from destroying the ship.  I'm not enamored of violence in general, but this scene, and all of the other ones in this subplot, were very well done, in terms of the acting, action, and dialogue.  In the end, Reed and Hayes are forced to put aside their conflict for the good of the ship, both in terms of the immediate crisis and in more far-reaching ways as well.  But by the end of this episode, Archer didn't really have to tell Reed and Hayes to drop the hostilities, because they'd pretty much come to that understanding themselves.  Personally, I hope we haven't seen the last of this story, though I'm not holding out hope.

The one thing I regretted about the Reed subplot was that Hoshi was not the one to try to talk Reed around.  I've long been an advocate of pairing Hoshi with Reed--not necessarily in a romantic way (at least at first...), but in a way that would give her character more meaningful dialogue while developing his character as well.  She really, really needs a character partner, and Travis isn't it (neither important enough nor interesting enough, frankly).  I'm guessing Trip wouldn't be right either, especially after this episode, if you get my meaning.  That leaves Reed.  But I suppose I'll have to concede that I know why they had Trip and not Hoshi communing with Reed in the mess hall...after all, it resulted in some of the best dialogue in the episode, mostly centering around Reed jabbing Trip about the neuropressure stuff.  Speaking of which, I guess it's time to move on to topic number three....

Where to start, where to start....

Well, I suppose I've suspected an approaching watershed moment in the Trip/T'Pol relationship for a long time, although I didn't predict Amanda Cole's part in it.  As it turns out, she seems to be (for the moment, at least), little more than a catalyst for T'Pol's feelings about Trip to surface.  Corporal Cole's headaches prove that Trip is still a novice when it comes to neuropressure, at least without T'Pol's guidance.  He is also, it seems, a bit of a novice when it comes to male-female relations.  Let's face it, the boy gets bounced back and forth like a volleyball in this episode, and I suspect he only puts up with it because there's kissing and other...er...things involved.  I don't mean to paint Trip as shallow...not at all.  If anyone's being shallow, it's the two ladies.

I disliked the characterization of Cole from the beginning of this episode; frankly, she comes across as a bit of a vixen, and I don't mean that in a good way.  I'm trying to decide if T'Pol's much better.  Let's take a look at T'Pol's reactions throughout the episode....  When she learns of Trip's neuropressure sessions with Cole, she acts like a subdued but very wronged girlfriend.  When Phlox suggests that she take over Cole's neuropressure to repair Trip's damage, she doesn't seem to revel in the idea.  During the training sessions where two of our subplots collide, a MACO's fist collides with T'Pol's head when she spends too much time watching Trip and Cole.  She complains that Trip and Cole are spending too much time together, and that their behavior is pretty hard to miss (mind you, Reed makes the same point, so we shouldn't read too much into it, I suppose).  During the girl-girl neuropressure scene, T'Pol pokes Cole particularly hard when she mentions how nice Trip's arms are (I guess I've never noticed; I'll have to watch next time).

Finally, T'Pol gets into a verbal sparring match with Trip, and scores a blow by bringing up Sim's revelation of his and Trip's feelings for her (see "Similitude").  After a few more words to bring the argument around to trap Trip in his own words, T'Pol leans forward and kisses him.  And then she disrobes.  And we see (briefly) her behind.  Doesn't really bother me personally, but then, I don't have young children.  Then she kisses him again, and, well, I think we can all guess what happens after that.  Trip seems a bit stunned by the whole thing, but I guess he's not about to turn down that kind of opportunity, and as T'Pol points out, he is attracted to her.

Now fast forward to near the end of the episode, after Reed and Hayes have stopped the alien from destroying the ship.  In a mess hall scene, Trip tries to get T'Pol into the 'let's talk about last night' discussion, and she answers in a manner which contradicts her behavior pattern for the entire episode.  She claims that it was nothing more than an experiment--her exploration of human sexuality.  This is worse (by far) than Tasha Yar telling Data at the end of "The Naked Now" that 'it never happened'.  Because while Tasha may have had certain repressed inclinations toward Data (many fans have latched onto that idea), she was the equivalent of seriously drunk at the time of the encounter.  T'Pol was not drunk.  She knew exactly what she was doing, and her words suggest that she has no regard whatsoever for Trip's feelings, which she must know would be hurt.

Of course, I don't believe for one minute that she meant what she said.  What exactly she did mean, I am not sure.  Either she was simply trying to downplay the importance of the encounter (all that unemotional Vulcan pride and such), or she was just teasing him a bit.  Given that expression in her eyes at the end, around the time Trip suggests that they can still do neuropressure together, I suspect more of the latter theory.  But a little of both could be true.  In any case, I feel a little sorry for Trip.  Even though he might not be feeling sorry for himself, at this point.

I could sit here and complain to high heaven about T'Pol's emotionalism, and how much that conflicts with many fans' set view of what a Vulcan should be.  But I and others have covered this ground over and over...and frankly, I've grown battle-weary.  It is clear to me that T'Pol is a special case when it comes to Vulcans.  She is not the stereotype; she is the exception rather than the rule.  The counter-argument to this is that all of Enterprise's Vulcans have suffered similar indignities, and to some extent, I agree.  But whether or not we agree with it, T'Pol's emotional character is here to stay.  Would I have written it differently?  Certainly.  But the same goes for a lot of things in Trek--not just in Enterprise, by the way.  It's not a perfect world; Enterprise certainly isn't perfect.  But I enjoy it, and I believe many others do as well, and sometimes, that is enough.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for better, however....

Some notes:

Internal continuity continues in this arc as we speed toward Degra's red giant (see last week).

I thought it was cool how Reed managed to grapple the pod in the jello on only his second try.  Maybe it wasn't so cool when he accidentally pulled the whole Enterprise in instead of pulling the pod out, but that's okay.  Not sure about the physics of it, though.  I mean, once the Enterprise got partway in and started to resist, wouldn't the pod just come free?  Or maybe the pod was in there so long that it started to congeal more around it....oh, never mind.  Enterprise science; gotta love it.

Given the above statement, I'll try not to dwell on the ammonium sulfide in the air.

Corporal Amanda Cole's fun facts:  she's from Florida, her hometown was less than 50 km from Trip's, her high school and Trip's were rivals, she and Trip went to the same movie theaters (I wonder if she watched corny old ones too), her hometown (as well as Trip's) is now gone due to the Xindi attack, and her family moved north a few years ago and therefore didn't get vaporized.  There, everything you need to know about Amanda Cole, right?

The hull of the alien's pod is the same material as the stuff on the surface of the Death St--er, I mean, spheres.

I guess all those Klingon encounters weren't for nothing, although I wonder in what instance it was that Reed learned that 'little Klingon move [he] picked up'.  Maybe it was when that female Klingon was beating him up in "Sleeping Dogs"?  Maybe not.
 

"These are training sessions, Major.  If your men can't understand that, then I'm going to put a stop to them right now."  -Reed to Hayes, after Mayweather gets a bit beat up.

"Until I can get the answers I need, we'll have to bend a few ethics."  --Archer to Phlox...I'm sorry, I'm having trouble trying to stop laughing....

"I don't know who did more damage to the engine, the alien or Malcolm."  --Trip to T'Pol, trying to break the ice with a little small talk.

"Think we're dismissed?"  --Reed to Hayes, after Archer leaves without dimissing them.

"When the Xindi destroy Earth, my people will prevail."  --the alien's last words.  Looks like we finally found the instigators of this whole thing.
 

Rating:  ****3/4  I must admit, I was both entertained and intrigued this week.  Though parts of the episode left me wondering about character integrity, etc., I must admit that, to the shipper in me, this was a bit of a triumph.  I was never a fan of Archer/T'Pol (as anyone who's been reading my reviews will know).  This episode has not driven a stake in that pairing, but it has wounded it considerably.  No matter what T'Pol may say, the fact is that when she wanted someone with whom to be intimate, she chose Trip.  Not Archer.  Trip.  In fact, I was somewhat surprised that Archer played no role whatsoever in this part of the episode.  He was spending his time yelling at aliens and security officers instead.  Not that I'm saying such pastimes don't suit him, but considering all the buzz in earlier episodes, I guess I expected something.  But TPTB were toying with us then, and they're still toying with us now, I dare say.  Anyway, I enjoyed myself this week, and look forward to more.
 
 

2/4/04--Review for:  "Stratagem"  (Archer messes with Degra's mind to get the information he wants)

I found the structure of this episode to be quite interesting.  The multiple deceptions that Archer had in store for Degra were well played, and I'm ashamed to say that I myself was fooled once for sure, and (for a minute or so) twice.  I found Degra's sputtering lines when he was trying to bluff that he had figured it out earlier than he actually had amusing and somewhat reminiscent of what we fans can sometimes do (aw, yeah, I knew about that plot twist all along).  Of course, sometimes the plot twists are pretty obvious on Enterprise, and we actually do see them coming from a mile away.

I'll admit, for the first few minutes of this episode, I wasn't sure what was going on.  I thought maybe we were in another reset button (and I wasn't looking forward to it), but was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be the old 'fool them with the holodeck' ploy (although since holodecks haven't been invented yet except in "Unexpected", this is instead the 'fool them with the hydrolics' ploy).

Then, after their cover is blown (by a rather unobliging flickering viewscreen which had been posing as a window), Archer needs to figure out another deception, and does it masterfully.  The episode was cleverly structured throughout, though it may have had a somewhat muddled feel during the first viewing, before you have figured out exactly what is going on.

But the structure was just the dressing; the core of this episode was a battle of wills between Archer and Degra, with Archer playing the deceiver trying to get the information he wants, and Degra as the adversary, reluctant or otherwise, who is being tricked into revealing his secrets.  Degra as a character is (pardon the expression) humanized through his dialogue with Archer, as we learn more about his past and his outlook.  We see that he did not look at the 7 million lives lost with the cold eyes of an unfeeling man, but with the regret and awakening horror of a man who is struggling with his priorities and his conscience.  He got into this to protect his family, but at the same time he wonders how many children were killed in the attack on Earth.

At the same time, Archer's own assumptions about Degra (and the Xindi in general) are given another jolt, as he hears Degra's reaction to the 7 million dead.  Archer's first questions about whether all Xindi are evil had come with Gralik the sloth a few episodes back, and now we see another aspect of the many views the Xindi have about Earth and conflict in general.  Whereas Gralik was simply appalled that he was taking part in the manufacture of such a deadly weapon, Degra knows full well what he's doing, but still has reservations about causing so much death and destruction.  For me, Degra's is the more interesting dilemma, because Gralik was just an innocent, whereas Degra has his reasons--whether they be right or wrong--for wanting to do this.  That makes Degra the character with internal conflicts, which I always love.

A little tangent.  I suppose I am still disappointed in the writers' apparent unwillingness to focus on anything but the most violent and deceitful aspects of the reptillians and insectoids.  While it's true that Archer made up the stuff about the insectoids taking over after Earth was destroyed, Degra did eventually believe him.  This says to me that Degra sees the insectoids as at least capable of such treachery, even if he wouldn't have thought of it himself.  What would have happened if this episode had been done with an insectoid in Degra's place?  Well, for one thing, the budget would have been impossible, since we'd be talking about a CGI alien in a heck of a lot of shots.  Okay, so what about a reptillian?  I suppose we needed a high-level Xindi, though--someone who would know enough about the weapon and its location to be of any help.  And we know what bastards the high level reptillians are, don't we?  But that's a corner the writers have painted themselves into.  Somehow, I doubt the reptillians or the insectoids will ever be 'humanized', just as I doubt we'll be seeing anything more of the manatees than we have already.  So it's down to the sloths and the primates to carry the 'good' side of what the Xindi represent.  Okay, I suppose I can live with that.

But to tell you the truth, I still don't find *any* of the Xindi races terribly interesting.  However, this episode *has* been better at giving life to a single Xindi character than any before--in my opinion, far better than Gralik's story in "The Shipment".  As a character story, this episode did fairly well; the plot structure gave it an interesting twist or two, which elevated it a bit more.  I would take off points, however, for the somewhat cliched nature of the first 10 minutes or so (Archer and Degra making friends on the fake shuttle), and also for the gratuitous 'knifing out the bloodworm' bit--I'm the sort of person who always looks away when Martok slits his palm, if you know what I mean.  I suppose I should have known straight away that the bloodworm was one of Phlox's pets, but I'm easily fooled by plot devices, after all.  I suppose I should also be glad that there were no scantily clad females or seduction scenes this week.  Both of out regular ladies escaped without embarrassment, and were actually able to play a somewhat meaningful role in the more mundane aspects of the plot.  Yippee.

Some notes:

I just have to gripe about this again:  reptilian and primate neural pathways are virtually the same?!  I'm not sure if this is quite as bad as the thing about sharing more DNA than humans and chimps, but still, I am constantly amazed by the writers' lack of scientific understanding.
 

"I think you overdid the turbulence just a little, Ensign."
"I'll try to do better next time, sir."  --Archer and Mayweather.
 

Rating:  ****3/4  A high score that reflects the thought that went into the episode's structure as well as the story of Archer and Degra as characters.  Degra, for me, has become the most interesting Xindi to date, and I hope to see more of his own conflict in the future.
 
 

1/21/03--Review for:  "Proving Ground" (Shran shows up and Archer trusts him)

Although the first couple of minutes of this episode were eaten up with a bunch of "a couple of months ago on Enterprise" clips, the rest of the episode was well scripted and well acted.  I've still been avoiding spoilers--I didn't even see a brief teaser or summary of this one.  So I was genuinely both surprised and pleased when I saw Shran and his crew in the teaser.  I knew he was going to be in an episode this season, but I didn't know it would be this one.

Where to start....

I suppose the first thing I want to say is that I liked this episode.  A lot.  There, I showed all my cards straight off.  I usually do, don't I?

It's no secret that I have enjoyed Jeffrey Combs's acting over a variety of roles (btw, if you haven't seen him in "The Frighteners", it's worth a rental).  His role of Shran on Enterprise has not been one of his deeper ones, and still isn't after this episode.  But Shran is becoming a more interesting character with each outing.

Throughout the first part of the episode, I was convinced that Shran was trying nothing more than to drive a wedge between the humans and the Vulcans (some would say he wouldn't have much work to do).  But there was always that element of doubt, which in the end proved to have some merit.  It was obvious for awhile that Lt. Talis (sp?) was not entirely trustworthy, although at the time her actions could also have been interpreted as just a bit of flirtation or mutual understanding with Reed.  Despite my earlier theories about Shran's actions, I was not especially surprised when General whats-his-face called up and started implying things of a more sinister nature.  Neither was I surprised at Shran's hesitant attitude towards this.

The character of Shran has gone from his humble beginnings as a one-dimensional, punch-throwing bully to a much more fleshed-out character who has a special connection with Archer.  For whatever reason, he has grown to trust and respect Archer, and despite his statement to the contrary in "Shadows of P'Jem", seems to continue to owe him a debt in his mind, if only in the form of what his heart tells him is the right course of action.  This gives Shran the uncomfortable position of being torn between duty and conscience.  He knows that what his general tells him has a measure of truth; the concept of a deterrent that can be used to prevent war is one that has been used in the 20th century...North Korea is an example of a country that still seems to think it's a good strategy...and sometimes I think my own country, the US, believes it's a good strategy as well.  Shran's hatred of the Vulcans is realistic and his need for revenge is used to further justify the pull to fulfill his duty.  Yet although Shran seems to believe that using the weapon as a deterrent is a good idea, he also seems to have doubts about two things.

Shran's first doubt concerns whether his government will, indeed, use the weapon as a deterrent, or whether they will simply use it to nuke Vulcan and possibly other planets as well.  The second doubt concerns the idea I mentioned earlier:  Shran's relationship with Archer.  Shran does not want to betray this trust, and it seems that he wants something better for human/Andorian relations, even if he does not want the same for Vulcan/Andorian relations.  His taunting attitude to T'Pol early on (shades of Weyoun in places) could be construed as part of his ruse, but I suspect that his mixed feelings about humans and Vulcans are genuine.  He has lived with his hatred of the Vulcans for years, and even his semi-praise of T'Pol for leaving her people to stay aboard is part of his characterization of Vulcans in general--they're so bone-headed and stubborn that she had to resign her commission to be allowed to stay for this mission.  Now, there's some element of truth to this perception of Enterprise Vulcans (as we've seen over and over), but Shran's goal is clear, and my earlier supposition that he is trying to drive a wedge between the humans and Vulcans has some truth.  To my eyes, that's exactly what he is doing, because deterrent or no, allies are still important (no matter what his general says).  This may seem naive, given what he must have known Archer's reaction would be when the Andorians ran off with the weapon, but then, things didn't exactly go as Shran planned, did they?

Archer's insistence that he be aboard calling the shots made Shran uncomfortable for obvious reasons.  In truth, Shran could have dealt with Archer by disposing of him in some unfortunate accident (airlock, anyone?), but for a couple of reasons, he did not.  Firstly, Shran knew that such a blantant act would not be looked upon favorably by Earth (although it might actually gain a few points with the Vulcans).  Secondly, Shran has one of those unfortunate, debilitating things known as a conscience...and it may have cost him his prize.  If he had wanted to, he could have disposed of Archer and perhaps even torpedoed the Enterprise enough that they couldn't follow.  But he didn't.

Archer's ploy of setting the weapon to explode inside the Andorian cargo hold was a smart one, and an excellent way to give Shran a chance to glare at him spitefully (actually, I really loved the acting from Combs in this bit).  Archer was not willing to allow the Andorians to take the weapon and run; Shran was not willing to sacrifice his ship on a matter of principle.  So he let his prize go, and as a reward for hesitating so long he got his ship pummeled by the explosion.  He refused Archer's help, but in secret transmitted the data on the weapon to the Enterprise (at least, we all assume it was him, but let's be fair, it could have been that very charming tactical officer, eh?).

The title of this episode is linked to the obvious reference made by Archer:  the 'proving ground' for the weapon, evidenced by the large craters on that moon.  But in a larger sense, 'proving ground' could also be said to stand for the state of human/Andorian relations, and even to Shran as a character.  This is not a terrific start for the former, but for the latter there is some degree of promise.  We know what has to happen eventually:  humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and others will form the United Federation of Planets.  Right now, that seems like a million miles away, but circumstances change, and a mutual enemy can prove to be a strong uniting force for former foes.  But I doubt it will be the Xindi who unite these races...no, my bet's still on the Romulans.  But that discussion is for another time.

So, given the large themes and potential setups displayed in this episode, how did it play as a whole?  In my opinion, very well.  Everyone--Archer, Shran, T'Pol, Reed, and Talis--seemed to be 'on' this week.  No complaints about acting at all, and kudos to Combs for making me smile with his Andorian Mining Consortium ruse--a clever way to get the scans they wanted.  I don't want to bash Archer or anything, but when he tries this sort of thing (and he has several times in the past), it always looks a little flat.  Another thing this episode did well was to use what I call the 'guest star in distress' device, which is often more effective than the 'regular in distress' version.  The thing about regulars is that we all know they're going to make it (well, we usually know, at least).  Despite my lack of connection with a lot of spoilers, I think I would get the word somehow if one of the regulars was about to leave.  But with the guest stars, it's not always certain, and for a moment I actually wondered if stubborn little Shran was going to blow up his ship rather than go back empty-handed.  But of course, he didn't.

I also liked the way the Andorians brought out the character of the regulars.  Kudos to Reed for apologizing to Talis, even if his trust in her was later betrayed.  I also found interesting the interaction between Shran and Trip.  Not only did we get to learn a little bit about Shran's past and his motivations, but we also get Trip claiming that revenge for his sister's death is not his primary motivation.  He claims it's more about making sure this doesn't happen again (echoing the 9/11 stuff again).  I'm not sure if I believe him, given his hostile reactions to Xindi in the past ("Blow 'em out the airlock", anyone?).  Then again, I'm not sure we're supposed to believe him.

I loved the moment when Archer slugs Shran in the jaw (drawing some blue blood).  Even though I don't normally like violence, it was a perfect echo of Shran's treatment of Archer in his first episode ("The Andorian Incident").  But Archer wasn't paying him back for that; he was paying him back for his betrayed trust, and Shran knew it.

Maybe it was just me, but just about everything seemed right this week.  The plot was interesting, the conflicts real, and the characters compelling.  For me, this easily ranks the highest of all the Xindi episodes thus far, and perhaps that's because it wasn't really about the Xindi, as such.  It was about trust and lack thereof, about the staggering beginning of alliances--both personal and galactic...but most of all, it was about duty versus conscience.  For the most part, Shran chose duty, but in the end, his conscience had its say as well, in the form of that data transfer.  I certainly hope to be seeing more of this character, as well as the Andorians in general, in the future.
 

Some notes:

Okay, now I'll be watching out for a female Andorian who is not stubborn and/or condescending.  But maybe that was just an act to win over Malcolm's trust by using reverse psychology?

I realize that when we hear the Xindi speak, they're getting the 'univeral translator' treatment (with the exception of the insectoids and the manatees, who get the 'closed captioned' treatment).  But when the reptillians start saying things like "Typical humanoid arrogance", it just strikes me as odd.  But presumably, the term in their language doesn't have anything to do with humans at all (although it's an interesting thought:  maybe since all of this conflict with Earth started, the term 'humanoid' is literally an insult...but let's not get into that; I'll assume that it's just a term for the apes that TPTB decided, for sake of clarity, to translate in a way we humans would understand).

After being virtually absent for the last few episodes, Hoshi gets a few lines, and shows that she's not just a translator or a comm officer...she's also good at recovering deleted files from computers.  Oh, and I guess T'Pol helped a bit too.  Speaking of T'Pol....

T'Pol's main part in much this episode was that of a verbal punching bag--first for Shran when he expresses his distrust and dislike of Vulcans, and later for Trip when he accuses her of avoiding him.  I wonder if he's starting to enjoy the neuropressure more than she is...oh, I forgot; Vulcan's can't enjoy, right?  Mind you, T'Pol seemed to be proven right when she warned Archer about the trustworthiness of the Andorians.

A brief account of early Vulcan/Andorian relations:  Andorians are duplicitous, Vulcans are stubborn.  That enough for you?

FYI, Shran's ship is the Imperial Warship Kamari (sp?).  Lieutenant Talis (sp?) is the pretty lady with the dark blue lips...oh, and she's the tactical officer as well.

Did Archer really tell Shran about Trip's sister?  That seemed a bit odd to me, and I suppose Shran could have got ahold of that information, seeing as how they've been spying on Earth.  But what purpose did it serve, other than to cement Trip's trust a bit and give us the "no great victory comes without sacrifice" line?  I guess it showed us a slightly less violently hateful side of Trip, but I'm not entirely convinced that he's not in this for revenge.

Take note:  Archerite is a good name for a made-up element.  A bit of a risk in choosing that name, perhaps, but then, the Xindi aren't that bright, after all.

A couple of slight nitpicks about the weapon itself.  First of all, Archer mentioned something about developing a defense against it...um, exactly what sort of defense do you put up against a huge laser beam that is powerful enough to blow up a planet?  Maybe they could develop a mirror the size of Montana and just hope they can move it to the right place at the right time?  Okay, that wasn't much of a nitpick...I suppose there's some sort of defense they could develop (just so they don't use 'Missile Defense'--it doesn't work).  My second point is with the reasoning of the Xindi council--they seemed very disappointed that the weapon only kind of broke up the moon instead of blasting it to smitherines.  If you ask me, life would have a tough time surviving on a planet that has been dealt such a blow, though it might give a few of them time to escape.  Mind you, if I were in charge of Earth I'd already be evacuating as many people as possible, in case Archer's crazy little mission fails.  I guess the reptillians' desire to destroy all of humanity in one bold stroke seems just a tad unrealistic to me, and of course, "Twilight" backs me up.

One other question I have:  what makes Archer think it was Gralik who was responsible for the weapon's overload malfunction?  Sure, the guy promised to help, but the failure was much more likely to be just a technical mistake of one kind or another.  That's why people test things like that before actually using them--to find shorcomings and work them out.  If you happened to catch that Nova program on developing the landers for the new Mars missions, you'll see what I mean (malfunctioning parachutes, punctured airbags, possible short circuits, etc.).  So unlike Archer, I don't buy the idea that Gralik necessarily had anything to do with it (but on this show, if Archer says it, it's true, right?).

Andorian technology is, naturally, far superior to that of humans at this point.  This applies not only to their sensors, shielding, and weapons systems, but apparently also to their communications capabilities (minimal interference in the link with General whats-his-face).

One of my favorite little moments was that cute shot of the back of Archer's head, with Shran's antennae on the viewscreen, poking out of Archer's hair.

Just a question:  was Phlox even in this episode?  I didn't even think about this until it was over--I'll have to go back and see.

One more thing:  despite my occasional derogatory references to Archer as a 'Dubya type', I must admit that at least the man knows how to pronounce the word 'nuclear'.
 

"Don't underestimate these Pinkskins, lieutenant; they're still out there."  -Shran.

"What happened to your uniform, Subcommander?  Not that I don't find your new look becoming, but it's not exactly regulation, is it?" -Shran to T'Pol, proving that he's only human...er, Andorian.

"Your world is in jeopardy, and where are your friends?  The Vulcans.  Where is their mighty fleet?  They couldn't even spare one officer--she was forced to abandon her career to remain on your ship.  A remarkably selfless act...for a Vulcan.  But we've come to your aid.  We've come into the expanse when they refused.  We're here to help you; if you don't want our assistance, then we'll leave you to deal with the Xindi on your own...just like the Vulcans have done." -Shran to Archer; ahhh...yes, Combs delivering a wonderful performance, as always.

"I'm not gonna to ask them to work with guns at their heads just because you don't like them."
"I neither like nor dislike Andorians; I've simply had a great deal of experience with them." -Archer and T'Pol

"I don't trust them either, T'Pol.  But based on my experience, I think I can trust Commander Shran."  -Archer to T'Pol; I bet she'll be rubbing his face in that one for awhile.

"We keep doing each other favors."
"Isn't that how alliances are born?"  -Archer and Shran.

"I thought you might be avoiding me."
"Three neuropressure sessions a week is hardly avoiding you." -Trip and T'Pol; I'm not complaining...I just wonder when this whole situation is going to come to the fore, if you know what I mean.

"For what it's worth, Lt., I'm not here to steal your secrets; it'd hardly be worth the effort." -Talis to Reed.

"No great victory comes without sacrifice." -Shran to Trip.

"We're looking for a rare element.....Archerite!" -Shran, in a good bluff.

"Take us out of the system--but not too quickly.  The Andorian Mining Consortium runs from no one." -Shran.

"You like to talk about repaying debts.  I've owed you that for a long time!"  -Archer, after slugging Shran.
 

Rating:  *****  Very, very good episode, in my humble opinion.  Entertaining, thought-provoking, and largely character driven, "Proving Ground" has gone a long way toward proving to me that Enterprise is still very much worth my time.  It is the best episode thus far for Shran's character, and is, at this point, my favorite of the Xindi arc.  Kudos all around, and I'm looking forward to the next one.  BTW, I still think Shran would make a great regular...and despite the antagonism displayed in this episode, I think he's closer than ever to being in a position to serve as the Andorian representative aboard the Enterprise.  Not that he was ever very close, mind you.  Talis would be cool to see again as well.
 
 

1/14/04--Review for:  "Chosen Realm"  (the Enterprise is taken over by suicide bombers)

Forgive me if this is a bit tardy, but I've got other things on my plate right now, and I'm out of the review-writing rhthym since this is the first episode in quite a few weeks.

Although the real world analogy in this episode was, as usual, very obvious, I still found it to be a good 42 minutes of television.  It explored some of the reasoning that motivates suicide bombers or other religious fundementalists, no matter what century--or what planet--they come from.

I'm not trying to offend anyone with what I write, just as I'm sure the writers of this episode weren't trying to offend anyone with what they put out.  I happen to be an agnostic (I look at the world with scientific reasoning, and see no proof or reason to believe that there is a god...yet since you cannot prove a negative, I cannot say that he/she/it/they does not/do not exist either).  Anyway, as an agnostic, I always find these sorts of stories fascinating, although I tend to be a bit cynical about the subject of religion.  That's why I said I wasn't trying to offend anyone...I am really not.  But you have the right to be offended, nonetheless.

One point I noticed very clearly was the idea that certain people can justify anything--even mass murder--and more often than not they use religion as the justification.  This is not a swipe at Islam.  Every major religion has had some sort of holy war or prejudice against other religions, or even other factions of their own religions.  If you don't believe me, just glance over the history books--from the Crusades to Mary Tudor's slaughter of protestants to Israelis and Palestinians blowing each other up, religion has proven to be a lightning rod for bloody conflict.  I'm not saying that all religious people are like that...but as someone once said:  without religion, good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things...but for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.

Okay, I've probably offended about 99.9% of people who are reading this, now.  Sorry.  Just my humble opinion.

As a little tag on the plot, the issue of abortion was brought up.  I suspected this as soon as the woman asked Phlox (somewhat nervously) for help.  Well, what else would you guess she was asking about.....her husband's athlete's foot, perhaps?  The way this plot point was treated suggests that Phlox, at least, is pro-choice...hopefully so is humanity at large, by that century.  Oops, I probably just offended some more people, right?  But the nice thing was that this wasn't treated as an issue, as such, but rather as an illustration of one of the many reasons why abortion should be legal.  The woman, quite wisely, didn't want her kid to grow up as just another religious fanatic--or better yet, get blown up before he reaches puberty.  Is it so wrong to want your kid not to suffer?  Her husband's reluctance to talk about it for fear of being found out parallels real life as well; most opposition to abortion (or contraception) stems from religious groups, after all.  Yeah, I know...tell you something you didn't know....

The plot itself was somewhat simple, but not torturously so.  Archer's selection of himself as the one to be executed was expected, and of course, the only choice a good Starfleet Captain could make.  I admit, I didn't see the transporter ploy coming as soon as I should have, but as soon as I saw what he was doing it brought a smile to my face.  Clever Archer, and he used his opportunity well.  Naturally, we could all see the conversion of Yarrik (sp?) to 'one of the good guys' from a mile away, but it worked.  Too bad that in real life, very few people are open-minded enough to doubt their faith, even in the face of great wrongs.

The one slight bone I have to pick is the idea that Archer would rather save his crew than allow the fanatics a chance to wreak havoc on their enemies.  See DS9's "The Adversary", a similar situation in which Sisko set the Defiant (which was out of his control) to self-destruct as soon as they entered the system of the world they were trying to save.  I realize that Archer may have had a plan like this in mind in case his other plan failed, but it should have been mentioned.  Unless, of course, Archer would try to play that "priorities are different since 9/11--er, I mean, since the Xindi probe" line.  Allowing one group of people to die so that you can save your own is morally questionable at best...downright evil at worst.  But I'll give Archer the benefit of the doubt on this one.

The climax was well done, including the highlights of Phlox's pet bat getting loose (I'll have to watch it again to figure out if this was fortuitous or if he did it on purpose) and Reed kicking some serious butt (at least, eventually--he gets beat up pretty bad first).  The other faction (you know, the one with the arrow markings on the other side of their faces who think the world was created in 10 days instead of 9) seemed to give up a bit more easily than seems realistic.  But I guess they're just reasonable people who wouldn't stoop to killing innocents just to wipe out their opposition.  Refreshing, eh?

The ending was great, as was Archer's line about their faith bringing 'peace'.  Here it is indeed...you can't say their world isn't peaceful now, can you?  The dead don't tend to fight very much, after all.  The image of the dessimated surface of the planet was even more haunting than the head religious guy wiping out all of Archer's Death Star data.  Great, don't tell me we have to go through a bunch more Death Star episodes to get back to where we were....
 

A few notes:

I've decided that no Starfleet Captain in his right mind would answer a distress call from a ship traveling at impulse.  Or traveling at warp.  Or standing still.  In fact, they shouldn't ever answer any at all.

Chosen Realm=Delphic Expanse.  At least, we suppose so.  Archer didn't really prove that conclusively, did he?  He just kind of assumed that the entire Expanse was the only mass these guys could be referring to.  Aw, I'm babbling again.  Never mind.

According to T'Pol, there are 59 Death Stars in the Expanse.

Not to be harsh or anything...but sometimes I think people get exactly what they deserve.  That female crewmember who was watching the suicide bomber's veins go ballistic, for instance.  How many seconds was she standing there?  Shouldn't she at least have said something?  Or called security?  Or run away?

Back to the two factions:  9 vs. 10 days.  Well, some real religions are split for less than that, I suppose.
 

"Doubt is the basis of all scientific progress."  -T'Pol; well said.  It's also a good thing to have in many situations, scientific or not.

"Mythology often has a basis in fact...."  -T'Pol; again, a fair statement.  But in my view, having a 'basis in fact' does not mean that it IS fact.

"In the service of the makers, all actions are blessed ones."  -The religious leader.  Yes, and that, in my opinion, is one of the the major problems with any religion.

"There'll be an extra helping of snow beetles for you tonight, young lady."  -Phlox to his helpful bat.

"Captain, it's Reed; I have the bridge.....this would be a lot easier if I had weapons back."  -Reed to Archer, once he's taken the bridge.  Obviously.

"You want truth...I'll show you some truth."  -Archer to the religious leader, before taking the group down to their decimated planet.  Hope they weren't using nukes...that would be dangerous.  But I'm sure the ever-alert Enterprise crew checked for radiation before letting anyone go down there.  Right?

"Your faith was going to bring peace; here it is."  -Archer on the planet, in the best line of the episode.
 

Rating:  ****3/4  A few minor quibbles keep this from being a perfect score, but it was pretty darn good, in my opinion.  It was one of the few episodes this season where I didn't feel like hitting Archer over the head whenever he said something (I am not a violent person, but I was getting pretty sick of hearing about Xindi every five seconds).
 
 
 

11/26/03--Review for:  "Carpender Street" (Archer and T'Pol travel to the past to order fast food and foil a Xindi plot)

Trek is full of episodes where some or all of the main cast travels back to a time period at or near to the year when that episode was made.  Examples range from Voyager's "Future's End" to the fourth Trek movie, The Voyage Home.  But this formula, though it can be fun, is not always a surefire way to a good episode.

And I'll tell you right now, I didn't even have fun with this one.

This episode was a mixture of a bunch of tired plot devices, and unfortunately, the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts.  The teaser was dull, and that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the episode.  Maybe if I had liked the main guest star better, this would have made more of an impression.  But as it was, I watched with a slightly glazed look on my face (I presume) as a reptilian Xindi (surprise surprise) made his appearance.  I wasn't much more impressed when Daniels appeared in Archer's quarters (if you've been reading my earlier reviews, you'll know that Daniels is not one of my favorites).  On the other hand, maybe even a whole episode of Daniels would have been more entertaining than what we actually got.

I guess I don't quite understand what the point was.  Sure, we got yet another piece of the Xindi-building-the-weapon puzzle, but I'm not sure why it was necessary to include time travel in the plot.  The excuse Archer gives us is "The past seems like a pretty good place to hide."  Feeble.  No, beyond feeble.  It doesn't matter whether they got the time travel ability from their own advancements or from some meddling guys from the future...either way, it stretches credibility with the rest of the Xindi arc.  For crying out loud, these guys have the ability to travel across time and space to reach Earth of 2004, and they can't manage to just swarm the Enterprise and kidnap eight people (one for each blood type)?  Of course, maybe they figured out that for some reason the Enterprise crew has only seven of the blood types or something.  *Gasp!*  I guess they didn't have Rajiin grope enough people when she was aboard.  If she'd spent more time touching as many people as possible instead of spending it all on T'Pol, we might not have had to sit through this episode.

And before you start pointing out what happened in the last few minutes, let me reply by saying that no, those wascally weptiles did not mean to use the virus on 2004 Earth originally.  They were going to develop it there and then bring it back to the future.  Of course, one wonders, given how temporal mechanics tend to work in Trek, why they would even bother to bring it back to the future at all.  Why not do what they tried to do out of desperation:  release the virus on Earth of the past?  After all, they're conveniently located there already.

So why was this a time travel episode?  Was it so we could see Archer ordering fast food and T'Pol flinching from the idea of bacon strips on her salad for an extra 40 cents (or whatever it was)?  Was it so we could watch Archer figuring out how to drive a car?  Was it so we could see hookers and two-dimensional villains?--it's not like we don't see that on Enterprise all the time anyway.  Ooohhhh...bad Illani, bad....

The bottom line:  I just didn't care for this episode.  It had a few amusing moments, but overall I found it to be one of the biggest snooze-fests I've seen on Enterprise so far.  And for those who still insist that Archer and T'Pol have loads of chemistry...I'm sorry, but I simply don't see it.  Most of the episodes where these two are stuck together without involving any of the other regular cast members turn out to be dull, in my humble opinion.  This one is a prime example.

A few notes:

The workings of temporal mechanics...it takes awhile for changes to ripple through the timeline.  Not an unusual idea in sci-fi, but it never made sense to me.  If history's changed, it's changed; it has been changed for centuries, and it's not going to take time to work its way through the timeline.  As Troi said, "We don't have the time to argue about time!"  Or something like that....

For the record, we were in Detroit, in 2004.

In 2061, the humans...er...did something.  With regard to fossil fuels.  Either they ran out of them (hard to believe it took that long), or they just stopped using them altogether.  Either way, I really hope it doesn't take that long in real life.

Archer's blood type is B negative.  Just FYI.

Just a question:  were Reed, Sato, Mayweather, and Phlox in this at all?  Let's see, that happened in "Carbon Creek" too, right?  Anywhere else?
 

"He said it would take too much time."
"I would think he'd have all the time in the world."  --Archer and T'Pol, regarding Daniels.
 

Rating:  ***3/4  I grade on a curve, remember.  Some episodes I rate on the low side because they're stupid or offensive.  This one was just dull.  And kind of stupid too.  But not offensive.
 
 

11/19/03--Review for:  "Similitude"  (Phlox creates a clone to save Trip)

Well folks, it looks like Dr. Death is at it again.

First of all, let me say that this episode invoked so many different reactions from me, I hardly know where to begin.  So let's start with the one thing that really, really bothered me, and get that out of the way.

I never had any illusions that this episode would make scientific sense.  But I truly think they've outdone themselves this time.  I'm willing to stretch my mind a bit and accept that this larval moth (or whatever it was) is able to create a short-lived clone of a human being.  But as I pointed out in the review of "Fraggle Rock"--er, I mean "Extinction"--below, memories are NOT included in genetic programming.  NO WAY is 'Sim' going to remember ANYTHING from Trip's life.  Not his parents, not his sister, not his feelings for T'Pol...NOTHING.   Unless there is some kind of telepathic link between Sim and Trip, which was clearly not the idea, there would not be any transfer of memory.  Got that?  NO MEMORY TRANSFER.  If there's anything even more stupid than Trip's memories being transferred to Sim, it's the idea of Sim acquiring more memories as he grows up, taking on Trip's memories of that age.

Just to go off on a little tangent, let me compare this to another instance of cloning and memory transfer in Trek:  the Vorta on DS9.  Clearly, each new clone of Weyoun had the memories of the previous ones...so what's the difference between that and Trip and Sim?  The difference is that, although it was never mentioned explicitly on screen, the Vorta have been assumed by most fans that care to have some sort of technological implant which can download the memories and transfer them to the next clone, possibly via a signal.  It would not be beyond Dominion technology to do this, and given that the Vorta do have suicide implants in them, it's not far-fetched at all, in my opinion.  Either that, or the Vorta have innate telepathic abilities to do the transfer.  In either case, there is no such excuse here.  Trip and Sim do not have telepathic abilities, nor do they have memory transfer via an implant.

I was going to rant about using neural tissue to do a transplant (unless it was from the medula oblongata or cerebellum), but when I realized everything I just said above, it kind of seemed pointless to argue.  *Sigh*  And I won't even go into the physics of the two shuttlepods pulling the Enterprise.  I'd just like to remind the writers that there's no friction in space.

Okay, I'll try not to dwell on the science now.  I'll really try.  *Sooooo stupid....*

There are two other major aspects to this episode:  the ethical aspect and the character aspect.  Let's start with the ethics of what happened.

Did you read my first sentence, above?  Well, it's true; Dr. Death is indeed back, and this time the crew is directly affected.  I understood exactly what the writers were going for here, for I have often thought about this myself:  the possibility of cloning entire human beings and harvesting their organs.  Not so terribly far from science fiction anymore, and somewhat disturbing.  I feel the better path would be to work on ways to clone just the organs...the highly questionable ethics of creating an entire human being just to serve as a source of organs would be avoided.

And that's exactly what is dealt with in this episode, with a twist, naturally.  The difference is that, apparently, Phlox didn't realize at first that Sim wouldn't survive the operation to transfer his neural tissue to Trip.  I guess the obvious question would be:  if Trip can't survive without that tissue, why would Sim be able to?  The conclusion?  Well, it's obvious, isn't it?  Dr. Death knew all along, but also knew that Archer wouldn't go along with it if he thought that Sim would live only 8 days instead of 15.  All right, Phlox fans, I didn't mean that...but it does raise an interesting point.  Frankly, I'm not sure how much of a difference it is whether you live 8 days or 15.  15 days is not long for a sentient being to live, after all, and one must go further and ask the question:  was it right to create Sim in the first place, even if you thought he was going to survive the full 15 days?

Perhaps it would have been better to keep Sim unconscious for his whole life.  Keep him under, let him grow for a few days, and let him die without knowing what he was missing.  It sounds a lot kinder to me...whether it's more ethical or not, I'm not sure.  That's the thing about ethics:  they're never certain.  But if Archer had done the kind thing, this episode would have been dead boring.

Sim's initial resistance to giving his life to save Trip was understandable, though I'm not sure it was entirely in character.  Would Trip give his life to save another member of the crew?  Undoubtedly.  But sometimes, you can be the harshest on yourself.  His change of heart comes, not surprisingly, with the thought of his dead sister, and how he doesn't want the rest of Earth to suffer her fate.  So we've established that without Trip, there is no hope, right?  I guess that's plausible.  Sim's frustration with Phlox when our dear Dr. Death has withheld a possible way (albeit an unlikely one) for him to live a normal life is the most understandable of all.  Listen, I like Phlox, but I don't always like the way he's written.  Simple truth that applies to a number of other characters throughout Trek.

Oh, and did I mention that Darth Vader is back?  I honestly think that Archer is becoming seriously unhinged.  His lack of consistency between episodes is quite amazing....

Now, on to the character aspect.  I'm going to put aside my reservations about the science and look at the result:  we were given what was basically a shadow of Trip.  He's like Trip...mostly.  He has Trip's memories...to some extent.  It's not made very clear exactly how much like Trip he is, but obviously, there are a few differences, many of them revolving around his feelings for T'Pol.  It's like a shadow of TNG's "Second Chances", the episode in which they find Riker's double, created by a transporter accident, and the double still has very strong feelings for Troi.  In "Similitude" we have a different situation with many of the same emotions involved.  In both cases, the 'double' had fewer inhibitions about expressing his feelings.  We may never know whether Sim's feelings for T'Pol are the same as Trip's; it may be that some subconscious feeling of Trip's came to the fore in Sim, or maybe he just got images of all that neuropressure (not to mention the decon in "Broken Bow") and created his own feelings accordingly.  I remember that Trip himself seemed to be trying to tell T'Pol something in the beginning of this episode (it was either during the mutual foot massage or when he had his head in her lap, I can't remember).  To me, this suggests that perhaps the feelings are very real on Trip's side, and Sim simply had less of a problem admitting them to T'Pol, seeing as how he was going to die soon anyway.

I'm not quite sure what to make of T'Pol's reaction to all of this.  Through most of Sim's attempts to flirt, she remained cool, trying to distance herself from him.  But near the end, she seemed to be admitting that Sim did, indeed, mean something to her.  And then she came forward and kissed him--and not just on the cheek either.  Now we have to ask:  did she do this because she genuinely had feelings for him, or did she do it because she wanted to make him feel better?  The more cynical among us might want to suggest that the writers had her do it because it was what Sim wanted, and they didn't take either T'Pol's character or her own feelings into account.  But I won't go down that road.  I honestly found it to be a sweet moment, because I've always argued that Trip and T'Pol have more chemistry than any other pairing on the show (I think Reed and Sato come close, though they don't get nearly as much screen time together, yet).  Now, if T'Pol had kissed a clone of Archer like that, I'd be the first one yelling about how demeaning it was for her character.  I suppose a lot of how we see things can depend on our own feelings, eh?  Trek is always feeding us pictures of crewmembers kissing each other before using a reset button or similar device.  The difference here is that for T'Pol, there is no reset.  That was the actual T'Pol kissing Sim, and therefore, the T'Pol we will be seeing in the future will be the same one who kissed him, with all the appropriate feelings in play.  It could be interesting.

No matter what feelings are bouncing around between Trip, T'Pol, and Sim in this episode, one thing struck me:  the neuropressure seems to become a more intimate affair each time we see it, especially in the emotional sense.  Scoff all you want, but the fact remains that these two characters are sharing a great deal of intimacy--not the romantic variety, but intimacy all the same.  Being intimate with someone isn't just about tongues and climaxes.  It also has a lot to do with being comfortable with another person to the extent that Trip and T'Pol seem to be becoming--comfortable both physically and emotionally.  On the other hand, we all know that this is just a juvenile ratings grab...but I can try to see it from another perspective, can't I?

I'd be interested to see the rest of the crew trying to explain to Trip what happened.  I suppose I would be a bit unnerved, to say the least--how would you like to hear that a fully sentient clone with basically your own memories was created and sacrificed to save your life?  I suppose T'Pol would leave out the part about the kiss....

In part, the tension of the episode (for me) had to do with this character exploration, but also the question of which man was the one we saw dead at the beginning of the episode.  For awhile there, I was actually wondering if they were going to do a 'Nemesis' on us and kill Trip off only to have him replaced on the crew by his slightly unpolished clone.  But in the end, we got our own Trip back...which was from my point of view certainly the right choice, from the perspective of character.  I'll be interested to see if any of Trip's feelings for T'Pol--latent or otherwise--surface in the episodes to come.

A few notes:

For the first time in awhile, we see the ship straining herself, approaching the maximum speed she can attain.  In this case, they seem to have strained it a bit too much, even with Trip's amazing technobabble innovation.

When I first heard Phlox say the kid's name was going to be 'Sim', I couldn't help but wonder:  has he ever played the computer game?  That's the ultimate voyeurism, right?  Well, maybe not the ultimate...forget I said it.

Note to self:  if you ever want good fertilizer for your vorsic fern, you can use...er...oh never mind....

I thought the actors playing the younger versions of Trip did a fine job, and in particular, the two older ones looked a lot like him.  Don't you just love that nose?

Key lime pie is (apparently) Trip's favorite dessert...somehow I thought it was pecan pie, but I suppose that's just his second favorite....

One has to wonder if the iron stuff on the hull will be easy to get rid of, even once the Enterprise leaves the field.  I guess that's a new one for the maintenance crew.

Aha!  Mayweather gets to pilot a shuttlepod!  Amazing, that they're actually letting the pilot do some piloting.  It's a wonder that Archer let Reed take the other one; the captain usually takes that glory for himself.  But maybe he was afraid it would blow up.

No toilet facilities on the shuttlepods?  I guess that could give "Shuttlepod One" a whole new urgency (so *that's* what they used the empty booze bottles for).
 

"You know, you made this sound a whole lot worse than it is."
"Advanced neuropressure can place great demands on the body."
"Well, I have to say, so far it's a piece of cake."
"We haven't gotten to the more...challenging postures."
"Well...I'm always up for a challenge."  --Trip and T'Pol...do I really have to tell you the context?  Please don't make me....

"I don't make this proposal lightly, captain, but I'm obligated to provide you with all available options."  --Phlox to Archer (hah hah).

"Symbionts are living, conscious entities.  We'll be growing a sentient being for the sole purpose of harvesting tissue."  --T'Pol to Archer.

"The Earth needs Enterprise.  Enterprise needs Trip.  It's as simple as that."  --Archer to T'Pol.

"There's part of you, something inside you, that Trip needs.  Dr. Phlox is going to have to perform an operation."
"Will it hurt?"
"Not at all.  You won't feel a thing."
"Doctors always say that."
"When Phlox says it, it's the truth."  --Archer, Sim, and Phlox.  Yeah...because when Phlox operates on ya, you die, kid.  Bwahhhaaahhahhhaahhhaaa!!!

"You know, he was really starting to enjoy those sessions with you."
"They were helping him sleep."
"I'm not sure that's not the only reason."
"What do you mean?"
"Was there ever anything between you and Trip?"
"If you're referring to a romantic relationship, no."
"The reason I ask is...well...you're all I think about, if you know what I mean.  And I'm not talking about an adolescent crush--that was, well, that was two days ago.  This is much more serious, the way I feel about you.  Anyway, what's driving me crazy is that I don't know if these feelings are mine...or his."
"I can't answer that."
"I didn't mean to make you feel uncomfortable."
"I'm not uncomfortable."
"I just thought I should tell you this...while I still had the chance."  --Sim and T'Pol, in a beautifully acted scene.

"I've got a temperature warning light."  --Ah yes, another brilliant line from the mouth of Mayweather.

"I have his memories...I have his feelings...I have his body!  How am I not Trip?"
"Commander Tucker is lying in Sickbay."
"Than what am I?  Just something you grew in a lab?  Does that make it easier for you to condemn me to death?"
"If you refuse to go through with this, you'll be condemning Trip to death!"
"I didn't put him in a coma."
"No, but you can save him."
"In a way I will...by saving myself!"
"Phlox says there's almost no chance the enzyme will work."
"My life is at stake!  Any chance is worth taking!"
"But at what cost?!  It'll take a day to synthesize the enzyme.  By that time, your neural tissue won't be compatible with Trip's anymore.  He'll die!"
"I know."
"I can't let that happen."
"So what're you gonna do, drag me down to Sickbay?  Force me onto a biobed at gunpoint?"
"If you truly have all of Trip's memories, you know the answer to that.  I don't have to tell you what's at stake.  I must complete this mission, and to do that I need Trip!  Trip!  I'll take whatever steps necessary to save him."
"Even if it means killing me?"
"Even if it means killing you."
"You're not a murderer."
"Don't make me one."  --Sim and Archer.  Looks like Darth Vader's back.

"You wish to spend your last hours in Engineering?"
"Why not?  The two things I care about most are in this room."  --T'Pol and Sim.

"Can you imagine a lousier way to spend your old age--cooped up in that thing?  Peein' in a bottle?  Actually, I can imagine a worse fate."
"What's would that be?"
"Being stuck in there with Malcolm."  --Sim and Archer, regarding the shuttlepod.  Hah!

"Damn, this is a screwed up situation."
"I can't argue with you there."  --Sim and Archer.  No kidding.

"Do me a favor when this is over.  If Commander Tucker decides to do any more modifications to the engines, tell him to watch his ass."  --Sim to Archer.

"You see I don't just remember Trip's childhood; I remember mine.  You made a damn good father."
"You're a damn good son."  --Sim and Phlox.

"You owe me one."  --Sim to the unconscious Trip.
 

Rating:  ****1/2  Actually, as high as that seems, it was interesting enough, from the perspecitive of character and ethical issues, to warrant an even higher rating from me.....but I lopped off a bit for the even-worse-than-usual science.  I simply cannot get around the stupidity of it all, and I honestly think they could have done a variation of this episode with less horrible science (you know, transporter duplicating accident or something).  I lopped off a bit more for the way Archer and Phlox were acting at times.  It's true that there had to be a devil's advocate in this situation, but to carry it to such extremes--especially when it's the captain--strikes me as unwise.  But enough griping; the bottom line is, I enjoyed this one.  The premise may have been stupid, but the result was thought-provoking and character-building.
 
 

11/13/03--Review for:  "North Star"  (Archer finds a planet populated by humans from the old west--take note, that's old, not ancient)

It's kind of hard to analyze an episode where the high point was Reed shooting T'Pol with a phase pistol, but here goes.

Again, I've been staying away from internet spoilers.  But this time, I could tell from the brief synopsis in my local TV paper the gist of what this episode was going to be:  stupid.

But perhaps that's a bit unfair.  You have to keep in mind that Trek has done similar things before, not only on the original series, but also in the modern ones.  Not that I'd call "The Royale" a brilliant piece of writing, mind you.  But this week's episode made a little more sense than that.  At least these really are bona fide descendants of a human population.  It's been 300 years since they were kidnapped to be used as slaves...kidnapped from what Worf's son Alexander would have called the 'ancient west'.  I guess a few of their horses must have been taken too...enough to form a population of what appears to be more than one breed.  That's fairly diverse.  But let's not dwell on that.

Someone (Reed, maybe?) said early in the episode that all the buildings, clothing, etc. were manufactured from raw materials natural to the planet.  Okay, that makes sense.  Now let's think about this society a little more.  It's been 300 years, and their culture is basically the same as the culture they were taken from.  Strife breeds change in cultures, not the other way around.  Women are still in corsets and subservient, and men are still slinging guns and drinking whiskey.  Clothing has remained unchanged.  They still have the same guns--somewhat plausible if a few gunsmiths were captured with the original slaves and they passed their tradition down.  You've got to wonder, though, what happened to the energy weapons the Skagarran (sp?) had--maybe the humans couldn't figure out how to work them?  Or maybe they just wore them out and (obviously) didn't know how to make more.  Then there's the question of accents, which rarely remain the same over periods of hundreds of years.  The same goes for the language itself.

The Skag predicament was mildly interesting, mainly used as a morality tale regarding bigotry, discrimination, and even genocide.  But it's not as if we haven't seen Trek deal with these things before.  What makes a good episode is not merely the issues that it raises, but how they are dealt with.  I'm not sure this one did a particularly good job.  Sure, we all feel for Bethany's tragic plight...her forward-looking mindset which would fit in with the best of the enlightened Trek humans we all know.  Her little conversation with Archer near the end of the episode reitterated a few of the issues, but didn't really do much with them.

Overall, the episode had a clumsy feel to it.  Archer seems to have left his brain behind again...Darth Vader is back to the bumbling idiot who couldn't see a threat approaching if it spit tobacco juice in his face.  It was never explained how Archer, Trip, and T'Pol got ahold of their outfits...or their apparently functional pistols.  Remember, this is pre-replicator Trek (supposedly).  They either had them fabricated somehow (the clothes would be hard enough, but the guns would be extremely difficult) or they jumped a few residents of the planet and stole their stuff.  I'm betting on the latter.

As an homage to a western, it doesn't sing.  The villains are stunted stereotypes--the scene in the tavern was particularly unconvincing.  Archer's failure to predict Bennings's ambush was embarrassing (surprise, surprise...they're going to shoot the strangers when they emerge from their spacecraft...Illani rolls her eyes).  The fire fight, predictable though it was, was at least somewhat entertaining.

Ultimately, I found redemption in the little touches of this episode.  Trip and T'Pol on the horse was a nice little moment of comedy.  Trip trading his harmonica for rent of the horse was interesting...I know how much he loves that thing.  Maybe he has more back on the ship.  Reed's bullseye shot and the sniper falling in slow motion was cool, I'll have to admit.  But my favorite aspect of the episode has to be Reed stunning T'Pol.  Clever Malcolm--stun the Vulcan and then stun the gunslinger.  Coolest moment in the whole episode, especially the look on Reed's face.

I wonder what Picard would have said if he'd seen the way Archer dealt with this.  I could just hear him screaming "Prime Directive!" when Archer landed a shuttlepod in the center of town, in front of a gawking crowd.  Mind you, he'd already transported out of there with more than a few people watching.  And his accent was not very convincing, to be honest.  But let's not go there.

A couple of notes:

The name of the hero/villain (depending on your point of view) was Cooper Smith.  Folk hero and liberator to the humans, butcher to the Skagarrans. I'll have to admit, that sounds eerily familiar, somehow.

At one point I was wondering if poor Mayweather was going to be in this episode...but then there he was.  And he even got a line.
 

"Things won't be any different there."
"Maybe not.  But you won't be spending ten years in prison."  --Bethany and Archer, regarding her potential future in another settlement.

"We can't just transport 6000 people to Earth."  --Travis Mayweather, in a line which displays his stunning performance worthy of note in the Trek history books.

"You managed to change, we haven't.  Even if you could take us back, I don't think we're ready."  --Bethany to Archer.
 

Rating:  ****  Despite a few cute moments, I have to say, I'm not impressed.  Maybe I'm the wrong person to be doing this review...maybe a real western fan would appreciate this more.  Then again, maybe a real western fan would appreciate this less.  What more can I say?  It didn't sing for me.  I suppose I should be grateful that Bethany didn't have to demean herself and kiss Archer (in Kirk's day, she would never have got away with that).  Oh well...at least this episode provided us with that cute little moment when Malcolm stuns T'Pol...I honestly think that's one of the best moments of the season, thus far.
 
 

11/5/03--Review for:  "Twilight"  (Archer's brain parasites cause the destruction of Earth)

Personally, I have found that there are certain advantages to staying away from the spoilers.  In my case, I have not been hanging around the Trek sites on the internet for a long time, and since my local Fox station doesn't even show the previews for the next episode, I'm pretty much in the dark.  All I have is the two line summary in the TV paper, and frankly, that usually isn't a lot of help.  So when I started watching this, and seeing events unfold, I was not certain that this really was an alternate future.  At one point, I thought maybe the Xindi had captured Archer and were brainwashing him with a holodeck or something, so that he would give up hope for the mission.  Then I realized that such a plot wouldn't make much sense, but I also realized that nonsensical plots have never seemed to stop B&B before.  And besides, it had to be fake, right?  I mean, the real T'Pol would never have gone with that hairstyle.  Then I decided that I was just plain wrong.

What we have is another in a tradition of Trek episodes in which someone in a disastrous version of the future finds a way to change the past so that the disaster never happens.  It's called the 'Reset Button', and some fans love it...others hate it.  I think it is an okay plot device if done right.  We saw a version of this in DS9's excellent "The Visitor."  I won't try to compare that episode with this one; they are emotionally so different that such an excercise would be futile, in my opinion.  The Reset Button is not always used so well, but I won't go into those examples.  So let me mention some points from this week's episode, starting with the beginning.

The teaser was riveting.  The visual cues of the guard outside Archer's quarters, then seeing T'Pol as the captain (and in a Starfleet uniform), were enough to let us know that something big was going on.  Then there was the excellent destruction of Earth.  Great effect, simply great.  I especially loved the shots with the opening fissures and boiling oceans--the effects people have outdone themselves on this one.

One thing that struck me throughout was that this was a very strong episode for T'Pol.  It's amazing how much easier it is to take her seriously as a leader when she's wearing a Starfleet uniform.  Like Troi and Seven before her, ditching the catsuit (if only temporarily) makes you consider her as a character, not just as a 'hot babe'.  The T'Pol from the 'far' future, with the long hair, was strong in a different way, although I'm not sure how much I like the idea of her giving up her life to keep explaining things to Archer.  Obviously, we're meant to think that she has the hots for him, but I'd like to think instead that she thinks of him as the friend who opened her eyes about humanity.  Phlox's comments later on about her having formed this relationship with Archer raises an interesting question.  After all, can a relationship form if it's pretty much one-sided?  I'm reminded of Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in Groundhog Day, somehow.  Anyway...I suppose if only one side of a relationship is evolving, that relationship is still changing (it takes two, after all).

Speaking of T'Pol, it was interesting to see her standing up to Soval as strongly as she did.  She practically raked him over the coals for holding back the warp program, even suggesting that the Vulcan policy over the last 100 years has contributed to Earth's destruction.  Meanwhile, Soval seems to be just as devious as ever; this time, he's trying to use Archer's condition to lure T'Pol back to Vulcan.

Episodes like this are often interesting merely by the virtue of showing us a slice of the future, if you will.  Over a decade after the 'present', we're bound to see changes in the crew, although apart from T'Pol, Phlox, and maybe Trip, we haven't seen enough of them to see how much they've changed as characters.  What we do see are the physical changes.  Reed has just been made a captain, and he has a beard--a rather fetching one if I may say so.  Sato is a lieutenant, and has a new hairstyle, which I also happen to like.  Tucker hasn't changed much, except that he's a captain too and a little on the grey side.  Phlox, who had been living back on Denobula for awhile, now wears black (some would say it suits him) and his hair's a little different (a little longer and maybe a bit more curly?).  We even get a one-liner referring to General Shran, who has apparently given shield technology to what's left of Starfleet.  As for Mayweather, he was one of 13 killed in a Xindi attack, which, considering that the writers never knew what to do with him in the present let alone the future, is hardly surprising.

Episodes that deal with temporal mechanics often give me headaches...I'll freely admit that.  For instance, if Phlox and T'Pol in this future timeline destroy the parasites (therefore destroying them in the past as well), this version of Phlox and T'Pol will no longer exist in the new version of the future, and therefore they will never have destroyed the parasites, and the past will not have been changed, and....  See what I mean?  I guess this is what they mean by a temporal paradox.  Not that this is a unique thing.  The same logic has been used countless times in Trek and elsewhere (including the instances I mentioned at the beginning of this).  It's just one of those things you have to accept, even if you're not sure how it could happen.  Who knows?  Maybe that's the way it would happen, if time travel were possible.  Not that I'm completely ruling that out either.

But I remember thinking of something, about the time they were trying to purge the little beasties from Archer's brain and discovered that they had also been destroyed in the past.  I realized that really, if they believed that destroying these little buggers would restore the past, why didn't they just blow up Archer in that subspace implosion mentioned earlier?  I mean, if this version of Archer's going to cease to exist anyway once the timeline's reset, why not just vaporize him?  Then, a few minutes later, I sat smugly, realizing they were going to resort to exactly that!  Heh, that's great, guys!  Keep listening to me, all right?  As if....

The future ends with the often-used idea of everyone dying before the reset.  Reed, Sato, and Trip were all killed when the Xindi targetted the bridge, literally blowing the cap off of it (and taking out my three favorite characters).  Then first Phlox, then T'Pol, and finally even Archer himself was picked off in Engineering; the latter had enough time to finish the setup for the subspace implosion, however.  The destruction of the Enterprise was mostly very well done, except that the explosion of the port nacelle might have looked a little superimposed (I'll have to watch it again), and I'm not sure that the saucer should have blown up first, considering that we're talking about a warp engine overloading here.  But never mind the rationale; I loved the way the sections of the saucer separated and blew outward.  Very nice.

But what does this episode ultimately boil down to?  You can deal with the character of T'Pol and her 'hidden feelings' for Archer all you want, but while her strengths were displayed quite well, there was something else--something inescapable--that you may interpret as you wish:

The reason Earth got blown up was because T'Pol was in command instead of Archer.

That's the basic idea, and the only thing that seems to have been changed by the presence of the parasites in Archer's brain.  What does this say about T'Pol's leadership?  It doesn't seem to be the most feminist of sentiments, but let's not jump to conclusions.  The most likely reason seems to deal with the way T'Pol rammed the docked Xindi ship into the second one (it was the logical course of action, according to her).  Trip rakes her over the coals for it later, when it appears that her action, which damaged the starboard nacelle and greatly reduced their maximum speed, is what prevented them from stopping the Xindi weapon from destroying Earth.  But I've got to believe that it's more than just that.  For instance, Mayweather was already dead when T'Pol decided to ram the ship.  So unless they really are planning to kill him off, something else has to be different.  Just some more logical vs. illogical decisions earlier on, I guess.

But I don't think the point is to say that T'Pol is a bad leader.  History comes down to chance more often than not, and her decision seemed right to her at the time, considering the situation.  So Archer might make a different decision, which is not as logical and is not necessarily 'better' than T'Pol's.  But the result will be drastically different.  Who knows?  Perhaps there will be other factors, such as a personal relationship Archer will form with a Xindi (as we saw last week).  In any case, I hope to see this idea play out in the episodes to come.  If used well, it could be very interesting.

So in the end we're left with Archer lying on a sickbay bed whining to T'Pol about pillows and turning down the lights.  I suppose it was worth it for the "You'd make a good nurse" line?  Perhaps.  But while we, the audience, may have been taken on a ride, as far as the characters are concerned, the only thing that 'happened' this week was that T'Pol got her ankle caught under a fallen chunk of metal and Archer got knocked out by an anomaly because he stayed around to save her.  And that's the reason why a lot of people find the Reset Button to be incredibly annoying and frustrating.  As for me, I think this kind of episode can be and often is fun, and a great way of exploring potential scenarios, as well as character.

Some notes:

Again, even if it caused the destruction of Earth, I thought the maneuver with crashing the docked ship into the other one was neat.  I've often wondered why they don't do things like that more often, but given the damage to the Enterprise, perhaps my question has been answered.

So, the human colony is on the fifth planet in the Ceti Alpha system, eh?  For those of you who don't know the significance of this, Ceti Alpha V was the planet where Khan and company were marooned.  After this, Ceti Alpha VI exploded (don't ask--maybe it's those Xindi again, in the future!), the fifth planet was knocked into a different orbit and became the barren, frozen wasteland we see in Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan.  Nice to see it mentioned...I suppose it's a bone thrown to us long-time Trekkers.  And did I hear the Mutarra system mentioned somewhere too?  The one with the nebula?

I believe this is the first Enterprise appearance of a Yiridian, and this one was true to the stereotype.  I wonder if we're ever going to see a Yiridian who's not up to some kind of mischief?  As for the one in this episode, I'm still not sure why he was ordered to follow Phlox.  Was it the Xindi just trying to track him to the location of the humans?  If so, it seems odd that there's no other way to find them.  I suppose this Yiridian could have been an unwitting player in the TCW, somehow...but that seems odd as well, since with the death of this alternate timeline, we're not likely to be seeing him again.  Oh well....

Unless I missed something, the insectoids and reptilians seem to be the only Xindi involved in this massive war in the future.  Hardly surprising, but it would be interesting to know how the apes, manatees, and sloths feel about this rampant genocide.  I suppose those who were willing to destroy one planet might not stop there, but what happened after the actual destruction of Earth seems to be harder to justify as self-defense.

You'd think that a brig with room for more than two prisoners would be a good idea.  When we saw it in "Rajiin" it seemed to have enough room for more than that, though nine would be a little crowded, I suppose.

I mentioned 'General Shran' above.  It seems that, in this timeline at least, Starfleet and the Andorians have formed an alliance against their Xindi enemies...and more to the point, the Andorians are willing to share their technology (shields to replace the hull plating).  A sign of things to come?  In the 'real' timeline, does Starfleet still get this technology from the Andorians, or do they end up inventing it themselves?  Wait and see, I guess.

Is there a reason why Phlox and T'Pol were taken down with one shot each, while Archer was still moving after two shots?  What happened to that tough Vulcan constitution?
 

"We've taken nine prisoners, but the brig was only designed for two.  I'm not sure what to do with the others."
"Blow 'em out the airlock."  --Reed and Trip...not to mention a rather shocked glance from Hoshi after the latter's comment.

"How many of us are left?"
"Less than 6000."  --Archer and T'Pol, on the fate of humanity.  So, those nasty Xindi destroyed Mars, Alpha Centuri, etc.....I wonder if they bothered with Terra Nova?  After all, they might not have recognized them as humans--they're 'mud people', remember?

"That uniform doesn't suit you...Captain."
"I doubt you traveled all this way to criticize my attire."  --Soval and T'Pol.

"You owe the humans nothing.  They chose to leave Earth before they were ready.  If they'd accepted our counsel, this tragedy would have been avoided."
"We could have saved them."
"How?"
"We held back their warp program for 100 years, a policy which you supported.  If we would have helped them develop faster ships...better defenses...."
"Your emotional attachment to Archer is clouding your logic."  --Soval and T'Pol.

"You're makin' one hell of a sacrifice.  Why?"
"I have my reasons."  --Trip and T'Pol, about her resigning her commision to take care of Archer.

"At this point you often wonder if you're the victim of some elaborate deception."
"It did cross my mind."  --T'Pol and Archer; it crossed my mind too, actually.

"I can only imagine what it must have been like...spending all those years in that house, learning so much about him, yet he remembers nothing about you."  --Phlox to T'Pol.

"Our shields are holding.  Nice to know they work in combat."
"Remind me to send a thank-you note to General Shran."  --Captain Reed and Captain Trip.

"How do you feel?"
"Like a shuttlepod landed on my head."  --Phlox and Archer.  In both versions.

"You could have been seriously injured.  I told you to leave me behind."
"Fortunately, I don't take orders from you."  --T'Pol and Archer.

"You know, you'd make a wonderful nurse."  --Archer to T'Pol.
 

Rating:  *****  From me, a perfect score is rare in Enterprise.  I'll be honest...I really enjoyed this one.  Bakula played it well.  Blalock played it well.  Everyone else fulfilled their supporting roles to perfection.  Despite my distaste for any Archer/T'Pol hint-dropping, in this instance I didn't mind.  No juvenile references, unless you count Phlox's incessant penchant for match-making.  And the plot, if you swallow the temporal mechanics, is cleverly designed and well thought out.  The resolution was foreseeable and yet I think it worked very well.  Despite the fact that this whole episode was a Reset Button, I found it to be an entertaining and satisfying 40-some minutes of television.  To the writers, actors, effects wizards, and everyone else involved, I salute you for a job well done.
 
 

10/29/03--Review for:  "The Shipment"  (Archer makes friends with a sloth)

Before I analyze anything, let me warn you:  due to the sun spots acting up this evening, large chunks of the last 20 minutes or so of this episode were disrupted to such an extent that I was unable to follow the dialogue.  Therefore, although I was able to discern the gist of the plot Archer and his slothy friend concocted, I may have missed some crucial bit of exposition.  Anyway, on to what little I have to say this week.

This week, we are treated to a closer view of the so-called Sloth-Xindi, more specifically, a view of an individual of this species.  Basically, this episode 'humanized' this individual and to some extent the Sloth-Xindi species, in Trek tradition.  They've done a good job of that aspect, as we can really believe that this guy was horrified by what Archer has told him of the acts of the other species.  But this softening of attitudes comes at a cost.  While Archer is coming to view his new friend, and the Sloth-Xindi in general, as nicer than he imagined, it is clear that the reptilian and insectoid species are being painted in as black a light as ever.  The writers are humanizing one species while demonizing others, putting them into convenient stereotypes and trying to diminish moral ambiguity.  In fact, the way it looks at the moment, the only interesting action is with the two remaining species:  the 'apes' and the 'manatees' (or whatever).  We know little of the latter, except that they appear to be reluctant to rush to any sort of action.  The apes, on the other hand, have the potential to become the 'swing' species as events unfold (no jokes about apes swinging, please).  Strangely fitting, according to the standards of B&B, that the most human-like species is the one that may be making the difference.  I would like to be wrong on this.  I would like to think that the reptilians (who look more and more like the Galaxy Quest baddies with every appearance) will be the ones who come to terms with Archer.  But I have the feeling that it's going to be Archer versus the reptilians and insectoids, and a bloodbath may be unavoidable.

Now then, did I miss something about the Xindi planet?  A few episodes ago, our gallant crew stumbled across an obliterated planet, which they assumed was the Xindi homeworld.  This is again confirmed in this episode.  But we were told earlier that the reason the Xindi were building the weapon was that they were afraid the humans were going to blow up their planet, right?  Why worry about humans blowing up your planet if it's already been blown up?  Moreover, we learn in this episode just how that planet was blown up (by the reptilians placing explosives in fissures or something).  Let's face it, I'm confused.  Maybe this will be explained later...maybe not.  In any case, let me move on.

I'm not sure what to make of Archer's weekly moral philosophy change.  A few weeks ago he was shutting people into airlocks and spitting every time he said the word 'Xindi'...now we're getting quotes like "I thought we were here to try to stop a war, not start one."  Well, Jon, let me just say that I'm glad you think that.  This week.  Next week, who knows?  The writers seem to have extracted Archer's war-mongering gene and transplanted it into poor Malcolm.  I'll be blunt:  I like Mr. Reed.  I like him a whole lot.  But in this episode, he was acting just a bit like a jerk.  I realize that he, too, was affected by the 9-11 probe thing, but the way both he and Archer were acting in this episode came off as a bit strange.  I can't help wondering if switching Reed with Trip would have been better.  After all, wouldn't Trip be the better devil's advocate to Archer, since his hatred of the Xindi has a very personal component?  Anyway...I suppose Reed and Major Hayes were not out of character or anything in the viewpoints that they took, though considering their animosity towards each other in the past, it would have been nice to see them take opposing viewpoints.

From what I could gather, what with the solar flares killing my reception, Archer planted some 'contaminated' chemosite (sp) on the Xindi ship, and they're planning on using that as a homing beacon of sorts, in order to track them.  Nice trick, if a bit on the predictable side.

The subplot (if it can be called that) about the maggots and the guns seems to have been nothing more than a set-up for future combat in the stories to come.  It's an interesting idea, and suitably alien, to have reproducing maggots living in your guns.  I won't comment on the feasability, but I found it a bit strange that Phlox said they wouldn't make good pets.  This is Phlox talking, right?  You know, the guy who keeps osmotic eels and other assorted critters?

It might be interesting to have an episode down the line where the crew debates the ethical connotations of killing the maggots with radiation, as Phlox has suggested doing.  But if the radiation is lethal to humans, might it not also be lethal to whoever is carrying the weapons as well?  Just a thought....

Some notes:

Kemosite?  Would this be the same stuff that Quark was smuggling in "Little Green Men"?  I remember Rom telling him it was unstable.

We learn that there was a sixth species of Xindi--the Avians.  So, the birdie-Xindi got wiped out, eh?  It would be interesting if they came across a colony of them after all.

Malcolm's forcefield emitters are back!  After what, a year and a half absence?  Where have they been all this time, pray tell?
 

"I have some questions for you."  --Archer, trying to be tough with the Sloth-Xindi.

"I thought we were here to try to stop a war, not start one."  --Archer, displaying the changeability of his character once again.

"There are fewer than 100 people on this planet; it doesn't go unnoticed when one of them goes missing."  --the sloth making a good point.

"Looks like some sort of count-down...."  --Trip, taking an amazingly long time to realize that the weapon is about to overload.

"Quick thinking, Commander."  --Phlox, contradicting my above statement, apparently.

"If everything you've told me is true about the attack on your world, I hope you remember that all Xindi are not your enemy."
"I will."  --the sloth and Archer, in an encouraging exchange.
 

Rating:  ****1/4  Nothing horrible, but I saw nothing spectacular either.  Archer does seem to be shifting closer to the traditional Trek captain's role, in seeking the peaceful solutions when possible, yet the way it was done disturbs me.  The writers haven't made it clear what has caused this shift in character; rather, they're acting like the infamous 'airlock incident' and other similar actions never happened.  All in all, this episode was a piece of the puzzle, but not one of the most interesting or inspiring for me.
 
 

10/15/03--Review for:  "Exile"  (Hoshi's seeing things again, but this time someone else is doing the imagining)

After Vulcan zombies and seductive slave girls, a mind-intruding, castle-dwelling alien seems a bit of a relief to me.  We were long overdue for a Hoshi episode, and in this respect, the writers delivered.  But is it agood Hoshi episode?  That's always the debate, isnt' it?

I suppose the first question is, which former Trek episode are they copying this week?  There are elements of several that I spotted, and probably more that I missed.  My first thought was Enterprise's own "Vanishing Point."  The first scenes of this episode, with an exasperrated Hoshi trying to convince her crewmates that she's not just seeing things, must have seemed very familiar to Linda Park.  Then I started thinking it was a "Man of the People" thing, with a telepath mentally raping people.  Then partway through, it hit me:  this ain't "Man of the People."  It's "Sub Rosa."

For those of you who don't remember (or possibly don't care to remember) that particular outing from TNG's ricketty seventh season, let me refresh your memories.  "Sub Rosa" involved a ghost-like, non-corporeal alien who had been literally living off of the life energy of the women in Beverly Crusher's family for centuries.  After the death of her grandmother, Beverly herself was seduced by this being, and we spent the episode surrounded by gothic settings and ghostly passion.  Those responsible for this episode were obviously trying to make it romantic, but not everyone in the audience was convinced.  In the end, Beverly's trusty Enterprise crewmates show up and she's convinced of the true nature of her ghostly lover.  She breaks her dependence on him and everyone lives happily (sort of) ever after.

Back to Hoshi's episode.  The similarities between "Exile" and "Sub Rosa" are obvious:  a lonely guy tries to lasso in the latest in a line of companions, so that she can stay with him until she dies of old age.  But here, the motivation is nothing more and nothing less than the need for companionship.  Tarquin's motives are not entirely selfish, as he seems to genuinely believe that Hoshi is as lonely as he and that she would benefit from staying with him.  He tries to make her feel at home by letting her touch his crystal ball and giving her a book to translate (to Hoshi, this is more fun than a Playstation).  But despite all his attentions, he is unable to reach his goal.  What he does not seem to perceive is that Hoshi views his attempts to keep her there as not only unfriendly, but unacceptable.  Despite his ability to read her mind in such vivid detail as to recall memories of her grandparents, Tarquin is unable to comprehend this basic revulsion to what Hoshi sees as imprisonment.  I would speculate that his species is not so bothered by imprisonment, but he seems to be melancholy enough about his own imprisonment on his planet.  But loneliness can be a powerful motivation, after all.

Hoshi's reactions throughout the episode are well played.  At the beginning, we see the redux of "Vanishing Point," except that this time it's Reed playing the straight man, saying that she is seeing hallucinations and nothing more.  His reaction in their scene on the bridge is typical of what you'd expect.  He has run his scans and done everything to try and see evidence of what Hoshi saw--after all, stranger things have happened in the Expanse so far, and he wants to trust Hoshi's judgment of her experience.  But at the same time, he's skeptical, and tries to comfort Hoshi by relating his experience of hearing clicking sounds.  He leaves her with assurances that he's still taking her seriously, and will continue to watch out for strange readings.  Later, when Hoshi has been vindicated and the source of her visions revealed, Reed and Archer both take on the more protective role, not wanting Hoshi to risk herself.  But Hoshi remains strong, insisting that she can take care of herself.  Ultimately, that proved true (see the second paragraph after this one).

But as the episode progresses, any resemblance to "Vanishing Point" vanishes (sorry, couldn't help it), and shades of "Sub Rosa" come to the fore.  The design of the outside of the castle was interesting--not something you see every day on Trek.  The somewhat gothic setting of the interior matched it quite well; it's good to see some more old-fashioned settings in Trek, after so many futuristic ones.  As the plot thickens, we see Hoshi becoming increasingly uncomfortable with Tarquin being able to see such intimate thoughts from her mind.  The realization of what he's really up to (in the scene with the four graves) may have been a bit under-played, but I forgive them, considering the nice little gothic plot device of the young woman venturing into the forbidden part of the property (throw Jane Eyre in there with the other sources for plot devices).

Now we come back to the "Sub Rosa" comparison.  While the motivations of the male characters parallel each other, the roles of Hoshi and Beverly are quite different.  Beverly was seduced by her antagonist, while Hoshi does a much better job of resisting.  I would accuse the writers of doing this because of Tarquin's very alien appearance, but thankfully we see Hoshi resisting his human projection just as much.  Considering this strength of character, I'm willing to dismiss earlier questions I had about Hoshi wearing somewhat scanty outfits, even after she knew what Tarquin was up to (at least she looks better in them than T'Pol does in her semi-weekly Vulcan nighttime fashion parade).  Hoshi continued to resist even when presented with the illusion of her captain.  Even though the audience was well ahead of her in realizing that "Archer" wasn't real, Hoshi finds out in good time and is suitably angry.  But she maintains enough composure to think on her feet, and before her would-be captor can react she seizes her opportunity--threatening to destroy his crystal ball, the one physical object that is important to him.  Her strategy works, and Hoshi has solved her own dilemma, as well as that of her crew, without needing anyone else to rescue her.

One of the more interesting things in this episode was the insight into Hoshi's character; things are revealed that I, for one, did not suspect before.  Apparently, she is plagued by a nagging loneliness, cutting herself off from the rest of the crew.  We learn that this may stem from her childhood, when her parents, perceiving her extreme intelligence and talent, kept her apart from other children and gave her private tutors.  She thought it was normal to be alone.  This creates a strong parallel between Hoshi and Tarquin, who was also isolated for his mental abilities.  The idea of a society exiling telepaths (1 in 50 million of their people) because they fear them is quite interesting.  A telepath, whether guilty or innocent, would certainly evoke strong fears in the rest of society.  As seen in this episode, such a being would have the power to spy on and manipulate others, and the only way to completely prevent that would be to exile that person to a distant planet.  Whether it is right to do so is up for debate, but this episode wasn't about that.  It was about the result of such an action--the consequences of sentencing such a long-lived being to such isolation.  And in that respect, I think this episode succeeded marvelously.

But that wasn't all we were given this week.  We also got a B-plot that was, shall we say, a bit unorganized.  We learn that there are more Death Stars out there and that they're creating a heck of a lot of anomalies.  The fact that one of these anomalies blows out a large chunk of Enterprise's hull plating seems lost in the flurry of Archer's obsession with moving forward.  Did they even suffer any casualties from that?  From the scale of the disaster, you would think so.

But in any case, Archer doesn't care--he finally gets to play with some Trellium D (and tells T'Pol to steer clear of the launch bay lest she become zombified), and the Trellium seems to protect the shuttlepod, for the most part.  I wasn't overly enthralled with the scene where Trip accidentally sends the shuttlepod flying and they shoot at the thruster to get it back.  I was a bit puzzled, as the Death Star didn't seem to have enough of a gravitational pull to make the shuttle fall as it eventually did.  The shuttle sure wasn't acting like it was under that kind of pull when it was spinning away as though in a zero gravity environment.  But what bothered me about that scene wasn't the shoddy science (we're used to that), but rather the incredible stupidity of Archer and Trip as they stand immobile in the tumbling shuttle's path, not bothering to move a muscle.

Trip:  Uh, Cap'n?  Shouldn't we, uh, at least be tryin' to get out of the way?
Archer:  Nah, Trip, don't you pay attention?  It's always the same in these situations--it always comes to a stop before it reaches th--GUURRrghplppp!!

Anyway, I thought the B-plot was a bit out of place, but not terribly offensive.

The end of the episode saw a convergence of Hoshi's part of the story with Archer's.  We knew all along that Tarquin would most likely reveal something about the Xindi, so it came as no great shock when Hoshi presented the coordinates to the captain.  So I guess we're going to be heading to a Xindi colony which is building part of the weapon.  Oh goody.  If I was a Xindi in that colony, I'd scarper right now; Captain Jon "I put the Darth in Vader" Archer is coming, and he's not best pleased.  No doubt we'll be seeing more rabid Xindi hating coming up...but whatever comes in future episodes, this one will remain relatively untarnished.  I enjoyed this hour of Enterprise, and I'm not going to let bad boy Archer spoil it for me.

A few notes:

You know that little aquarium we saw in Sickbay?  I have one just like it.  Looks like they spray-painted it silver, though.

I thought the scene with Archer's water polo ball getting stuck to the wall was cute.  Bakula played it quite well, illustrating both the humor of the moment and the fact that these anomalies are becoming kind of old hat to the crew these days--but also a good indicator of the proximity of the Death Stars.

Hoshi has studied Medieval Klingon.  Hmmm...uh, okay.  I guess we all knew what Hoshi did with her spare time already, so this really shouldn't come as a shock.

We finally got the "small moon" reference with regard to the Death Stars.  Nice.
 

"I assume we're getting close?"  -Archer to T'Pol, upon seeing his water polo ball stuck to the wall.
 

Rating:  ****3/4  The A-story was well conceived and well acted, and in my opinion, on par with the best of Enterprise.  But the B-story drags it down a bit, not so much with the shoddy science or the lack of self-preservation instinct, but more because we've seen it all before.  The massive hole in the hull might have provided something different, but it was forgotten almost as soon as it happened.  But overall, the episode was a pleasure to watch, and it reaffirms my admiration of Hoshi's character, which has been drastically underused recently.  I hope this theme of her nagging loneliness shows up again, and I wouldn't be surprised it if does, considering the good record Enterprise has had with internal continuity.  In any case, I'm pleased with this outing; well done to all involved.
 
 
 

10/8/03--Review for:  "Impulse"  (T'Pol loses control of her emotions almost as much as usual)

First things first:  I'm not sure what was accomplished by showing us the 'flash forward' right off the bat.  It established that Archer and T'Pol got back to Sickbay and that T'Pol knows how to scream.  My first thought was:  I guess all that time alone with Trip is starting to get to her.  Then I realized that Archer was the one who brought her in...well I guess it's all that time alone with Archer that did it.  Makes even more sense.

If this little intro was meant as a way to lasso in the casual channel-flipping viewer, I'm not sure it has done its job.  Frankly, it's not the most enthralling teaser I've ever seen.  Jolene Blalock has proven to me that she can act most of the time...but this episode was not, IMO, her best outing.

This episode was a strange mix of suspense and lack of suspense (yes, feel free to question my sanity).  We knew what was going to happen to T'Pol; we also knew that Phlox, being the mad genius that he is, would be able to come up with the miracle cure with little problem.  So where's the jeopardy?  Actually, at one point during that tightrope/balance beam scene, I was wondering if the military grunt they'd brought along was about to become the latest redshirt.  Then when he went ahead of Reed, the thought flashed across my mind that Malcolm might be the one to go.  I haven't been following the gossip on the internet or anywhere else lately, so as far as I knew, it was perfectly possible that Dominic Keating had gotten fed up with the show and decided to jump ship.  But Reed got across okay, and I was relieved.  It was then that I realized I had actually been worried about a crew member for the first time in the whole series (I think).  What does this show?  A) That the scene was well-executed, in the sense of developing enough tension to make me worry.  B)  Reed is one of the few people I would actually miss if they did decide to kill off one of the regulars.  Let me put it this way:  if Archer had been the last one to cross, I would have been rooting for the Vulcan zombies to make him trip.  The way Blalock behaves sometimes, I wouldn't have been completely devastated if they had done the same to T'Pol.  But Reed...no.  I still care about Mr. Reed...and Ms. Sato, and Mr. Tucker, and (to some extent) the Phlox-meister.  As for Mayweather, it would be a blessing (hey, at least he'd get a story).

Speaking of Mayweather, is there a reason why he stays behind while Archer pilots the shuttle to the Vulcan ship?  We see scenes of Archer's shuttle narrowly avoiding asteroids, then we cut to Mayweather at the transporter controls.  Now, I realize that this was a plot contrivance so that Mayweather could pilot the other shuttle later when the transporter stopped working, but it still doesn't make sense why he would stay behind initially.  *Sigh*  It's not like Mayweather had a lot of great lines in that subplot.  I guess it was all worth it so we could see yet another example of Earth-like gravity on a mass that's too small (see season one's "Breaking the Ice").

Getting back to the Vulcan zombies, which weren't particularly remarkable in and of themselves...I'm not sure I buy the reason for them attacking Archer and company instead of each other.  Judging by the Vulcan blood Reed found, the zombies haven't always been so cooperative with each other.  Perhaps just when aliens show up?  But if they're zombies, and unable to communicate with T'Pol, how do they know enough to be able to tell friend from enemy?  Wait, I've got it--the smell!  Yes, those smelly humans...that's why the zombies hated them so much!  That's right, call me a genius....

And then there was Archer, who spent most of the time playing off of T'Pol like a zombie himself.  That is, until he made a statement that made me laugh out loud:  "I can't try to save humanity without holding on to what makes me human."  Good grief.  This is the same guy who said "There's too much at stake to let my morality get in the way" a couple of weeks ago, isn't it?  Please, let me know if I am wrong...but it certainly looked like the same guy.  And here was I thinking he had contradicted himself last week.  Deary me...I hadn't seen the half of it yet, had I?  I give up on Archer; the writers clearly have no idea how they're going to portray him, and I expect we'll get more contradictions in the future.  This is one prediction I'm pretty sure I've gotten right.

A few notes:

This is the first episode of the season without any neuropressure--or even direct mention of it (the sleep remark near the beginning could be interpreted as a reference, but the point is, there's no semi-naked massaging going on).  Trip did seem to ask T'Pol on a date (to the movie), but it looked more like an invitation of friendship, rather than anything else.  Fine with me.

The name of the Vulcan ship, Seleya (sp?), is a nice homage to the Vulcan mountain of the same name.  This was the place Spock and McCoy were taken to for the rejoining ritual in Star Trek III:  The Search for Spock.

Chivalry hasn't died out, I guess.  Archer and Reed both reached down to help T'Pol out of a hatch when they first get to the Vulcan ship, even though neither of them had needed such assistance.  I'll try not to take this as a sign of chauvinism, just thoughtfulness.

I thought Reed and the military guys going one way while the two senior officers went the other way was a bit odd.  I realize the writers are always trying to keep Archer and T'Pol together, but the meager dialogue which results doesn't quite seem worth it, frankly.

Lastly, I hate to bring this up again, but remember the Death Star a couple of episodes ago?  Chalk up another Star Wars connection with the asteroid field.  In both The Empire Strikes Back and this episode, the asteroids were very unrealistic (so close together and moving so rapidly they would have pulverized each other in a very short time).  At least this episode had the 'excuse' of the spacial anomalies to push aside such criticisms put forth by the laws of physics.  Ah, but what the heck, I enjoyed the asteroid fields in both Star Wars and this episode, so forget the sloppy science.
 

"This'll be a new one for the maintenance crew."  -Trip, referring to the splats of trelium on the walls of the transporter platform.

"I can't try to save humanity without holding on to what makes me human."  -Archer to T'Pol.  I find this statement to be utterly laughable, considering the way Archer has been behaving recently.
 

Rating:  ****1/4  It had its good points and its bad points...and some mediocre ones in between.  I enjoyed the action, especially the balance beam escape near the end.  I wasn't so keen on yet another episode where T'Pol starts to lose control of her emotions.  That concept is, quite frankly, getting to be old hat on this show, and it's not like it was all that great in the first place.  To fans who have criticized Blalock's performance and the way T'Pol has been written, this only makes them laugh at the concept that T'Pol ever controls her emotions.  I am not as harsh of a critic as many of them, but I can see their point.  Archer's statement, quoted above, was even worse, given his behavior in the past.  It's not an indication that his character has changed, merely that the writers don't know how to write the guy, and apparently don't understand that 'morality' and 'humanity' are related terms.  All in all, this episode kept my attention, but I could think of better ways for Enterprise to spend its production time.
 
 

10/1/03--Review for:  "Rajiin"  (at the expense of the crew, a slave girl gathers information for the Reptilian race of the Xindi)

After a few muddled showings, as well as last week's Fraggle convention, this episode was in some ways closer in tone to a traditional Trek outing.  Despite a few scenes obviously meant for juvenile titillation (the Enterprise trademark again), I felt that this episode held together remarkably well.

Right off the bat, we were fed more Trip and T'Pol with their neuropressure.  This time she's working on his face and neck, but it's just as [juvenile/titillating/embarrassing/take your pick] as the lying down stuff.  I'm still not sure if this is going anywhere, but this time we got a bit more of a story.  The issue of the rest of the crew's reaction to Trip's late-night visits has been brought up, but not much was resolved, apart from Trip agreeing that it's none of Malcolm's business if he wants to romance and/or press neurons with a Vulcan.  In any case, there's no indication that this thread is coming to an end anytime soon.

We saw Trip and T'Pol working together professionally as well, but after their work resulting in an explosion even Malcolm would have been proud of, maybe they would rather just stick with the neuropressure from now on.  But anyway....

Rajiin herself was a somewhat interesting character, well-played by the actress.  I wasn't overly-fond of any of her 'seduction' scenes, but she can't help what the writers spew out, can she?  What I can't figure out is where she got the outfits she wore after coming on board the Enterprise.  Remember, this is pre-replicator Trek, which means garments don't just materialize out of thin air.  They don't even have Garak to take care of tailoring duties.  So, since she didn't seem to be carrying any extra garments when she 'escaped' to the ship, she must have borrowed those clothes from female crewmembers (at least, I hope they were female).  Of course, I suppose the ship might have a storage rack of 'slave girl fashions' on board for just this sort of emergency.  William Ware Theiss would have been proud.

Of course, the Theiss titillation factor was spawned in the 60s, which was a different era.  Now, the titillation comes from cheezy sex scenes spawned from the minds of everyone's best friends, B&B.  Initially, Rajiin seems to be interested only in Archer, but before long it's clear that she seems to have an effect on everyone she encounters--even the women.  I can just see fans speculating about the sexual orientation of both Hoshi and T'Pol, neither of whom seem particularly immune to Rajiin's charms.  But for myself, I take these scenes as A) a manifestation of the writers' fantasies, and B) having nothing to do with the sexual orientation of either Hoshi or T'Pol, but rather they're meant to show Rajiin's inescapable power to seduce/influence anyone, no matter what their normal preference might be.  But that might not be the whole story; in T'Pol's case, there might be another reason.

Looking at the T'Pol scene as a plot contrivance, I suspect the catch of this episode might be that Rajiin got T'Pol's genetic profile or whatever, instead of Archer's or another human's.  It would be the most practical explanation for why T'Pol suffered the most damaging of Rajiin's attacks, and would also explain why she seemed to have sought T'Pol out specifically, after Archer had told her that T'Pol was a different species.  This ties in with Rajiin's insistence (in the brig scene) that the best thing Archer can do for himself is to let her go.  The problem with this hypothesis is that I'm not sure humans and Vulcans are really different enough that a bioweapon engineered for Vulcans wouldn't work on humans.  On the other hand, T'Pol seems to be resistant or immune to a lot of things that affect the humans, so it's possible the reverse might be true in this case.  I'll be interested to see if this idea of mine has any merit, but I'm not crossing my fingers....

Ignoring the cheap ratings gimmick seduction scenes, Rajiin did get some meaningful dialogue.  Her most interesting words came when she was confronted by Archer in the brig.  This is Archer after he's found out she's working for the Xindi.....which means he's gone a bit berserk.  As I'm sure you'll all recall, the last person Archer confronted in the brig was being decompressed in an airlock as soon as the good captain found any hint of a Xindi connection.  It's probably a good thing Rajiin didn't know what happened to that guy.  But Archer's threats were pretty hollow this time around, and he didn't seem inclined to throw her in an airlock at all.  Gee, I wonder why that would be...could it have anything to do with physical attraction?  Nah, our good captain wouldn't let a thing like that cloud his judgment, would he?  Not that I wanted him to throw her in the airlock, but my opinion of Archer has still not improved.

The Xindi themselves didn't gain much depth in this outing; once again, the more alien looking (reptile and insectoid) races were the most unreasonable, while the mammalian looking ones don't seem to have their hearts in the whole plan.  Hopefully, we'll get more interesting and nuanced views of these races as the season progressess...but somehow, I doubt it.

A couple of notes:

As is the norm for Enterprise, the effects and production values were impressive in this episode.  I especially enjoyed the first shot of the Enterprise approaching that blue planet--beautifully done.  The airlock hatch being blown was well done, but it makes me wonder if it might not be a good idea to install automated weapons systems in places like that, giving the security team a bit of help when trying to fend off the bad guys.  But I suppose it might malfunction at some point and blow Soval's head off when he's boarding the ship.  Not that I think anyone would complain about that....

Intra-series continuity continues to be on display, as Phlox mentions Archer's affliction from the previous episode and tells him that it'll linger for awhile longer.  It probably won't be mentioned after this, though I've been wrong before and will be again.

Finally, take note of this very important piece of advice:  when you see a wad of slime hit the wall behind you, don't just sit on your behinds staring at it for ten seconds like it's a rather interesting spitwad.  Don't stare at the slime; run from the slime.  You gotta wonder sometimes how these guys passed their security training.
 

"On our planet, wars were fought over these."
"Snort/cough/hack....What's this one called?"
"Black pepper."  -Trip and the chemist.

"I'd love to hear your language."
"Actually, I speak quite a few."  --Hoshi and Rajiin, who is acting like Hoshi's dream girl.
 

Rating:  ****1/2  It would be higher, but I had to take off points for the excessive (even for Enterprise) titillation (how many times have I used that word today?) scenes to which we were treated.  It's not that I'm deeply offended or anything, it's just that the show's short enough as it is.  With only forty-some minutes to tell your story, you can't afford to waste so much of it on mindless drivel like this.  Trek has always had a sensual edge to it, sure, but it never had such a large percentage dedicated to it before Enterprise hoved into view.  The show could be so much better with a few tweaks here and there...but I probably shouldn't have written that.  Knowing B&B, 'a few tweaks here and there' is going to be misinterpreted.  Good thing they don't read this (believe me, there's freedom in being unknown and unread).
 
 

9/24/03--Review for:  "Extinction"  (Archer, Reed, and Sato turn into Fraggles)

If you've never seen the old Jim Henson show Fraggle Rock, my apologies.  Fraggles are weird little muppet critters, many of whom have hair that looks like...well...kind of like Archer's and Reed's when they get infected by the virus in this episode.  Weird hardly begins to describe this episode.  In fact, the denizens of Fraggle Rock seemed utterly normal by comparison.

I admit, I wasn't expecting a completely sensible episode, but what we got was beyond the level of cheeziness we usually get.  It started out normal enough--normal for Enterprise, that is.  T'Pol and Trip with some peaches and another gratuitous massage scene (food and pseudo sex have become Enterprise trademarks).  This one wasn't as bad as most though, as Connor Trinneer and Jolene Blalock have a very nice natural chemistry which tends to make even their most poorly written scenes watchable.

And then Archer, Reed, Sato, and T'Pol land on a planet and things...well, they start to get weird.  I suppose the idea of a mutagenic virus that can alter genomes isn't too far-fetched, by Trek standards, but Enterprise science is as stupid as ever.  No mutagenic virus, no matter how advanced, is going to plant memories as vivid as Archer's view of that city.  Moreover, it's not going to give you another language.  Humans are not born pre-programmed for any one language, nor are they programmed with 'racial memories' of this detail, which are pure fiction.  Yes, we have a basic recognition for things like faces, and fears of creatures like snakes or spiders--fears that are genetically programmed to some degree.  But to dream about a city, in such accurate detail, is utterly preposterous.  Sorry, did you get that I didn't like that?

And I wish the writers would give up putting primitive, jerkily speaking dimwits in their episodes.  Whenever they try to do an episode like this, it's a disaster.  I'm sure the actors love to stretch themselves by playing variations of their regular characters, but that doesn't help the audience that has to sit through a good half hour of Archer talking like a mildly educated caveman and Sato twitching her head uncontrollably.  I understand what they were going for, but in my opinion the result missed by a mile.  The only interesting part was when Archer and Sato stole Reed's maggot-filled coconuts, and Reed tried to kill Archer.  Heh.  I was cheering for Reed, but predictably, Archer won the fight.  When Reed was rescued by Trip and company, even this slightly interesting dynamic of the hierarchy of the three creatures was lost.  Archer's idiotic snort-flirting with T'Pol displayed even less chemistry than usual, but at least they didn't overdo it as much as they could have.

The leader of the guys who come to exterminate our crewmembers (didn't catch their name--was it even given?) was well-played, and I liked his costume.  Too bad he had to be wasted in one of Enterprise's less worthy offerings.  The rest of his species--the ones with environmental suits and flamethrowers--were little more than generic bad guys out to get our heroes.  Speaking of flamethrowers...it was a bit different and more frightening to have something like this rather than mere phasers or disrupters.  As a side-note, Hoshi seems to have overcome her reflex of screaming at the sight of gruesome bodies.  She was quite calm and collected when she found the charred body at the beginning of the episode.

The end of the episode wasn't much better than the rest.  I was somewhat perplexed when Archer and Hoshi burst onto the bridge, still partially mutated, and without environmental suits.  Even if they've been infected with the counter-virus, is it really safe for them to be exposing themselves to the rest of the ship in this manner?

And then there's the final Archer moment--the usual stuff B&B shove down out throats at the end of the episode, trying to send us their pathetic message of the week.  Archer's little speech about not wanting to torch the test tube felt hollow.  Is this the same guy who tortured a guy in an airlock last week?  Placing myself in his shoes, I can somewhat understand his reasons for wanting to keep a sample of the virus for posterity, but I can't help wondering if this is a bit of a stupid thing to do, considering the circumstances.  Suppose the Enterprise gets banged around a lot and Phlox's little stasis box falls on the floor and breaks open?  I can see it now:  the whole ship crewed by Fraggles--pounding on the consoles with whatever blunt objects they get their hands on, gibbering madly at a hapless T'Pol, fighting amongst themselves over Phlox's moth larvae...just imagine the possibilities!  Er, I'd better stop now, or I'll be giving B&B ideas for a sequel....

There's one more thing I don't understand...why didn't Hoshi's hair grow too?  Oh, never mind....
 

"Hold on, you never said anything about feet!"  --Trip to T'Pol; er...I won't comment further on that one.

"Are you sure this is safe?  I mean, has anyone ever tried it on a human before?"
"Not to my knowledge.  The risk of paralysis is minimal."  --Trip and T'Pol.
 

Rating:  **1/2  Not a total disaster, but near enough.  It was especially difficult to watch Dominic Keating and Linda Park, my two favorite actors on this show, embarrassing themselves with this drivel.  Bakula wasn't any better, and even when he was nearly 'back to normal' at the end of the episode, Archer's character was being written in a horribly erratic fashion.  The only thing that saves this episode from a one star rating is the opening scene--yes, the pseudo sex.  Compared with the rest of the show, T'Pol biting into peaches and massaging a shirtless Trip was a positive triumph.
 
 
 

9/17/03--Review for "Anomaly" (the Enterprise encounters the Death Star; Archer starts acting like Darth Vader)

I'm glad to see that Porthos is still alive and well.  Not that that has anything whatsoever to do with this episode, but it's nice to see.

Well, well, well...it's the first casualty, right?  Crewman Fuller.  Too bad we never heard of him before.  A lot of people have been grousing about lack of casualties for a long time...but I'm not sure this was the best episode in which to play that particular card.  In fact, I'm fairly certain it wasn't the right situation to do this.  I thought they were holding back on the first casualty to make a really big impact on us--to impress upon us the direness of the situation.  Somehow, I'm not getting the impression of danger here.

For me, the only thing that ups the tension a bit is by the information that though entering the Delphic Expanse is a simple matter, leaving it may not be.  The fact that this comes from the mouth of the 'enemy' is inconsequential:  we, the audience, are meant to believe it.

About the big spherical space station...I mean, we can all joke and make fun, but it's not exactly like the Death Star.  It's a complete coincidence, frankly.  Now, if it had blown up a planet, I would be really worried.  But it's not like it's the first time Enterprise has used a space ship similar to the trademark of another sci-fi universe.  That Dr. Who time travel/Tardis episode last season is still fresh in my memory, yes sirree.  During this one, I kept expecting someone to say "Look at him, he's heading for that small moon" and the reply "That's no moon; it's a space station."  What's next, do they encounter a bunch of Egyptian god-impersonators in their pyramid-shaped ships?  Or perhaps a hammer-head species of aliens with a fondness for Reeses Pieces?  But my money's on the big red ship crewed by the guitar-playing slob, the fashion-conscious cat, and the smeghead hologram.

Getting back to the episode...I'm starting to wonder about the direction of the show again (yes, I know:  already).  Archer is becoming increasingly unhinged.  In his feverish obsession with finding the Xindi, he's willing to break all the rules of normal behavior and protocol...such as sticking someone in an airlock and depressurizing it.  Malcolm Reed and another officer walk in on this session, and Reed's reaction is very telling.  His confusion and even, if I might suggest, horror at what his captain is doing mirrors the reaction of a lot of us watching.  Kirk and Sisko could get tough, but depressurizing an airlock with someone inside is not an acceptable means of gathering information.  This alien was not proven to be an evil person.  His people were acting out of necessity, and though their actions may not have been right by our standards, does he warrant this kind of treatment as a prisoner?  Of course not, and this kind of treatment again emphasizes Archer's growing connection to Dubya, referring of course to Dubya's detention of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere--prisoners who have not been given due process of the law and who may or may not be terrorists.

The episode ends with Archer staring intently at the Xindi database scrolling on his screen.  What we see next week is meant to be hinted at as interesting, though I'm not convinced it will be.  But it's the characters I want to see going strong.  This Xindi plot, at this point in the game, is little more than a glorified distraction from what makes the show important and interesting to its long-time fans.

And already the military are starting to show their highly trained stuff.  It's too early to tell how much more of this macho posturing we're going to see, but I have reservations about this aspect of the show.  I'm not adverse to a little combat in a Trek show, but turning Enterprise into 'the macho commandos hour' doesn't sit well with this fan, at least.  The best thing the writers can do with these characters is to develop them to a point, then kill them off (either all at once or one by one, take your pick).  There's no better way to give the audience an emotional reaction than to kill off characters who are reasonably well-developed.  If, on the other hand, these guys and gals are here for some in-your-face fighting and maybe a little sex.....well, let's just say I'll be disappointed, but not surprised.

But what about the main characters--how are they holding up here, at the beginning of season 3?  I've already discussed Archer's shift from bumbling leader to obsessive tough guy, but what about the others?

T'Pol seems to be holding her own (no pun intended, I swear), as the voice of reason and, dare I suggest, logic.  But that grip could loosen the more the writers spend on the neuropressure stuff.  Trip retains some of his charm as the ship's lovable grouch, but has taken on an edge with the more serious matters--namely, the death of a loved one--now playing on his mind.  His bond with Reed remains strong, although there seems to have been a bit of a shift in their roles in this friendship.  Whereas in the beginning (after the totally hostile period), Trip seemed to be the one who was emotionally stronger, now Malcolm seems to have taken on that role.  It is related to the death of Trip's sister, but I'll be interested to see more of this, as it's a side of Reed I enjoy.  Sato, though having been in the background in most recent episodes, still plays an important role in the crew, beyond just her linguistic skills--it's been mentioned by some that she's like a big sister to the crew, and I agree with that to a point.  She certainly seems to have gained her confidence, after a flustered beginning.  That doesn't mean this issue won't crop up somewhere down the road, however.

Phlox, oddly enough, seems to be losing ground as of late; his medical advice to Tucker in the previous episode doesn't do much to add to my respect for him.  He might still get back on track, but for now they seem to be using him as a foil for the rest of the crew.  Last and unfortunately least, Ensign Mayweather has nearly disappeared into the background.  Quite a feat, really, considering he sits at the front of the bridge.  I can't figure out what is going on here...in the beginning of the series, they went to great lengths to give him more backstory than anyone else, except maybe Archer himself.  So why is Travis still a peripheral character?  He's failed to find a niche like Sato, Reed, or Phlox, and if things don't change soon, Harry Kim had better watch out--his 'most underused regular' pedestal is falling to another.  After all, at least Harry was someone's best friend.  I don't get the impression that Mayweather's anyone's best friend, at least not on the Enterprise.  The only one who seems to spend time with him as a friend is Sato...and even that is barely mentioned.

The music and effects seemed particularly good this time around, for some reason.  I loved the shot of the pod traveling from the Enterprise to the sphere, with the ship's outline in the background.  They do seem to have broken tradition and entered orbit in a different orientation to normal (as we've seen plenty of times, ships in Trek tend to orbit with their side facing the planet).  But that's okay, I'll just assume that those darned anomalies are playing tricks with the ship again.  It twists out of orbit in a later shot, though...who knows?

Stembolts on the Death Star, eh?  I wonder if they're self-sealing....
 

"There's too much at stake to let my morality get in the way."  --whether words of bluff or of sincerity, a statement that should never issue from the mouth of a Starfleet captain.

"It's not what you think."
"Oh, I wasn't thinking anything."  --Trip and Malcolm, after Trip mentions T'Pol stimulating his neural nodes.

"All I'm saying is that this mission, whether it succeeds or not, is looking more like a one-way ticket all the time."  --Trip to Malcolm, in a switch of the optimism/pessimism roles.

"It's the Death Star!"  --my mother, after seeing that constructed planet.

"Oh, uh, please, be careful to sleep on your back.  If you roll around you might anger them."
"Maybe an hour a night with T'Pol isn't so bad."  --no kids, it's not what you think.  Okay, so maybe it is, but you're not supposed to think it.

"Are you taking me to your torture chamber?"  --the alien to Archer; and the answer was yes, by the way.

"The airlock's decompressing, sir.  He'll die."
"Not for another 20 seconds he won't."  --Reed and Archer, in an exchange headed for infamy.
 

Rating:  ****1/4  A fair episode, exciting in a few places, dull in others.  The rip-off of the Death Star doesn't really bother me, but Archer's behavior does.  This is heading for some kind of watershed; it remains to be seen whether Archer will see the error of his ways.  But at the very least, I'll remember this episode--if only the part where Archer loses his head and resorts to such a primitive device as torture.
 
 

9/10/03--Review for "The Xindi" (the Enterprise continues (unsuccessfully) on its search for those responsible for attacking Earth; meanwhile, Trip's having trouble sleeping, so T'Pol gives him some 'assistance')

Well, Enterprise is back, and it's pretty clear there's a been a change in tone.  Seasons 1 and 2 were pretty similar as far as the mission and pacing were concerned.  But stand back:  season 3 is heralding the meaner, leaner version of Enterprise--the one that's willing to stand up for its ideals and kick evil in the @$$.

Or so we've been told.

To tell the truth, I was somewhat apprehensive about this season opener, and here's why.  The finale last season was like a relaunch, and some of the things that were said and done therein scared me, quite frankly.  After decades of standing for the ideals of peace, harmony, and doing our best to get along with those around us, Star Trek was about to take an ugly turn.  True, Trek had given us plenty of conflicts and even war before, but only when it was clearly necessary, and the good guys were never the aggressors* (*please, feel free to unravel my last statement by pointing out all the times when the 'good guys' were the aggressors in Trek; it was just a turn of phrase after all).  But the biggest thing that bothered me in this case was the attitudes of some of the crew.  Trip had apparently lost his sister, so he was understandably upset.  His reaction was more extreme than the rest, and he wanted to hurt whoever had done this act of interstellar terrorism.  But Archer's reaction seemed a bit above the bar as well, which is what led me to wonder (somewhat worriedly) if this show was about to do a 'Dubya.'  It's pretty bleeding obvious what Rick and Brannon were thinking (9/11 analogy).  What wasn't clear then, and still isn't clear now is this:  how are they going to play it?  Which side of the coin is Archer on:  is he Dubya's blatant warmongering, Tony Blair's stress for action with cooperation, or 'old Europe's' (Rumsy invented it, not me) passivity?  Or is he just an Iraqi civilian about to be smashed by the powerful Xindi military?  Any one of the four could conceivably be true at this point.  Possibly more than one.  But how are B&B going to write it?  I don't know.

I'll be honest:  I'm much less worried about Enterprise's new direction than I was before I saw "The Xindi."  But that's not to say I'm completely okay with the way the show's headed.  It is yet to be shown whether Archer is destined to be Dubya incarnate or if he shapes up and takes the more noble path we've seen on Trek before.  We'll all just have to wait, I guess.  More likely than not, we ever won't be getting any sort of coherent message from this anyhow--why do I bother to wonder about this?  But enough about this; no doubt we'll have plenty of opportunities to ponder this issue in future episodes.  So, I'll take the rest of the episode point by point.

The military officers.  Although I didn't like the sound of them being on the crew at first, it occurs to me that they might bring some extra story ideas to the sagging brains of Berman and Braga.  Reed is obviously not on good terms with them, and in fact, this could make for some interesting characterization (if done right and not botched by B&B).  The scene with Sato and the officers in the mess hall was somewhat blah, and I saw it as just a way of showing that these guys are separate entities from the rest of the crew, at least for now.  But I can already tell what's stewing in B&B's minds...I just hope they don't try and drag Hoshi through a romance with one of these guys.  If they do, they should at least have the decency to then kill him off, thusly giving Hoshi something major to mope about.  I know; I can be cruel.  But so can life, after all.

The Trip/T'Pol scene.  You know the one I'm talking about.  Erm...I knew they were going to keep doing this kind of thing, to keep those 14 year old boys (not to mention men of all ages, actually...okay, and maybe some of us unscrupulous shipper women) watching.  But at least they paired T'Pol with Trip this time instead of Archer.  It was embarrassing to watch, but I can't deny that it was kind of cute, in a way (shameless Trip/T'Pol shipper alert).  This could be a new aspect to their relationship, even though the way it began was hardly tasteful.  I sometimes get the feeling Phlox fancies himself a bit of a matchmaker....

The sewer scene...was gross (obviously).  I think this is a first for Trek:  characters trudging through 3 feet of iced tea pretending it's sewage.  Ugh.  With that sensitive Vulcan nose of hers, it's a wonder T'Pol wanted to be in the same room as Trip, let alone touch him, even after all those showers.  Maybe those nasal numbing agents really do work.

The slavers.  What they had in mind for our gallant crew was painfully obvious, right from the moment Reed advised caution.  But personally, I thought it became even more obvious when the slaver boss started asking Archer questions like "How strong is your ship's haul?" "How many strong hands are aboard?" and "You don't happen to have good defenses, do you?" (okay, so he didn't quite say those things, but almost).  Once again, Archer shows his idiocy by ignoring these danger signs and plowing ahead with his obsession with finding the Xindi homeworld.  Maybe that was supposed to be the point, but it made Archer look even more careless than usual, and that's saying something.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea for ships like the Enterprise to start carrying things to use for trade.  It's a bit inconvienient to keep having to do things like strip the plantinum alloy from the antimatter relays--I mean, wouldn't it be better to carry around a few bars of gold, silver, platinum, etc. in pure state to use as barter when they need it?  Just a thought.

Science has never been Enterprise's strong point.  Actually, it's been a downright weak point 99% of the time.  So I won't spend too long griping about Phlox's statements concerning the two sets of Xindi DNA.  Specifically, Phlox stated that the two sets of DNA were closer than that of humans and chimpanzees.  Obviously, someone on the Enterprise writing staff doesn't understand the basic principles of evolution.  The reason that humans and chimps share so much DNA is that they are our closest relatives.  After chimps, our next closest relatives are gorillas, orangutans, then on to the various groups of monkeys, and so on.  Now, here's my problem with Phlox's statement:  the two Xindi he was comparing were of different classes, Mammalia and Reptilia.

Suppose a species of dinosaur had evolved into a being of similar intelligence to our own; suppose further that this species looked more or less like us, with reptilian skin and features, but basically a humanoid form (as in that stupid Voyager episode).  These two species, humans and dino-humanoids, would share much less DNA than humans and any other mammal, because they arrived at their current forms through convergent evolution, rather than being closely related.  In other words, the mammalian Xindi would share more DNA with a Xindi mouse (if there is such a thing) than with their reptilian look-alikes.  This is without even getting into the other three Xindi species, but if B&B want us to believe that the insectoid Xindi also shares more than 98% of its DNA with the others, I'll throw up my hands in frustration.  Another example:  just because a dolphin and a shark have similar body plans doesn't mean that the dolphin shares more DNA with a shark than it does with an elephant.  Likewise, just because reptilian and mammalian Xindi share similar body plans and intelligence doesn't mean they share more DNA than a human and a chimp.  Grow up, guys.  Please.

Speaking of the Xindi, the mission to find their homeworld seems to have encountered a bit of a hiccup (tough to find it when it's been blown up, Alderaan style).  Not only that, but it was blown up 120 years ago, according to the Enterprise's scans.  We'll probably find out more about this as we proceed through this expanse.  The Xindi council thing almost made me laugh--all the time I was thinking of that one in Attack of the Clones.  Mind you, this one was a little less corny (which is not not saying much).  The CGI aliens were pretty good for a TV show...not up to Gollum's level yet (gee, I wonder why), but certainly less cartoony than Species 8472.  As for what was said at the council, they seemed to keep it purposefully vague, for obvious reasons.  The one thing they didn't keep vague is probably what they should have kept vague--the Xindi in the council openly admitted that they had launched the probe, and that they had a bigger weapon they didn't want Enterprise to find.  The fact that their planet's been blown up already hints at interference from a third party, probably Temporal Cold War related.  The simplest explanation at the moment is that Future Guy told both sides that the other side was going to attack them, in order to start a war between the two civilizations.  But it might not be that at all.  Stay tuned....

Then there's the strange anomalies in the cargo bay and elsewhere.  I guess I was expecting a lot more weird stuff to be happening in this Delta--er, sorry, Delphic Expanse (I sense Braga's input in the naming, somehow) than what we've got so far.  Mind you, I'm not complaining.  I for one don't want a whole season of "Frame of Mind" (TNG), "Vanishing Point" (ENT), or "Twisted" (VGR)--in other words, really weird stuff happening with only a half-baked explanation.  Okay, so I know we're probably going to get that anyway, but I wish they'd keep it to a minimum.

So, with all of these considerations, how was the episode as a whole?  Despite some criticisms I had of the plot and the way certain scenes were handled, I thought this episode was well executed.  It had a good pace, and seemed to escape, for the most part, the nagging boredom which afflicted the characters for most of last season.  Despite the unraveling of Archer's character, Bakula's delivery was better than usual, and I thought the rest of the regular cast (excepting Mayweather, who got about a line and a half, I think) did better than usual.  The standout for me was once again Dominic Keating as Reed.  Reed may be getting some good character work as a result of being contrasted and conflicted with the military contingent on board.  I really liked the way Reed was written in this episode, especially when he was right about caution being the right course.  Archer decided to throw caution to the wind, and prompty (and stupidly) got caught.  But what else would you expect?  At least I got to chant "Reed was right...right again...Reed was right, so tell some friends...."

As with the season 2 finale, season 3's opener had a rather disorganized feel to it.  Most of the plot threads are continuing, so I'm guessing the coming episodes are going to be similarly odd.

So, with the first episode of season 3 in the bag, I feel a little better about the direction of Enterprise than I did at the end of season 2.  This isn't to say I won't be eating my words in a few weeks' time.

One more thing:  the opening credits.  They appear to have gone for a slightly faster, more energettic version of "Faith of the Heart."  I liked the old version better, but I'm not bothered by this one.  They have also changed the name from just 'Enterprise' to 'Star Trek:  Enterprise', presumably in an attempt to boost the show's popularity and possibly also meant to placate a certain group of fans who have always attacked the show for this omission.  Ah, well...I see little point in arguing over a name, but I admit, it's probably a step in the right direction to pull at least the title of the show closer to traditional Trek.  Not that it's going to affect the content, but it's a start.
 

"Try not to breathe."
"Yes, sir."  --Archer and Reed on the polluted slave labor planet; thankfully, Malcolm didn't take that literally.

"I imagine you must have a very large crew."
"And why would you imagine that?"  --the slaver boss and Archer; like cattle being led to the slaughterhouse.

"That was...far more effective than a hypospray."  --T'Pol to Trip during you know which scene.

"Are you implying I'm making sexual advances?"
"No.  No, no, no, not at all...."  --T'Pol and Trip; I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone sound less convincing.

"Finish the weapon quickly!  Or I'll destroy the Earth Ship, whether this council approves or not!"  --the insectoid Xindi; okay, maybe he's going to be Dubya.
 

Rating:  ****1/2  Mostly entertaining, with a couple of flaws and a slight feeling of discombobulation throughout.  The token embarrassing pseudo sex scene was a bit more tolerable for me this time around because I find Trip/T'Pol easier to digest than the T'Pol/Archer cr*p they kept feeding us last year.  I wouldn't mind the Trip/T'Pol stuff continuing and developing, as long as they keep it less juvenile (yeah, I know:  fat chance).  Anyway, the episode as a whole was not a bad start, considering what I was worried it might be.  I look forward to next week...and that, in itself, is always a good sign.