TOS - DS9 - ENT - DS9 - TOS - DS9 - ENT - etc.
Well, like most shows, I've come to appreciate Enterprise more with a little perspective. I still think there were things in the show that were very much mishandled and blatant pandering. Most of them involve decon gel. But it also had a certain swashbuckling flare that I don't think any other show does as well. And in and amongst its run are great arcs and great Star Trek plots.
Whether I wanted Star Trek to have a new baby brother or not, the baby arrived. And now it's part of the family. And not only do I have to accept that, but hopefully I can even learn to love it too.
"Broken Bow" was an extremely ambitious pilot. Which is a nice way of saying it's kind of a mess. In the space of two hours the pilot has to reintroduce us to the world of Star Trek, at a time period we've never seen before, give us the sense of the politics, introduce us to the whole cast, introduce the series' recurring villains, give us an incredibly complicated plot, take us to four different planets, and set the show up at the end. Oh and Klingons also.
"Emissary" and "Caretaker" were busy pilots too, and both had an awful lot to do. But "Broken Bow" just feels denser. Maybe because it refuses to focus closely on one character, giving us plenty of Captain Jonathan Archer, but also a lot of T'Pol, Charles "Trip" Tucker III, and a weird amount of backstory and focus on Hoshi Sato and Dr. Phlox. Only Malcolm Reed and Travis Mayweather really take the back seat on this pilot.
Enterprise takes us back earlier in Star Trek's future than we've ever really seen before. (Not counting the DS9 episode "Past Tense," and possibly some other miscellaneous forays.) It's only the 22nd Century, and humanity's first contact with Vulcan is still a vivid memory. A small handful of Vulcan's are living on earth, overseeing and advising Earth's burgeoning warp flight program. They've even brought a few other aliens to Earth like the Denobulan Dr. Phlox.
"Broken Bow" begins when an uninvited alien turns up on Earth, a Klingon who immediately gets shot by a human farmer. He's being chased by a pair of Suliban, genetically-enhanced reptilian baddies employed by the future.
Last week I said DS9 was the only pilot that started with a flashback to the Captain's past, which just shows how poorly I remembered "Broken Bow." Interspersed with this busy pilot are scenes between the Captain and his father, a starship engineer who the Vulcans held back from ever seeing his engine take flight. This has filled Archer with a resentment of Vulcans that he seems to share with most of the human race, and this conflict pushes us through the episode.
On his mission to return the stricken Klingon to Q'onos, Archer's forced to take a Vulcan on board as his executive officer. T'Pol doesn't like him and isn't shy about expressing it, in that way Vulcans have of using logic as an excuse for being rude.
Trip, Archer, and T'Pol are very obviously meant to be McCoy, Kirk, and Spock here, and I'm OK with that, mostly because Trip sells country and cantankerous as well as DeForrest Kelley but adds a boyish charm and T'Pol sells Vulcan almost as well as Leonard Nimoy (well, as well as can be expected) but adds a confrontational edge Nimoy never had.
T'Pol has the Seven of Nine problem of being a really poor choice of sex symbol, costumed in a catsuit but written as a necessarily non-sexual character. Vulcans go into heat every 7 years; the rest of the time their sexuality is as repressed as their emotions. Jolene Blalock really can act, so I don't question the casting, but there is a sense that costuming and promotion on this show were being driven by different factors than the writing.
The rest of the cast is competent and promising here with what little they're given. Hoshi Sato brings back the long-lost post of communications specialist with a kind of cute nerdiness that makes sense for a linguist. She's not quite at ease on a spaceship, but she's unparallelled in her element. Travis Mayweather, the space boomer pilot, is sort of retro-sci-fi in his youth and profession, but his background hints of fleshing out this chunk of Trek history. Phlox is going to be Dr. Yoda plus comic relief. Sure, why not?
The weakest player in this outing is Malcolm Reed, mainly by virtue of not being given overmuch to do. He's cynical about the transporter and British. And pretty into the butterfly ladies. We don't quite know what makes him tick yet, though.
What to say about the plot? When I first watched Enterprise, I was very worried about the introduction of a time travel plot in the very first episode of the show. I felt strongly that the show and its new time period needed to stand on their own two feet, and a time travel plot was too tempting a way to introduce familiar characters. That fear wasn't really justified. But I still distrust time travel here. It's very messy and introduces uncertainties and a looming threat of reset buttons.
Here, it's just a distraction. Everything about the Suliban in this pilot is too complicated for me to really care about or get into it. All the stuff about genetic enhancements and not waiting around for evolution is theoretically compelling, but I was worn out enough focusing on the new crew and their mission. The bad guys just didn't need to be that deep. When Archer meets a Suliban woman, she kisses him, and she gets shot dead less than five minutes later, it was hard not to feel like I was being manipulated inexpertly.
Random Observations:
- It's been said before, but 3 weeks from Earth to Q'onos at Warp 4.5 badly contradicts everything fans had figured out about Star Trek spacial geography and was, in my opinion, a large part of, or at least highly representative of the initial fan backlash against the show. Fanon explanations abound and are hilarious as usual, including a suggestion that "Q'onos" is a generic Klingon word for "capital" and that the capital of their space was moved at some point in time.
- Another big complaint at the time was that the Vulcans in this show were too dickish. But honestly, most Vulcans we see on Star Trek kind of are. Sarek is probably the nicest full Vulcan we ever meet, and even he's kind of rude.
- How long will it take Star Trek fans to see Scott Bakula and not immediately think Sam Beckett has leapt into their Captain's body? Too long, I should think, although I guess this show was made for people much younger than that reference.
- The torch-passing cameo here is a weak one, but the best that could be done given the circumstances. James Cromwell reprises the role of Zephram Cochrane from Star Trek: First Contact, but only on a screen in a scene that feels pretty out of place in an already overstuffed script.
- Ok, the decon gel. Just the worst possible way to try to make your show sexier. If you want to make your show sexier (and I object on principal to trying to make Star Trek sexy, it's almost always disastrous) you need to actually involve sex. Having your characters randomly getting in their underwear and rub stuff on each other, while having a completely unrelated plot-heavy conversation is just ... bizarre? Exploitation? Basically the set up for a bad space porno? It's definitely a "What the heck were the producers thinking?" thing, and I even thought that when I was a teenage boy.
- One thing that's grown on me a lot is the opening credits sequence. It's a very big departure from previous shows, but it's a welcome one, visually stimulating and with a nice, chill song.
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