Unexpected (ENT)

This is the episode where Trip gets pregnant. I have to admit, it was less obnoxious about that premise than I remembered it being. It's too bad that the premise itself is pretty obnoxious.

The problem is that's not really the premise of the episode. The episode doesn't deal with gender roles or pregnancy or parenthood. Trip doesn't deal with any of those things in a serious way. The situation isn't an allegory for much of anything, since the way Trip ends up pregnant is a cultural misunderstanding, not analogous to either rape or consensual sex, and the the alien inside him is never treated particularly like a baby or a living thing, more like an inconvenient growth.

So even though "Trip gets pregnant" is the tagline (and it was certainly the trailer line) it's not what the episode is about. So what IS the episode about?

The Enterprise is experiencing some weird malfunctions and power fluctuations -- mud instead of seltzer water, no gravity in the showers, things randomly catching fire in engineering, the kind of stuff that can really screw up your Monday morning.

Somehow they figure out that the problems are being caused by a tiny cloaked parasite ship that's eating their ... um ... subspace wake, or something? So they do the Starfleet boy scout thing and offer assistance. Trip travels to the ship, which has grass and fish and different air and is pretty much a world of pure imagination. But after a nap he comes to love it there and he hangs out with a young alien woman in a holodeck and they put their hands in a bowl of pebbles that lets them read each others' thoughts.

And then he fixes the ship and goes home, and everything is fine for the rest of the episode. Except that Trip's pregnant, and rather than deal critically with questions about abortion they hop into hot pursuit of the tiny invisible ship, which is not the easiest thing to do.

But they do track the ship down, and it's back at its old parasitic ways, eating the subspace wake of a Klingon ship. I think this is the first time we've seen the Klingons since the pilot. They're not very smart or honorable Klingons, and the scene where our heroes talk them into sparing the ship (and letting Trip go along when they decide to board it and steal its technology) is ... it feels like watching a nerd talk a dumb bully out of beating him up in a high school movie. It sort of weakens the image of the Klingons for me; they're both too dumb and too easily talked down.

So Trip goes over to the alien ship, fixes it for real, and it turns out that the baby is really easy to transfer to another host, and has none of Trip's DNA, so there'll be actually no consequences for him. Guess he learned a lot about pregnancy and what it's like for women, huh?

It's just not a very ambitious episode, is what it comes down to. It doesn't have any Star Trek story about the human experience it's trying to tell and it doesn't commit to the premise it does adopt. Like too many episodes of Enterprise, it just seems like a bunch of things that happen.

I may have to adjust my mindset for these reviews and stop expecting Enterprise to behave like Star Trek, with a message and a moral at the heart of every story. I know there are some people who find that a relief, who consider the moralizing of Star Trek pedantic and grating. But I think, without that, Star Trek has a bad tendency to just become Star Wars done badly.

Random Observations:

-- It's always a bit of a suspension of disbelief how easily Starfleet engineers in all the shows can fix other people's ships. But here it's especially implausible. What is so special about Trip that he can fix these people's ship better than anyone on board it, despite the technology being thoroughly alien? Trip is not, as far as we know it, a savant.

-- Enterprise has a tech creep problem. Ok, the timeline of the invention of the holodeck is problematic in and of itself: in "Encounter at Farpoint" and "10010010101" it's implied that holodeck technology is fairly new at the start of that show, but Jack Crusher was able to make Wesley holo-recordings when he was a baby. But, all that aside, holodeck technology is way too widespread during Enterprise for it to have taken another 200 years for the Federation to adopt/develop it. It's like the creators wanted to have their cake and eat it to, from a prequel-making perspective.

Strange New World (ENT)

In the first season of Enterprise, there's a spirit of "everything old is new again" that pervades the storytelling. Everything Kirk's crew did without even thinking - using the transporter, making first contact, exploring new planets - Archer's crew finds to be a thrilling, and daunting, adventure.

"Strange New World" has a lot of fun with this concept, starting with the "Lower Decks" style opening in the mess hall with several random crewmen and none of our intrepid heroes, discovering that the Enterprise has arrived on a new planet only when they see it out the window.

The writers had a lot of possibilities for what our heroes might find on their first M-Class planet, and I have to applaud their decision to make it ... nothing at all, except some mind-altering drugs.

The episode really did keep me guessing. And if this were any later than the third episode, I wouldn't have bought for a second that T'Pol could be conspiring against the crew. But it's so early in the show, and she's been so openly antagonistic, that it's not a hard sell she might be hiding something on behalf of Vulcan high command.

Between the tricky camera work and the use of light and shadow in the caves and windstorm, the episode made me want to believe there was a lifeform on the planet, even once it became pretty clear the away team was going crazy.

Furthermore, I even bought Trip's freakout, because buried beneath the effect of the drug was the very real fear every member of that crew must be dealing with. I think a lot of "crew goes crazy" episodes on Star Trek don't work because the crazy version of the character is so shallow. But Trip's paranoia is so obviously rooted in the character's real misgivings about the mission (and about T'Pol) that it played out as compelling drama. The crew of Enterprise may have been a bunch of pretty people, but they could also act.

Crewman Elizabeth Cutler is introduced here, to nice effect. The show's willingness to build an ensemble beyond the leads shows that the lessons of past shows are not entirely forgotten. Another good touch is the use of the Hoshi and the Vulcan language to get them out of the climactic showdown. Finding ways to keep a communications officer relevant is a bit of a balancing act, so it's nice to see the creativity.

The camping scenes, the ghost stories, the absurd conceit of bringing your dog on an away mission so he can get some fresh air all worked. The beginning of the series is also an important time to let your characters play a little, get the audience comfortable with them.

I liked this episode a lot. It didn't blow me a way with a great sci-fi concept or stunning effects, but it did entertain me and ingratiate its characters to me. It was good to see Archer work with first Phlox, than Reed, and than Hoshi to craft a solution to his crew's dilemma - the whole ensemble was used to good effect.

Random observations:

- I do believe Archer's lie about a "silicon-based lifeform" was a shout out.

- Cutler's appearances are a bit sad, also, to those of us who followed the show when it was on, as actress Kellie Waymire died unexpectedly in 2003, during the third season of Enterprise.

- Next week is (hopefully) double DS9, to get us back on track and finally make up for my missed Tuesday on Christmas. If we had done double DS9 last week, it would have perfectly lined up with the 20th anniversary of DS9's premier. Too bad I didn't know about that until just now.

Broken Bow Parts I and II (ENT)

Surprise! You're not getting another Original Series review today, you're getting Enterprise. This space will alternate between TOS and ENT, even as it alternates with DS9 for a pattern like this:

TOS - DS9 - ENT - DS9 - TOS - DS9 - ENT - etc.

Enterprise is the newest and least-loved addition to the Star Trek franchise. I was a detractor at the time that it came out. My biggest objection was that it just didn't feel like Star Trek. Great efforts were made to make it cool and hip and to make it draw in a non-Trekkie audience. Those efforts failed, by and large, while simultaneously succeeding in alienating loyal Trekkies, leading to the first Star Trek series since the original to be cancelled before completing a seven-year run.

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.

The plot works best when we're on board the Enterprise and the central conflict is between Archer and T'Pol or Trip and T'Pol. Still, "Broken Bow" lumbers through it's messy pilot with it's share of witty lines, fun moments, and cool action scenes, and sets us up with a promising premise. Archer and T'Pol don't like each other, but they've earned each other's respect and they're both going to commit to the relationship. The Enterprise NX-01 is heading out on an exploration mission it's not quite ready for. All is right with the Star Trek world.

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.