Breaking the Ice (ENT)

Breaking the Ice is a paradox of an episode of Star Trek. It answers questions like "How groundbreaking can an episode be without actually being interesting?" and "How can an episode where characters leave the ship on a dangerous and special-effects filled mission still feel like a bottle show?"

The episode is groundbreaking and envelope-pushing in that it really plays with Enterprise's conceit, bridging the gap between today's NASA and Kirk's Starfleet. The whole runner with the grade school class back on Earth is very NASA and something we would never see on other shows (although starting on Next Generation they have the kids right on board.) And theoretically its also a way to get the audience to learn a little more about day to day life on Enterprise.

But in practice, it doesn't work at all. The scene is way too long for starters. It straight-up feels like padding. It has actual poop jokes in it, and it turns out jokes about poop jokes are not as many sophistication levels above poop jokes as they think they are. It features the actors basically playing their characters being bad actors as they awkwardly interact with the camera, which is also not as fun as it sounds (they're maybe too good at it.) And as for the actual answers, they are the epitome of show, not tell. We don't want to watch the bridge crew yakking at us for that long when the ship's under attack, much less when the stakes are nonexistent.

And that's the problem with the whole boring episode. Besides the children (who, by the way, we never get to see, even though an adorable child could maybe have saved this episode), here are the other three subplots:

- Vulcans like to watch us and be condescending ... but everything is exactly as it seems.

- T'Pol is having second thoughts about her arranged marriage we never heard about before and accidentally confides in Trip.

- There is a comet.

I honestly have no idea what was going on with that comet. I guess, it was really big? And it maybe had some kind of rare mineral inside it. Not, like, one they needed to fix the ship, just one that was shiny. Reed and Mayweather land on the comet for some reason and then basically just goof off, build snowmen, and blow something up for some reason. And the Vulcan story kept seeming like it was going somewhere, but it really wasn't. There were just Vulcans, really just the one, looking over Archer's shoulder, being creepy. Don't they have better things to do, seriously?

Only the T'Pol plot really held any interest for me, and that only the faintest bit. Maybe it's not the best idea to put the emotional weight of the episode on the shoulders of a character that doesn't express emotion? It doesn't really make your boring episode less boring.

To go back to my initial observation, this show tries to bridge the gap between present and future, and in doing so reveals a fatal flaw in Enterprise. Space travel is fundamentally less interesting and less awesome now than it is in the 23rd Century. To go backwards was to impose all kinds of limits on one's storytelling at a time when the franchise needed to be exploring strange new worlds to survive.

Star Trek has progressed through wormholes, time warps, and nebulas that turn thought into reality. Why would viewers find a really big comet interesting? Why should this tension exist between Enterprise fulfilling it's potential as a show and being accurate to its conceit, and Enterprise actually being good?

This might be why the show starts to lean so heavily on time travel as a crutch -- it's a way to deliver something new to viewers, despite that the premise only allows for the old and the outdated.

Either way, Breaking the Ice is a swing and a miss. And a miss and a miss and a miss. It's rare and mesmerizing to see a show attempt four different subplots in an episode and succeed at none of them.

Random Observations:

- Nope, I'm done. Nothing more to say about this train wreck.

The Andorian Incident (ENT)

Once upon a time, there was a cheesy 60s sci-fi show. It was a remarkable cheesy 60s scifi show that captured an uncommon number of hearts and somehow, miraculously and often by the skin of its teeth, outlived it's 1960s roots and became one of the longest running single franchises in television history, probably. But before that, it was a 60s sci-fi show. It employed the tropes of the genre -- swashbuckling white male heroes, sexy alien babes, "in space" versions of things that shouldn't have been in space.

Then, 20ish years later, the maker of that cheesy show got a chance to make a new, modern, savvy late 80s version of that show, and he made some changes. He made the ship bigger, the social issues more sweeping. The hero aged like the creator had, from a brainier Buck Rogers to a bald, British, older man who traded in raw testosterone for tempered wisdom and cultural sensitivity.

This new show was going to be something else. It was going to be a shinier, more polished future. It was not going to be so silly. And so, although all of the other people working on the show were excited about bringing back their favorite aliens, planets, and plots, the man made some decrees. He said that certain aliens were too cheesy, too silly, too 60s to return, no matter how much the fans might have liked them.

And that's why Tellarites, Orion Slave Girls, Tholians, and, especially, Andorians were never on TNG, DS9, or Voyager. (Yes, super geeks, I know there are technically exceptions like the holographic Andorians that appear in "The Offspring (TNG)".)

Many years later, when that man had died and his followers were dreaming up the fifth incarnation of the show, they felt they had gone as far forward as they could. The Federation of the 1990s had become small. There were no quadrants left to explore (except the Beta Quadrant, and let's face it, nobody knows what's going on with that).  But there was a tempting stretch of unexplored time. No, not the time between TOS and TNG, the movies had covered the highlights there and the uniforms of that era were exceptionally silly looking anyway. It was the time between now and then. If James T. Kirk was the pioneer Picard revered, who was the pioneer Kirk looked to as a mentor?

And so, Enterprise was made. And the creators, looking through the 40 years of loose threads and once-explored planets, realized that this new show was the chance they'd been waiting for to finally defy Gene's ban on "the silly races."

Enterprise is defined, for me, by a number of threads. Overuse of time travel plots. Misguided attempts to be cool and/or sexy. Showing the lost firsts of all our favorite stock Trek threads. But my favorite one, and the one that's frankly the most interesting in the context of my own rediscovery of The Original Series as I write this blog, is the reclamation of the silly parts of TOS, and the attempts to remake them in the image of the 00s version of cool.

Enter the Andorians, led by Shran, played by Jeffrey Combs, one of the most versatile Star Trek guest actors there is. Their introduction here, crashing the peaceful meditation of a Vulcan monastery, is inspired. It instantly sets them up as the anti-Vulcans, totally driven by passion and emotion. Weren't the Klingons already the anti-Vulcans? Maybe, but Klingons on Enterprise are big, dumb brutes. Anyway, why should galactic politics stay the same for two centuries? It's nice to see a shiny new (old) bad guy on Enterprise.

The problem is, of course, that the Andorians are not very intimidating in this first appearance. Their sheer brutality could be scary, but they feel too much like petulant children -- the condescending way the Vulcans treat them (even while imprisoned by them), combined with, for instance, Shran's violent destruction of the communicators. They're cool-looking aliens, but the most intriguing thing about them is not the race themselves, but the political triangle they set up with the Vulcans and Earth. (Ok, credit where credit is due, "pinkskins" as an epithet is pretty hilarious, too.)

As for the episode itself, it's a throwback to TOS in more ways than one, putting more or less the whole plot in the hands of Enterprise's version of Kirk, Spock and Bones: Archer, T'Pol, and Trip. A runner about Vulcans finding humans smelly totally fails to land, mainly on account of not being funny. The big reveal at the end of the episode is so painfully obvious that it barely counts as a twist. I knew exactly what they were going to find and where they were going to find it, although, to be fair, Archer did surprise me with his "stick it to our allies" reaction to finding a secret listening post under the monastery.

I'm sure this is going to come back to bite him in the butt, but I also imagine his kindness to the Andorians is going to come back in a good way. So I'm eager to see the ramifications of the obvious serial threads the episode set up. I'm eager to see T'Pol torn between her people and her new family (whom she is way too slowly warming to, in my opinion).

This episode, though? Kind of an uninspiring prison break episode filled with Vulcans. Ever wonder why the vast majority of time when we see Vulcans on the show they're fish out of water in an environment full of humans? It's because the more Vulcans you have together, the more boring they are. Characters without visible emotions are by definition boring -- it's not their fault. It takes a heck of an actor to make a fullblooded Vulcan both a consistent character and a compelling one, in particular when they have mostly Vulcans to play against. And that goes double for Vulcan monks, I should think.

And the plotholes, oh the plotholes! Does Enterprise's transporter do only "beam down" and not "beam up"? Because that's a really easy solution. Or, why, exactly, when they suspect something to be amiss at the monastery, do they all decide to act like insensitive oafs and then tackle a wall, rather than like, beaming back up and making a plan? What about the Vulcans in the listening center? They can't send, like a distress signal to help out the poor monks? They don't ever need to leave to go on supply runs or anything? Is the only entrance or exit through the monastery? For that matter, which came first? Are the Vulcans so irreverent toward their own religion that they built a listening post under their sacred monastery? Or is the monastery just a front for the listening post, a total religious sham?

As for the rest of the ensemble, left behind on the ship, they don't do a whole lot. I did like how Linda Park let a subtle annoyance at Reed's being in command slip into some of her line deliveries.

This has been a bit of a ramble so I'll sum up: This episode sets up stuff I'm excited about and introduces a race I like a lot, although at this point I'm honestly not sure why. The episode itself is ok, but it's really predictable and it has way too many Vulcans.

Random Observations:

- This entire review belongs in Random Observations. Sorry about that.

- I worry that I'm too hard on Enterprise sometimes. It definitely has to earn my love more than the other shows do. If there are Enterprise fans reading who want to tell me how wrong I am, you are welcome in the comments. We'll be civil together.

- How many episodes is the plot going to be driven by Archer deciding something would be cool and then refusing to give it up no matter how many objections T'Pol raises?

- Trip tries a little too hard with the wise cracks a lot of the time.

- Jeffrey Combs', by the way, famous roles are Weyoun and Brunt on Deep Space Nine, neither of whom has shown up yet on the blog.

Terra Nova (ENT)

Enterprise is best when it's embracing its premise. Here, the show turns in a solid episode by cashing in on the recentness of Earth's acquisition of warp drive to create a generation-old mystery story that wraps around to another prime directive tale (although of course there isn't yet a prime directive).

The Enterprise travels to the home of Earth's lost deep space colony, to discover it peopled with savage subterranean aliens. In a twist so predictable you can hardly call it that, the aliens turn out to be the colonists, but the show doesn't rest for a beat on that weak reveal. The why of how the colonists came to live underground and lost the knowledge of their race is slowly revealed: in the midst of a growing political conflict with the homeworld, the colony was hit by an asteroid whose radiation killed all but the children, who inherited the mistaken idea it was an attack by humans.

The now-grown Novans are hostile toward humanity, and they kidnap Malcolm Reed. Archer and company have to build a bridge and teach one of the natives to remember the truth so they can rescue Malcolm -- and so they can rescue the colony, whose noncontaminated water supply is running out.

After last week's plot-holey story that didn't seem to know how seriously to take itself, this is a welcome installment. T'Pol's nagging had been toned down, the crew's chemistry is gelling. Amazingly, Enterprise is a much quicker starter than most of the latter shows.

The guest stars do fine here, even if the native dialect (English with keywords swapped out for other word that are related) is a bit of a scifi cliche.  The aboriginal makeup is another thing that arguably doesn't work. But the writing is solid and the story moves at a good clip -- as I said before, even when the revelations aren't earth-shattering, the plot doesn't need them to be, always moving on to another reveal.

There are some questions raised but never quite answered about what constitutes a distinct culture, and whether relocating a small number of humans one generation removed from their society is tantamount to destroying one. But better good questions that hang in the air than no real ideological meat to speak of.

Random Observations

-- It's high time for a Travis Mayweather episode. Also for a Malcolm Reed episode, which, despite appearances, this isn't.

-- This is apparently Brandon Braga's least favorite episode of the show, which shows he and I have different tastes.

-- Sorry I missed last Tuesday, and this week is so short. I'll be playing catch-up with a bonus post some time this week.

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.

Fight or Flight (ENT)

Fight or Flight is a smart second episode for Enterprise. When the show committed itself to filling in the gaps between today and Star Trek, to showing the early days of Starfleet, it committed to a scary galaxy. The Enterprise is always the only ship in range. Everything is new, a lot of it is scary, and the only friends they'll have are the ones they make.

It's smart to focus this story on Hoshi Sato, too. She's the first communications officer in the main cast since Uhura, and Uhura's character was woefully underdeveloped. (Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest is essentially a parody of that reality.) By contrast, Hoshi is at this point probably the most relatable character on the Enterprise after Captain Archer. And she's not a space cowboy like everyone else on board. She's excited about the academic opportunities and very very good at her job as a linguist, but being a linguist doesn't usually involve being shot at or interacting with dead bodies or climbing into a claustrophobic EV suit.

Hoshi Sato is most of us, if we found ourselves being asked to go on an interstellar exploration mission. She's terrified and she's in way over her head. But in the end, she finds her mettle and proves that Starfleet didn't make a mistake putting her on the mission.

Around the story of Hoshi Sato, which is really the emotional meat of the story, is a lot of storytelling that builds up the background of the show and sets trends for the future - basically solid second episode stock.
So Fight or Flight finds the crew itching for first contact, upset that the only alien life form they've met yet is a slug, and it's about to die.

When they drop out of warp to do some target practice, their dreams come true: they encounter an alien ship. Unfortunately, instead of being full of aliens, it's full of alien corpses whose blood is being drained out through tubes.

A classic Archer-T'Pol debate ensues. Archer wants to hang around and try to lend aid, attempting to contact the dead aliens' homeworld. T'Pol wants to get the hell out of dodge before the fluid-stealing aliens return. They both make good points, but T'Pol turns out to be right and the aliens come back, scan the Enterprise, and discover that human fluids are equally delicious.

Luckily, the dead aliens' compatriots arrive at about the same time. But only Hoshi Sato's language skills can convince them to save the Enterprise.

The day saved, the Enterprise stops off to drop Sluggo the slug off on a planet similar to, but not the same as the one they found him on, to be a metaphor for humans struggling out in the larger universe. But also, very possibly, to irrevocably damage an alien biosphere.

At the end of this episode, I find myself excited about this show and its potential. Looking forward to delving more deeply into some of the other characters.

Random observations:

- Pretty great scene between Phlox and Trip in the mess hall, and some cute Archer/Hoshi scenes. The difference between how Kirk interacts one on one with female subordinates and how Archer does shows us that, if nothing else, sexism has become less overt since the 60s. On the other hand, T'Pol's catsuit and decon gel.

- Speaking of comparisons to classic Trek, this episode's basic "whoa space is scary" conceit is quite reminiscent of "The Corbomite Maneuver." Pretty solid episode 2 fare, I guess.

- Meanwhile, Hoshi's stars are going the wrong way and Archer's floor is squeaky. Isn't spaceboard life wacky?

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.