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.

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.