Bonus post - seven-year-old Nathan's favorite characters

I didn't have time to write a post while I was home with my family this weekend - but did find these. Enjoy!

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.