To Boldly Step Forward (Enterprise: Season 1) [1.2]

(Continued from 1.1)


Shadows Of P'Jem: Well, I thought I was going to like it more than I did. What we have here is a follow-up to The Andorian Incident, with fallout from that whole monastery plot leading to T'Pol getting recalled because Vulcan High Command think she was the one at fault there (and they can't shitcan Archer). Some neat stuff is teased but what we get is just... Archer and T'Pol kidnapped for most of the episode. There's some funny physical comedy moments between the two as they try to get out, and the Andorians do show up again to help bust them out to repay their debt from The Andorian Incident, but then a Vulcan strike team busts in and complicates their rescue attempt. I found that interesting because, from our point of view, the Vulcans came in and ruined what would have gone off without a hitch... but in-universe if you asked the Vulcans, they'd say everything would have been fine if the humans and Andorians hadn't blustered their way in. You know, kind of like what happened with P'Jem! T'Pol takes a shot for a Vulcan captain and that convinces them to let her stay on the ship. It's an episode with good ramifications and things to think about, but otherwise it's not the greatest in the world. That's okay though. It's a step up from the messes that the last two episodes were...

Actual post-watch experience of "Fusion".

Shuttlepod One: A more low-key episode that I kind of misinterpreted as I watched it, but still enjoyed. Armory Officer Malcolm Reed and Engineer Tucker are in a shuttlepod doing tests when they find wreckage from the Enterprise, assume it's been destroyed, and slowly drift through space with only a few days of air left and little hope of rescue. The majority of the episode is just them adrift with little hope, Tucker as an optimist and Reed as a pessimist regarding any chance of rescue. Now, the story has little mentions of miniature black holes called micro-singularities, and I thought maybe this would be an alternate timeline deal or something involving them. No, it turns out the debris was just from a rescue attempt the Enterprise made that gets talked about after the opening credits. So, I made this one out to be more interesting than it was, but it's still pretty good. Reed's mournful bit late in the episode about how he's only recording logs for his family and all his old girlfriends to find, because the real family he cared for was the crew of the Enterprise who are now seemingly dead, is a great little moment. Not so great is Reed's dream of being rescued and then T'Pol making out with him. Or his drunken declaration that she has a nice ass. Yeah. That happened. Eyebrow-raising, but this was still an interesting one that I got to write a big paragraph about so it must have done something right.

To Boldly Step Forward (Enterprise: Season 1) [1.1]

Part One: No, They're Not Gonna Hold Me Down No More

(Since this ended up being something in the realm of 7000 words once I wrote about every episode of Season 1, you get it split in half so your eyes don't glaze over. I can be kind with my walls of text sometime. The other half of the season will go up tomorrow.)

Okay, so Season 1 of Enterprise. As I write this I am maybe... halfway through it. If I had seen all of it, I'd give you a brief summary of what it was like. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: Good to great, with some missteps.) Right now, all I can do is set the scene for you. A little Star Trek lore: In the mid-22nd century humanity developed faster-than-light warp engines for travelling into space, and attracted the attention of the Vulcans. You know 'em, those logical people with the pointed ears and the eyebrows. Enterprise is set about 100 years afterward, with rapid technological progress thanks to our alliance with the Vulcans. The story of humanity making first contact with the Vulcans was told in the TNG movie, Star Trek First Contact, and the ending of that made it seem like humanity was about to enter a golden age. It's somewhat golden, but there's a sense of progess being held back. The Vulcans, ever logical and without emotion, simply do not trust the overly emotional and irrational human race, and have been holding back technological advances. Many resent this, but now we have a fancy new spaceship, the NX-01 Enterprise, launching off into the vast unknown as humanity is ready to take its first steps forward into space and explore and learn (and encounter a bunch of tricky shit on the way, as per Star Trek convention). So, then. Here's Season 1 of Enterprise, episode by episode.

To Boldly Step Forward (Introduction)

Introduction: Gettin' From There To Here


Star Trek was never really my scene as a kid. I was 2 years old when The Next Generation premiered, and was in no state to be watching it. I remembered seeing part of a rerun of the old 60's Star Trek show once, when I was very young. An alien shot a laser beam at two people and turned them into tiny cubes, then crushed one of them in his hand and said "THIS MAN IS NOW DEAD". It terrified me. Later, when I was about 10 years old, I saw the Star Wars trilogy thanks to an older cousin of mine with a large VHS collection. He eventually moved just next door to us for a time, and after I saw Star Wars I was intrigued by his Star Trek VHS collection. That got me to watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I know a lot of people rag on this movie nowadays for being an ultra slow, agonizing borefest of a film that just fucking drags itself across the screen, but you know what? This shit was fascinating to me as a kid. It had another horrific moment there with the transporter accident scene, but after all the bombast of Star Wars I had never seen anything like this. So it was that I went through those other movies, and fell in a sort of love with the original crew in my own way. The TNG movies were concurrent at this time, and I saw them... but they didn't click with me. In hindsight, I get why. They're far less of a general audience thing. I didn't need to watch a Star Trek episode from 1967 to know that Khan was this larger-than-life space Ahab who wanted to get revenge at any cost against Captain Kirk, but these TNG movies? They just sort of fell flat because I had no investment in this crew. That was my Star Trek limit, and for many years I didn't bother.


Then I picked up TNG around... god, I don't even know how long ago it was now. Late 2016? Let's say that. Here's where I have to give credit where it's due. At well over a hundred episodes, maybe even something like 180 (I've not looked it up), TNG would have taken me ages to blast through. I needed a roadmap. No, more than that. A tour guide. I found my guide to the stars in the author of Eruditorum Press's critical analysis/personal life experience journal of Star Trek. I'd known about them already due to the anime Dirty Pair and their analysis of that series as it related to Star Trek, so I reached out. I asked for a curation of TNG on a season by season basis as I worked my way through, to avoid the bad episodes, the ones with unfortunate implications. I mostly followed my guide's advice, though I did dip into episodes featuring Q and a bunch of the ones that were described as "this is a fan favorite episode but I disagree with it because of ____". It was important for me to get a sense of why Star Trek fandom at large went to bat for those episodes, and I saw the strengths and weaknesses of them. I understood why general consensus would love them, and I found my own love for this show growing. This, more than those movies I saw when I was 10, became my ideal Star Trek. A space utopia spreading across the stars, growing and learning and changing across the vast expanse. Peak Star Trek, in Doctor Who terms for me, is a fusion of the weird (See: The Underwater Menace or, to give a more recent example, It Takes You Away) and the sheer potential of the human race (See: Tom Baker's "indomitable species" speech from The Ark In Space). I don't really have to sum up TNG because the show made itself a narrative bridge between its beginning and ending. The first episode shows our new crew having to prove humanity's worth to Q, the omnipotent alien trickster god who demands the human race retreat from the stars because they're too aggressive and morally bankrupt for it, and puts them on trial to answer for their crimes as a species. The final episode reveals that the trial never ended. The entire show has been about humanity proving itself, showing its best and worst tendencies through good and bad. Utopia wins out. Humanity has bettered itself in its exploration, and so too did I better myself by experiencing it. What a wonderful show.


I could go on. I could write about TNG and sing its praises for thousands of words, but... Well, my guide made an entire book series about that. I don't feel like I could do better than them, and even my personal affirmations would be a hollow duplicate. What I can do, however, is share in my newest adventure. One my guide hasn't quite made it up to yet with their massive project, and one I'm still exploring. I dabbled in Deep Space Nine after TNG, and managed to go back to those TNG movies and find... well, not too much of an opinion change, more of an understanding. I could go on about those, but here's the new voyage I decided to take. Star Trek Enterprise, the prequel Star Trek series that aired from 2001 to 2005. I spent a ludicrous amount of money on the Blu-Ray set of the complete series, and I have been working through it slowly but surely. Here and now, in the middle of season 1, I decided to make a thing out of it. Why not chronicle my journey? I did it with Sailor Moon, and made an entire nine-month journey out of it. Six months to watch it, and then three to write it down. Things will be different this time. For one, I'm not going to write it out like I did with Sailor Moon. Instead, I'll take more of a capsule review approach, going through episode by episode and giving a paragraph or so of thoughts. Roughly. More to the point, I'll actually write things down concurrent with my watching of the episodes. None of this waiting to watch it all and then spending months sitting on my thoughts. You'll get it all when I finish a season, and they'll probably be split up to two posts per season. Maybe three. I don't know how much I'll talk. Well then. Take my hand, won't you? The guided has now become the guide. Let me take you on a journey through the stars, a journey of a utopia not yet fully formed. We cannot boldly go where no one has gone before, as we've gone so far back that even this assertiveness is new to us. These are simple moves that will echo across into the future. Not a Discovery, or a Short Trip.


Come with me. We will boldly step forward, where others will go afterward.


TO BE CONTINUED...

Do Androids Have Nightmares Of Electric Ouroboroi? (Mega Man X6)

Well. Well well well. Here we are. Dear God in heaven, here we are. I debated whether or not I was going to write this. As I played the game in question, I really wanted to rip it to shreds in a proper exorcism. Then I beat it, watched some speedrun stuff, realized some other stuff, and now I'm faced with a dilemma on just who is to blame for the experience I had. It was only digging up my old writings on Mega Man X5 and seeing the teaser for this game I inadvertently put at the end that made me pull the trigger on it. So, here it is. Mega Man X6. A screed I have yet to commit to the page, but which will be partly a rage-induced exorcism and partly a treatise on the nature of culpability in a difficult video game experience. Let me set the scene for you. It's 6:30 PM on Monday night (January 24th for those of you coming to this well after the fact) and my Internet connection just went out. Well, shit. Now what do I do? At least I have a myriad of video games to choose from. Against all odds, I decided to fire up the Switch and see what Mega Man X6 had to offer. The online connection didn't come back until 9:30 on the 25th, so that was a good 27 hours or so of being cut off. Nothing but me, and Mega Man X6. This is not a review in the traditional sense. This is a travel journal, of my survival in the depths of hard video game hell. Here then, is my experience with Mega Man X6, and what I've been mulling over for the past week.