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.



Fusion: Oh fuck off. We have an interesting idea here, meeting a crew of Vulcans who left Vulcan to get in touch with their emotions and are far more agreeable and friendly with the Enterprise crew as a result. No doubt this is meant to invoke comparison to Spock, whose entire character was a balance between Vulcan logic and human emotion. On its surface, this is fine... but then there's the problem of the subtext I took from it. It felt for all the world like this was some metaphor for LGBTQ+ lifestyle, with a bunch of Vulcans who live their lives in a different style than the "heteronormative" Vulcan logical ideal. Viewed this way, things get just a little uncomfortable as T'Pol keeps herself at arm's length from them. It doesn't help that her scenes with Tolaris, one of the other Vulcans, have this constant sense of unease to them as he tries to get her to experiment with being more emotional. Both the subplots in this episode involving the emotional Vulcans, when viewed with that subtext, do not work. The Tolaris/T'Pol one has him mind meld with her to try and awaken her emotions, and when she starts feeling uncomfortable and trying to break out of it, he's physically keeping her in the mind meld even as she's saying "no". This is fucking mindrape, perpetrated by a character cloaked in enough metaphor to make shit even more problematic than usual. If nothing else, the episode at least calls a spade a spade and has Archer say, to Tolaris's face, that he assaulted his sub-commander and will be leaving his ship right the fuck now. Points there, Archer, but they get taken away from the other subplot. Another emotional Vulcan named Kov, as it turns out, had a falling out with his father over being an emotional Vulcan, and now a message from the High Command says that his dad is dying and wants to hear from him. Kov has no interest in talking to the man, and Archer and Trip are left trying to convince him to reconnect with his dad before it's too late and this is played as a good thing. NO FUCK OFF! This is the most overt LGBTQ+ subtext in the episode, with a shitty dad who all but disowned his son for not being "logical". Kov has every right to say "actually no, I don't want to get back in touch with him" (as indeed he does when Archer first passes on the message), and Archer and Trip should respect that, understand their life experiences can't match this, and leave him be. Yeah, remember when I said writing a big paragraph meant the episode did something right? I take it back. This one sucks.


Rogue Planet: It's better than last time at the very least. Nah, I really liked this one. It was a bit slower paced than others, but sometimes Star Trek can do that very well. The setting this time is a titular rogue planet out of orbit with a big jungle and lots of wild animals, and there are a bunch of alien hunters down there to do their four days of hunting a year. At first you think they're just hunting alien boars or whatever, and though the Enterprise crew thinks hunting is a little barbaric and out of fashion, they're still down to hang out with the hunters as they check out the planet. Then Archer starts seeing a mysterious woman and, well, it turns out that the alien hunters are here to hunt sentient shapeshifters. For what I can only assume is the glory of hunting. What I love is the explanation for why Archer sees a mystery woman; she's the woman he imagined when he heard a Yeats poem about a mysterious woman as a kid. I love how poetic and lyrical that is, with thoughts made real. Stranger is how the crew deals with the situation: they have Phlox whip up some science stuff so the shapeshifters can no longer be tracked by the hunters and fuck up their hunt so the day will be saved. I want to say upfront that I like this solution, and it was the right thing to do from my own moral standpoint... but to see them just do it without any hesitation, when we had all this handwringing about interfering with lesser species, especially in "Dear Doctor"... is a little inconsistent. Surely this is one of those Prime Directive situations. The shapeshifters are a pre-warp lifeform and the crew is directly fucking with their biology to give them an evolutionary edge. It's exactly the sort of thing Phlox was against in "Dear Doctor". The inconsistency is weird, but this was still a good episode for me.


Acquisition: Oh good CHRIST. Of all the myriad species in Star Trek canon to bring back for Enterprise, we had to have a return of the Ferengi? The hyper-capitalist misogynists of space? Ugh. Gross. Worse yet, this episode actually tries to make them out to be a credible threat, having them successfully knock out the entire crew with sleeping gas and then board the Enterprise to steal everything that's not nailed down and abscond with all the HYOOMON FEEEEMALES. I want to fucking barf. Not only is this gross, but it's not anything I can take remotely seriously. The Ferengi, aside from making my skin crawl, are a goddamned joke. I'm remembering an episode of TNG in which the Ferengi took over that Enterprise. This was also an episode where a bunch of the crew, including Picard, got turned into little kids due to a transporter accident. It was a farce of an episode and that was the only way they could get close to making the Ferengi a credible threat. There are some shining spots in this one, mostly with Captain Archer's interactions with the one Ferengi holding him hostage and making him do all the heavy lifting of loading up their shuttle. Archer very quickly realizes these are gross hyper-capitalists and does his best to play that game and seed doubt in the mind of Krem the Ferengi, and the dialogue also doubles as a basic critique of how fucked up capitalism is. It's not enough to save this one, but it's something. They don't even have Armin Shimerman playing one of the Ferengi. Miss.


Oasis: Funny how that works. I watch Acquisition in the morning, write up that blurb above and put in that Armin Shimerman line... and then I load up Oasis and see the words "And Rene Auberjonois" appear on the screen. Turns out they can cast Star Trek alumni after all. He's not playing Odo or Odo's ancestor or any fanwank nonsense like that. He's a guy who crash-landed on a planet whose entire crew save for his daughter died, so he made up hologram versions of them to keep them company while they were all stuck there. That's the big twist. The episode sort of makes it a theme of them being ghosts but they're really holograms. Spiritus ex machina, if you will. This episode is just fine, really. It didn't stand out in one way or the other, barring Auberjonois who knocks it out of the park with a great performance (love his final scene). Other than that. Yeah. Sometimes you need something a bit normal, and this one delivers. No high highs, but no low lows either. Perfectly average.


Detained: Now this one was really damned good. Archer and Ensign Mayweather end up being detained in what at first appears to be a prison for Suliban criminals, but is actually an internment camp for Suliban civilians after war broke out between the planet they live on and the Suliban Cabal (that Temporal Cold War lot). This, of course, is a "Star Trek does the WW2 Japanese-American internment camps" story. If you didn't think it was subtle enough, Archer actually mentions them later when he decides that what's going on down here is wrong and they need to bust out the Suliban. There's some handwringing about having to respect the laws of alien cultures, but Archer's response is basically "fuck it" because these people are innocent and being brutalized for no reason other than they're the same species as The Bad Guys. Dean Stockwell is here as well and turns in a great performance, giving a great villain in the form of the Colonel/warden who, in his mind, is acting perfectly practical in keeping all these Suliban in custody; both to protect them from violence against them by citizens of their planet, and to keep them from joining up with the Cabal and making more enemies for their war. Of course, it all comes apart at the end when he's angrily shouting that these people have no rights. If you wanted to keep the Suliban safe and from joining up with the army, there's better ways to do it than imprisoning them. The crew does the right thing and breaks the rules. Ethically sound, and one of the better episodes of this season so far for me. And hey: Dean Stockwell and Scott Bakula on the same screen again. That oughta make a lot of sci-fi fans happy.


Vox Sola: Another... weird one. It's also a Hoshi episode, which is neat! I said it way back when I wrote up Fight or Flight, but her role on the show is as a bridge between the human and the weird. In a way, you could call her the Deanna Troi of Enterprise because her whole deal is more of an emotional core of empathy and understanding. Well, she's a less confident Deanna because this episode has her doubting that she can pull off tricky translation jobs after some aliens visiting were offended. Turns out they also had a stowaway tentacle... web... lifeform thing which absorbs a bunch of people, including Archer and Trip. Oops. Yeah this episode is almost broadcast TV Alien, in just how alien and gross this thing is. There's tentacles and organic webs and white fluid everywhere. Giger eat your fucking heart out, I guess. Rather than blow it up, the solution is Hoshi figuring out a way to talk to the alien and figure out that it just wants to go home. This one's weird as fuck, but then I remember that weird as fuck is what defines Star Trek for me. Stuff like The Motion Picture and Encounter At Farpoint. Dreamy weird sci-fi. I just wish Hoshi had gotten to be the one to apologize to the aliens in the cold open for offending them, not Mayweather. Come on, this is her episode. Oh well.


Fallen Hero: It's more human/Vulcan relations fun. And I don't mean in a naughty way, even though that screencap there is the third line of the episode. Enterprise is sent to the planet Mazar to pick up a Vulcan ambassador who apparently broke the law, but then they get chased down by hostile Mazarians who want her back. There's a lot going on here, but the major theme is trust. Remember, a big thing still present in human/Vulcan relations is that the Vulcans have trusted the overemotional humans about as far as they can throw them, and humanity has grown to resent them a little for it. This, of course, is touched on, with the ambassador's mission and the truth of the situation being hidden from the crew even as the Mazarians are threatening to blow them to cinders. Archer vents his frustrations at first, but eventually T'Pol gets a certain sense of the truth out of the ambassador. T'Pol, as well, is dealing with trust issues, considering the ambassador is someone who inspired her to become a science commander in the first place. By episode's end, we get a real feel for how far we've come along in such a short time. Frustrations and anxieties are voiced, talked through, and at the end of it all these humans and Vulcans trust each other that bit more... particularly Archer and T'Pol. This is the moment, I feel, where T'Pol has truly become part of the Enterprise family and not just a Vulcan nanny for these impulsive space humans. That's quite lovely to see, and I look forward to more of it.


Desert Crossing: I'm not really sure how I feel about this one. Enterprise helps an alien ship in distress and its pilot Zobral (played by the wonderful Clancy Brown who you might know from Highlander or as Lex Luthor in the DCAU) invites Archer and Tucker to his desert planet for a big dinner. Turns out they're freedom fighters at war with their oppressive government, and Archer's reputation precedes him from the big Suliban breakout in Detained. Now Zobral wants Archer to help them out in the war and I'm already preemptively dreading another handwringing non-interference episode. What we get instead is a survival episode with Archer and Tucker stuck in the desert while the Enterprise crew tries to figure out a way to get them out. There's a little of "oh gosh I'd love to do the right thing but THE RULES say I can't" at the end but at least Archer acknowledges that Zabrol's cause is probably in line with their one. Really, it's less handwringing and more of a situation showing a consequence of Archer doing the right thing in Detained, which is fine enough. Yeah, it's fine.


Two Days And Two Nights: Ah, Risa! I'm pretty sure this tropical paradise resort planet showed up in TNG a few times, but this Enterprise crew has been trying to get there in both Fallen Hero and Desert Crossing before the plots of those episodes interrupted their planned vacation. Now a bunch of the crew gets to try and have a nice little bit of rest and relaxation on Risa, and... that's the episode. It's low stakes fluff with a lot of smaller plotlines. Reed and Tucker go to the space bar to pick up women but end up getting mugged by shapeshifters and spend their vacation tied up in a basement in their underwear. Hoshi goes off to meet new people and learn the local language and actually hits it off and does get it on with a friendly alien. But like, in a romantic and sweet way. There's a whole subplot of Mayweather having an allergic reaction to Risan medicine and Dr. Phlox being waken from hibernation to treat him that's just pure comedy. Last but not least, Archer relaxes and hangs out with a lovely lady in the suite next to him who turns out to be a Tandaran (that's the race who were keeping the Suliban locked up in Detained) who wants to know everything he knows about the Suliban. Not much else to say beyond the summary. This is the calm before what I assume is the storm of the season finale. It's just an all around pleasant episode. Now let's set sail for that turbulent finale...

Sorry about your utopia.

Shockwave, Part I: Yeah, hope you enjoyed that fun holiday on Risa because this episode opens with Shuttlepod One kiiinda sooorta accidentally igniting the volatile atmosphere of a colony world, burning the planet and its over 3000 inhabitants up to a crisp. OOPSIE WOOPSIE WE DID A FUCKY WUCKY! This really horrific incident leads the Enterprise mission to be recalled, and a grim Archer to go along with the order and head back to Earth, where the Vulcans will no doubt use the disaster as proof that humanity wasn't ready to boldly step forward after all. This is all familiar narrative collapse stuff, threatening the show's grand story... but it wasn't the crew's fault. No, this is Suliban Cabal fuckery of a level we've not seen before, as Crewman Daniels (who's still around for... temporal reasons, I don't know) explains to Archer and imparts him with all the knowledge he needs to get the evidence from the Suliban ship which pulled off the deed. This one's turning into more of a plot summary, but it's a very good episode and it's great to see Archer and pals unite to strike back against the Suliban who would frame them with a level of pure competence you'd expect from these pals. This wasn't supposed to happen, though, as Daniels tells us... and when Archer is ready to surrender himself to Silik when he comes to capture Archer in retaliation, he's whooshed to the 31st century. The ruins of it. Time has been rewritten, and Archer and Daniels are stuck here now. I think it's safe to say that this is no longer a Temporal Cold War; a cold war is supposed to be one where each side dare not attack the other, for fear of mutually assured destruction. The Suliban have delivered an attack. The destruction of the colony wasn't supposed to happen, nor was any of this. Events have been changed, and they led to the destruction of the 31st century. What will happen next I don't know, but what I can say was that this was a damn good episode that had me guessing... and still does, considering it's only Part One. T'Pol continues to show how supportive she can be, in her logical way, and I really am enjoying the budding friendship between her and Archer. Let's hope he can get back to the 22nd century to continue that friendship...


So, final thoughts are in order for all of that, I guess. It took me a bit to get through all of that, but a lot of it was on and off. The holidays happened, I wanted to beat some games, I got more things in the mail to watch. You know the drill. I'm glad it worked like this because I could really let the first season of this show simmer in my thoughts. I get a sense, via just plain Internet opinion osmosis, that this show "gets really good" in the last two seasons. We'll see what the quality of that is, but it reminds me of the Internet opinion consensus of TNG; that Season 1 wasn't all that good and the show "got good" in like Season 3. That's just not how I see the first season of TNG, and it's not how I see the first season of Enterprise either. These are but our first steps forward, and yet they've been wonderful steps. Sometimes we've stumbled, of course, and sometimes things have just been okay. Other times, though, this show has sung with a confidence and determination to prove itself amongst the sea of other Star Trek shows, much like humanity in the show moves forward with confidence and determination. We'll close with a little summary of the highs and lows: Five Good Ones, and Five Bad Ones. I'll see you for the Season 2 writeups, whenever I get around to starting that (and then finishing it). Until then, let's leave Archer in the 31st century. Don't worry. Think fourth-dimensionally. He'll be fine with the wait here.


FIVE GOOD ONES: Civilization, Rogue Planet, Detained, Fallen Hero, Shockwave Part I

FIVE BAD ONES: Unexpected, Dear Doctor, Sleeping Dogs, Fusion, Acquisition


TO BE CONTINUED...