| You're currently viewing the Jolene Blalock - We Want Brunette Jolene SciFi Fan Forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. We do not release ANY email information at the Brunette Jolene Board!! As a new memeber your access will be limited until you have 10 posts. Once you reach that level other sections of the Forum will open up. Due to spam we have blocked certain IP and email addresses. If you are having difficulty with registration, please email the board admin using the link and request to be added manually. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
- Pages:
- 1
- 2
| My ENT season two reviews; by Kevin Thomas Riley | |
|---|---|
| Topic Started: 21 Mar 2006, 19:35 (1,580 Views) | |
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 21 Mar 2006, 19:35 Post #1 |
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
By popular demand I hereby post my reviews of ENT season two (including Shockwave, Part 1 from the previous season). 1-26 Shockwave, Part 1 Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley Overall, Enterprise's first season ends on a high note, with a rather ominous cliffhanger that is designed not to allow the audience to figure out exactly how it is all going to be resolved. That is in itself is a very good thing. Shockwave, Part 1 also manages to have some rather good character moments and an intriguing, if somewhat contrived, plot. That is where the episode doesn't quite succeed - the plot. But given that this is a Temporal Cold War story that isn't very surprising. Still, it is an entertaining hour. The strengths of the episode are mostly in its first half, where the Enterprise accidentally triggers a planet-wide explosion that wipes out an entire alien colony they're visiting. That is a great beginning and the crew's reaction to the disaster are top-notch. They're all plagued with guilt and disbelief, especially since they can't fathom how the explosion could occur. Reed in particular, who knows he sealed of the plasma vaults that ignited the colony's atmosphere, is hurt by the notion that he might have screwed up. As is Archer who, as commanding officer, is ultimately the one responsible. The scene where he I silence watches as the list of Paraagan (as the aliens are called) casualties scroll down the view screen is very effective and moving. It comes as no surprise that Starfleet's Command Council, on behest of the Vulcans, decides to cancel the mission. Doom and gloom enters the Enterprise as the head for home. Here I have a quibble with how Archer is portrayed. While the crew feels very loyal to him and their mission he essentially gives up then and there. Sure, a Captain has to follow orders from headquarters but I can't see a Kirk or even a Janeway throwing up their arms here, no matter how guilt-ridden they might feel. Given the mysteriousness of the disaster one would expect a strong Captain to at least stall for a while to try and figure out what happened. Tucker and even T'Pol react to this surrender of Archer. Enter stage left: Daniels - the temporal agent from the future we all thought was killed in Cold Front (don't ask). He brings Archer back in time to the eve of their mission to tell him that things aren't right, that the destruction of the Paraagan colony wasn't supposed to have happened. A faction in the Temporal Cold War staged it to discredit the Enterprise mission. This is where the plot contrivances come in and this is also when the episode weakens. Archer and the Enterprise crew essentially becomes puppets in Daniels's little temporal play, throwing some genuine suspension away. If it wasn't for the surprise ending of Shockwave, Part 1 the episode itself could be considered a failure. What follows is Archer acting on behalf of knowledge given to him by Daniels. He's now suddenly strong, decisive and re-invigorated because he now knows that it wasn't their fault. Too bad that he couldn't be shown to be strong and decisive before Daniels showed up. Through an amazing (at least for Enterprise) amount of technobabble, courtesy of a hidden device in Daniels's old and sealed off quarters, Archer gets his crew to construct a device to detect cloaked Suliban vessels. Then he takes the ship to a location, also provided by Daniels, where a Suliban stealth cruiser is hiding. In a paint-by-numbers action sequence, that actually is quite entertaining despite its predictability, the Big Three boards the cruiser and recovers some data disks - proof that it was the Suliban that did it. This latter half of the episode is, as indicated, also its major fault. Archer et al acts like temporal agents by proxy, privy to knowledge they shouldn't have that is served to them. They are not masters of their own destiny; others are jerking them around. The episode also raises some inevitable questions that always arise when time travel is introduced. Why, for example, didn't Daniels intervene before the Paraagan colony was destroyed? And why didn't Daniels himself do the legwork? Sure, from a dramatic standpoint it has to be the Enterprise crew that acts but at least to me it seems too much of a leap to make. It is so obvious that it does take away some of that important suspension of disbelief. Armed with his new evidence Archer sets course for Earth to sway the Command Council - and the Vulcans. Alas the Sulibans, led by Silik, haven't given up as they take up pursuit. Surrounded and outgunned by Suliban cellships Silik, acting on orders from the shadowy figure dubbed "Future Guy" by fans, threatens to destroy the Enterprise unless they hand over Archer, who is now suddenly more important than the data disks. Before Archer can get captured Daniels whisks him forward in time, to the 31st century where all suddenly is in ruins. Bringing Archer accidentally destroyed the future Daniels knew. A thoroughly pissed off Silik threatens to blow the NX-01 to smithereens. Thus ends the cliffhanger. Now, this ending is a saving grace. It really gives this exciting "I can't wait to see what is going to happen next" feeling. There is no obvious way out of it and that is how a successful cliffhanger should work. It does, however, bring out one of my major gripes about the whole Star Trek: Enterprise as a show. Why would removing Archer from the timeline result in such dire consequences? Throughout the show we're told, especially by Daniels, that Archer has a major role to play in future events. Thus, with no Archer, utter destruction. This is a bit silly and really stretches belief. Sure, one man can make a huge difference in history, but not all by himself. To introduce this concept really relegates all others unimportant, a notion that also Daniels hammers down in the future episode Zero Hour. It kills drama and does also a huge disservice to the other characters. To make matters even worse, we never learn exactly why Archer is supposed to be so important, what he actually will do. Cardinal sin in dramatic storytelling at work again - we're told rather than shown. Besides, there is a logical flaw in Shockwave. If removing Archer from the timeline has such disastrous consequences, why didn't they manifest themselves when Daniels first removed him? And why didn't that happen when Daniels again removed him in the future episodes Carpenter Street, Azati Prime and the aforementioned Zero Hour? To sum up, Shockwave, Part 1 as a whole is a successful cliffhanger episode. It was the first half, and the last moments, that accomplished that. Most of the latter half is a bit disappointing though and that is what keeps me from giving this episode an 8 grade. Had the plot instead showed us how Archer and his crew figured out what was amiss on their own instead of introducing Daniels ex Machina it would probably have been one of the season's best episodes. But as it stands I can't give it anything higher than a 7+ on my 10-graded scale. That means seven bums: Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
 |
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 21 Mar 2006, 19:38 Post #2 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-01 Shockwave, Part 2 Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley All too often Star Trek cliffhangers are resolved in a somewhat unsatisfying manner, as is multi-part episodes, and Shockwave, Part 2 is unfortunately not an exception to that "rule". When the episode ends we're really none the wiser about what has transpired but at least the Enterprise can continue its mission (as there really was no doubt it would). Given that the end of part 1 was so ominous and with a "how will they get out of this mess" feel, then part 2 was a big disappointment. But even so it wasn't a total disaster. I enjoyed parts of it a great deal, especially the scenes on the NX-01. Still, the writers and producers took the easy way out. They obviously had no idea how they were going to get out of the corner they had painted themselves into at the end of Shockwave, Part 1. And if the situation seems impossible then the solution all too often will be too easy and contrived - and that's exactly how the puzzle was solved in Shockwave, Part 2. If you can't explain all the mechanisms behind time travel because you don't know it yourself, just have a character, in this case Daniels, say that to the protagonist that he "wouldn't understand it". As if that really gets them off the hook! But this goes for the entire Temporal Cold War idea. It is never explained because it was never thought out beforehand. From something that could be intriguing (I'm conveniently disregarding my general tiredness with time travel stories) it has become the writers' crutch. In the end we still don't know who Future Guy is and why he's manipulating the Suliban to help him. We don't know why he wanted the NX-01 mission aborted or why he wanted them to bring Archer. We don't know why 31st century Earth was devastated. All we get are general hints that Archer is instrumental in forming the Federation we know from the other Treks, but we never learn why. We're just told it. (For my rant on that I refer you to my previous review of Shockwave, Part 1.) After the conclusion of this episode we're all pretty much back to square one. We don't even know that bringing Archer back resetted the timeline to what it should be in the 31st century, even if it's a fair bet it did. Now, something I really liked about the episode was how the crew worked together to thwart the Suliban. This was real teamwork and it worked very well, perhaps a bit too well, but I can let that slide since it was so good to see them all hatching up a plan and execute it in such a clever manner, despite them all being locked in their quarters, all thanks to Trip's jerry-rigging of the comm system. I was actually surprised to see that the capture and subsequent savage beating up of Reed was all part of the plan. The fake reactor breach was also cleverly done. Silik's torture interrogation of T'Pol was also done very well (even if I don't like seeing my Vulcan girl suffer). But her reactions to it were very believable and it must have been pretty rough to have that effect on a Vulcan. The scene when she's brought back to her quarters conveys that all too clear, as is her response to seeing Archer's floating head from the future. They even managed to be somewhat humorous there, without taking away the seriousness of the situation: "You're on the ceiling. Why aren't you on a monitor?" I wish that we'd seen more of the after effects this experience would have on T'Pol in later episodes, but alas, that was not to be. Hoshi loosing her shirt was maybe a bit unnecessary but it happened so fast that it came off more as a bit of slapstick humour than something gratuitous. I had more problems with Hoshi's initial whining about how claustrophobic she is and that she wanted to pass the torch to someone else. Get over it already! This is a matter of life and death, Ensign! What was too convenient and way too contrived was how Archer managed to get back into the 22nd century from the ruined 31st. I suppose we should be grateful that he and Daniels didn't construct a time portal out of a shower stall, but even MacGuyvering some stone knives and bearskins to make a temporal communicator was much too easy. And Daniels just happened to have left a device back on his quarters the Enterprise that could interact with the Suliban image chamber (that was never designed to send people through time) and propel Archer back in time! I do wonder how Daniels could possibly know that Silik would have trouble contacting his benefactor and that he thus would fall for the trap and use said device? Besides, I would have thought that Starfleet by now would've laid their hands on everything Daniels might have left behind. But no, his old quarters still remain sealed up for no good reason. A nice twist was to see how totally lost Silik became once he lost contact with his future benefactor. "Instructions, I need instructions!" I suppose if everything you've done, accomplished and even became is thanks to someone other than yourself you'd feel rather weak and lost yourself after they've disappeared. While it was too bad to see the show's resident villain Silik emasculated in such a manner it was believable. But after this episode it will be hard to take him seriously as a bad guy again. To make matters worse (for him) he gets beaten up by Archer and taken hostage. Poor Silik, Enterprise would do well to search for a new arch-nemesis after this. This brings me to another gripe I have with Shockwave, Part 2. Why did Archer let Silik go? If he is Future Guy's main contact then wouldn't it be prudent to hand him over to Starfleet? It would even serve as more proof of their innocence in the eyes of the Command Council and the Vulcans. It makes no sense just to let him go on his not so merry ways again. Speaking of the Vulcans, why were they so thickheaded here? Even for Vulcans of the 22nd century they were pretty dense. Ambassador Soval accuses Archer of holding T'Pol hostage and disobeying orders to return to Earth when they detect that a swarm of ships has surrounded the NX-01! Huh? Given that they already know about the Suliban wouldn't the most logical explanation for the NX-01 not returning to be that they're being prevented from doing so? And last but not least, this episode gave us the infamous gazelle speech! I have to wonder if anything as silly and cringe-worthy has ever been uttered on Trek before? It really made Archer look like a fool. Is that the best analogy he could come up with? Did the writers intentionally want him to come off as a complete goof? One has to wonder since it really was T'Pol's speech that put it "over the top" in the end, and not Archer's. The speech certainly didn't do the Archer character any favours. Ugh! To sum up, Shockwave, Part 2 was a bit of a let down after part 1. I still enjoyed parts of it great deal so I'm going to be generous and give it a grade of 6- on my 10-graded scale, and that's mostly for the scenes involving how the crew worked together to break free from the Suliban. The rest were pretty average if not disappointing. That means six bums: Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 21 Mar 2006, 19:40 Post #3 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-02 Carbon Creek Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley When this episode aired originally it seemed most critics were tearing it to shreds. It was one of the worst things ever to come out of the show. It made a mockery of established continuity, the story was boring, slow and unengaging, the acting was wooden etc. Frankly I wonder if those critics saw the same episode as I did, since I thoroughly enjoyed Carbon Creek. It was a nice and low-key little story that didn't pretend to be something it wasn't. And it worked! Every now and then we as viewers need a little break from The Big Picture, something to sit down to, relax and watch just for fun. This was such a story, and it also managed to be quite moving as well. The framing for this story is T'Pol retelling how her fore-mother T'Mir got stranded in the small mining town of Carbon Creek, Pennsylvania back in 1957, way before the Vulcans made official first contact with Earth in Bozeman, Montana in 2063. That little tidbit was enough for the canonatics to get their panties in a twist, but since T'Mir's group was never revealed as Vulcans I can't see the problem. Sure, it might be a bit of a stretch for them to manage to hide their true origins for so long, but I can easily let that slide. And even if some of them accidentally showed their ears I'm sure the mechanical rice-picker excuse would come in handy again! Anyway, T'Mir (who bears a striking resemblance to T'Pol both in looks and demeanour) settle in Carbon Creek while they await the inevitable rescue, and mix to varying degrees with the locals. Essentially it's an episode where the Vulcans have their preconceptions about humanity challenged, despite the a-bomb and the fact that the Russians have just launched the first intercontinental ballistic missile (that was also used to put Sputnik into orbit; the reason why the Vulcans were here in the first place). As such it isn't terribly new or anything - many Star Trek stories are about the inherent strength in humanity - but it was well done in this episode. Initially it is a Vulcan named Mestral who is the one most fascinated by the humans. Far from the aloof stoic stiffs that some fans interpret how a "proper" Vulcan should be, Mestral is actually a compassionate character, full of curiosity and empathy for the people on this new world. In that he's a bit like Spock, down to the stocking cap he has to wear. Mestral even enters into a relationship of sorts with Maggie, a woman who owns the local bar. T'Mir is hesitant at first but Maggie's son Jack is the one who gets her to open her eyes. Jack is a smart kid who wants to go to college but unfortunately the family can't afford it. In a very touching scene T'Mir sells the patent for velcro (interestingly enough the real inventor of velcro was a Swiss guy named George de Mestral) and donates the money anonymously to Jack's college fund. Now the bright kid can study and hopefully become a successful scientist one day. (Some fans has even speculated that "Jack" might be the Jackson Roykirk who created the Nomad probe from the original series episode The Changeling. I certainly hope that's not the case since that would put a sad twist to this little adventure.) In the end even the most recalcitrant of the Vulcans - the one that got called "Moe" - seemed to have warmed up a little. He even kept his mouth shut about Mestral deciding to remain on Earth. One might ask why we should even care about these characters - humans and Vulcans alike - since they are completely new to us. But as the episode unfolds I found myself that I really did care about them, despite the fact that they were strangers. It doesn't necessarily have to be regular characters in order for me to invest myself in them. It all depends on how the story is told. Besides, I found that it did leave an impact on at least one regular Enterprise character, namely T'Pol. That last scene with her taking out T'Mir's old handbag communicated that it's quite likely that T'Pol's interest and curiosity in humans is something she got from her fore-mother. While some may have preferred a more ambiguous ending as to whether or not T'Pol had actually told Trip and Archer a true story, I liked the one we got because it said something about T'Pol and where she might come from. Sure, she might still have exaggerated a bit but I'd like to think that most of it was true. I also liked the framing scenes very much. I always like when the main cast sits down at the Captain's table to eat and socialize. Too bad that these Big Three moments became more and more scarce as the show progressed. They usually showed great camaraderie and friendship. I loved T'Pol's understated but yet playful expressions as she told the story. And it might just be the Trip/T'Pol 'shipper in me but I did see some small flirting moments and looks between them. Of course there are some nitpicks in this one, like how they could avoid being exposed, how they conveniently found clothes on a line that fit and that no one in town recognized them as their own clothes, or that their appearance didn't at least make someone suspicious in this era of the Red Scare. The biggest one is that their crashed Vulcan ship was never discovered in all those months, and that we never saw the rescue team deal with the wreckage (presumably they destroyed it or took it with them off screen). But all in all, I liked Carbon Creek very much. A good and touching drama, the right amount of humour, like Mestral waiting to watch I Love Lucy (one wonders how many got the Desilu-Paramount connection), some character insights and a moving end. I give this a grade of 7+ on my 10-graded scale. It comes very close to being an 8 though. That means seven bums: Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 21 Mar 2006, 19:42 Post #4 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-03 Minefield Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley I really liked Minefield a lot. Season two started out quite strong and promising, even if Shockwave, Part 2 was a bit of a let down. But this instalment and the next showed that Enterprise indeed could have a great season. Alas, that wasn't going to happen and one has to wonder why since the first episodes had this quality. The story is straightforward enough. Malcolm Reed had to defuse a Romulan mine that has latched on to the hull and gets nailed to the hull in the process. So Archer has to help him and get rid of the mine before it explodes and/or the Romulans lose patience. Nothing complicated here but it doesn't have to be as long as the execution is good and it was for the most part. Minefield is supposed to be something of a bonding episode between the rather closed off Reed character and the more open captain Archer. I'm not sure it succeeds in this regard. It's not like they become fast friends after these events. Perhaps it wasn't even intended to be that way. It is more like they both come out of this incident with a new appreciation and acceptance of each other. Archer's rather soft and relaxed command style has been a complaint among many fans and Reed echoes those concerns. Since Reed himself is much of an uptight by-the-book officer, with strong feelings about respect of the chain-of-command, he is frustrated by his commanding officer's lax approach to these things. He feels uncomfortable socializing in general and when he gets invited to breakfast at the captain's table he gets very uncomfortable and can't relax. This leads me to wonder about two things; If Archer wanted to approach his tactical officer in this manner, why did he wait more than a year before doing so, and why did he do it in the first place? He should know what Malcolm was like so why force it and make Reed uncomfortable? At any rate, I felt that this episode was different than Shuttlepod One because in the latter there wasn't such a self-conscious effort to make the characters friends, and in the end Reed and Trip did become friends. Minefield felt much more forced in this regard and I'm unsure whether or not this was a deliberate difference. I certainly didn't mind the difference because I thought that what happened in Minefield worked on another level. Reed got some new respect and understanding of Archer the captain, and Archer came to understand his reserved tactical officer more. Not everyone has to become buddy-buddies to work well together. That doesn't mean that I have come to accept Archer's affable style. He still lacks a real sense of authority that other Trek captain had, even when they were socializing with the crew. It was cool to finally see the Romulans on Enterprise, even if we didn't see them (as per the original series' Balance of Terror). We saw their ships, and the 22nd century versions of the Bird-of-Prey looked really great. The one major goof, which has also been admitted by the producers, was that their ships were cloaked. In Balance of Terror the Romulan cloaking technology was new and unheard of. In fact, that was a major plot point in that episode. Of course many fans have come up with all sorts of explanations to still make it fit with the original series, but it still was a screw up. It didn't detract too much of my enjoyment of Minefield though. Another nitpick is the use of the name "Romulans" since we've been lead to believe that this is a name given to them by Humans, probably as an identification for their home system with twin planets Romulus and Remus, named after Roman mythology. Add to that their language, which isn't recognized even by T'Pol, despite that it shouldn't be all that different from the Vulcan language since it's only been 1,800 years after the sundering when they left Vulcan. I suppose one could come up with explanations for that too. A nice, but also problematic, nod was the means by which the Enterprise used to detect the cloaked Romulan mines. They simply tweaked the future technology given to them by Daniels in Shockwave to see through the Suliban cloaks. While fine to remember past events, it does puts into question how that future technology affects events in ways that was never intended to happen. Bah, temporal mechanics gives me a headache! The visuals in Minefield were absolutely stunning, from the explosion that tore a huge gap in the saucer section to the amazing shots of Reed and Archer walking outside on the hull in their EV suits. The combination of live actors, the ship's hull, space and the planet with cloaking and decloaking Romulan ships were just so cool. Great stuff! The sequence of Reed and Archer floating away on a piece of detached hull plating, and the detonation of the mine was another jaw dropping moment! I guess they overdid the effects budget so that they weren't able to show how the two of them got onboard again. I did wonder why they never tried to use the transporter to just beam the mine away, but I suppose that it had a mechanism to prevent that. But just a simple line of dialogue could've answered that. Another thing that irked me slightly was why the minefield was cloaked in the first place. If you don't want trespassers the best way would be to but up a big beacon stating "Danger, minefield ahead! Keep out!" But this isn't the first nor the last time such a mistake is made on Star Trek, or on TV in general for that matter. I guess we have to accept it, for otherwise we'd have no drama here. And while the rupture of the hull was awesome, I'm a bit miffed that no one actually died, especially considering how large the gap was. Some casualities would've added to the realism and severity of the situation. But all things considered I enjoyed Minefield too much to let my complaints interfere with my grading too much. So I give it a grade of 8- on my 10-graded scale. Or, in my new personalized grade, it gets eight bums! ;) Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 21 Mar 2006, 19:44 Post #5 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-04 Dead Stop Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley Dead Stop is probably the best episode of season two. I really like this one a lot. A creepy story without going overboard, mostly great character moments and top notch visual effects. Had they maintained this kind of quality story telling, I'm confident that Enterprise would've survived for a lot longer than the four seasons we got. Alas, after this it went downhill fast and when the show started to pull back, the damage had already been done and it was too late to get the viewers back, no matter how good the two remaining seasons were. First of all, hats of to the writers for recognizing that previous events must be taken into account and that they didn't fall into the Voyager trap of miraculously having everything back to normal the week after. In Minefield, the NX-01 suffered some major damage and has to be repaired. The problem is that they're far away from home. Other Treks just cop-outed in similar circumstances but the writers here use this as a vehicle for telling a good story. Sure, finding an automated repair station just a few clicks away seems like a stroke of good fortune, but who cares? At least the problem is tackled and we get fine episode from it. Besides, it's not like the repairs were for free. The beginning of the episode also gave some nice nods to continuity, with Archer and Trip surveying the damage from the inspection pod - a scene echoing Broken Bow. Even the little scratch Trip made then is referenced later on, in a joking manner. Nice! And not only the damage done to the ship was recognized; Reed's leg injury got a fix too, which he probably was very grateful for. Who knew that Phlox had a mean streak in him? "It's unethical to harm a patient; I can inflict as much pain as I like." Hehe! The repair station looked very cool. Whatever race that originally designed it may have taken lessons from the Monolith aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The interior looked very reminiscent of the Discovery. I was almost surprised that they didn't meet Dave Bowman onboard! It looked sterile yet somehow invoked an ominous feel. Even the station's computer (voiced by the director Roxann Dawson, mostly known as B'Elanna Torres from Voyager) gave off a certain HAL 9000 vibe. There is just something about "soul-less" computers that is very unsettling to us. The docking berths and the mechanical repair arms, while efficient, also looked menacing. But it's not like they had much choice but to accept the station's offer. However, Archer's initial instincts were right. There's more to the station than meets the eye. Something is fishy besides the replicated catfish. One of my small complaints about this episode is why T'Pol for whatever reason doesn't feel suspicious. Why was she so trusting when logic would tell her that they got too good of a bargain with only some warp plasma as payment? She's worked for Vulcan intelligence before, for Surak's sake! Maybe a foreshadowing of later episodes where she's made to look weak so that others (notably Archer) can look good? I really enjoyed the scenes with Reed and Trip when they were snooping around the station. Sure, they acted very reckless and rightly got a dress-down from Archer for it, but I can't help thinking that they weren't completely irresponsible. Something wasn't right and they had to find out what. Great character moments for them. I especially loved the scene when they got beamed back right onto the Enterprise bridge, to the gazing eyes of T'Pol. That was hilarious. "Evenin', Sub-Commander!" Archer reading them the riot act afterwards was good too, with a recognition from himself that Reed indeed had been right: "You've made it clear that you think discipline aboard Enterprise has gotten a little too lax. I'm beginning to agree with you." Another nod to the previous episode. As it turns out, the station does require another form of payment. It takes Travis Mayweather to use his brain for its CPU, leaving a dead clone in his place to not draw too much suspicion. Here is another minor problem. Since Anthony Montgomery is in the main cast - albeit terribly underused - there's no way the viewer is going to believe that he is, in fact, dead. A nameless redshirt would actually have worked better, and the revelation that he wasn't dead would then have been more of a surprise. And while somewhat touching, Hoshi reminiscing about Travis's pranks fell a bit flat since we were never privy to that aspect of his character. We're just told about it by Hoshi. It would've been nice if we'd actually seen it before. That would've made the scene more poignant. The way Phlox did find out about the clone worked reasonably well; with a minimum of medical technobabble it sounded plausible enough. I liked how they all worked together to finally thwart the station, with Archer and T'Pol going to free Travis while Trip made a good try to stall the computer by impersonating a disgruntled customer. While there never was any doubt that they would succeed the action sequences worked very well. When I saw the episode for the first time I was actually surprised that they did blow it up, and the method they used. Go figure! T'Pol had some cute scenes, from the afore mentioned look she gave Trip and Malcolm on the bridge to when she gave up on trying to open the air duct by cracking the code and just blasting it open. And while that brownish rug of a catsuit isn't one of my favourite outfits, there were plenty of nice shots of her awfully nice bum in this episode! Oh give me a break; I'm a man for chrissakes! I also thought her scene with Trip at the replicator table, when he "ordered" the pan-fried catfish, was cute. What sealed the deal for me regarding Dead Stop was the ending. It felt really ominous when the blown-up station started to repair itself. Really, really creepy. While it might have been nice to know who built the station and for what purpose, I'm almost glad that we never learned that. Just leave it as a mystery. It doesn't detract from the story and I'm sure that any revelation would've been anti-climatic. Dead Stop has two small touches that are almost lost if you don't pay attention. The first is when we hear a Tellarite (a species first seen on the original series Journey to Babel) through the comm system. We still have to wait until Bounty for them to make a visual appearance but it was a nice nod regardless. And the second is a brief glimpse in Travis's quarters of a model of the Nomad space probe, which of course made an appearance in the original series episode The Changeling. Writer Mike Sussman sure proves his fanboy credentials here. Given how much I really liked Dead Stop I must give it a grade of 9-, the minus for my smaller nitpicks. As probably the best episode of season two, it also stands out when compared to the one that was to follow it, which up until the so-called "finale", was easily the absolute worst episode of the entire series. Sigh! In my new personalized grade, Dead Stop gets nine bums: Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 21 Mar 2006, 19:45 Post #6 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-05 A Night in Sickbay Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley It wasn't nearly as fun to write this review as I first thought it would be. I mean, to completely trash something so abysmal as A Night in Sickbay should be great fun, right? It is often fun to badmouth things you find lacking, and when they're as bad as this outing of Enterprise it ought to be a great exercise. Instead I found myself getting progressively more and more pissed off as I went through the episode. The thing is, I really love the show, and I really don't find it funny when it is treated so badly as it is here. After possibly the best episode of season two - Dead Stop - we get not only to the absolute worst but also what up until the so-called "finale" was the worst of the series, if not the whole franchise (I'll put a disclaimer in here since I haven't seen all of Trek yet). To make matters even worse, A Night in Sickbay is also the first in a long stretch of bad episodes that not just doomed the second season, but probably the entire series. Despite picking up in the third and especially the fourth seasons, it was too late. By then much of the audience had already left and they weren't coming back. It is no secret that I'm not a big Archer fan, quite the opposite in fact. I find him boorish, incompetent, petulant and certainly not made of "the right stuff". He's probably the worst of the Trek Captains (or at least in a tie with Janeway). But I find that I like Enterprise in spite of Archer. I can learn to tolerate him, and since he's portrayed so inconsistently he also has some good moments. However, in A Night in Sickbay he's at his absolute worst. If he wasn't character assassinated enough already, then this episode surely did him in. I'm not sure what the writers were aiming for, perhaps to show that even a Starfleet Captain can be a flawed human and that we as viewers would sympathize with him? Instead his behaviour here made me wonder how he was even allowed into Starfleet, let alone to command the first warp 5 capable starship. There is a huge difference between inexperience and ineptitude. The fact that they're the first out there, that Archer's the first, does not in any way excuse the complete and utter lack of common sense that is rampant in this episode (and in some that came before and sadly also after). If you go by this episode, then the Vulcan High Command is right; Humans are too stupid to be let out there on their own. To recap, Archer brings down Porthos with him on a diplomatic mission to the easily offended Kreetassans (Vox Sola), where the dog promptly pees on one of their sacred trees. Porthos also catches some life-threatening bug in the process. The now insulted Kreetassans dismisses them and demand an apology from Archer. But Archer is so ticked off at them that he stubbornly refuses to admit any wrongdoing while he pays vigil over Porthos in sickbay as Dr. Phlox tries to cure the animal. In other worlds, Archer puts his own freaking dog ahead of his mission and the safety of his ship and crew (the Kreetassans has plasma injectors the Enterprise really needs). T'Pol actually tells him as much about his ridiculous behaviour in one of the few better scenes in the episode. Everyone can have a bad day, but the sign of a good commanding officer is that he doesn't let that affect his command decisions and his good judgement. To make matters worse, this isn't even a first contact situation. He knew from a previous encounter that the Kreetassans were easily offended but did he take that into account? No! It is amazing that T'Pol and Phlox doesn't deem him unfit for command at this moment and relieve him of duty! Instead of eliciting sympathy for his concerns over Porthos's fate, Archer comes of as being totally moronic. This guy shouldn't even be allowed to command a marching band! Just when his character seemed to be picking up the writers throw this on him. There is no way I'd respect a guy who behaves like this and I sure as hell wouldn't want to serve under such a commanding officer. A Night in Sickbay made a complete and utter mockery of the Archer character. The episode wasn't even remotely funny, even if it sometimes has been billed as a "comedy episode". Whatever the supposed "fun" moments where were lost in the seriousness of the deteriorating diplomatic situation and Porthos's illness - all caused by the sheer stupidity on behalf of the Captain. The slapstick of Phlox and Archer running around sickbay fell flat (the only cute moment was Hoshi catching the escaped bat), as did the weirdness of Phlox's grooming habits. And lets not get started on Archer's Freudian slips! On the other hand, lets. Completely out of left field the writers suppose to introduce some "sexual tension" between Archer and T'Pol! Huh? Where did that come from? Up until this episode there was never the slightest hint in that direction. If anything we've been shown a growing professional CO/XO relationship over the past season but certainly nothing else. There's no "friction" between them, other than that Archer has an annoying habit of not taking T'Pol's, often sound, advice. But that's something she shares with the rest of the crew. I'm not sure what the writers intended here either. Perhaps this was a desperate attempt to make the Captain more likable by linking him with the resident babe? Instead it backfired. Archer came off as juvenile and behaving in a highly inappropriate manner! And under no circumstances should a commanding officer get involved with his executive officer. Add to this that Bakula and Blalock have zero chemistry in this regard. In fact, their lack of chemistry has made it hard for me to even buy that they have a developing friendship. Thankfully, this angle was dropped after A Night in Sickbay and I prefer to see it as nothing more than something induced in a stressed out and sleep-deprived Archer by the quirky Denobulan doctor, especially since T'Pol politely gave him a brush off at the end. Too bad though, that the producers insisted on a lot of Archer and T'Pol scenes (even if they were non-romantic) for the rest of the season. What a snooze-fest! What were they thinking? Eventually Archer realizes that he has to apologize to the Kreetassans and that is performed in a weird ritual involving beads, tattoos and a chainsaw (don't ask). But you never get the sense that Archer actually learns anything from this. He's still as pissed off at the Kreetassans as before. He just realized that he had to swallow his pride and apologize for the sake of the mission. But he still seems to think that it really was all their fault. Never does he look himself in the mirror and take responsibility fro his own actions in getting them into this mess in the first place. If they'd at least shown us that he'd learned, then this episode wouldn't be so totally craptastic as it was. And he's supposed to be a trained diplomat! Hah! If Archer ever took Diplomacy 101 I'm sure he Kobayashi Maru-ed it. Again, why on Earth would Starfleet send out a guy with such a huge chip on his shoulder on their most important mission? It boggles the mind! The only thing that saves A Night in Sickbay from a grade of zero is These Are the Voyages, the so-called "finale" that almost manages to make this instalment look like one of Shakespeare's worst plays. For Hoshi's diplomatic skills and T'Pol reading Archer the riot act I give A Night in Sickbay a grade of 1-. Otherwise a total waste of an hour that epitomizes all that was wrong with a show I generally like very much. What a shame! So only one little bum, or perhaps just one cheek, to ANiS: Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 1 Apr 2006, 18:22 Post #7 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
I'll put this here too so we'll eventually have all the reviews in one thread. 2-06 Marauders Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley Before I get on with this review I feel I must make a disclaimer. Marauders is one of my guilty pleasures. Yeah, I know that it is really a bad episode, with a paint-by-numbers story and plot holes bigger than sphere in the Expanse, but ultimately I don't care that much. It's a fun romp that I have a hard time taking seriously. I'm not sure that was the intent of the episode though, but that's how I choose to view it. Low on deuterium, the Enterprise arrives at a mining colony to trade for some, only to find that the alien settlers are being plagued by Klingon marauders who routinely steal most of what they extract. Archer and his crew then proceed to teach the settlers how to stand up to the bullies. That's about it and that's the kind of story that's been done a million times before, in many different genres. There are no surprising plot twists or otherwise daring or challenging things happening. There aren't anything that could tie this episode to the current 22nd century timeframe and make it meaningful in the grander scheme of things, and it is really a pity. Imagine if we had seen a colony of human miners instead of the literally funny forehead "aliens" we got? And imagine if one of the mission objectives of the Enterprise was to seek out such places and extend the support and protection from Starfleet? That would have made for a far more interesting story that nicely would've fitted the prequelian concept of Enterprise - to have Earth staking its claim on this sector of space and protect its interests. Another lost opportunity there. The usual Trekkie moral applies here - bullies are bad and they get what they deserve, albeit in a non-lethal manner. How very convenient and how very boring. This simplistic notion - epitomized by Archer's "I've never liked bullies, Trip. Not on Earth... and not out here" isn't really an Earth-shattering revelation. Nor is this philosophical gem: "Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime." Groan! While Archer's idea to help the settlers was very noble, it was also very stupid. Stupid in that he didn't really offer any long-term help to them. He, and the settlers, just got lucky since this particular group of Klingons really were a couple of cans short of a six-pack. No wonder they were marauders preying on the weak. Those guys wouldn't have lasted long among some real Klingon warriors. In reality, what was stopping the marauders from coming back and bomb the site from orbit, just out of spite, once the Enterprise was gone? Nothing! Archer's "magnificent seven" tactic might have worked if the settlers had been evenly matched with the Klingons, but they weren't. And how gullible were those Klingons? It defies belief that they would be fooled by the re-location of the village, since they presumably have the old transporter co-ordinates already. Then they just walked up - in plain sight - to the gullies where the settlers and the NX crew where hiding and allowed themselves to be trapped in a ring of fire. And that is what scared them off? Not only are they the stupidest Klingons ever, they're also the most cowardly! Why didn't they just use their firepower to obliterate their opponents? As for the Enterprise, T'Pol was initially right when she suggested that the only way to really help was to kill the Klingons. The NX-01 sure outgunned the Klingon ship that was nothing more than a freighter. But that would probably have been too rough and violent a solution for Trekkie sensibilities. It still would've made most sense. Those Klingons didn't deserve any better. Killing them would also send a powerful signal to the region that there is a new player in town that wouldn't tolerate this kind of behaviour, especially against humans and Earth interests (had those settlers actually been humans as suggested above). It could also have tied into further storylines about Earth and Starfleet trying to form alliances against piracy, something that could've been done in Fortunate Son and in the later Horizon too. More lost opportunities. All right, all this is what makes Marauders a bad episode, and I can see why most viewers would think that. It continued the trend of a long stretch of bad episodes in season two that started with the previous A Night in Sickbay. But as I stated initially, I kind of like it despite all its faults. Cheesy as it was, I enjoyed this "E-Team in Space", complete with groovy headbands and tank tops. Add some Vulcan kung fu, or Suus Mahna, with T'Pol kicking ass and at least I was entertained. Malcolm and Hoshi also had a nice little exchange when she showed that she indeed had improved her targeting skills to Mal's admiration. I absolutely dig the beige desert uniforms. But the real treat here is T'Pol absolutely drool-worthy white catsuit. Oh my God, that was jaw-droopingly delicious to watch! Her awfully nice bum (to quote Reed from an earlier episode) couldn't look any better! Too bad that never got to be her real uniform. Trip's "Good ears" comment was very cute too. I'm sure her ears wasn't all he noticed, hehe! So, for the episode and all its faults I shouldn't really give it any more than a 3 or 4, but for the entertainment value and T'Pol's white outfit (I'm shallow, sue me) I end up giving this guilty pleasure of mine a grade of 6 on my 10-graded scale. Never more has my personalized grade of six bums been more appropriate: Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 24 Apr 2006, 16:37 Post #8 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
And just for archive purposes, I put my 7th review in this thread too: 2-07 The Seventh Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley It is quite a feat to produce two of the worst episodes of Enterprise in such close proximity to one another. First there is the abysmal A Night in Sickbay and only two episodes later we get The Seventh. If the former was a thorough character assassination of Archer, then this effectively does the same for T'Pol - and Tucker to a lesser extent. And it wouldn't end there. There is a prolonged stretch of not just mediocre episodes, but of really bad ones. This is what ultimately killed the show. It could never recover after this slump, no matter how good subsequent seasons were going to get. The damage was done. Penned as a story about trust and friendship when T'Pol encounters unpleasant memories from her past as a Vulcan secret agent, it in effect reduces her to a weakling that has to lean on big, strong Archer to get the job done. This episode epitomizes the unhealthy tendency on Enterprise to make other characters weak just so that the captain can look good. It also is a prime example of what would become the greatest failing of the second season, when they tried to make it the show about the intrepid captain and his Vulcan sidekick/cheerleader. All other characters were reduced to mere extras. Can you spell boring? Archer and T'Pol don't have much chemistry on screen, and that spells doom for the show when they are constantly shoved into the forefront. I just never got the trust/friendship vibe and when that is the main focus of a story, like it is in The Seventh, then everything falls flat. All right, so T'Pol has a past with the Vulcan Ministry of Security, I can accept that. Being an ex-agent could make for some really interesting storylines. With that background it also makes sense that ambassador Soval would put her on the Enterprise. Alas, that's not what The Seventh is about. Instead it paints T'Pol in the worst possible light. Seventeen years prior she was tasked with finding and apprehending some Vulcan fugitives, former undercover operatives that had gone native. She found all but one and when he is discovered again, the Vulcans order her to finish the job. Since she doesn't trust herself she asks Archer to tag along and lo and behold, the fugitive Menos successfully plays mind games with her, convincing her that he's innocent of the charges (of smuggling bio toxins) levelled against him. It is revealed that she suffered a breakdown after killing Jossen, one of the fugitives, seventeen years ago, and had to undergo a mind wipe ritual (the Fullara) to regain sanity. Of course those memories come back to haunt her once she encounters Menos again. So she has to lean on big, strong Archer in order to get the job done. Gosh, how utterly pathetic! I winced every time she pleaded "Captain" and looked at him for some strength. It defies belief that someone this weak-minded would be entrusted to become a secret agent in the first place. So she killed a guy, one of Menos's partners in crime, what's the big deal, especially since it was in self-defence? It doesn't speak well of her to become so guilt-ridden that she volunteers to have her memories of the incident wiped from her consciousness. No wonder she left the Security Ministry after that, but why would the High Command take her in after that? Even more incomprehensible is the fact that the Vulcans again asked for her to apprehend Menos when they knew about her weakness and that Menos would recognize her immediately, not to mention that she's fallen out of favour after what happened at P'Jem (The Andorian Incident). T'Pol says it's a matter of honour, to which Archer replies "How very Vulcan!" Er, or not! These are Vulcans and not Klingons. It makes no logical sense to send T'Pol after Menos again, even for the somewhat different Vulcan standards of the 22nd century. Also, after proving herself this vulnerable to crack under pressure, she should have no business being the second-in-command of the Enterprise. I guess that one redeeming factor for T'Pol was that she did realize how insecure she was and that's why she asked Archer for help since she felt she could trust him. The problem is that I don't buy it. We have never really been shown why she should trust him. Trust is something earned and just talking about it (like they also did in Fallen Hero) doesn't make it so. In fact, even here we see prime examples of Archer's boorish behaviour when he tosses his water polo ball on the wall when T'Pol tries to talk to him, spewing comments like "If the Vulcan High Command doesn't approve of the water polo match I'm watching, I can easily find another." Realistically, she should've asked for assistance from someone like Reed, who is the ship's security officer, for a mission such as this one. But Archer? At least Mayweather got to go with them, but at times I found myself forgetting that he was actually there. That's how much in the background he got pushed. In the end, T'Pol can't bring herself to even stun the escaping Menos, despite him being proved a liar and a smuggler of weapons of mass destruction. She has to have big, strong Archer standing beside her to tell her to pull the trigger. It wasn't even as if she were going to kill the fugitive. Which brings forth another question, why did she really have to kill Jossen seventeen years ago? Didn't her gun back then have a stun setting? Think of all the troubles that could've been avoided! Another Enterprise character that gets the shaft in The Seventh is poor Trip. In Archer's and T'Pol's absence he's the acting captain and it is plainly obvious that command doesn't agree with him. He's indecisive to a fault and can't even make the simplest command decisions. They played it for laughs but it only showed off Trip as an incompetent buffoon, only to hammer in that Archer is the only one fit to sit in the big chair (or pace around the big chair). Thank God the series in later episodes made up for that and really showed that Tucker is indeed C.O. material, perhaps even more so than Archer. It defies belief that a ranking officer, the third in command (originally slated as the executive officer) would be so inept at command. And Trip was right in the beginning when he wanted to know where Archer was going. As acting captain he really should know in the event something went wrong. So was there anything good in this episode? Well, the visuals were nice. The snowy interplanetary truck stop looked cool, as did the bar that brought back memories of the Mos Eisley cantina from the original Star Wars movie. Actor Bruce Davison was good as Menos, even if it was real hard to actually picture him as a Vulcan. And even if her character was truly assassinated here, Jolene Blalock played a weak and doubting T'Pol very convincingly. That cannot save the episode though. The Seventh is "better" than A Night in Sickbay by a hair. Still, it only gets a grade of 1 on my 10-graded scale. After the so-called "finale" and ANiS, this is the worst that Enterprise had to offer. So just one measly bum for The Seventh. Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 9 May 2006, 16:14 Post #9 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-08 The Communicator Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley If the previous episodes thoroughly managed to assassinate the characters of Archer, T'Pol and Trip, The Communicator continued in the same unfortunate vain and added Malcolm Reed to the mix as well. We're now knee deep in the abysmal and infamous season two slump, when things seemed to if not go from bad to worse, then at least stick to the very bottom level of storytelling that effectively killed the show. The premise of The Communicator isn't all that bad -- the implications of cultural contamination on another, less developed, species. But going by how the NX-01 crew acted here one has to wonder which species is really the most developed? It's really bad that the only thing that moves the plot along is when they have to act like complete and utter morons! Sure, one can make a tiny mistake, or even two, like dropping a communicator when on an incognito mission on an alien planet, but the mistakes just pile up and gets progressively worse and worse. Starfleet doesn't seem to have a protocol in place for dealing with situations like these and even if we take the fact that this is the 22nd century into consideration there's a lot to be said for common sense. Once again the writers and producers confuses inexperience with ineptitude and it really hurts the characters (not to mention the show). I found myself actually thinking that Reed and Archer are so stupid in this episode that they did deserve to get hanged. And even if Starfleet hadn't thought this through, Archer should've done it himself. He's into his second year in deep space and he has encountered other pre-warp cultures before (not that those events turned out all right either). He should've learned something by now. They should've worked out a cover story that would hold in case they'd be captured, and not have to improvise on the spot (with disastrous results). Here we have a planet on the brink of a world war and in order not to reveal that they're aliens from outer space Archer and Reed make matters worse by telling the military guys that they're actually genetically enhanced super soldiers, with powerful energy weapons, from the enemy side! Huh? How on Earth would that make things better? Add to that the rescue in the end with the cloaked Suliban cell ship, and now those military guys must get really alarmed about the supposed abilities of the other side. They'd better launch a pre-emptive strike as soon as possible before the enemy can take full advantage of their superior technology. In all likelihood the stupid antics of Archer et al. precipitated a global war on that poor planet. It's really to bad that we never got to see that consequence! And all this for a freaking communicator! It would have been better just to leave it there, especially since it wasn't two communicators that could, you know, communicate with each other. It's not like a single cell phone would mean that much to a 19th century human. Besides, if Hoshi could home in on it why didn't they just use the transporter to get it back? For that matter, why didn't they use the transporter to get Reed and Archer back? And all those gadgets should come with a self-destruct mechanism that would fry the insides if someone unauthorized tried to use them, or if a certain signal was sent to them. There are all sorts of sensible fail-safes that should've been in place. If 21st century viewers could think of all this then surely people of the 22nd century could too! But no! Archer and Reed have to go down again, and in a shuttlepod that for inexplicable reasons go undetected throughout even if they have to have parked it somewhere. They bring phase pistols, scanners and even more communicators to actually add to the forbidden tech that the natives have already. They behave in a not so very inconspicuous manner when they go snooping around in the backroom of the tavern. Even T'Pol is afflicted with the "when in doubt, act like an idiot" syndrome when she calls Archer on the communicator stating his rank and everything, despite the very plausible risk that they'd been apprehended! On second thought, maybe the damage the NX-01 crew did wasn't so great. If the other side is as stupid as their supposed "super soldiers" then they won't pose much of a threat to Archer's captors. On the other hand, the captors weren't the sharpest tools in the box either. Why allow for Archer and Reed to share a cell? The only reason would be to eavesdrop on them to get more information, but this they plainly didn't. And why execute them instead of interrogating them further? At least they should've settled for killing just one of them if dissecting one was deemed so important. I suppose the conversation between Archer and Reed while on "death row" was supposed to evoke some strong emotions, but it all fell flat. There was no way I could sympathize with their plight and their sacrifice for the "higher good" when they have none but themselves to blame for having acted so stupid. In the beginning Archer jokingly scolded Reed for losing the communicator in the first place: "How about thirty years in the brig? Or a good flogging?" I'm thinking that's what they deserved. The Communicator has few redeeming qualities. Gosis, the alien general, was one of them. Actor Francis Guinan did a good job portraying a conflicted individual that was as amazed at the unlikely events transpiring before him as (for other reasons) the poor viewer. Neither he nor his colleagues were inherently bad persons and I developed some sympathy for them. Seeing the crew back on the Enterprise working together to come up with a solution was good too. But I didn't find the "Trip's arm gets accidentally cloaked" subplot to be that funny. I felt it reduced his character to comic relief (again). Other nitpicks include how Archer and Reed were able to talk to their captors? Was there a hidden universal translator working somewhere, and if so, wouldn't that have been noticed? And wasn't it all too convenient for all their equipment, plus their X-ray photographs, to be lying in plain view on a table just so Archer could nab it before departing on the Suliban cell ship? Lucky for them to suddenly pull that deus ex machina out of their asses, otherwise conveniently forgotten ever since Broken Bow. When the episode finally ends most viewers must have realized what a royal screw-up it all had been, but they still have to have T'Pol telling an oblivious Archer, who even then thinks that it was more important that they managed to get their stuff back, of this fact. Argh! Soval was right. That guy has no business being out there, messing around willy-nilly! Sigh, why does almost every Star Trek episode dealing with the "prime directive" (or in this case proto-prime directive) have to suck? While marginally "better" than The Seventh I cannot give The Communicator more than a 2- on my 10-graded scale. That means just two lonely bums: Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 21 May 2006, 18:49 Post #10 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-09 Singularity Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley Right in the middle of the "season two slump" there actually come s a pretty decent episode. While not terribly original or deep it nevertheless manages to be quite funny. For that alone it gets props. Still, one could wish that it hadn't relied so much on gags and had delved more into the psyche of the crew. As it stands it's a pretty straightforward story about the crew acting strangely and/or out of character™. That has more or less become a staple of Trek and even science fiction in general. All the shows have had an episode like this, beginning with the original series' The Naked Time. That episode however did give us some needed insights to the backgrounds of the characters, and what makes them tick. Singularity has no such ambitions, which is a tad unfortunate. Here, the different crewmembers become singularly obsessed with one thing that happened to be on their mind at the time they were affected (with some black hole radiation - don't ask). Only two of the characters - Reed and Phlox - are "lucky" enough to have it be about something that tells the audience something about them. We get to see that Phlox's obsession with finding medical cures can have rather sinister implications when taken to the extreme, as he tries to lobotomise poor Ensign Mayweather. John Billingsley gives a chilling and excellent performance here. It is only T'Pol neck-pinching the doctor that saves the helmsman (great scene). What was Mayweather's obsession by the way? Even here his nondescript character suffers from the writers not knowing what to do with him. He didn't even get to pilot the ship through the asteroid field in the end - that job went to Archer - since he was conveniently sedated. He can never catch a break, can he? And Malcolm Reed is totally in character when he wants to upgrade the security protocols to better meet the needs an all too often hostile universe demands of them. The surprising thing is that in more than two years not exactly devoid of such threatening moments, no one has thought to implement them before. Simply enough, a single command when threatened would polarize the hull plating, bring the weapon systems online and get the crew ready at their duty stations. Why this general quarters order wasn't standard operating procedure before is anybody's guess, but at least it will be after this episode. This will evolve into the "Red Alert" known on the later era Treks. Trip even jokingly refers to it as "Reed Alert". While T'Pol is the one that saves the day in Singularity (a welcome change), without the "Reed Alert" the NX-01 would've been dust at the end of this episode. Even Archer acknowledges that and decides to keep the new protocol. Trip was again unfortunately relegated to comic relief. That's the third episode in a row and it doesn't bode well for how the writers/producers viewed the character in season two. His obsession with fixing the Captain's chair was rather silly and the fun part of it quickly became tiresome. At least he manages to tear himself away from that important task to visit T'Pol's quarters. It's probably just my little pink shipper glasses talking to me, but I found that interesting. And coupled with the fact that it is Trip acting out of character that alarms T'Pol that something strange is afoot, Singularity manages to give the Trip/T'Polers such as myself at least something to chew on. They could've done more with Archer's obsession. Now all it was about his him writing the preface to a biography about his father, Henry Archer. Considering the already established background of Archer having lost his father at a young age, that Henry Archer was instrumental in constructing the warp engine and that Jonathan entered Starfleet because of his father, that could've been worked into this story. That would have given much more depth to Archer's obsession. Now his is one of the least interesting obsessions in Singularity. Hoshi's obsession is with making the perfect Japanese soup, since she volunteered to fill in for chef that was out of commission for one reason or another (don't they have more than one cook onboard?). With that little to work with, it is actually rather funny, especially when she yells "Carrots!" so some poor chef's assistant. I'm torn about whether or not the episode should've played out more menacing than it did. It really is more of a comedy piece and the tone is generally a light one. But they are still in dire straits (much like the Enterprise was in The Naked Time) and once the crew has passed the obsessive phase and passed out, the danger becomes imminent. Thankfully T'Pol is still awake and clear-headed. After putting Archer under a cold shower he can then help to pilot the ship out of danger. I'm not generally a fan of his, but it was nice to see that he was able to snap out of it enough to be able to do that. Overall the actors give very good performances and the comedic writing is mostly fun to watch (one good exchange was Archer: "You're lucky you're a decent engineer, because you obviously don't know anything about writing." Trip: "I'm not the only one!"). I'll give this episode a grade of 7- on my 10-graded scale. That means seven bums: Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 3 Jun 2006, 08:46 Post #11 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-10 Vanishing Point Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley All right, let's see what happened in this episode. Trip and Hoshi are down investigating alien ruins on some planet. A storm makes them evacuate early and they beam up to the ship again, one at a time. Then Hoshi goes to sickbay and talks a little with Phlox and Archer. Well folks, that's about it. Oh, I almost forgot, when beaming up, Hoshi got caught in the pattern buffer for 8.3 seconds and had a weird dream. That's really what happened in Vanishing Point, which is a very apt title since the point of this episode did completely vanish. You have to look long and hard to find a more pointless episode. Besides showcasing Hoshi's fear of having her molecules scrambled it wasn't about much at all. I could stop right there since there really isn't anything substantial to talk about. Since most of what was depicted in this episode was Hoshi's dream it didn't mean squat. I absolutely hate Reset Button™ episodes and this is as bad as they come. Sigh! It really is too bad that an episode featuring Hoshi Sato, a character that's been all too neglected on the show, has to be one that ultimately doesn't matter. This is a case when the ending makes or breaks the story. It doesn't matter if what happened before was good or not. If the pay off is lacking it drags the entire story down. If it hadn't been "just a dream" then Vanishing Point might have been a good story. But as the "plot" progressively got weirder it seems the writers didn't care and just rushed to the ending and did a cop-out. No need to explain anything since it was all a fantasy in Hoshi's head. Using dreams can be a good dramatic device when it means something for the overall story. In Vanishing Point weird things happened for no good reason. I guess one of the things the writers tried to do with this episode was to highlight Hoshi's fears and insecurities. She worries about not being noticed as she literally becomes invisible. That aspect would have worked much better in early season one, not in mid-season two. Surely by now she must have settled in and overcame a lot of the anxiety she felt when she had just come onboard. And if not, well then she really shouldn't be onboard. It's not like she overcomes her fears in her dream either. She steps on the alien transporter platform because she hears Trip's and Malcolm's voices breaking through from reality. One also has to wonder about how the real Hoshi views the rest of the crew when they act as they do in her dream. But on the other hand we can't really be sure that's how she really views them, since dreams can be rather screwy even in regards to people we know. Take the horrid scene when she watches as Archer tries to tell her dad about her "death". That Archer isn't quite like the father figure/mentor one would expect. And the less said about "Mr. Sato" the better. The Transporters have been around for as long as Trek has but I've grown increasingly weary of stories with them malfunctioning (not to mention when they're used as a deus ex machina device to get people out of trouble). That's one of the things I liked about Enterprise - that they would be used sparingly. I still would have wished that they would have no Transporters at all. But it made sense for the crew to be afraid to use them. Too bad that they started using them almost as often as the other shows as the seasons progressed. Of all the Trek shows, Enterprise is the one most entitled to a Transporter Malfunction™ episode since they are chronologically the first. But since they have been done to death before it would be hard to come up with a novel use of the concept. Vanishing Hoshi reminded me of the Next Generation episode The Next Phase (which I rather liked) and when I first watched Vanishing Point I thought the pay off would be similar. While it sometimes can be good to have your expectations thwarted, this wasn't one of those cases. But like in The Next Phase, some things should be impossible to do. If you become transparent and can move through solid objects, why can you still stand on the floor? That should tell Hoshi that something was wrong and that what she experienced couldn't be real. Call me shallow but I have to give the episode points for displaying Hoshi in the shower and the fact that she conveniently had to become invisible to the crew while wearing a tight tank top, making her wear that for the rest of the episode. But showing some Hoshi skin isn't going to help this episode much. The beginning of the episode is all but forgotten, which is too bad. I for one got a bit curious about what those alien ruins were all about and what kind of people that used to live there. But rest assure that whoever they are/were, they had nothing to do with those guys showing up in Hoshi's dream to try and blow up the ship. And the reason for Trip and Hoshi to use the Transporter is quite unbelievable. Some electric storm won't allow the use of a shuttlepod but a Transporter, which ought to be infinitely more sensitive, is perfectly all right! Yeah, whatever! I also find it strange that neither Archer nor T'Pol bothered to check for weather patterns before sending them down there. There is no answer except that "the plot required it". My greatest regret from Vanishing Point isn't that all this didn't happen to Hoshi, but that Cyrus Ramsey never existed. Too bad, I would have liked George Webb (Strange New World) to have some company. There isn't much else to say about this episode except to give my grade. Vanishing Point only gets a 3- on my 10-graded scale, and that's generous, but you can thank Showering Hoshi and Workout Outfit Hoshi for that plus. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put this episode together again. Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 19 Jun 2006, 18:14 Post #12 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-11 Precious Cargo Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley When it comes to romance I'm normally a sucker for "opposites attract" stories, the whole African Queen, Han Solo and Princess Leia kind of thing. That's why I was instantly drawn to Trip and T'Pol on Enterprise. With Precious Cargo the writers tried to do that with the "rogue" and down-to-earth human engineer and an uptight alien princess. Alas, it didn't work here at all. It's not just enough to toss two different characters together and think that they will click. There has to be that sometimes elusive concept called chemistry present. While Connor Trinneer mostly manages to have chemistry with just about anyone, this wasn't the case with Princess Fishstick… sorry, Kaitaama. And when there's no chemistry the whole underpinnings of this type of story comes crashing down. Not only is there no chemistry, Padma Lakshmi, the actress playing Kaitaama, while being very nice to look at, gives a terrible performance. Precious Cargo is just bad from start to finish. Granted it's not A Night in Sickbay bad, or The Seventh bad, but bad nonetheless. It doesn't make character assassinations like those did. That is its only redeeming quality. In the end it is just forgettable. It doesn't add anything, but it doesn't detract anything either. It was just mind-numbingly stupid, with an all too predictable plot that served no real purpose. It's just the latest in a long line of tired and uninspired clichés. While using clichés can work sometimes, when they have a different angle or a surprise twist, there's nothing new about Precious Cargo. The banter between Fishstick and Trip is supposed to be funny, but the episode doesn't even work as a comedy piece, unless you count the unintentional humour factor you get from viewing something this bad. I'm also very weary about Alien Babe of the Week™ stories. No matter who gets the girl in the end, they never matter because by the end of the episode the characters go their separate ways. If only the writers had tossed two regular characters together - like Trip and T'Pol, who actually have great chemistry - and have them sparring each other, then it could've been a good episode. By the end of Precious Cargo there is absolutely no doubt that Trip and Fishstick will never meet again, despite the lines they're forced to spout by the writers. It was also very hard to take the villains seriously. They were so generic and inept that it was quite laughable. I'm surprised they managed to kidnap the princess in the first place, let alone work out a ransom deal. The hows and the wheres about that weren't delved upon at all. We're just supposed to take it for a fact. Considering that the writers made Kaitaama's homeworld Krios Prime (from the next generation episode The Perfect Mate) one would think that they should've used the political situation in that system as a template for this episode. But they don't, and the Krios Prime reference is just a meaningless throw away nod to Star Trek: The Next Generation. And Kaitaama is no empathic metamorph like Kamala on The Perfect Mate, and Padma Lakshmi is most certainly no Famke Janssen. There really is only one good scene in this episode, and that is when Archer and T'Pol stage a faux military tribunal for Plinn, one of the alien abductors, to force him to give away how to track his partner's vessel. T'Pol as Lord (or should that be Lady) High Executioner in Vulcan robes was a riot, and I loved to see Archer grovelling before her, even if he was just play acting. I almost felt sorry for him (Plinn, not Archer). That scene could, however, not save this episode. I suppose women viewers liked to see Trip in his blue underwear (again) while down on the steamy jungle planet. I for one liked to see Kaitaama in her nice little silk slip. But the scenes between them down there where the most cringe-inducing parts in the entire episode. Two attractive and sweaty people don't make for a hot scene. While one at the same time could see it coming a mile away, the kiss (and whatever happened after that) came out of left field - that's how much those two lacked in chemistry. Ugh! Despite what he had to work with here, the Trip character did well for the most part. He came off as a competent engineer - T'Pol even said he was "resourceful" - who could think on his feet to get out of a tight situation. He even treated Kaitaama with respect, much more than she really deserved. What I didn't like was the stereotyping at the very beginning, with him playing the harmonica just like we all know all Southerners do! Sigh! As if catfish eating wasn't enough. Good thing he eventually got rid of the harmonica in the next season (North Star). While she couldn't act her way out of a wet paper bag, I have to admit that Padma Lakshmi is one great looking woman, which is probably why she got the part. Those legs are to die for. As a former model, she should've stuck to that instead of dabbling in acting where she's clearly out of her element. A lesser-known fact about her is that she is married to author Salman Rushdie, who still has a death sentence from the mullahs in Iran for his novel The Satanic Verses. One tidbit is that Trip reveals that there are still cars - as in four-wheeled vehicles - around in the 22nd century. A nitpick is that Archer says that the aliens can park their vessel in the launch bay when it is clearly seen as being much too large for that. And did those aliens look butt ugly or what? There really isn't much else to say about this, so I'll just give my grade of 2 on my 10-graded scale to Precious Cargo. Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 19 Jun 2006, 18:15 Post #13 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-12 The Catwalk Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley Finally, Enterprise is back from the prolonged slump it got in season two, beginning with A Night in Sickbay. With The Catwalk it showed that it was capable of a lot more than the mediocre and outright bad episodes the producers gave us for too long. Still, while a very good episode, The Catwalk wasn't a sign that things were back on track. The rest of the season would be quite uneven, going like a roller coaster from high to low and back again. Really a big shame. In many ways, The Catwalk had it all. It had some really nice character moments and we got an exciting adventure story. Neither took the backseat to the other and no one was forced to act stupidly or out of character because the plot required it. This is how you make a good and memorable story. The catwalk in the episode is the maintenance shaft running along each of the warp nacelles, a rather sensible thing to have for easy access when you have to make repairs. Normally inhabitable, they now have to be used as a shelter for the entire crew to be protected from the radiation coming from a "neutronic wavefront" that the ship can't escape. I'll admit that this was a bit techno-babbly for me - and don't even mention the "radiolytic isotopes". But it didn't distract too much, although one has to wonder about that special phenomenon (more on that later). Anyway, the crew has to make do with being there for a little more than a week or so. While cramped and probably getting very smelly soon, the crew manages to settle in as comfortable as they can get. Sure they get irritated (Malcolm) and claustrophobic (Hoshi) but eventually come together like a big family. In the end they probably learned more about and respect each other. Additional problems arise when it is discovered that aliens from the Takret militia, who also happens to be immune to the radiation, have boarded them, seeking deserters and then try to steal the ship. I actually liked Archer in this episode. He was a good captain, walking around the catwalk, talking to his crew and reassuring them, just like a good commanding officer should. He was also quick to think on his feet when time was running out and they had to retake the ship from the Takret militia. I can't really fault him for not acting more on the suspicions he must have felt about the Takret refugees that warned them. It was just a matter of hours before the wavefront would hit and there was no time to do anything else but prepare for the evacuation. Hell, I even liked his scenes with T'Pol, especially when they were in the back of that makeshift "bridge" trying to get some sleep. It came off very natural and nothing like the forced and stilted moments we all too often have had to endure. It's only slightly ruined with Archer watching that inane water polo sport on his Padd. "Is this bothering you?" "Only slightly." And vice versa. Hehe! He tried to induce her to socialize more with the crew and in the end she does just that, although some of them might not appreciate that she spoiled the western movie they watched. T'Pol even made a funny joke. Archer: "It's bringing the crew closer together. If you forget about the storm outside, it's almost like a camping trip." T'Pol: "Perhaps we can sing a few songs later…" I'm sure I'm not the only one who got flashbacks of "Row, row, row your boat" from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (or Aliens for that matter). But I have to wonder why they didn't remember the camping out they did in Strange New World back in early season one. T'Pol mentioned the kahs-wan ritual she had to undergo as a young Vulcan, thereby canonizing something that was originally mentioned on the animated series. Trip was also back from the despicable status of comic relief he had for far too many season two episodes. This is the chief engineer who knows his ship like the back of his hand and who knows what has to be done to chase the aliens away, even if he has to talk T'Pol and Reed through how to shut down the warp reactor. That was another nice scientific bit about accumulated radiation as the reason why Trip couldn't make a second excursion around the ship. Even Travis had some really nice moments. First when he retold what he had experienced with a similar wavefront when he was younger. Finally his Boomer background shows. And then of course when he did some cool bit of piloting the ship through the storm via remote control from the catwalk, forcing the Takret militia guys to abandon ship. Phlox gave us some insights to Denobula when he mentioned that 12 billion people have to share a single continent and that Denobulans are used to crowds. Reed was perhaps a bit too irritable, but I can see that since he is a rather private man that probably didn't like being cooped up with a lot of others for too long. We even got to see Chef's legs… and it wasn't Riker's. Only Hoshi wasn't shown much in this episode. It really was a team effort to get the aliens to go away. Eventually Archer didn't do much but distracting the Takret captain while Travis piloted the ship and Trip told Reed and T'Pol how to shut down the engines. I like it when no one outshines another. I wish they'd done more on those aliens though. We've had quite enough of bumpy foreheads, thank you (yeah, I know it was more bumpy chins this time but the sentiment is the same)! I also wonder about that wavefront. Having a huge (many light-years across) "neutronic storm" travelling through space at high warp should really make a lot of civilizations worried. What direction was it heading? What effect does it have on planets and stars? One would assume that it is lethal; otherwise the crew could just have weathered out that storm on that poor nice planet they planned on doing some R'n'R in the beginning. Why worry about asteroids and comets when there are radiolytic isotopes going faster than light? Another little moment I liked was at the end when they were watching that movie and Trip said to T'Pol: "Glad you could join us, Sub-Commander. We have movie night every Tuesday - you know - if you're interested..." Hey, he asked her out on a date! Wonder if she, or even he, realized that? But my TnT fanboy heart skipped a beat there. Oh, one last little tidbit was the mention that Solkar was the first Vulcan ambassador to Earth. According to Star Trek: The Search for Spock that is Sarek's grandfather and Spock's great-grandfather. Wonder if he knew Soval? I'll go out on a limb here and give The Catwalk a grade of 8 on my 10-graded scale. One of the best episodes of season two. Great stuff! Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 2 Jul 2006, 13:49 Post #14 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-13 Dawn Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley If the plot of Dawn seems eerily familiar it's because it is. The story has been done numerous times before, and not just on Star Trek. We have the original series' Arena and the next generation's Darmok. But what Dawn resembles most is the movie Enemy Mine, which is also a story about a human and a lizard-like alien that shoots each other down on a deserted planet, and are eventually forced to work together for survival. While derivative stories can work (at this time there are hardly any truly original stories left to tell, especially in science fiction) if they're well done, or takes a surprising twist, this isn't one of those cases. Dawn is a retread and it's even less original than the stories it's based on. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt! Enemy Mine, for example, gave us an insight to the alien culture, but we hardly learn anything worthwhile about the Arkonians (as the lizard men are known here) in Dawn. And Darmok took a new and interesting perspective on an alien language, as well as gave us some good character revelations. In Dawn we have Trip as the main protagonist, and while his character is the one on the Enterprise best suited for this sort of challenge, we already know that he's a very decent and sympathetic guy. Whatever bigotry he might have had, has by now been washed away. It wasn't very deep anyway, not like Archer who still has a major chip on his shoulder, especially when it comes to Vulcans. For a good character piece it would have worked better to have Archer stranded with the Vulcan ambassador Soval, and have them sort out each other's mutual resentments. What insights we could've had are sacrificed to create mostly artificial drama and tension. We have the technobabblium isotopes that conveniently interfere with shuttle engines, sensors and communications (but apparently not the transporters). We have Trip and the alien Zho'Kaan spending most of their time kicking the crap out of each other and trying to deceive one another. We learn that the Arkonians aren't very friendly towards Vulcans, but that's it. There was a story begging to be told, but unfortunately wasn't. So in most respects Dawn is a wasted hour and a wasted opportunity. It's not insulting or even bad but it certainly isn't anything to write home about either. It's a simplified paint-by-numbers episode that we've seen too much of already. For some of the female viewers a sweaty and dirty Trip showing off his muscles might have saved this one from total obscurity. For me, Dawn will just be remembered as a rip-off of Enemy Mine. In order for the plot to work there has to be a lot of contrived set-ups. For no good reason they send away Trip alone in a shuttlepod to test a new autopilot system. It makes little sense to send one of the most important officers - the Chief Engineer and the third-in-command - off all by himself. Things might go wrong and a back-up pilot should be needed. But then again the story calls for Trip being stranded alone. And it makes little sense to not equip a shuttlepod with a standard universal translator. But then again the story calls for Trip and Zho'Kaan to not being able to communicate with each other. I won't mention the contrived explanations for why the NX-01 couldn't locate the downed shuttlepod again. And saying that the gas giant has more than 60 moons with atmospheres (let alone breathable ones) is really stretching believability. Given that Jupiter only has four moons large enough to retain any atmosphere, at most a couple of this planet's moons should have their own atmosphere. Given the constraints, the scenes between Trip and Zho'Kaan worked reasonably well, even if I quickly grew tired of watching them fighting and trying to fool each other. Given that he was confined to wearing a lizard mask, Gregg Henry did a good job of portraying Zho'Kaan despite the lack of depth his character had. But Zho'Kaan's continuing belligerency went too far, even when there was no reason to continue with it. I must admit, however, that I did like it when he at first didn't trust Trip after Trip threw the pistol away and came at him again. Trip was a bit too naïve and gullible there. Once they work out their differences all should be set for them to return, but unfortunately the writers stuck some additional artificial drama into the episode. The moon Trip and Zho'Kaan are on is approaching dawn and with that comes an all too high a temperature for them to survive in. I'm no expert but I would think that such great temperature differences wouldn't be possible on a planet with an atmosphere you can also breathe. At any rate, the quick temperature differences should be producing howling winds, but we see nothing of the kind. But the worst part is when they're discovered and it should be an easy task for the Enterprise to get them off. Enter; a contrived explanation from Phlox as to why the Arkonian physiology couldn't survive a transporter, despite the fact that there really is no way Phlox could know that already. And then Trip decides he wants to remain on the surface until an Arkonian shuttle can pick them up instead. While touching, that was just plain stupid and Archer should've beamed him up regardless. For that matter, the most glaringly stupid thing is that nothing gets beamed down to them - no water, no whatever liquid it was that the Arkonians drink, no shelter! That stuck out so much that it completely took away whatever "counting clock" suspense they were aiming for. A delirious Trip recounting his past experiences in space as he awaits death, makes no sense in this regard. Even if he should've been beamed away immediately, there's no doubt that Archer eventually would have done so if Trip was on the verge of actually dying. All in all, Dawn was a below average episode. In Darmok Picard learned the meaning of "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra". In Dawn Trip learned that the Arkonian was glad that he didn't destroy his shuttlepod. I'll give it a grade of 4-, bordering on a 3, on my 10-graded scale. Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 10 Jul 2006, 20:52 Post #15 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-14 Stigma Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley Stigma was Star Trek's and Enterprise's much hyped and talked about AIDS episode. As such it is a perfect example when continuity and plot has to take a back seat in order to "tell the big story". The studios executives tell the producers to write an "AIDS episode" and they do, regardless if it actually fits into the pre-established universe. And never mind that an AIDS episode at that point came about 15 years too late to actually mean something. Now it's just more of preaching the obvious, in this case "AIDS is bad and you shouldn't discriminate against those infected with it!" Wow, what a courageous stand to make! It turns out T'Pol, while being forced in a mind meld (Fusion), has contracted the potentially lethal Pa'Nar syndrome. Mind melds are something frowned upon by 22nd century Vulcan society and now T'Pol carries the stigma of having involved herself in such a practice. So the Vulcans are reluctant to research and help those Vulcans that have contracted Pa'Nars. Two things spring to mind here that violates the internal continuity on Enterprise. First of all, in Fusion we were told that mind melds were something more or less unknown. Now mind melds seem to be known - how could there otherwise be a stigma against them - but very few Vulcans seem to be able to practice it. It also seems odd that T'Pol would have risked involving herself with a practice that could give her a deadly disease. Of course Pa'Nar wasn't thought out when Fusion was made, but this goes to show what can happen when you try and shoehorn something new into an already established chain of events. This brings me to my second beef with the continuity. In Stigma T'Pol neglects to mention the fact that she initially had agreed to do the mind meld with Tolaris in Fusion. It was only later, when she began to feel uncomfortable, that she asked him to stop and he then forced himself on her. This really takes away some of her hero status in Stigma, when the other Vulcans are lead to believe that she was forced to do the meld. It doesn't change the fact that she was mind raped, but for the Vulcans here the abhorrent thing is mind melding itself, something T'Pol had initially agreed to. By not mentioning that fact she effectively deceived her superiors so that she wouldn't lose her commission. But given the plot requirements of Stigma to paint T'Pol as having a noble cause, this omission isn't surprising. Perhaps the writers thought the viewers wouldn't remember the details of an episode from a year back? At any rate, knowing those details really lessens the impact of T'Pol's moral stand when she refuses to reveal that she had been mind raped, in order not to perpetuate the prejudice against melders and indicting them in the process. By the end of the episode her mind rape is revealed anyway, by Yuris, one of the Vulcan doctors who is secretly a melder. As an AIDS allegory Stigma doesn't really work either. It's not subtle enough for that, and besides, they don't get the facts straight. The analogy between melders and homosexuals doesn't work because nowadays there isn't much of a stigma against gays, especially in the Western world. The stigma comes from the disease itself, and that can be contracted in a number of ways. Yes, an allegory doesn't have to fit perfectly with the subject, but really, if you're doing an AIDS allegory today, prejudice against gays isn't the major problem. The problem with the spread of AIDS today, more or less confined to the developing counties, is lack of protection, education, insufficient resources to fight the disease and promiscuity. But if that had been taken into account Stigma would have had to be a very different kind of episode. Since unprotected promiscuity is one of the reasons for the spread of AIDS, it is rather odd for the subplot in Stigma to feature the polyamorous nature of the Denobulans, exemplified with Phlox's wife Feezal making advances on poor Tucker. I'm not making judgements on the Denobulan way of life, but it seems out of place to have this storyline paired with the AIDS allegory. Not the best of choices on the writers' part. However that's not the only reason I didn't really care for the B-plot. Sure Feezal was cute enough (and also with the same goofy Denobulan smile as Phlox) and the character seemed sympathetic. But once again Trip was relegated to being the comic relief he all too often was subjected to in this season. Also, the sexual innuendo was all too blatant, especially when Feezal and Trip were putting that microscope together. Ugh! What I don't object much too, on the other hand, is the general portrayal of the Vulcans on Enterprise. I don't mind them being bigoted and arrogant. Thus I can't object much to the way we saw them in Stigma either. As I've said before, I find it feasible that Vulcan society at this time is different from later eras. I don't even mind the fact that mind melding is frowned upon. In fact, given the private and emotional suppressing nature of Vulcans, it isn't hard to picture them as thinking less of a practice that allows for very intimate contacts between people. The problem is, as I said above, that facts about melding don't jive between Fusion and Stigma. But overall, the way Enterprise Vulcans are portrayed set up for some good storytelling later on, in the last season. While I didn't care for the story and what it did to her character I must say that Jolene Blalock gave a really good performance as a conflicted T'Pol here. And she looked good in those Vulcan robes we saw her in briefly. But to have yet another episode where T'Pol is made to look weak and where big strong Archer has to come to her rescue isn't doing her character any favours. The threat to recall T'Pol to Vulcan was also silly from a dramatic standpoint. It has been done before (Shadows of P'Jem) and will be done again (The Expanse), but we all know that's not going to happen, so there is no real tension, and the drama falls flat. John Billingsley did a great job as Phlox, showing that the Denobulan doctor is very protective of his patients (in this case T'Pol). But one has to wonder if it was that wise for him to approach the Vulcan doctors the way he did. It didn't come as a surprise when they put two and two together and immediately suspected that Phlox had been talking about T'Pol when he asked for information on Pa'Nar syndrome. They may be arrogant jerks, but they're not stupid. Summing up, I really didn't care for this episode - flawed analogy, heavy-handed message, breaking internal continuity etc. I give it a grade of 2 on my 10-graded scale. Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 31 Jul 2006, 19:59 Post #16 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-15 Cease Fire Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley There is a distinct lack of really good episodes in season two, but Cease Fire was one of the few. It might possibly be the best one of the season and it shows that if the writers and producers just put their minds to it, some really excellent tales could be told. Unfortunately they didn't do that very often in this season. Cease Fire centers on the Vulcan/Andorian conflict and that means we get to see my two favourite guest characters - Ambassador Soval (Gary Graham) and Commander Shran (Jeffrey Combs) - again. A disputed border planet, called Paan Mokar/Weytahn (take your pick depending on your loyalties) threatens to re-ignite a war after Shran leads a force to take it back, unless Archer can mediate a cease fire between the parties. Apart from being an exciting action piece, Cease Fire is also a good prequel story, one that foreshadows the birth of the Federation, and frankly the kind of story that Enterprise should have told much more than it did. It is also good character drama. What lies beneath this story is much more than what might be apparent from a cursory first glance. It showcases what humanity and Earth has to contribute to in terms of interstellar politics. Archer's accomplishments - with help from his crew - in negotiating this cease fire will send a powerful signal to the rest of the quadrant that there is now a new force to be reckoned with. That is no small feat considering the involved parties are the old Vulcan besserwissers and the trigger happy Andorians. Not bad for a species that's just begun to get its space legs. The Vulcans can no longer claim that humans are too immature. And we have also proved that we're nobody's puppets but can remain impartial. In other words, the perfect world to bring other worlds together to eventually form an interstellar federation. At last even Archer realizes that his, and Starfleet's, mission is more than just to chase comets and say "hello" to the natives. In an interesting conversation he has with Phlox he even says: "Maybe we're not out here just to scan comets and meet new species. Maybe we're out here to prove that humanity is ready to join a much larger community." That is something he should've realized from day one, and if he hadn't then Starfleet command sure should have realized it and told him that. Still, it is Archer's and Earth's good fortune that the Vulcan/Andorian conflict isn't any deeper than it is. I seriously doubt the tactic used here would work in the Middle East today. There aren't even any casualties in this latest Paan Mokar/Weytahn incident, and no side is deliberately hurling rockets at innocent civilians or blowing up school buses. Here both the Vulcans and the Andorians have legitimate grievances and neither side is blameless. And both sides have a vested interest in the cessation of hostilities. It finally comes down to trust, and when Soval and Shran learns that they can trust each other, then an agreement can be reached. Archer says: "I believe someone once defined a compromise as a solution that neither side is happy with." To which Shran replies: "In that case, these talks have been extremely successful", and then toasts to Soval: "Join me in a drink… to our mutual dissatisfaction." It isn't clear what that compromise entails, but the important things is that they're going to keep talking and that they have found some common ground. One rather chilling aspect that was very understated in the episode, and that didn't become clear to me until after repeated viewings, is that Phlox has to inoculate Archer against some mutagenic pathogen that's immune to Vulcans before he can go down on the disputed planet. This suggest that maybe the Vulcans have used biological weapons to drive the Andorians away. It does fit with the more sinister Vulcans we've seen on Enterprise but it is chilling nonetheless. No wonder other species still view Vulcans with suspicion even on the original series. But the Vulcans do change, and this story arc is one that I've found interesting overall on Enterprise. We can see it most clearly on T'Pol but in Cease Fire we begin to see it in Ambassador Soval as well. For the first time his character is painted in a more sympathetic light when he interacts with T'Pol, Archer and Shran. On his own playing ground on Earth he can be his obnoxious arrogant self but in the field another self starts to kick in. Soval handles himself very well here. He realizes the advantages of striking a deal with Shran and in the end he even admits to Archer that Archer's "presence here has not been… overly meddlesome." He has come a long way, our grumpy old Vulcan, and he will come much further than that before the show ends. And if Soval can, then so can the rest of Vulcan when they eventually learn to respect humanity. I liked the scenes between T'Pol and Soval, which revealed that she was something of a protégé of Soval and that he cares for her and has probably been defending her choices to the Vulcan High Command. He wants to know why T'Pol has decided she wants to remain on Enterprise when she could've had a better diplomatic career. Our T'Pol finds her posting "gratifying" and being the outsider she is among her own kind, as well as being a scientist, she probably finds it far more interesting to travel around the galaxy on a human ship than making all the compromises she otherwise undoubtedly would have to make had she remained with the Vulcans. We also learn that she and Soval share a similar background. She has previously worked for Vulcan intelligence, and so did Soval when he was young and stationed on Paan Mokar as part of the then occupying force. They also managed to have a fun exchange. Soval: "What is their fascination with our ears?" T'Pol: "I believe they're envious." Or it could be that we find them to be very attractive attributes! On another shallow note, I love how T'Pol looks in her landing party jacket. Another guest star that handled herself well was Suzie Plakson (whose other Trek roles include Worf's ill-fated mate K'Ehleyr on The Next Generation) as Shran's not so loyal aide Tarah. While it was quite obvious from the start that she would betray him, it nevertheless worked here. Her part was to show that reaching a peace isn't easy and that changing people's attitudes is hard and will take time. When Tarah says that there are other who feel like she does, we know she means it, and not just on the Andorian side. And I think it was funny how they played out the height differences between the very tall Plakson and the not-so-tall Jeff Combs. Tucker handled himself very well here as acting captain, a far cry from the indecisive dolt he was portrayed on The Seventh and the comic relief he has been relegated to all too often during this season. Trip was a competent commanding officer that understood the situation and decided to take the necessary risks when he positioned the Enterprise between the Vulcan and Andorian ships to prevent them from fighting each other. I also enjoyed his little bickering with T'Pol when they sat at the Captain's table in the beginning, when he responded to T'Pol assertion that the engines could take further strain with: "Yeah, and my underwear's flame-retardant. That doesn't mean I'm going to light myself on fire to prove it." Hehe! Summing up, I give a grade of 9- on my 10-graded scale to Cease Fire, one of the best episodes to come out of this season and one where everyone handled themselves admiringly. Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 9 Aug 2006, 18:58 Post #17 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-16 Future Tense Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley Future Tense is one of those episodes I’m torn about. On the one hand I like a lot of what’s in there, the action flows and it is somewhat intriguing. But then there are elements I have a hard time to stand and that’s not so easy to overlook, all of which makes this one tough to grade. The Enterprise revisits the Temporal Cold War when they discover a mysterious pod that turns out to be from the future. This fact alone should downgrade the episode since the Temporal Cold War got old fast on the show, and it ultimately didn’t lead anywhere, most certainly because the writers/producers had no idea what to make of it. Future Tense is no exception and overall it doesn’t add anything to that storyline. The Temporal Cold War is just a convenient backdrop to show off some nifty scenes and further complicate the storyline and confuse the audience. It’s like how The X-Files was most of the time; By the end of the episode more questions had been asked than were answered. Still, the action scenes worked well enough on their own merits and I liked some of the events even if they were never explained - like how the pod was bigger on the inside than on the outside, and that the Tholians (courtesy of the original series’ The Tholian Web) showed up with an interest in its technology. Alas we get no real answer as to why and how the Tholians are involved in the war. All we get is a sense that they’re somehow involved with tampering with time, which will be further reinforced in season four with the mirror universe episodes In a Mirror, Darkly. I loved the improved look of the Tholians arrow-shaped ships and their weird squeaky-sounding voices. But if they’re actually a faction in the Temporal Cold War or just curious, we’ll never know. Sigh, would it have been too much to ask for if this whole “arc” had been properly thought out before introducing it? For whatever reasons the Tholians seem reluctant to destroy both the Vulcans and the Enterprise, but they had no such qualms when they blasted the Suliban ships to oblivion. Another thing I liked, even if it was just a throw-away, is the speculation that the corpse found on the pod might be Zefram Cochrane. Fans of the original series already knows that this can’t be the case since Kirk et al. actually met him in the episode Metamorphosis, but the people of the 22nd century can’t know that. Nice nod there. It quickly turns out that the corpse can’t be Cochrane though, since while being mostly human it does have DNA from several other species, including Vulcans, as well. This is one of the things I’m torn about in the episode. Not that Future Corpse is a hybrid but how this fact is presented. Basically it is used here to indicate that the might be a possibility for Archer to hook up with T’Pol in the future. Thankfully those scenes are clouded in enough ambiguity to offer alternate explanations. Every time they tried to hint in that direction in season two, it was so contrived and Future Tense is no exception. Archer and T’Pol have zero chemistry with each other and trying to force them together, even if it’s just as friends, always comes off as cringe-worthy. “Swapping chromosomes” my foot! No wonder T’Pol balks at the idea and insists that it is unlikely that humans and Vulcans can ever reproduce. Of course we all know that is not the case because of Spock. One might also suggest that T’Pol’s mind was on another crewmember when the subject came up. There is a funny moment in the last scene when she checks out Commander Tucker’s behind as he leaves the Captain’s Mess, and in hindsight we know that she will eventually hook up with the Chief Engineer and have not just one, but two children with him. Unfortunately Future Tense also showcases the annoying crew-acting-stupidly-to-further-the-plot syndrome. Here we have a mysterious pod that is sensor-proof, and about which they know squat about. What does Archer decide to do? Sure, bring it on board without the slightest concern for the safety of their ship. They know nothing about what it is or what it may contain inside. For all they knew, it could’ve been a bomb! And then Reed just phaser-torch it up, with no concern what that might do. And despite the chances of there being a toxic atmosphere inside, Archer takes a sniff! The god of fortune was sure on their side and that’s good since the god of common sense surely wasn’t. Then when Trip discovers that it is bigger on the inside, does he inform the Captain? No, he climbs “down” because he must get his spanner back! Then he and Reed just rips off a piece of equipment for studying. But it doesn’t end there. When it becomes obvious that both the Sulibans (who even border the Enterprise) and the Tholians really want the pod and puts the Enterprise in danger, what does Archer do? He decides to keep the pod even if chances are extremely slim that he’ll get anything out of it, jeopardizing his ship and crew in the process. He should’ve followed T’Pol’s advice here, but then again, his M.O. suggests that’s not something he usually does. A sensible Captain would’ve blown up the pod at the first available opportunity. In the end, Archer does try and blow up the pod, but it is too little too late, and the method he used was questionable at best. Why did he decide to use explosives from a photonic torpedo that had to be dismantled? I’m sure there are other and better means, which Dead Stop proved. And why did he and Reed dismantle the torpedo in the shuttle bay when they knew that there was a temporal loop there. The logical place would’ve been to do it in the armoury, if for no other reason than that they wouldn’t have to haul an entire torpedo up to the shuttle bay. But then we wouldn’t have this “cool” time loop scene, would we? To me that was just annoying and just a way to create some more artificial drama in an already tense situation. At any rate, they failed and the situation was only saved when the thingamajig that Trip took from the pod starts to send out a distress call, which promptly makes all the future things, including the corpse, to vanish back to the future (presumably). We still don’t know who these people are (or rather, who they will be) but a fair guess is that they’re from the same faction as Daniels. This makes one wonder why that same faction hasn’t taken back the stuff that Daniels left behind in his now sealed-off cabin, and that Archer and T’Pol took a convenient peek at in this episode? Another Temporal Cold War plot hole. One nice scene was the talk between Malcolm and Trip about knowing or not knowing your future. It told us a thing or two about those characters. Trip is being more impulsive and open to new possibilities so he doesn’t want to know how his future is going to turn out. Malcolm is the more rigid and structured one and he would see it as a great opportunity to know about his future so that he can get there as conveniently as possible (like avoiding a lot of awkward first dates). While T’Pol’s caution in this episode is commendable, her resistance to the concept of time travel has already passed the line of sound scepticism. Given all that is now known about it, it just makes her look like a fool for not admitting that the Vulcan Science Directorate is wrong on this issue. Lastly I come to the gruesome task of grading this episode, and I’ve finally settled on giving Future Tense a 6 on my 10-graded scale. The sheer entertainment value it had despite its numerous shortcomings made me rate it slightly above average. Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 19 Aug 2006, 20:01 Post #18 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
^ About once a week. So be patient, you'll get your chance to put up your reviews. I'll put up a new one tomorrow. Until then, here's my Canamar review: 2-17 Canamar Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley Canamar is your average action piece, nothing more and nothing less. That is also its greatest failing. It doesn’t offer the audience anything new or exciting in terms of either storytelling or character development. What it offers is what you see, a wholly predictable plot that takes you from beginning to end with no detours or twists that could’ve made it interesting. It’s not bad either. It’s just there. The episode features a run-of-the-mill prison break plot that has been seen a million times already. Even Enterprise has done one before (with Detained) and will again, already in this season (Judgment). But while Detained at least tried to tell a deeper story, there really isn’t much meat to Canamar. There is perhaps a small dig at overly harsh sentencing systems, but that is lost in all the action. Besides, the real bad guy of the episode is a prisoner, Kuroda, while having had a bad childhood turns out to be a real psycho with no redeeming qualities. Archer and Tucker find themselves on a prison transport to the penal colony Canamar (which we never see in the episode), accused of smuggling by overzealous authorities on the planet Keto-Enol. Of course the Enolians are wrong, which they soon learn when the Enterprise comes looking for its Captain and Chief Engineer. But before things can straighten themselves out, Kuroda stages a take-over of the transport vessel, with the help of a beefy Nausicaan (God why did it have to be a Nausicaan? I hate the Nausicaans for some reason. I don’t think they have a place on Enterprise. They’re a Next Generation species, but I digress…). This forces Archer to impersonate an outlaw so he can get close to Kuroda. The rest is a predictable plot where they have to outrun Enolian patrol ships while Archer tries to turn the situation in his favour and save the rest of the prisoners from Kuroda, who plans to crash the vessel once his associates show up. If there was supposed to be a “message” here about the harsh prison regime of the Enolians it is sure lost by the sheer incompetence they display. If they’re so paranoid about their security, why do they have such lax standards onboard their transports? It was much too easy for Kuroda to take over the ship. Those guards certainly weren’t the sharpest tools in the box. The transport had no escort and it took far too long for the patrol ships to arrive, and when they did, they got outsmarted by the easiest trick in the Trek book, courtesy of Archer - igniting venting plasma! There really is no good reason for all this except that the plot required it. The same goes for the arrest of Archer and Trip. We never learn what charges were brought on them or what they were supposedly smuggling. It doesn’t even make sense since Archer states in his log that he has made a successful first contact with the Enolians. One would think that the Enolian government would try to inform its law enforcement agencies of these two envoys from another world? If anything it would have been prudent for the authorities to check Archer’s story out before just hauling him and Trip away. It doesn’t matter though, since the plot requires them to be on that prison transport. But later, all it takes is the Enterprise showing up and T’Pol telling them they were wrong and an Enolian bureaucrat readily agrees. I suppose that’s an improvement over having been forced to watch an Intransigent Alien Official™ again. The beginning of the episodes has some cool shots of Shuttlepod One drifting in space, with a tricorder floating in zero-g. But it makes no sense for the pod to be there. If it had been used for smuggling, why didn’t the Enolians impound it? There’s no reason except that the plot required it so that the Enterprise could find it and have a reason to go after the Enolians. The scenes onboard the transport vessel weren’t bad. They weren’t particularly good either. It was enough to make for an average story. Watching Archer trying to play a criminal was a little fun. Alas the scenes meant to be fun in the episode really weren’t. I’m of course talking about Trip with the annoying alien that just won’t shut up. He was just too much and anyone who has met persons like that in real life (and it’s a fair bet that you have) will know what I mean, unless you’re one of those overly talkative types yourself. By proxy this also makes Trip the comic relief on the show again! Sigh! The choreography of the final shoot out, when Reed and his men board the transport, was well made. But since clichés abounded in Canamar, there had to be a senseless fight between the Kuroda and Archer right where the ship was about to be incinerated in the atmosphere. And needless to say, Kuroda decided to go up in flames rather than return to prison. Been there, done that, and all I got was the customary lousy t-shirt. The visual effects were top notch though, as we’ve come to expect on Enterprise. But they never showed the transport vessel burning up in the atmosphere, which is understandable considering that the episode originally aired just weeks after the space shuttle Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003. With this said one might think that my grade for this episode would be quite bad but I don’t consider a 4+ (on a 10-graded scale) as too bad, all things considered. It was a slightly below average episode that wasn’t upsetting in a negative way like the poorer outings of season two. There just isn’t much worthwhile to remember from Canamar and that unfortunately is what epitomizes much of this season. Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 27 Aug 2006, 17:56 Post #19 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-18 The Crossing Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley The Crossing was your standard fare Trek Alien Possession Story™ and us such it was fairly adequate. It was an entertaining hour but nothing more, which is a pity since there are a lot of possibilities of what they could’ve done with it that would’ve made it rise above all the other examples we’ve seen over the years. It starts of promising enough, with the Enterprise being chased by a huge alien ship that swallows it. That reminded me a bit of V’Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and elicited some sense of wonder. Unfortunately that sense of wonder got lost before we were half way through the episode. The visuals, however, were truly great and of the quality we’ve come to expect from Enterprise. But as with too many episodes, especially in the first two seasons, the story isn’t on par with the scenery. Aliens-taking-over-the-crew is a tried staple not just of Star Trek, but of many science fiction stories. If you’re going for it you either have to have a twist to it or at least tell it competently. Alas, The Crossing only did the latter, if that. In these stories the aliens can either be bad guys that needs to be fought, or good guys and it turns out everything was just a big misunderstanding, or bad guys that turn good guys after some persuasion. The Wisps of The Crossing are just bad. All alternatives are ridden with clichés and if you have nothing new to add, it is better not to go down that road altogether. I can see the appeal though, since this is the first example, from a chronological standpoint, that a Trek crew has encountered non-corporeal energy beings. Still, most viewers familiar with Star Trek has already seen this countless times before. After the initial sense of wonder, and even some humorous moments, it quickly turns into the-crew-gets-taken-over-one-by-one-and-can-the-ship-be-saved-in-time story. As such it is well made, but nothing new or even particularly exciting. It does have its creepy moments, like when Wisp Trip stands in the background and spies on when Archer and T’Pol lays out the strategy to Phlox. Or when Wisp Hoshi confronts Archer on the bridge and then later tries to fool Phlox so she/it can escape. Too bad Wisp Hoshi didn’t succeed - and in so failing, effectively made that whole scene redundant - because her/its escape would’ve added a little excitement to a story that by then had gotten a bit stagnant. Another creepy moment was when T’Pol allowed herself to be invaded by a Wisp alien. Jolene did an excellent performance there and you could really see how painful and hard it was for T’Pol to use her mental Vulcan discipline to keep it from taking over her. The ending was very brutal, with Archer blowing up the Wisp Ship. That’s not something we usually see on Star Trek. Kirk would’ve talked them into blowing themselves up. And had this been The Next Generation, Picard would probably have talked the Wisps into seeing the error of their ways and helped to fix their decaying ship to boot. Still, I kind of liked the ending as it was, since this an earlier era. My main complaint is that it ended too abruptly. They could at least have shown Archer thinking about what he’d actually done when he killed all those aliens. If they’d cut out the all too long scenes showing Phlox performing surgery on the Enterprise’s ventilation systems, there would’ve been ample room for an extended ending sequence. As mentioned, The Crossing has a lot of lost opportunities. We never get to see what the crew members experience when their consciousness leaves their bodies. Trip talks a bit about beaches, babes and barbeques (and is in so doing once again reduced to the Southern stereotype comic relief) but that’s about it. Given how great the visuals are on Enterprise, it wouldn’t have been that much of a problem to come up with images invoking some additional sense of wonder. This could also have been a great opportunity to reveal something personal about the characters. A nice twist would’ve been if the taken crew members became so awestruck by their non-corporeal experience that they didn’t want to come back. What was also lacking was any real sense of urgency and suspicion. The Wisps identified themselves too easily (perhaps understandable since they had no prior experience to being corporeal), but we never saw the Invasion of the Body Snatchers type of paranoia that one would’ve expected, and that would frankly have cranked up the suspense level several notches. Once two-thirds of the crew are safe behind the shielding in the catwalk (nice reuse, by the way) the immediate threat disappears. Speaking of the catwalk, if it is shielded in such a way as to prohibit the Wisps from coming there, then how can Wisp Trip live there? My first thought when we learn that that area is protected is to take the possessed crew to the catwalk and simply exorcise the Wisps by their mere presence there. But that would either have been too easy or the writers never thought about it. Conveniently enough, Phlox’s Denobulan physiology makes him immune from the Wisps, and it befalls upon him to save the ship through some rather unorthodox - and actually lethal - means. By temporarily “killing” the infested crewmembers’ bodies through asphyxiation by carbon-dioxide, the Wisps will be forced to leave. The thing is, an asphyxiated man won’t just resuscitate himself just because you flood the air with oxygen again. The good doctor would in all likelihood have killed his patients with this “cure”, since there’s no way there’d be sufficient time to go through each and every crewmember and bring him or her back to life. The other thing is that they would have no way of knowing that the consciousnesses of the real crewmembers would return once the Wisps left. I’d imagine the Wisps would be pretty angry by that point and just wouldn’t have allowed it. This supposes that the real consciousnesses would’ve known about it in the first place. I did like that we saw that there actually were different Wisp personalities. We had the friendlier Wisp that originally inhabited Trip’s body, the rather sinister and creepy one that possessed Hoshi and then the randy one that took over Reed. It made perfect sense to me that Wisp Reed sought out T’Pol since, as he/it stated, she is the most beautiful woman on the Enterprise. And she did look really good in her silk PJs! Yeah, sometimes I’m shallow just like Wisp Mal, sue me! But I wish we’d seen and learned more about the Wisps and perhaps even about their differences. Now they just came off as generic bad guys. We also learned that the Wisps live in subspace, but then why did they need an ordinary ship? And normal space couldn’t have been that deadly to them since they travelled back and forth through it. However, all my criticism aside, this was a competently made, standard alien possession story, and it gets bonus points for the stunning visuals (both the Wisp ship and T’Pol in her jammies). I give The Crossing a generous, perhaps too generous, 6 on my 10-graded scale. Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| Kevin Thomas Riley | 24 Sep 2006, 16:42 Post #20 |
|
Jolene Blalock Worshipper
|
2-19 Judgement Reviewed by Kevin Thomas Riley Well, I liked this story when first saw it, back in 1991 when it was called Star Trek V/: The Undiscovered Country. I suppose it depends on your outlook how you choose to view Judgement - as a respectful homage or a blatant rip-off of that movie. For me the similarities - from the Klingon kangaroo court to Rura Penthe - to the movie were just too much. It wasn’t a “tribute” but the product of some uninspired and lazy writing. And The Undiscovered Country is one of my favourite movies featuring the original series’ cast. Most of the episode we see Archer getting shuttled back and forth from his holding cell to the courtroom, and it grew tiresome fast. The outcome was a foregone conclusion and I dare challenge anyone who didn’t think he was going to be sentenced to the dilithium mines on Rura Penthe. I almost expected that there’d be a shape shifting alien there. Whatever possessed the writers to come up with this story? If they had to make another Klingon story, why couldn’t they think of something more original? A big plot hole is that we’re never shown how Archer was apprehended. The episode begins with him already being in confinement. What kind of lax security, especially after the incident with the refugees, allowed for him to be captured? That could’ve been something interesting to show us, instead of a retread of an old and tired storyline. What saves Judgement is Archer’s Klingon advocate, Kolos (played with excellence by J.G. Hertzler), a man of true honour that most of the other Klingons seems to have forgotten, despite them always invoking the concept. While it came as no surprise that Archer would soon sway Kolos to his side, that transformation played out nicely and gave us some insights and depth to the Klingon Empire. Not all Klingons are warriors. There are other professions too, like lawyers and doctors (the latter will be seen in the season 4 episodes Affliction and Divergence). The interaction between Archer and Kolos was great and they played off each other very well. However, the episode only added to the confusion about the Klingons and where they were in terms of historical development. According to Kolos the Klingons are now in a cultural decline, rapidly turning away from “honour”. Many of them are no better than mindless thugs and bullies (as witnessed in Marauders for example). In that they resemble the Klingons we see two hundred years later. They do not resemble the Klingons we saw on the original series. In the 23rd century they were smarter and more opportunistic. I admit to liking the insights to Klingon civilization we saw on The Next Generation, but those Klingons are often hard to reconcile with the earlier Klingons. In that way, I found the Klingons on Enterprise to be disappointing. I had expected them to be more like the ones Kirk encountered rather than Picard. Perhaps this is a forehead issue? The bumpy forehead Klingons are certainly different from the smootheads. Still, the forehead issue isn’t dealt with until season 4, so the writers of Judgement and other Klingon episodes on Enterprise couldn’t have known that. But in hindsight one can make a bit of speculation that the presence of human DNA somehow made the Klingons smarter and more calculating, as we saw in the original series. Once they overcame that, they reverted to the old ways seen in this episode. Unfortunately for Kolos, this would make his try at a reformation to be in vain. Yes, the Empire would change, but not in the direction he advocated. They change from being like Duras to being like Kor (from the original episode Errand of Mercy). The name dropping of “Duras, son of Toral” was also unnecessary. Presumably this Duras is an ancestor to the Duras from The Next Generation (and that Duras even had an illegitimate child called Toral). I wouldn’t have been surprised if this Duras’s mother had been named Lursa or B’Etor! It seems dishonourable behaviour is a family trait after all, which makes it sensible that Worf on The Next Generation would suffer for his father’s presumed treason. But it’s also very clichéd. Wouldn’t it have been a nice twist if Archer’s foe would’ve been named Mogh instead? Some things I really did like about Judgement though. I’ve already named Kolos. Another thing was how they at the trail told the stories from the two sides in true Rashomon-style. It was a little unnerving to see Archer act and behave as Duras said he did, but given Duras’s outlook on things, that wouldn’t be far from the truth as he knew it. And from a Klingon point-of-view, Archer was aiding and abetting rebels. I also really liked the visuals from the ring system of the gas planet that the Enterprise and the Klingon ship Bortas (another next generation nod) chased each other around. Very cool shots! No wonder that Archer managed to outsmart Duras in there. The Klingons might have superior firepower but you can’t just rely on brute force. One thing was conspicuously absent in this trail and that was Starfleet command. What was their reaction to the plight of their most important captain? I found it hard that they’d swallow the Klingons’ claim that they only had problems with Archer and not Starfleet. A big mystery is still what kind of relations Earth had with Kronos at this time. Unfortunately we will become none the wiser before the end of the show. The end also happened much too fast. T’Pol just had to bribe some corrupt Klingon officials she presumably knew about from her days as working for Vulcan Intelligence, and of Rura Penthe Archer could go, leaving poor Kolos behind to hopefully survive his year-long sentence to start his vain attempt at a Klingon reformation. I suppose one could argue that this corruption is natural for the kind of decline Klingon society is in, but it still felt like a big cheat. And while we’re at Rura Penthe, I must add that if they’re going to portray a really cold place, there is a big need to show the cold vapour from people’s breathing. How hard can it be to add some visible vapour using CGI even if the set itself has a nice temperate climate? My grade would be a below average of 4, but the presence of the Kolos character makes me generous enough to add one point to a final grade of 5- on my 10-graded scale. I also enjoyed it more than other episodes I’ve given a 4. Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image Posted Image |
|
|
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| Go to Next Page | |
| « Previous Topic · Enterprise · Next Topic » |
- Pages:
- 1
- 2
4:21 PM Jul 29
