11/27/02

Finally, a good story! I thought tonight's show was pretty good, even if it was reminiscent of a few Trek episodes gone by.

Hoshi & Trip were down on a lifeless planet, taking pictures of ruins that had survived for thousands of years. With two magnetic storms approaching, Captain Archer ordered them to beam out instead of taking the shuttle. They argued briefly about who would go first, because they each wanted the OTHER one to do it. Nice bravery! Go Starfleet!

Trip went first, then Hoshi...only Hoshi started noticing some strange feelings afterwards. She was sure that a birthmark on her nose had moved a quarter of a centimeter, and nobody seemed to notice her the first time she spoke. Once this stuff started happening, I thought maybe she'd been beamed back out of phase or something, because the scenes, especially the first one, had this slightly dreamlike quality to them. Nobody else seemed to be behaving quite like themselves. They also kept talking about her "traumatic experience" on the planet, which seemed odd because all it really involved was watching some scary storms from a distance and beaming up.

She showed up late for her next shift on the bridge to find them in the middle of a crisis. Trip & Mayweather had beamed down to the planet and were being held hostage, even though their sensors had detected no life forms on the surface. The aliens spoke to them and Hoshi was unable to translate, so Archer sent her back to her cabin! It was all very strange. She ended up in the mess hall, where T'Pol told her that an Ensign had translated, and Mayweather & Trip were safe. From there she tried to ease some tension in the gym, where Trip was spinning around in some giant gyroscope-y kind of thing. It looked fun, although I can't imagine what muscles it was working for him. It was there, however, where Hoshi finally disappeared, after seeing her image fade in and out of the mirror for the last day or so.

Turned out the crew couldn't see or hear her, and assumed she was dead. They decided that her molecules had come apart after an unsuccessful transport, and went searching for her cellular residue. I think the highlight of that was Dr. Phlox, crawling around in the ship's innards, saying, "Captain Archer will want Hoshi's parents to have this," as he scooped up some sticky green goo with a popsicle stick.

At that point, it reminded me less of the Trek episode where Dr. Crusher notices everyone disappearing but nobody else does, and more like that one where LaForge & Ro can see each other but nobody else can, and they find out that Romulans are planning on destroying the Enterprise. Hoshi saw aliens planting bombs on one of the decks, and even though she kept sneaking up and deactivating them, they'd get them working again. She tried using Morse code to get Captain Archer to notice her, but that didn't work, and she went after the aliens herself. They got the bombs up and running and jumped onto their own little transport platform, and she went after them without a second though -- and ended up in the Enterprise's transporter room. Turns out she'd been stuck in the pattern buffer for 8 minutes. It was all a dream. Poof!

Okay, so the end was a little easy, but I think Hoshi's just great and the story was well done. Good time had by all. Good night.

11/20/02

Everyone had a little something to do in this show, which makes me happy. Well. . .almost everyone. As usual, Ensign Mayweather got the short end of the dialogue stick, and became unconscious almost immediately.

As the ship moved towards a singularity, the crew started behaving strangely. It kicked off with Ensign Mayweather's headache, and seemed to really take off once Trip got the assignment of fixing Archer's command chair, because it was uncomfortable. Slowly everyone started becoming obsessed with their latest projects. Trip added a console and a cup holder to the chair, measured Archer from head to toe, and couldn't stop making adjustments. ("I'm gonna build you a throne!") Reed invented an entirely new tactical system, complete with loud alarms, restricted areas, and a new rule that security personnel should walk around armed. Hoshi, who'd agreed to take over the kitchen for a day to make a traditional Japanese meal for everyone, was so upset with the imperfection of the food that she wouldn't serve it to anybody. Archer got so wrapped up in writing a preface for a book about his dad that he made it twenty pages long and kept wanting to read it to everybody. Dr. Phlox was so fascinated by Mayweather's headache that he wouldn't let him return to duty. He knocked him out, and prepped him for brain surgery. T'Pol remained unaffected, and nobody would listen to her when she tried to tell them something was wrong. Archer actually yelled at her when she tried, and pushed her out of his cabin!

Things started getting dangerous in Sickbay, until T'Pol just managed to stop Phlox from opening up Mayweather's brain with a nicely executed neck pinch. I'm glad they haven't forgotten about it, I'd love to see more of those Vulcan touches. Aren't Vulcans supposed to be stronger than everybody else? I'd like to see T'Pol demonstrate some of that, it might take the edge off all the posing and pouting. All right, she did a good job in this episode, I'll leave her alone for a change.

Thanks to Phlox's research, she discovered that the crew was being affected by radiation from the singularity, and wouldn't survive long enough to go back the way they came. She plotted a course out, but desperately needed someone to help her pilot the ship while she made course corrections, so she woke up a disgruntled Captain Archer. Just as it looked like they were about to be smashed to bits by giant asteroids (or something), Reed's tactical system proved its worth by having put all the weapons online as soon as the shields went up. The day was saved, the crew recovered, and everybody stopped yelling at each other. And Reed, who was actually doing something useful despite having taken it a little too far, was allowed to develop his tactical alert system, with the recommendation by Archer that it become standard Starfleet procedure. Trip figured out that all he had to do to the Captain's chair was lower it by a quarter of a centimeter.

All in all, a decent show. Everyone got to act a little crazy, Reed & Trip even went to blows and had to be separated by Archer, and T'Pol received more reassurance that Vulcans are superior to humans. Still, if I were the Captain I would have held on to the tactical alert AND the cup holder.

But one more time. . .can they please mix up the extras a little? Once again, they're all white guys. It's such an easy thing to do, casting team. Please?

11/13/02

Tonight's episode began with a warning: "Sponsored by 8 Mile". Even more ominous: the ads described "8 Mile" as "now playing everywhere". Not in my apartment, I hope, or really anywhere I happen to be going.

The show actually had a great premise, but they could have done so much more with it than they did. It started with Archer, Sato, and Reed returning from a visit to a pre-warp culture. They peeled off their prosthetics, reminisced, but as they turned in their equipment Reed slowly realized that his communicator was missing. Since its discovery could completely change the future of the people on the planet, Archer & Reed got in the shuttle and headed back.

I was a little irritated by Archer's response to the whole thing. Reed felt just awful and made it clear that whatever disciplinary action was coming his way was well-deserved. Now I know they've set up that Reed is a strict stodgy Navy-type, and that Archer's command style is more relaxed than Reed would like, but this time Archer was a little TOO relaxed. He SHOULD have reprimanded him and disciplined him! Picard or Janeway would have made him feel even worse, and that would have been fine. Just call him Captain Wussypants.

They walked into a bar, tracked the communicator, but got arrested by not-so-secret police in the process. Of course they'd brought more communicators and some phase pistols with them, so the problem was only getting bigger. Then their prosthetics fell off in a fight, the aliens discovered their red blood -- oh my! -- and the beating-filled interrogation was under way.

In the meantime, Trip & Mayweather were trying to get the Suliban stealth ship up & running for a rescue. They struggled with the cloaking device until a little accident cloaked Trip's right arm below the elbow. That was actually a fun little diversion, I enjoyed all the associated effects as well as Trip's frustration. I just like that guy, the more scenes they give him the better.

Archer & Reed didn't do so well in their interrogation. Once the doctor who examined them convinced everyone they were aliens, they got the not-so-bright idea to claim to be working for The Alliance, enemies of the people they were with. They said they had secret weapons and that they themselves were prototypes for genetically enhanced soldiers. I have no idea why they thought this would (a) get them out of a jam; (b) not have a negative effect on the planet for generations. Their interrogators decided to execute them by hanging, so they could dissect them afterwards.

The Enterprise team finally got the stealth ship working and arrived just in time for a rescue. They jumped out of the invisible ship and picked off the bad guys one by one, then rescued Archer & Reed. As T'Pol pointed out at the end, those army guys now thought The Alliance had genetically enhanced soldiers, laser weapons, and invisible ships. D'oh!

And that's my big issue for today: once the damage was done, and Archer & Reed were captured, they should have weighed the damage a little better. They knew they were going to influence this culture in a way they shouldn't have, so was it better to make them think their enemies had insane secret weapons they should try to copy or steal, or would it have been more inspirational to show them that some people travelled through space and weren't at war? Bad call, Enterprise crew.

I did like Archer's brief moment of bravery, when he told them not to execute Reed because he was full of tactical knowledge. Again, that wasn't SUCH a great idea, since Reed would have either coughed up some tactical theories or been executed anyway, but it was well-intentioned. I also liked that by the end of the show, Trip had decloaked to the point that he had a tiny little hole in his hand. Nice effect.

To sum up: good premise, some nice moments along the way, but it just didn't live up to its potential. I would have liked to have known more about the people they were visiting, too -- did you notice that we didn't see ONE woman? Even the bar they went to didn't have any, which is probably why the bartender was disappointed to see Hoshi didn't return with Archer & Reed. I also think that what they SHOULD have done was just BEAM UP THE COMMUNICATOR! So what if it gets screwy in the transporter, if they could find it they should have been able to beam it up. Oops.

And a final note: take another look at Benjamin Bratt as the Captain. Please? Just think about it.

11/06/02

I finally realized who they SHOULD have hired to play Captain Archer. I know Scott Bakula is really popular, and the whole cast loves him, and so do the fans, so I understand that I'm a minority of (possibly just) one. But imagine this, if you will: Captain Archer as played by Benjamin Bratt! He would have been perfect. He's gorgeous, commanding, has a twinkle in his eye, always has something going on internally, looks great in a tight t-shirt, and he's just the kind of person you'd trust to look after the crew. Remember him on Law & Order? He was a cop with a morality streak, a sick wife at home, and a complicated life. And doesn't he look the part?

Now on to the show. . .which wasn't as bad as the preview indicated, but wasn't all that fabulous either.

T'Pol received a mysterious communication in the middle of the night, and the next day informed Archer that she was being assigned to an even more mysterious mission. I was happy to see that Mayweather was going to accompany her (as her shuttle pilot), hoping for a little interaction for the poor guy, since he almost never speaks. (He's pretty much the Uhura of the crew, all he does is fulfill his technical obligations and look good in a uniform.) That went out the window when she asked Archer to join her, because she needed someone she trusted. Sorry, Mayweather.

The story goes -- with much too much exposition and back story for my liking -- that 30 years ago, a slew of Vulcans were sent to work undercover on a corrupt planet. They infiltrated gangs and weeded out the bad guys, but not all of them returned. T'Pol was one of the officers assigned to track them down, but she only managed to capture 5 of the 6 on her list. The 6th, a fella named Manos, had just been found and it was considered a matter of honor that T'Pol be the one to apprehend him.

I'm sorry, but that just doesn't make any sense to me. Wouldn't it be better to send someone he wasn't likely to recognize? Honor before logic seems to be the way the Vulcans of the Enterprise series operate.

Manos was nicely played by Bruce Davison, who I've liked ever since I first saw him in "Longtime Companion". He gave his character a little depth and kept things from getting too dull, at least as much as he was able. T'Pol, Archer & Mayweather captured him fairly quickly, and then he tormented T'Pol by making her remember that she had shot & killed one of her captives the last time, that in fact she'd come back with only 4 of her assigned 6, and that the one she killed may not in fact have been reaching for a weapon. Manos had this whole sob story about how he didn't want to be rehabiliated, just wanted to carry on with his crappy job and his nice family, and he wasn't really a biotoxins smuggler. And that's where Archer came in, giving T'Pol the strength to acknowledge and fight her guilt, and keep him captive anyway, then recapture him when he escaped. I'll skip the details, and they weren't all that interesting.

In the meantime, Trip had command of the ship, which they tried to use for comic relief, but it didn't quite work. I knew they were desperate when Dr. Phlox said he wanted to inoculate the crew against something, but the side effects included the runs. Surely they can come up with something funnier than diarrhea, in a pinch?

All in all, an unmemorable show. I will say this, though. . .once again the visuals were just stunning. The shuttle landing on the cold snowy planet looked gorgeous, and I liked the giant alien who threatened Archer in the roughneck bar where they found Manos. I'd like to see more of those aliens, more of any aliens, but less of Vulcans, Klingons, and Suliban. I also think it was lovely that Archer started off the show by saying "Captain's Log supplemental", even if by the end he was back to calling it a "starlog".

Next week, by the way, looks a lot more fun! I'm looking forward to it.

10/30/02

I'm sorry, this one was boring. And next week's doesn't look any better.

Badly in need of deterium, the Enterprise stopped off at a little mining colony only to find a group of very jittery traders, who offered them some of what they needed if they helped with repairs and promised to be gone within two days. Why so jittery? It turns out that a group of badass Klingons stop by periodically to torment the colony and demand large amounts of free deterium. The Enterprise crew couldn't let that pass so they showed the colonists how to fight back, and they lured the Klingons into a trap, laughed at them, and sent them on their way. Yawn.

They didn't even build up any suspense or tension, which would have helped this episode a bit. The Klingons fell right into the trap, and responded just as predicted. All right, so they headed off in the wrong direction and the crew had to lure them about 50 feet to their left, but that was it! They didn't really threaten anyone, it never really looked like the trap was going to fail, nobody was in real peril, and the menacing Klingons just weren't that scary. While the colony itself looked just great -- this show is definitely the best-looking of all the Treks as far as FX, locations, and outer space shots -- the Klingons themselves could have used a little more time in make-up.

And what's up with T'Pol? Even when they're not wearing their regular flight uniforms, she still has to wear a catsuit. Is every outfit she owns skin-tight? "Look at her butt," I said to my husband as she slinked off. "That's all I've BEEN looking at," he said. I suppose that's the point. She's just silly. She taught self-defense to some of the colonists, which consisted entirely of ducking. It's a good strategy, but it seems odd that they never thought of it until she showed up to demonstrate.

The only highlight was seeing Hoshi's way with a phaser...she's a good marksman! She wowed Reed, which was nice.

You know what would have been better? A NEW ALIEN! They just keep relying on the same old ones, and that's getting boring. A brand new alien would have spiced things up quite a bit, along with a little tension here and there. Enough with the Klingons and the Suliban and the Vulcans, all right? Time to move on and meet someone new!

10/16/02

Well...this was my least favorite of the season so far. Sometimes I feel like they're just trying too hard. I liked some of the sickbay stuff, and getting to know more about Dr. Phlox, and I like just about anything with Porthos because he's a cute puppy, but they were pushing the sexual tension thing in a way that just didn't feel real, and there was just -- sorry, I have to say it -- too much Bakula. I like the ensemble shows better than the ones that focus on one person, and since my current faves are Trip & Hoshi, this didn't quite win me over. Sorry Scott.

I do like Dr. Phlox though, and all the weird creatures in Sickbay, so that kept me entertained.

The show kicked off with another silly decon scene. I'm sorry, but the decontamination process is just dumb. It's basically an excuse to strip the crew down to their underwear and have them rub oily stuff all over each other, which is all fine & good but doesn't quite make sense. First of all, why do they have to rub it on each other instead of themselves? (Because it's sexier.) Secondly, why do they have to strip down to underwear so they can reach all their parts, but still get to keep their skivvies on and don't have to slick up their boobies and butts and doodles and everything else? And thirdly, if Archer was putting the stuff on his dog, and T'Pol was putting it on Archer, and Hoshi was putting it on T'Pol, who the hell was putting it on Hoshi? Nobody! I'm sorry, I understand the point of it, but it didn't make much sense. Porthos looked cute with all that goop on him though. I'm a sucker for a cute dog.

They were there because the Enterprise had gone to the planet of the easily offended people. Remember them, the ones who got mad because the crew ate in front of them? It turns out they had these great plasma injectors and Trip insisted on getting them, but after keeping the crew waiting 12 hours, the aliens decided against helping them. Archer was already in a foul mood over that when he found out that Porthos had to stay in the decontamination room for a while, having picked up a pathogen.

Porthos got sicker, Archer got angrier, the crew got more nervous (because of the increasingly cranky captain), and the aliens got progressively more offended. (It would be hard to live in the great big universe when you're so easily offended by everyone, don't you think?) They were especially angry, it turned out, because Porthos had peed on one of their sacred trees. Archer was especially angry, however, because he'd sent them Porthos' genome info and they never warned him that their atmosphere had pathogens that were harmful to him.

Archer ended up spending the night in Sickbay so he could be near Porthos, and got to know a lot of interesting things about Dr. Phlox. He has 3 wives, and they each have 2 other husbands (plus him). He has degrees in veterinary science, and psychiatry, among other things, and Denobulans don't keep pets. (They have lemurs, but they eat their kidneys.) His toenails grow REALLY fast and he has to scrape his really long tongue with something. His bat escaped -- Hoshi caught it pretty effortlessly -- and he fed his toenails to some other weird creature. I did like most of that stuff, even though there were times it felt a little forced. Watching Archer & Phlox chase the bat around Sickbay with nets...I don't know, it felt like they were trying really hard to come up with some "business" so the two of them wouldn't be just talking. And I didn't buy the whole thing about Archer & T'Pol having sexual tension. We know that Vulcans only get the mating urge every seven years anyway -- even if Archer doesn't -- and he never seemed to think of her that way anyway. (Okay, I know she walks around with her pouty lips thrust forward and her perky breasts thrust even more forward, but that always seemed to affect Reed & Trip more than the Captain.)

After some last-minute surgery, Porthos was saved. Archer painted silly stuff on his chest and wore funny braids and did the apology ceremony for the aliens, and they got their plasma injectors. Archer apologized to everyone he'd yelled at -- it was just about everyone -- and he & T'Pol had a stilted conversation about not pursuing their so-called attraction to each other.

It was okay, but its re-run value won't be that high to me. They've had better shows this season, with better stories, even if I did enjoy hearing Phlox refer to Porthos as Archer's "subservient quadruped".

10/9/02

I'm never sure if I like the fact that they keep little threads of stories going from one episode to the next. It worked perfectly in this one, though, because the Enterprise was still reeling from the effects of the minefield. Reed was still in Sickbay, the hull was a mess, and Trip told Archer that without help, they were pretty much stranded, years from home. So Archer sent out a distress call -- a little risky in unexplored territory, but a necessity.

They heard from some Tellarites, although we never saw them, and were directed to the coordinates of an unmanned space station. When they first arrived, it had an uninhabitable atmosphere, but after scanning them, converted to one they could live in. Fascinating! T'Pol, Trip and Archer took a shuttle over to see what the deal was, and discovered the first replicator. It made catfish for Trip -- after scanning the Enterprise's database, which made them a little nervous. And rightly so!

The repair station, in exchange for some plasma to be delivered upon completion, started fixing the Enterprise, and offered up its services for R&R. It also fixed Reed's leg (which had been punctured last week by the mine). It insisted that areas being repaired be cleared of all personnel, and started working at an incredible speed. But suddenly Ensign Mayweather got a summons from Captain Archer to come to one of the areas under repair...next thing you know, they found him there dead. Dead!

With very little time left until the end of the repairs, Dr. Phlox tried to figure out what had happened, and found out that it wasn't actually Mayweather. The station had delivered a dead replica. Oops.

Turned out that the station was abducting one member of each crew that came its way, and using their brain power to keep itself going. They rescued Mayweather just in time, finding that all the other aliens were already brain-dead. They tricked the station by putting explosives in with the plasma and got away just in time, as it exploded. Then, in the final seconds of the show, we saw the destroyed station starting to repair itself. It was creepy and cool.

I loved it! Great show all around! Full of mystery that wasn't easy to figure out, and smart behavior from all of the crew, and little moments for just about everyone. A new favorite, I think. My only complaint is that they're still using all white extras for background. If they're just going to show miscellaneous crew lounging about, why do they all have to be white? A little diversity in the extras would be great. I also would like to SEE some aliens pretty soon, instead of just hearing about them, or running into the same species over & over.

Still, this season has been significantly better than last, and this episode was destined to be a classic.

10/2/02

I have to say, the beginning would have been a bit more interesting if they hadn't put up the story-revealing title of the episode quite so quickly. Once the word "MINEFIELD" came up, the mystery of what had hit the ship and what was going to happen to them next was pretty much solved.

I got very excited when the Enterprise reached an uncharted planet and decided to go visiting. I was hoping for one of those old fashioned Kirk-changes-an-entire-civilization kind of stories, but it was not to be. Suddenly the ship went THUNK and in a bit of gorgeous art directing, pieces of the hull started flying off in one section. They'd hit a mine! (Well, we knew that before they did because of the aforementioned on-screen title.)

Reed put on my favorite red spacesuit and went out to the hull to see what was going on. As he attempted to diffuse the mine that was stuck there, Ensign Mayweather did his best to steer around the rest of the mines they found surrounding them.

I have to say, the show is looking exceptionally gorgeous. All the space shots are just beautiful. It looked great seeing Reed out on the hull, especially when they pulled back from a close-up into this wide -- no, HUGE -- shot of the ship in space with a teeny tiny Reed on it. It got even cooler when he hit a wrong button and the mine shot out another grappling leg to attach itself even more to the hull...and shot it right through Reed's leg. More bad news came when a ship or two decloaked long enough to threaten Enterprise in a language nobody understood until Hoshi got out of Sickbay: Romulan!

Can I just speak up for a minute and say that I'd love to see the Enterprise have a NEW adventure instead of revisiting old ones? I mean, can we meet a new species or two? Because Star Trek history has it that nobody saw their first Romulan until Kirk's time, we never saw them, which was good, but I guess I would have preferred a brand-new species to Romulans, especially since we the viewers already know ten times more than the Enterprise does about them.

Anyway, Archer took it upon himself to go save Reed. There were some great moments between them, when Reed confessed that he didn't approve of Archer's "informal" leadership style. And Reed tried to do the honorable thing and disconnect his air supply to Archer would be forced to leave him there, then jettison the hull plates, thus sacrificing Reed to save the whole ship before the Romulans really got mad and blew up all of them. All good stuff, plus some really funny moments when Reed admitted he had to pee -- "use the bathroom", he said delicately -- and Archer encouraged him to go in is suit. Ew! My husband and I also both found Reed remarkably coherent for someone with a spike through his leg, but it actually fit in nicely with his whole m.o. of being formal and professional and a Navy-type tough guy. (We also found out that he got into space travel instead of following his family's Naval tradition because he has a phobia about drowning.

Eventually Archer managed to save him and get him back inside, Mayweather got them out of the minefield, and the Romulans left them alone. Good story, good pacing, gorgeous effects, and some nice character bits from Hoshi and Reed. Mayweather still isn't getting much to do except steer the ship, and next week's preview indicates that he's going to die (for part of the show anyway), which will give him even less. Hmm.

But all in all, another cool one. And I've finally found a song worse than the theme song: it's that Kelly Clarkson song they wrote for her on "American Idol". AAAAHHH!

9/25/02

You know, I don't usually like time travel episodes where they go into the past, and I usually also don't like episodes where we only see three of the characters, but I actually enjoyed the whole show.

T'Pol was dining with Archer & Trip (who's still my favorite character by miles & miles), and ended up telling them a secret: Vulcans actually had first contact with Earth back in the 1950s, and not in the 21st century as all of Earth history claims. Apparently her great-grandmother was part of a mission that crashed on Earth in Pennsylvania. Three crewmembers survived. Fortunately for them, they landed in a town of honest, hard-working, really REALLY nice people. They wore regular human clothes and took jobs as a waitress, plumber, and coalminer. They made friends. They sat in a living room. They watched "I Love Lucy". I kid you not.

All right, so they didn't explain quite how they managed to get enough money to rent a whole house, or how they got along as vegetarians in a mining town in America in the 1950s, or how they managed to find shoes when they stole something to wear from a clothing line in someone's backyard. In true Enterprise fashion, they didn't worry about the details. I wish they would, a little more.

Still, I thought the show was really fun, mostly because of Mestral. He was one of the Vulcans who crash-landed, but ended up liking Earth so much he decided to stay -- and not even because he'd had a date with the local bar owner -- played, by the way, by John & Joan Cusack's sister. Jolene Blalock played her own great-grandmother, and managed to be just a little less pouty and a little less chest-thrusting than usual. She also had a great scene (as granny T'Mir) where she decided to save the day for the local genius who couldn't afford to go to college. (He was also terribly kind & innocent, in an "aw shucks, I can't afford college but I'll pretend I'm just as happy to read about foreign places in the library" kind of way.) The scene was a little on the hammy side, but I enjoyed it anyway: she walked into some building where a guy in a business suit said, "You must be the one with the invention that's going to change the world." And she handed him a small piece of Velcro. Two minutes later, out she walked with a wad of cash, which she promptly donated to the college fund. Okay, so people don't give you wads of cash for inventions, but it was still a nice moment. And you have to love a disgruntled Vulcan who keeps getting called "Moe" because his haircut reminds people of the Three Stooges.

All in all, it was pretty fun, nicely written, and well-acted. Two for two, this season!

9/18/02 -- SEASON 2 PREMIERE

What a great way to kick off the second season! I thought there was one mis-step, and otherwise, everything was fun and looked cool and told a pretty good story.

As we saw at the end of last season, Daniels' swift rescue of Captain Archer from the Suliban resulted in the destruction of civilization! No Starfleet, no Federation, and no technology: so there he was, along with Archer, stranded a thousand years in the future with no available technology to send him back. D'oh! In the meantime, the Suliban took over the Enterprise, confined everyone to quarters, and the leader ominously requested that his minions bring him the Vulcan.

They tortured T'Pol. I do love the way they torture people on Star Trek, because I never have to see anything too gross -- it's always some futuristic kind of thing where the actor ACTS tortured, but there's nothing visual enough to give me nightmares. This time they put some kind of big collar on her with liquid-filled tubes on it, and it made her pained & delirious. She was just delirious enough, in fact, that when she got back to her quarters and was addressed by the phasing in & out head of Archer, she assumed she was hallucinating. Turns out he & Daniels found a way to contact the past -- a little trick Daniels learned in high school.

From there, the crew set their plan in motion. Everybody was smart. Everybody did their jobs. There was only one dumb moment in the whole thing, when the plan included T'Pol pretending to be disoriented and stumbling around in the hallway so she could distract the Suliban guards enough for Trip & Reed to knock them out. T'Pol was given the un-Vulcan-like line "it took you long enough." Why couldn't they have just switched that out for Trip? Or Reed? T'Pol's a better choice for an attacker anyway, what with the Vulcan nerve pinch not requiring any weapons to do its job. Other than that, they did great. Well...almost great. I still have some issues with T'Pol owning all those half-shirts, you know the midriff-baring tank tops she seems to cavort in. Vulcans and half shirts? It all seems very strange to me. (But then, I'm not in the target audience, being a chick & all.)

Reed was beaten up pretty badly when they caught him outside Daniels' quarters. I wonder why they didn't use the tube necklace on him, but I guess it doesn't matter because the scenes were great. And at the end, they tricked the Suliban into bringing Archer back, and thus history was restored.

It was great...lots of action, ships chasing the Enterprise, Hoshi having to crawl through tunnels despite her claustrophobia, Archer even taking charge when Daniels was losing it...all good. I still wish Scott Bakula would try some new facial expressions, and Mayweather is still woefully underused, but it was a really fun start to the season!

APOLOGIES TO ALL....I'M WOEFULLY BEHIND ON MY REVIEWS AND MISSED COVERING THE END OF THE SEASON! Sometimes life just gets in the way.

5/8/02

Two for the price of one. Sort of. I'm not sure what's behind the programming strategy of having two new eps back-to-back instead of extending the season a little, but perhaps it's a sweeps thing. Yes, there was a loose thread tying them together -- they wanted to go to Risa for shore leave -- but apparently that continues into next week. And then the week after that is the season finale, which is going to be a cliffhanger. I hope it's good. There have been some kickass cliffhangers over the years and a handful of crappy ones, so we'll see how it goes.

Episode 1: Diverted from much-needed shore leave on Risa, the Enterprise is sent to pick up a Vulcan diplomat named V'Lar from Mazur, who has committed some crime so terrible nobody can even talk about it. T'Pol is particularly concerned about V'Lar, who was a childhood hero of hers. They do all this alluding to the length of the Vulcan lifespan and I find it bizarre that V'Lar and T'Pol get into this whole revolting "don't ask a lady her age" thing. It is SO illogical for a Vulcan to care! That's a human attribute, keeping your age a secret, and in fact I would hope that all that false vanity would be gone by the year Enterprise is taking place. Don't you think?

Anyway, V'Lar was played by Fionnula Flanagan, who you may have recognized from the Nicole Kidman movie "The Others" as well as a handful of the other Star Trek series'. I liked her, she made a great Vulcan. She had that calmness that T'Pol completely lacks.

So it turned out that she wasn't really a criminal; instead, she was going to tell on those bad, corrupt Mazurites. The Mazurites, by the way, were very strange looking people with weird skin around their heads and these little ponytails. Very strange. They behaved themselves for a while and then attacked the Enterprise, which was rescued by the Vulcan warship sent to retrieve V'Lar at the last minute. This was all after a not very exciting chase scene in which the Enterprise maxed out at Warp 5. I wish they'd found a way to make it look like the ship was actually going really fast! It didn't look fast at all and usually their flight shots and ships and docking bays and space battles and the like are really gorgeous.

All in all, it was an okay episode. I still think that the dialogue isn't always right for the characters. Trip is drawn very well and so his Hoshi, but everyone else just says the line they're given because they're in the room. T'Pol's always saying things that don't feel right. I wish they'd made her more Vulcan, that's all. Instead she wears a catsuit, takes everything personally, and tries to join in the human cameraderie.

And one more note: the Enterprise crew rigged it so that once the Mazurites boarded, they would think that they had killed V'Lar. The Doctor said that she was in the regeneration chamber and the Mazurites shot it up good. (I wonder how long it'll take to rebuild it.) Then of course the Vulcan warship showed up to save the day, and in a burst of stupidity, a door slid open and V'Lar revealed herself to be alive and well...while the Mazurites still had weapons, and were angry. What is the logic of showing them the whole deck for no other reason than, well, gloating? It didn't make sense. It would have been more fun if Archer and Trip had WANTED to do that and V'Lar had said no.

I did like the whole bit about T'Pol prepping for V'Lar's arrival, though. I didn't quite get why Hoshi had to give up her quarters, it reminded me of original Trek when Uhura had to give up hers for that crazy Elaan who made Kirk fall in love with her by touching her tears. Why do chicks give up quarters to chicks? Why didn't T'Pol give up hers, which would have been more Vulcan-like? I guess it doesn't matter that much because it made for some nice bits between V'Lar and Hoshi, who of course would get along great. All in all....s'all right. Not a particularly riveting story, but some good scenes kept the pace up.

5/1/02

I have to say, this is one of the best episodes I've seen to date. Honestly, there are but a handful that were actually good this season and this was among them, perhaps even at the top of the list after the creepy scary upside down dead people one. There's nothing like a good old something-scary-is-on-our-ship scenario.

The show started off with a bunch of aliens storming back to their ship (through an airlock that reminded me of that really cool one from DS9) with the Enterprise crew following, desperately trying to figure out how to communicate with them so they could see what they'd done to offend them. No luck. As the aliens pulled away, We saw this transparent, weird blobby stretchy thing move from their ship to the Enterprise, then crawl inside it. Creepy!

As it crawled through the ship, it started looking more like Kleenex, wiith these flowy sort of tendrils. Some unfortunate slacker crewman who wanted to leave the disabled lighting system in a cargo bay to the "night shift" became the first victim. (No slackers in Starfleet!) The non-slacker chick who'd ordered him there went in to find him and then reported to Captain Archer that there was a life form in the cargo bay and then went silent. D'oh! By the time Archer & his team got there, the Kleenex had changed into some kind of sticky, gluey marshmallow and had enveloped both crewmen. Tendrils came out and grabbed Archer & Trip, and sucked them into the giant white sticky web. Reed got out, just barely, and managed to get a broken piece off of one of the tendrils by slamming the door on it -- not very futuristic, but that's okay -- and took the still moving piece to Sickbay.

The people caught in the web were groaning and panting a lot, so I assume that the webby thing was squeezing them, but they never quite spelled it out. I guess it was building its cocoon around it, they were definitely getting progressively more enveloped as time went on. Then it started linking their nervous systems together, and then their minds too so they all knew everything about Archer's favorite sport, water polo. No, really. It was water polo. I swear. I'd prefer no sports talk at all on Enterprise, but I guess if it's going to be something, it can be something stupid like water polo.

The crew tried firing on the thing and it only hurt the people trapped in it. T'Pol teamed up with Hoshi to figure out how to communicate with it, once Dr. Phlox confirmed that it was intelligent. Reed invented the very first force field so they could get in there. Mayweather -- still getting to participate and speak, hooray! -- tracked down the previously offended aliens to see what they knew. (They'd spent the time since they left learning English, and were able to deliver not only the coordinates for the cocoon-thing's home, but the explanation for the grievous offence: the Starfleet gang actually ate their food in front of people! Gross!)

In the end, they were able to talk to the thingy, and it freed the crew, and they took it home, where it intertwined itself back into the giant Kleenex-y thing it was really a part of. The loose tendril from Sickbay got to go home too. And off they went.

This was a really fun one! Great story, great use of extras in the crew, great use of the regular crew who all pulled together to save the day. I really like the whole briefing room thing they do on Voyager & Next Gen & original Trek where the Captain gathers everyone to get their opinion on the current crisis, and this was the closest Enterprise has come to that kind of vibe. AND it was creepy and scary AND the moral of the story was to communicate instead of just killing. Well done.

My only really negative note is that Captain Archer still calls the log his "star-log". Very Buck Rogers.

4/24/02

I'm glad to see my Ensign Mayweather theories are wrong. I was so sure they were gearing up to fire the actor, and that's why he wasn't getting any lines, but there he was, front & center -- he even got beaten up. Welcome back, Ensign Mayweather.

Tonight's show had some stunt casting involved, with guest Colonel Grat played by Scott Bakula's former Quantum Leap co-star Dean Stockwell. Fortunately Dean Stockwell is a decent actor, and I just tried to forget about the whole Sam Beckett/Al thing and move on. But the rest of the cast, most of them anyway, have started adopting this William Shatner style of acting, riddled with pauses in the strangest pauses. It's like they're emulating William Shatner imitators more than anything. Trip & Hoshi are the only two who weren't doing it. T'Pol was. . .I don't know what she was. I think most of these characters still need a lot more defining.

But what a great open! The show started with Archer & Mayweather waking up in a gray, prison-like room. They poked their heads out to see nothing but other prisoners -- all Suliban. Then boom! off to the opening (with that horrendous theme song) and commercial. Very smart.

Archer & Mayweather met with Grat, who ran the prison, and they all figured out that their shuttlepod had accidentally violated Tandaran space. The matter had to be sorted out by the courts, which wouldn't convene for 3 days, and Grat had nowhere to put them except in with "gen pop" (my expression, straight from HBO's Oz), and suggested they keep to themselves. While this is usually good advice in a prison, they quickly found out that there was more going on than they thought: turned out the Suliban there were not in fact part of the cabal they'd encountered in previous adventures, nor were they genetically enhanced. They had been rounded up and put into detention centers the same way that the Japanese were in WWII.

I have to say, the show went overboard trying to hammer this point home. They kept hitting us with it over & over, they finally mentioned the Japanese specifically, but they just kept saying it & saying it & saying it & saying it & saying it -- see how annoying that is? Okay, we get it: DON'T JUDGE PEOPLE ON APPEARANCES. Say it again, with me and the whole crew now: DON'T JUDGE PEOPLE ON APPEARANCES. Got it? Now remember: don't judge people on their appearance.

But aside from the strange bad acting moments, and the beat-you-senseless-with-it moral -- clearly we were supposed to realize that not all Muslims are terrorists -- it was a nice little story. The military force of the Tandarans was impressive and was able to get information on every single one of the Enterprise's encounters with those sneaky Suliban. The Suliban in the prison, however, looked terrible and not nearly as cool as ones we've met before. Their skin looked like they'd smeared clay on it, it didn't look like part of their skin, just something sort of stuck on. It did, however, look great on Malcolm, who came down in disguise to help free Archer, Mayweather, and the entire prison population. Hooray! I loved the whole rescue attempt. It was smart, it required a little help from everybody, and it was the Right Thing To Do.

I still don't quite get Archer's strategy with Grat though. As soon as he figured out something shady was going on, he made it clear that he was suspicious, and started acting hostile and silent as Grat questioned him. Wouldn't it have been a lot smarter to pretend that everything was fine, so an escape attempt could be made more successfully? Odd, pointless strategy.

But I'm ecstatic to see the transporter getting some regular use now. Reed said he was "finally getting used to it", which I hope means we're almost done with the long shuttlepod journeys and can start zapping people in & out of stories. It IS a story device, after all. Time to start using it. Maybe they can beam off some of T'Pol's lip gloss.

All in all, a good story with some cool moments, and a few dumb ones too.

4/3/02

Ensign Mayweather speaks!

Trip meets a girl!

Odo's there without his freaky make-up!

I don't know, I'm trying to make it sound more exciting. It was good, actually. No, it was. Good story. A few annoying bits here & there but a fun story with an interesting idea behind it. It was actually a new twist on that episode from original Trek where Kirk finds Flint and his daughter Rayna alone on a planet.

The Enterprise crew found out from a trader that there was a crashed ship on a nearby plane that was full of much-needed resources -- and ghosts.. They investigated and found a bunch of people there who lived under a dampening field, who said their ship needed repairing. The crew tried to help but got suspicious when they found no evidence of collision.

In the meantime, Trip started hanging out with the only young chick in the bunch and everyone assumed he was already doing it with her. I loved it! I did think it somewhat illogical of T'Pol not to agree to working with Liana herself, to avoid having Liana & Trip spend all that time together. T'Pol's just not a very good Vulcan. It would have been a bit more fun if Trip had ASSUMED she was worried about him being with Liana, the way he assumed Archer & Reed were talking about the same thing when they were actually trying to fill him on on the fact that the ship wasn't as damaged as it was supposed to be.

It came down to a big confrontation, and then Liana pulled a switch. Turns out that Liana and her father (Odo) were the only REAL inhabitants of the ship, and the others were all holograms. None of that seemed to phase the Enterprise crew, apparently they've seen many complicated holograms with their own personalities before!

There were some fun bits along the way. I loved when Trip was trying to describe marshmallows to Liana. I have no idea how to describe one to someone who's never seen one. I saw a whole show about marshmallows on the Food Network and still don't quite know how to describe them. And you can't blame them for loving Rocky Road ice cream. MMM....ice cream.

The bad holograms actually kidnapped Trip for a while, which seems the fate of engineers in ALL the Star Trek shows. It makes sense. Geordi got kidnapped by Pakleds, Belanna was taken by the weird robot-face guys...remember?

But I digress. It was a decent show, Ensign Mayweather actually got ot go somewhere and speak a little bit, and the crew solved one of their first mysteries. I just wish they'd start using the transporter already because those shuttlepod trips are boring. Make with the transporting! Let's have an episode about it and start using it.

3/27/02

Ferengis. Did we have to see Ferengis? The show has its moments but it sort of goes against the whole Star Trek history, which is that Picard and his crew were the first to see what a Ferengi looked like. D'oh!

They put together a little Trek alumni group to play them, though. Neelix was the one in charge, Clint Howard -- brother of Ron and formerly "Balok" on original Trek -- was the dumb one, and Jeffrey Combs, who's been on Voyager, DS9, and Enterprise (as an Andorian) was along for the ride. The fourth guy, alas, had no credentials.

It just. . .Ferengis are boring! I'm sorry, they are! There were only two highlights: the reappearance of the captain's dog (and his subsequent rescue), and watching Trip run around in short shorts. It was kind of a ripoff of the TNG episode where Picard pretends to be the barber to fight off terrorists, one of whom was played by Tuvok. I liked the idea that they had all been tricked into picking up an artifact that had a knockout gas in it (in Batman terms), I liked that Trip was in the decon chamber so he didn't get affected by it, and I thought it was fun when Archer pretended to be hiding the gold. But once Trip revived T'Pol, they didn't come up with a very exciting plan, it was just "I'll bring them here, and you shoot them." Oh well.

And one more complaint: if Ferengis knocked out the crew and tried to steal everything, why did they let them go? They have a brig. Couldn't they bring them back to Earth for punishment? Now they're free to go rob the next ship that passes by. Oops.

All in all -- it moved well, Trip's always fun, but the whole idea wasn't all that exciting. If they weren't Ferengis it would have been more interesting, since we already know Ferengis are dumb.

And again, I must ask this question: where is Ensign Mayweather? Every other sleeping crewmember got a close-up, but I think we only saw a bit of his head. Nurse Chapel got more airtime!

3/20/02

I really think part of the problem with this show is that the characters are such goody-goodies! Archer and Reed actually had a competetive conversation about who got more merit badges back in boy scouts. And Archer is still SO boring! He doesn't take any risks or have any kind of personality. He's just Mr. Calm & Responsible. It's sad.

But the show was fun anyway. Good story. And I didn't even recognize Eric Pierpont, who played one of the hunter-aliens and is famous as The Traveller from TNG.

The crew found this basically uninhabitable planet with these oases on it, so they took a shuttlepod down to check it out. (I can't wait 'til they get the transporters up to speed, the shuttle journeys are sooo slow.) They met these hunter-guys who managed to sneak by their night sensors. (Night sensors?) Turns out the hunters are stalking some local game, and even though the Enterprise gang is repulsed by the whole idea of hunting -- it's so primitive -- Malcolm Reed asks to go along, just for the experience of it. The gang stays on the planet for the night and that's when Archer sees her -- a mysterious woman in a really goofy dress who looks slighty familiar, who calls his name.

Everyone laughs at him in the morning and thinks he made her up, but the hunter-guys are a little too dismissive and Archer knows something's up.

More hunting, more lady appearing in the mist, until Archer finds out that she is a shapeshifter, and that her species is what the hunter-guys are after. He gives her a device to shield them from the hunters' sensors, and everybody's happy. Except the hunter guys. And me, finding out that Archer made up the vision of the girl from a Yeats poem his mommy read him every night. Sorry, could he be more of a pussy? D'oh!

Nice bits of suspense, good story, always happy to see them explore a planet. Good mystery. Fun interaction with most of the crew, except for poor Ensign Mayweather, who seems to have faded completely into the background. Are they going to fire this guy? He had ONE episode where he had something of a story and the rest of the time he's practically invisible.

2/24/02

"Enterprise is brought to you by Resident Evil."

I'm sorry, that's what it said!

Well, it did.

Regardless. . .some good stuff and some bad this week. But worst of all was the VERY misleading ad that ran every day before it, successfully tricking me into believing there was a TWO-hour show tonight. ALL NEW Enterprise. . .TWO HOURS of Enterprise starting at 8. . .what they didn't mention that the new episode ended at 9 and a re-run started shortly thereafter. D'oh!

The Enterprise met up with a Vulcan "civillian" ship, crewed by white male Vulcans (where are the Tuvoks?) who believed in the value of feeling emotions without giving up logic. Apparently they're part of some kind of controversial faction. They were all fat except for the one who was chasing after T'Pol, who was seduced for a while and then realized the error of her ways. She had this silly dream in the middle of it with jazz music and foggy streets and a hood and then scenes of her in bed with the skinny guy. . .whatever. It was silly.

The Vulcans ate meat, which was unusual, and were nice to the humans, so everybody liked them. Trip made friends with the youngest fat one, and gave him advice as well as updated information about the human species. "Is it true you mate year-round?" Apparently these emotion-lovin' Vulcans are also working on their 7-year mating cycle, trying to speed things up a bit.

The only skinny one was named Tolaris and was hound-dogging T'Pol from the minute he met her. Eventually he convinced her to do a mind-meld with him and when she wanted to stop, he didn't, and she had to push him away physically. It was all very un-suspenseful, unfortunately.

No, it wasn't that bad. I don't like T'Pol much but she did a decent job, I just think they could get better actors for the extras. And certain questions do spring to mind. . .like why does T'Pol wear boodles of make-up and a skin-tight outfit? Regular Vulcans wear big droopy outfits and even these emotional ones had big suits on that didn't cling to their bodies. And when Tolaris was trying to convince T'Pol that she was already experiencing some emotions, why didn't he bring up the sexy outfit she wears every day? It's definitely an attention-getter.

I liked that she was suspicious of them the whole time though, and that she turned out to be right. I long for the days when Vulcans were smarter than everybody. I didn't quite get why she left out the REASON their emotion-suppressing was a bad thing, but we found out at the end anyway when Archer baited Tolaris into losing his temper -- and throwing Archer across the room. Archer, by the way. . .so disappointing. I mean, I used to watch Scott Bakula on "Quantum Leap" and I thought he did a great acting job on that show, he had a personality, he had depth, and he was able to play a wide variety of characters. On Enterprise, he's so flat, it's as if he has no inner life whatsoever and not much of a personality. He's as much of a mystery as Ensign Mayweather, who didn't even appear in this episode as far as I know. Maybe he was sitting on the bridge once or twice, I don't know.

Dr. Phlox has way too much make-up on, even though he sparks up each and every scene he's in. But I think he was wearing pink lipstick. T'Pol has gobs of eye-make up on, plus that lip gloss she wears every show, and I swear you could see the youngest Vulcan's real eyebrows underneath the angled fake ones they put on him. The ship looks great, but the hair & make-up doesn't. And you know what? The best Vulcan ears ever done were on Spock.

But it was a fun show.

2/13/02

I think this is one of my new favorites. The cheaped out a bit by mentioning all these aliens that arrived in escape pods from a damaged ship and never showing any of them, but otherwise, A+ all the way.

Archer and Reed were studying an asteroid and arrived early at the rendezvous point to find debris from Enteprise. . .debris convincing enough to make them think Enterprise had been destroyed. Then THEIR oxygen supply gets into trouble and they find out they only have ten days left of breathable air, no sensor array, no navigation, and no com system. Then something knocked out one of the O2 tanks and they were left with only 2 days' worth. D'oh!

Reed spent his time recording sentimental farewell messages to friends, family, and old girlfriends while Trip tried fixing the systems and working on more constructive activities. They fought a lot, used mashed potatoes (from meatloaf dinner rations) to plug holes in the hull, turned the temperature to just below freezing to save air, and finally ended up sharing a bottle of bourbon. . .which led to Reed's confession that he likes T'Pol's bum. I swear, he said bum. ("Have you ever noticed that she's got an awfully nice bum?" Usually Star Trek's prudishness bugs me, but that one was kind of funny. The whole drunk scene was great, as a matter of fact, as was all of their high-tension, short-tempered banter.

The pacing was good, the story was good even though I thought someone should have chastised Reed & Tucker for their premature assumption that the Enterprise had been destroyed. Definitely one of the better episodes so far.

2/6/02

I wish the Vulcans were more Vulcan-y, but the cool Andorian antennae made up for it. I love the way the Andorians look! There was one really great shot when they were sneaking into the compound where Archer and T'Pol were being held hostage, and you could see the shadow of the Andorian's head with the antennae before his head appeared. Nice. The show is looking better every week, on a purely visual level. The stories and the characters are still catching up. I always sound like I'm complaining about the show, don't I?

The Vulcans recalled T'Pol (because of what happened with the Andorians at the Vulcan sanctuary) so Archer went with her alone on what he thought would be their last mission. On their way to the planet they were visiting, they were abducted by terrorists who demanded weapons from the Enterprise in exchange for their safety. There were some fun bits there. I liked when T'Pol tried to pretend that Archer was the steward so they wouldn't question him, and it was funny watching them try to stand up while tied up, leaning against each other's backs. Kind of. At one point, she fell right on him so her giant boobies were covering his eyes. Ouch! The best was when they were served bowls of gruel but not untied, and they had to flop over on their sides and eat like a dog would. Then Archer found a little transmitter in the food and the rescue was under way.

Reed and Tucker teamed up with a couple of Andorians to rescue them -- apparently one was the same guy they'd met on the Vulcan sanctuary and he felt that he owed the Captain a favor because of what happened there. They ended up clashing with the crabby Vulcans at the last minute, and T'Pol jumped in front of a phaser blast to save the Vulcan commander. In the end, they agreed to appeal to the High Command to let T'Pol stay. Too bad.

But it was kind of fun. Tucker had some fun moments in command, and Hoshi & Mayweather were left in charge after he went down to the planet with Reed. I still think they've forgotten to give Mayweather a personality.And the Vulcans. . .I miss the days when Vulcans were cooler than humans. I like the fact that humans are usually making fun of Vulcans, but feeling inferior because they are. In the Enterprise era, the Vulcans are actually the inferior ones. I miss the old days, which actually take place in the future. Spock and Tuvok were smarter, stronger, and more resourceful than everyone else -- that's what made them so much fun. Seven and Data got the same deal; everyone sort of pitied them for not being human, but they both saved their respective ships a million times because they were better, smarter, stronger, and unique in a way that the humans weren't. Maybe though, this is supposed to show us WHY those humans are so smug about being human. I don't know. I hope so, I hope there's a reason for it. I'm going to pretend there is.

But next week's preview looks great! Trip and Reed are on a shuttlecraft explaining how they ended up stranded with only two days of air left and the Enterprise destroyed. I can't wait.

1/30/02

Well. . .it was actually kind of a good story. I keep trying to figure out why this show just isn't taking off and I think it's just that none of the characters are all that developed. Hoshi is still the most fleshed out, Dr. Phlox is fun (although still something of a mystery) and Trip has his moments, but everyone else is just a bit bland.

Anyway, it was a good story with some fun little bits along the way. The Enterprise was studying a gas giant when their sensors discovered a vessel stuck in a planet's lower atmosphere. T'Pol, Reed, and Sato went to investigate, and found that the ship was filled with unconscious Klingons. Almost. There was ONE conscious Klingon, and she took their shuttlepod, leaving them stranded. The rest of the show was about the Enterprise trying to get them back, find out what was wrong with the Klingons, and get the Klingon chick to trust them. Archer finally convinced the Klingon chick that it wasn't the Enterprise that attacked them, and she led him back to the ship to rescue the landing party. After they revived the Klingon ship, its Captain tried threatening the Enterprise, and Archer threatened back, and he backed off.

There were some nice scary moments, like when the landing party was first stranded on the Klingon ship -- and found the smell so hard to take. Every time the ship sunk down a little more or the hull started to bend under pressure it heated things up a bit. And it was cool when the Klingon chick just came flying out of nowhere. I also liked the bit where Sato and T'Pol bonded, when Sato said that she envied T'Pol for not having emotions. (Finally! Usually the Vulcans get made fun of.) T'Pol taught her a little meditation trick that worked so maybe these two will develop a bit of a friendship. Someone needs to bond with T'Pol so they can defend her to everybody else. They need to work on the relationships between these characters, it'll make all the stories better.

And they've obviously decided to pretend that the Kirk-era Klingons ever existed. Archer read up on them and said that they had a warrior mentality, and they had this whole honor thing ("death before dishonor"). . .of course in the original series, they were just mean. They were cruel dictators after power and they didn't have any honor at all. They also didn't have big bones in their heads.

The sexy outfits they had T'Pol, Sato and Reed wearing during their decontamination were silly. T'Pol, as always, had the most ridiculous one. Did you see her little underwear?

That's it. I hope we're free of Klingons for a while now.

1/23/02

Another good one! Woohoo!

Dr. Phlox's letter to his human friend (on his home planet Denobula!) narrated the story, which seemed to be the first step towards the creation of the Prime Directive. They found this planet where two different human species were coexisting. One seemed more advanced than the other but all the people were dying of an epidemic, while the more primitive species seemed to be thriving. Dr. Phlox found the cure, but determined that from an ecological perspective, the disease was really evolution, taking its course so the more primitive (but smarter and gentler) people could eventually dominate. By that time the dying species had asked for warp drive in addition to medical help. And so there was another ethical dilemma for Captain Archer.

I'm still not really that excited about Captain Archer, but I like Dr. Phlox and Hoshi and they were around a lot. There were lots of fun bits along the way, like seeing the Enterprise crew watching a movie, and the chick who really liiiiiiiiiked Dr. Phlox, and all the fun facts about Denobulans. They don't like to be touched, they have several husbands or wives, they don't need very much sleep at night but they hibernate for six days in winter. . .fun! T'Pol had a cavity, which Dr. Phlox had to fill -- the first glimpse into the future of dentistry. And then there were all those funny languages. I don't quite get the whole universal translator thing, I mean, I get how it's supposed to work in the Star Trek world, but it doesn't make any sense whatsoever! I can maybe almost a little bit buy the concept (maybe) that a device could (possibly) translate so that you could hear an alien speak and it would sound like English to you. Maybe. But why would he look like his lips were moving perfectly to form the English words you heard? Whatever. It's just funny.

But so was the rest of the show, where it was supposed to be. We also learned more about the history of the Vulcans on Earth, which might almost make having T'Pol on the ship worthwhile. Her outfit is distractingly ridiculous. But I liked the show anyway! But I don't know, Enterprise seems a more plodding than any of the other shows, and I can't tell if that's because of how they're telling the stories, or because they have lame technology. It was good, but it lacked. . .um. . .adrenaline.

I think the whole crew should get captured by some insanely powerful aliens. Wouldn't that be fun?

1/16/02

Finally, a new episode. And a good one too.

The ship looked so good in this one, I especially like the mess hall.

A ship appeared out of nowhere, listened to Archer's greetings for a bit, and disappeared. That was a small mystery, and for the first half of the show, it didn't seem that interesting. Then it reappeared and disappeared again, and then when it returned, it started firing. The Enterprise took a beating, almost all systems went down, nothing was working, and then Reed and Trip Trucker raced against time to get the new "phase cannons" (hooray!) operational. It was all exciting and scary, especially when two of the aliens boarded the ship and did something to two of the crewmen, although they both seemed fine afterwards and no one really explained what was wrong with them. (This is one of the flaws of the show, that they don't think it's necessary to explain everything or follow up on it. I disagree.) Anyway, the aliens were long and spindly and had weird heads and even though they walked a bit like Jar Jar Binks, in a CG kind of way, they were still cool because they weren't just humans with big heads or funny outfits. They looked great.

Eventually the Enterprise went from being a friendly ship that kept insisting it would do no harm to an armed ship not to be messed with, and the aliens went flying back to wherever they came from. It was fun and scary and worked nicely with the whole idea that Trip and Reed are really trying to build the ship as they go, improve it, make those on-the-fly engineering decisions that Scotty and LaForge and Torres and O'Brien were all famous for. I liked it. And Trip is still my favorite character, by far.

And for once, I didn't mind the subplot. Archer was determined to make a special birthday dinner for Malcolm (Reed), but he couldn't figure out what his favorite food was. Hoshi called Reed's parents, his sister, his best friend, everyone she could think of and nobody knew. His mother, in fact, said that he had never been "comfortable making requests". In the end, she got some help from Dr. Phlox, who knew that Reed got an "injection" (I hope that's a hypospray) every week to overcome an allergy to pineapple. And that was his favorite.

But I have a few issues. First of all, I really didn't like the fact that Archer ordered Hoshi to track down Reed's favorite food. I like HER a lot, but it was almost as if she was his secretary. He should do his own dirty work. And second, can we please have some non-white extras? The cast itself is almost all white except for Hoshi & Mayweather, and the whole Star Trek thing is all about diversity, so why do all the extras have to be white? And mostly male? Why can't they just use people of different ethnic backgrounds for the extras? I don't get it.

Anyway. . .next week looks fun too.

11/28/01

The Suliban are back! Remember them from the first episode? They were bald with weird skin and they could slide under doors and see in the dark because they were genetically enhanced. They still look cool but I'm not quite clear what their agenda is. The whole episode was kind of confusing, to be honest, and even though I enjoyed it a lot, I kept thinking of ways to make it better.

The whole thing was that this Suliban had sneaked on board and apparently saved the ship by altering one of the conduits to prevent an explosion that was about to happen. He was sent on some mission by his people, but they didn't make it very clear as to what it was, except that it had something to do with making up for failing in his mission to destroy the Klingon empire. In the meantime, this crewman named Daniels who was serving Captian Archer his breakfast every morning turned out to be a time traveller from 900 years in the future, and he asked Archer to help him find the Suliban, because Sulibans are bad. Eventually Archer got locked in his cabin with the Suliban, who said that they had it wrong, that Daniels was the bad guy and he (Mr. Suliban) had been sent back to stop him from changing history. Instead of having this cool scene of trying to figure out which time traveller is telling the truth, Archer instantly sided with Daniels.

The Suliban guy killed Daniels and stole the magic holographic map device thingy that Daniels used to prove his case to Archer, he called it a "temporal observatory". Archer tracked down the Suliban, destroyed the device, and nearly got sucked through a cargo hatch out into space.

All of that was very action-packed, but I still didn't understand what the Suliban guy was doing there in the first place. And T'Pol had one good moment when she wasn't sure that they should trust Daniels, but spent the rest of the episode posing and pouting as usual. She doesn't act like a Vulcan, she doesn't speak like one, and she doesn't dress like one. She's all pouting lips and jutting breasts, it's a little silly. They really need to find a reason to put her in a less ridiculous uniform.

I liked the time travel idea, though, and T'Pol's reason for questioning Daniels was dead-on: why didn't he come in one more day earlier, so he could prevent whatever the Suliban was going to do? I always ask that. I just kept thinking they could have done a better job with it. I should try to be more grateful that there were a whole bunch of new aliens who were neither Vulcans nor Klingons, who had spiky boney heads and brought gifts and a goofy language they used to chant at the "plume", some kind of space phenomenon. But if they'd just added a BIT of a debate about which time traveller was telling the truth, and maybe given a a more specific evil motivation for the Suliban guy, it would have been a lot more fun.

(FYI: Tonight's show was directed by Robert Duncan McNeill, Voyager's Tom Paris.)

11/21/01

I guess it's getting better, kind of. The Enterprise was sent to aid a cargo ship that had sent out a distress call, and wasn't responding to hails. They found that the freighter Captain was wounded & unconscious, and the first officer had taken over. He said they'd been attacked by Nausicaans (the big scary tough-guy aliens famous for stabbing a young Captain Picard through the heart), but didn't mention that they were holding one of them prisoner, so he could beat him into giving up the shield frequency codes for the rest of the Nausicaan ships. When the Enterprise crew found out, they got into a fight, and Ryan (the first officer) ended up trapping Dr. Phlox, Reed, Archer, T'Pol, and Mayweather in a cargo bay with a hole in it. The Enterprise rescued them, and followed the cargo ship until they found it surrounded by Nausicaan ships. Archer negotiated the release of the prisoner and extracted a promise from the Nausicaans that they'd stop attacking freighters. In the middle of all of it, we got a bit of Ensign Mayweather's history, or at least a series of descriptions of life aboard a freighter.

I admit it all still looks very cool. It's great that the show is letterboxed, it always looks crisp and clean and believable. The slow-flying football at the beginning was fun, and so was the scary moment when they ejected the cargo bay all those Enterprise crew members were on, after they punctured the hull. But I'm still frustrated, I still feel like they're not telling very exciting stories. And the show, it's fun but it's just not smart. The other shows weren't always smart, but they tried to be, and I feel like they're giving up some smartness in an effort to snag a wider audience, which they're getting, apparently. It just ends up being a bit bland. There was a sickly sweet scene where Mayweather goes to Archer because he's conflicted about their pursuit of Ryan's cargo ship, he thinks Ryan is just defending himself. Archer gives him this speech about how human beings have a responsibility not to seek revenge, and that even people who don't come from earth are still "humans". Mayweather, having grown up on a ship instead of on Earth, says, "I guess I should know that better than anyone." I would have felt better about the racism lecture if Mayweather wasn't the only black member of the crew. In fact, the whole season so far is filled with white guys. Can't the extras, at least, be different? What's wrong with putting some women and some people with dark skin in some shots? Is that so wrong?

I'm nitpicking. I can't help it. I want it to be better than it is. Fortunately, next week's preview looks excellent! Time travel, scary aliens, questions of trust, lots of running around. . .it looks fun. (And even bad Star Trek is usually better than other TV.)

11/14/01

Well...it was better than last week. And there were some new aliens. And they did go to a planet. And it was still kind of boring.

It turned out that some OTHER aliens had already landed on the planet and were doing some kind of mining with the antimatter reactor and the people on the planet were getting sick from an "industrial lubricant" that had leaked into their water supply. The only fun part of the whole thing was when Archer was having a fight with one of the bad guys and he peeled the skin on his face back, and he had all this scaly skin underneath, it was cool.

There were a few good things in there, though. I liked the scientist-chick who was on the planet and was really smart and helped Archer save the day. And Archer had his first romance, which I assume will be one of many. But why can't they come up with some better stories? They had a few good ones at the beginning of the season, hopefully they'll cough up a few more before it ends. And just a little character development wouldn't be such bad idea either. It's Ensign Mayweather's turn.

11/07/01

When are they going to meet some aliens? Isn't it time for the crew to meet some aliens who aren't Klingons or Vulcans? I'm sorry, but this was a very uneventful episode.

The Enterprise crew found a huge comet and decided to land on it to sample its core. A Vulcan ship watched them, making it clear that there are always Vulcans watching the Enteprise. T'Pol received a secret letter that Tucker accidentally read, saying she was supposed to go back to Vulcan and get married. What else? I don't know, they made a snowman on the crater and nearly got stuck in it when the ice under the shuttlepod melted. The Vulcans helped them save the ship. Blah blah blah.

It had some fine moments but it just wasn't a great story. They have such opportunity there to be creative, they've talked about how they can tell all these cool stories about exploration, so it's disappointing when they don't take advantage of it.

The Vulcans are still sneaky, T'Pol's still a crab. I know she's supposed to be pouting or thinking or contemplating or something, but most of the time she just looks like she's posing. I liked that she ended up confiding in Trip Tucker though, it was the logical thing to do. And she ended up staying on the ship anyway, big surprise. Do Vulcan females go through Pon Farr like the men do?

I liked the letter from the schoolkids asking what happens to the poop from the Enterprise crew, but it didn't add much excitement to the rest of the show. Come on, Star Trek people, you're out in space! Do more than follow comets, nearly fall in ice, and read letters from home. Also, the Vulcans seem kind of racist, which makes we wonder how by Captain Kirk's time they were all about "infinite diversity in infinite combinations". And one more thing about that Vulcan Captain: since when do Vulcans have British accents?

Let's hope next week brings a more interesting tale.

10/31/01

Those sneaky, sneaky Vulcans.

Captain Archer, Trip Tucker and T'Pol beamed down to a sacred Vulcan monastery and found it taken over by angry (and violent) Andorians, who accused the Vulcan monks of spying on them with sensors and had them all locked in a room. They captured the landing party, beat up Captain Archer a whole bunch of times, and leered at T'Pol while the monks stood by and waited patiently for all of them to finish up and go away.

Eventually, after some trickery and more beatings for Archer, they found a transmitter underground and got a signal to the crew, so Lt. Reed could beam down & save the day. It all ended when they found a steel door leading to...lo and behold...a huge room full of advanced sensors, all trained on the Andorians' homeworld. Archer handed all the data over to the Andorians, even though they'd beaten the crap out of him several times, and the Enterprise crew left, without staying long enough to ask the Vulcans why they were spying and lying about it.

All of the spying and secrecy was very un-Vulcan behavior, but maybe since it's 100 years before Kirk's time, the Vulcans haven't quite evolved to a Spock/Tuvok level of enlightenment yet. And we also found out that Vulcans don't like the way humans smell, and T'Pol has been using "nasal numbing agent" so the smell of humans won't bother her so much. Fascinating.

As for the Andorians, they weren't very interesting as a species, but I liked their antennae. Unlike the Andorians on the original Star Trek series, their antennae actually moved. Their blue skin looked good too. And they all wore leather pants. Every week we have a Star Trek first, and this week, it was leather pants.

It wasn't a fabulous episode, but it could have been with a little postscript at the end, a little bit of explanation from the Vulcans, follow-up on the Andorians, information about why the Vulcans and the Andorians are in conflict. . .something. It needed a little punch at the end, I wanted to know if they were going to report the monks or shut down the equipment and I wanted to know what T'Pol thought, even if she does have to wear a catsuit.

As far as outfits go, it was lovely to see the Enterprise crew actually using pockets that were built into their uniforms. I find it interesting that Kirk & Picard & Janeway go without pockets, even though they still have to carry phasers and tricorders. I approve of pockets -- especially the ones they had sewn into the sleeves. Very handy. I don't know how T'Pol manges to carry anything in that spandex body-glove.

And Trip Tucker is still my favorite character. He gets the best lines and rolls his eyes a lot. I like him. I still like Dr. Phlox too, especially because he's always interested in everybody's food. And he has a wonderful voice.

But here's something to think about. . .if they were able to beam an away team down to a specific location on the planet under the monastery, then why couldn't they just beam the crew up? Is it because their communicators were broken? That wouldn't make much sense, since they were talking to the ship through a transmitter they found in the Vulcans' basement. They could have beamed down and THEN beamed them up, while they were all underground.

I'd say the episode was about middling, quality-wise. The theme song still stinks, which is a shame because the opening footage that goes with it is all really cool.

A final thought: where's Ensign Mayweather's episode? Everyone's had a little featured role so far except him.

FYI: The show was directed by Roxann Dawson, otherwise known as Voyager's B'Elanna Torres.

10/24/01

I hate to say this, but I think they're dumbing Star Trek down. People who don't watch Star Trek and think it's nerdy & boring (like Jenny) may think that it's already dumb, but it's actually always been kind of smart. But since they're trying to appeal to a wider audience with Enterprise, they seem to have dumbed the whole thing down and have taken the subtlety out of everything, especially this episode. It definitely wasn't a highlight of the season so far.

The Enteprise crew went to check out Terra Nova, the first colony inhabited by humans outside our galaxy. (Terra Nova, by the way, is the name of my favorite brand of body lotion.) There was a long history to it, which they revealed in an obviously just-for-exposition kind of scene where Trip and Archer complained that Vulcans don't know human history very well and then told her the whole backstory. They checked out the colony, and thought it was abandoned until they found a bunch of people living underground, who had weird scaly scars on their heads (sometimes it just looked like mud on their faces) and who thought humans were evil because they didn't know that THEY were human too.

Whatever. It wasn't that exciting and I didn't care that much about what happened to them. Sorry, but I didn't. They had radiation poisoning and all, but they were still rather boring.

The good news is that there were still some really fun moments in the show and I think it was just a slightly weak episode, not an indication of how it's going to be every week. I did like it when Dr. Phlox said he could cure lung cancer easily. That made me happy. I like to pretend we have a happy future in store for us even though the whole world has gone mad here in October of 2001.

It was kind of strange, though, when Captain Archer & Lt. Reed were running from the weird scaly humans, who were shooting them with guns, and then Reed got hit in the leg and Archer turned to see how he was, and he said, "I'm all right, sir" and Archer just turned around and kept running away. Hello, he was shot in the leg! He wasn't moving yet. He wasn't even standing. Of course the strange freako humans captured him. It wasn't very suspenseful after that, unfortunately. I liked the episode with the creepy ship full of upside-down dead aliens much better.

Some good lines crept in there, though. My favorite of all time: while Reed is being held captive, the guy guarding him asked if he was hungry, you know, in his primitive freako human way. "That depends on what's for dinner." The answer? "Dinner meat."

Dinner meat!*

Oh, and there was another Star Trek first this week. Last week they used the word "nipple", which was something new & fresh. This week, Reed asked where the "lavatory" was. I think that's the first time they've ever acknowledged on Star Trek that people actually go to the bathroom in the future.

While I didn't get into the story all that much, I did like that we got a glimpse of Captain Archer's darker side. Making successful first contact on Terra Nova (the colony, not my lotion,) was really important to him, he got really angry when he wasn't able to do it on the first try, it was almost like Captain Janeway when she would get all moody & dark & driven to achieve some specific thing she decided was suddenly the most important, character-defining task in the universe.

Some of the other characters could use a moment or two like that. Now that they've given everybody a bit of business in each script, it's time to throw some storyline at Ensign Mayweather. He flies the shuttle nicely, but I'd like to see a little more about him. Oh yeah! We found out what species Dr. Phlox is. He's, um....Denobulin. Or from a planet called Denobulin. That's what it sounded like, anyway.

By the way, I think the ship itself looks great. The shuttle craft too. The technology all seems a little cold, but in a good way. The way you'd think it would be on the first ship to have warp drive. I'd like to see more of it though. These are pre-holodeck times, I'd like to see what the crew does in their time off.

And one more thing: what's up with the universal translator? How come it translates everything perfectly except for a handful of words? What's up with that? I don't think it makes much sense, especially if the Enterprise crew can figure out what word the aliens are saying just because of the context. Sometimes they get a little cheesy on the alien languages. I won't ever forget that horrifying episode of Voyager with Lori Petty talking made-up alien baby language because the translators don't work. I've tried, but I can't. Yech.

A final note: the commercials that aired during the show got distractingly unpleasant at one point. There was the ad for the Roswell episode where a character auditions for Enterprise, and then an ad for an all-singing Buffy episode, which reinforced my lack of interest in ever watching it (sorry Jenny), and a really creepy Radio Shack commercial with Ving Rhames & Vanessa Williams. Why are Ving & Vanessa pretending they're a couple? Why are they doing cheesy ads? Why are all the recent Radio Shack ads so creepy? I can't address the Teri Hatcher ones, they're too scary. After that there was a commercial for the new Johnny Depp/Heather Graham movie "From Hell", and they kept saying things like: "The number one movie in the country is....from Hell." No kidding.

And that's all, except for a final rant about the how awful the theme song is. Honestly, it just is.

*hmm. I'm told by a fellow Enterprise viewer that it wasn't "dinner meat", it was "digger meat". Anyone else want to weigh in? Go to the boards or e-mail me at laurie@twogirlsandatv.com

10/17/01

Everything was just fine until the Klingons showed up.

No, really. It was a great story up until they arrived on the scene. Enterprise discovered a small ship hiding in their warp field, so Captain Archer sent "Trip" Tucker, the Chief Engineer, to go help the aliens -- the Xyrillians -- fix their ship so they could fly solo, and stop causing all those malfunctions on Enterprise. Tucker meets a chick -- who wears a Seven Of Nine/T'Pol type catsuit -- and they do some kind of funky, put-your-hands-in-pebbles-and-read-eachother's-minds thing. Next thing you know, he's growing nipples on his arms.

It was really funny when Dr. Phlox told him he was pregnant. The look on his face was priceless. And then they were all standing around accusing him of having sex with an alien, and he was insisting that he didn't do anything, and was a "perfect gentleman" the whole time, and then suddenly he stopped and said, "Well...there was that box of pebbles." It was funny.

T'Pol's getting back to her annoying self, but I do think everyone bugs her so much that she's entitled to some of her crabassed retorts. Even Dr. Phlox was harassing her about what she ate.

I thought it was cool hearing the unversal translator kick in, bit by bit, until the aliens' language sounded like English. Equally cool was the whole adventure of Tucker going aboard the Xyrillians' ship, he was the first human to get on a ship full of aliens. I'm liking him more every week. And I liked his flirtation with the Xyrillian chick, they totally looked ready to rip each other's clothes off, even though they didn't. She fed him ice-water-chip-things and little sparks flew all over when she touched his lips with her fingers -- so she did it again and again and again and again. The holodeck thingy didn't look very good, it had that soundstage-y feel, but I liked his reaction to it. And I loved the idea that Xyrillian babies retain all the DNA of their mothers, but their fathers just serve as hosts...and then get extra nipples.

I also think this is the first time the word "nipple" has ever been said on a Star Trek show.

But again, it was the Klingons that ruined everything. See, after the Enterprise left and Trip found out he was pregnant, they went back to find the Xyrillians and tracked them down next to a Klingon ship. All this talk of honor and schmonor....blah blah blah. I'm willing to pretend that Klingons always had bones in their heads, but what's all this about honor? Remember the Klingons Kirk had to deal with? Even in the movies? They were mean killers, they didn't have any honor at all. (Frankly, I always found Klingons pretty boring, except for Worf, and the one played by Suzie Plakson.) And on this show, they were boring and stupid. And they were willing to listen to reason and not execute the Xyrillians just because of the potential for recreating their homeworld in a holodeck. Very un-Klingon by any standards, especially when the Klingon Commander said, "You can see my house from here." </