Enterprise | the m0vie blog

Star Trek: Enterprise – Vox Sola (Review)

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Darren

Next year, Star Trek is fifty years old. We have some special stuff planned for that, but – in the meantime – we’re reviewing all of Star Trek: Enterprise this year as something of a prequel to that anniversary. This January, we’re doing the first season. Check back daily for the latest review.

Vox Sola is a rather sedate late-season instalment of Star Trek: Enterprise. Largely designed as a bottle show, Vox Sola has a rake of interesting ideas, but doesn’t offer any particularly insightful exploration. The alien creature of the week is unique and distinctive, but the episode constructed around it feels rather lacklustre. There’s a sense of late-season fatigue at work here, with Vox Sola feeling rather like a more low-key variation on the strange-space-phenomena-of-the-week story template that Star Trek: Voyager would use routinely.

“It’s alive!”

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: alien of the week, anomaly of the week, Archer, enterprise, Fred Dekker, fungus, hoshi, roxanne dawson, star trek, star trek: enterprise, t'pol, trip, vox sola, vox solis | 3 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Detained (Review)

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Darren

Detained is well-meaning, if a little clumsy and awkward.

It is a rather conscious effort to do a “message show” in the grand tradition of the Star Trek franchise, using the show’s science-fiction premise to offer a commentary on current events. Detained is very clearly structured as a response to the 9/11 attacks, even if Archer only explicitly references the internment of Japanese Americans at Manzanar. Detained is full of interesting ideas, and its heart is in the right place, but the execution feels decidedly rushed and haphazard. Detained works much better as a two-line moral than it does as a forty-five minute episode of television.

You can’t call him Al…

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: 9/11, allegory, dean stockwell, enterprise, essentialism, klingons, metaphor, mike sussman, phyllis strong, quantum leap, racism, Scott Bakula, star trek, star trek: enterprise, suliban, xenophobia | 9 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Oasis (Review)

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Darren

Oasis is an interesting story.

It was also an interesting story that time it was produced as Shadowplay during the second season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Ghosts of Star Trek’s past…

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: deep space nine, enterprise, ghost stories, hauntings, oasis, Odo, rene auberjonois, Shadowplay, star trek, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: enterprise, the tempest | 4 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Acquisition (Review)

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Darren

Acquisition feels like a misstep for the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise.

It’s not the worst episode of the season. In fact, it falls rather comfortably into the show’s “big middle” – the random and generic episodes that take Star Trek clichés and execute them in a competent manner while overlooking the opportunity to do something a bit more novel and exciting. Acquisition ranks with failures like Civilisation or Sleeping Dogs or Rogue Planet. It is competently executed and contains a few moments of merit, but there’s a feeling that this has all been seen before.

“Take us to your leader.”

Of course, Acquisition serves to foreground a number of pressing concerns about the production of Enterprise. It’s something of a lightening rod to certain aggressive elements of fandom. Bringing back the Ferengi for a guest appearance proves that the show is more of a prequel to Star Trek: The Next Generation than to the original Star Trek. Glossing over continuity issues by refusing to name these marauding aliens demonstrates that the show clearly doesn’t care about continuity at all. Trying to do a comedy episode featuring the Ferengi demonstrates the producers have no idea what does and doesn’t work in Star Trek production.

All of this is, of course, nonsense. Acquisition isn’t a bad episode because it plays with continuity, or because it features the Ferengi. It’s a bad episode because it’s a comedy adventure that isn’t particularly funny or exciting.

“Hey, at least we got here before the Borg…”

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: Brannon Braga, comedy, continuity, deep space nine, ds9, enterprise, Ferengi, Ira Steven Behr, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: enterprise, the last outpost | 13 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Rogue Planet (Review)

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Darren

And with Rogue Planet, Star Trek: Enterprise wanders back into “generic Star Trek“ territory.

Rogue Planet is a story that could easily have been told on any other Star Trek spin-off. Indeed, a great deal of its story elements feel inherited like hand-me-down clothes. Hunters chasing sentient game is a stock science-fiction trope, but it is one that the franchise has explored quite frequently. The first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine gave us Captive Pursuit, another story about our heroes interfering in the hunt of a self-aware life form. The fourth season of Star Trek: Voyager introduced the Hirogen, a bunch of big-game hunters that put the Eska hunters to shame.

In fairness, wearing a glowing green eye patch on a pitch black planet probably isn’t the best strategy…

Indeed, it hasn’t even been that long since Star Trek did an episode about hunters pursuing sentient prey. The final season of Voyager had produced Flesh and Blood, a gigantic feature-length television movie around the Hirogen and their pursuit of holograms that had developed self-awareness despite not meeting the more obvious criteria for sentience. This isn’t Enterprise retreading old ground; this is Enterprise retread ground that hosted a big song and dance less than fifteen months earlier. As with Civilisation and Sleeping Dogs before it, Rogue Planet has a definite “been there and done that” feeling to it.

That’s a shame, because there are a host of interesting elements here. They just are pushed into the back seat for a stock science-fiction plot.

Oh, Trip, have some respect!

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: Archer, big game, chris black, genre television, hunters, hunting, Planet, rogue planet, star trek, star trek: enterprise, the most dangerous game of all | 4 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Fusion (Review)

Posted on January 22, 2015 by Darren

Fusion is a mess of an episode.

On the one hand, it feels like an attempt to develop that Vulcans as they’ve been portrayed on Star Trek: Enterprise. It’s a clear attempt to justify their behaviour and to suggest that there are reasons that Vulcans eschewed emotions. It also gives some focus and development to T’Pol, a character who has been given very little space to herself so far in this first season. It brings back the relaxed pacing of episodes like Breaking the Ice or Cold Front, soaking in the details rather than driving the plot.

Out, out brief candle…

On the other hand, there’s a disturbingly reactionary subtext to Fusion. It feels like an even more cynical and mean-spirited version of All the Children Shall Lead or The Way to Eden, a story about how people need to be wary of youthful and experimental subcultures. It’s disappointing that one of the first season’s big T’Pol episodes is basically a rape allegory. And the plot of the episode feels crammed into the last act to make up for the somewhat loose pacing.

Fusion is simply all over the place.

False idols…

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: Archer, emotions, enterprise, fusion, hippies, mind meld, mind rape, rape, romulans, star trek: enterprise, t'pol, vulan | 13 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Shuttlepod One (Review)

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Darren

Shuttlepod One is the best episode of the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise.

If you want to be particularly cynical about it, you could argue that it’s the show’s first absolutely unequivocal success. Enterprise‘s first season is a lot stronger and more interesting than most give it credit for, even if most of its stronger episodes were qualified successes – like Breaking the Ice, Cold Front or Dear Doctor – that hinted at a new type of character-driven Star Trek without entirely committing to it.

… it is very cold in space…

The first season of Enterprise tried quite a lot of new things that didn’t always work. That’s fine. That’s what a first season should be for. The greater tragedy is that the second season (or even the tail end of the first season) didn’t necessarily try to improve on those experimental successes, and instead fell back on that conventional Star Trek plotting that had been competing with that more experimental style in the first two-thirds of the first season.

In many ways, Shuttlepod One is the unlikely zenith of the first season. It comes off a string of flawed-but-intriguing episodes only briefly interrupted by the misfire that was Sleeping Dogs. However, the episode was written by creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga to save budget in the second half of the season, filmed as a way to recoup budget overruns from elsewhere in the year. Despite that, it’s a compelling glimpse of Enterprise as it seemed to want to be – very much character-driven Star Trek.

Reed has a close shave…

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: Brannon Braga, charles tucker, connor trinneer, david livingston, dominic keating, malcolm reed, reed, Rick Berman, shuttlepod one, star trek, star trek: enterprise, trip | 6 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Shadows of P’Jem (Review)

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Darren

Shadows of P’Jem is a wonderful episode. It is, in many respects, the first true post-9/11 episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, and it is a surprisingly thoughtful one at that.

In many respects, Enterprise has already established itself as Star Trek for the George W. Bush era. Archer is the franchise’s first white American male lead character since Kirk, and his contempt for politics and thirst for action mirrors the popular image of George W. Bush – a dynamic man with no time for questions or hesitation. Even little touches – like the fact that officers drink beer rather than champagne, or the anti-intellectual contempt that Archer and Trip feel towards Vulcans – suggest a Star Trek show that is very much in line with Bush’s America.

Shadows on Coridan…

However, Shadows of P’Jem was among the first episodes written after the events of 9/11, and it’s an episode that seems quite thoughtful and introspective. The franchise has often used the Federation as a stand-in for American values and ideals. Shadows of P’Jem twists this idea on its head, offering the future Federation members as stand-ins for various facets of American foreign policy.

Shadows of P’Jem is a considerate and reflective look at what Walter Nugent termed “the habits of empire”, a look at the cost and consequences of imperialism in a post-colonial age, and how those issues tend to fester.

A night in sickbay…

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: 9/11, american foreign policy, Andorian, coridan, empire, enterprise, foreign policy, geopolitics, imperialism, mike sussman, p'jem, phyllis strong, politics, Prime Directive, romulans, shadows of p'jem, star trek, star trek: enterprise, t'pol, Vulcans | 5 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Sleeping Dogs (Review)

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Darren

There’s really very little to say about Sleeping Dogs. It’s not particularly good, it’s not particularly bad. Like Civilisation before it, it’s an episode of Star Trek constructed to a familiar formula. The ship in question answers a distress call from an alien ship. Our crew attempts a rescue mission, during which the away team end up stranded. Meanwhile, our captain tries to figure out how to communicate with an alien from a radically different culture, eventually coming to realise that he must address them on their terms.

These are all stock elements, and they are mixed into Sleeping Dogs with a minimum of fuss. The only real kink in Sleeping Dogs is that the aliens in question are Klingons. However, we’ve spent so much time with Klingons in the various other Star Trek spin-off shows that using them as a light seasoning in a fairly stock Star Trek plot doesn’t make for a particularly appetising combination.

Again with the Klingons…

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: Archer, boring, cold, enterprise, first contact, gas giants, hoshi, hoshi sato, klingons, sleeping dogs, star trek, star trek: enterprise, the way of the warrior | 4 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Dear Doctor (Review)

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Darren

Dear Doctor is certainly the most ambitious episode from the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise, and also the most controversial.

The show’s first true “Prime Directive” episode, the show wrestles with the moral implications of “playing god”, attempting to justify the inevitable development of “Starfleet General Order Number One”, the rule prohibiting interference in the development of “less advanced” species. As such, there is almost an impossible amount of weight bearing down on Dear Doctor, as the show tries to explore the moral conundrums that result from contact with a less technologically advanced species.

Stargazing…

Dear Doctor is an episode that is deeply problematic. Indeed, it was a show that was so controversial and so divisive that UPN itself insisted on a change to the episode’s ending. It’s an episode that tends to provoke strong reactions, from both defenders and detractors. It inspires passion. It is not uncommon to find people who will rank the episode among the very best of Enterprise and the very worst of Enterprise.

While the show’s internal logic and conclusions are quite unsettling, Dear Doctor is a provocative and challenging hour of television. It is decidedly more ambitious than any of the episodes surrounding it, even other experimental shows like Breaking the Ice or Shuttlepod One. While it might not be the best episode of the first season, it is certainly the most breathakingly ambitious and engaging. And that must count for something.