These are the adventures of the Starship Enterprise (no, not that one. The
other one before it you never heard of. The sensual one), its continuing
mission to sensually blunder around not particularly strange or interesting
worlds, to antagonize sensual new life and new civilizations and to
sensually go where three decades of Star Trek and just about every other
science fiction show on the planet have gone before.

Teaser - Angry aliens are sensually hurrying away from the Enterprise crew

Hoshi: Wait, why are you leaving us?

Alien #1: We can’t take it anymore.

Trip: What’s the matter?

Alien #1: This is the worst show I’ve ever been on! Your stories have
no point, your characters are boring and, your plots are cliched and our
appearances completely throwaway with no lasting effects!

Hoshi: I can’t understand a single word they’re saying. It’s as if
they’re speaking entirely in some different language.

Alien #1: And that awful theme song, is this supposed to be the
Karate Kid or a 21st century Science Fiction series anyway? How can you
stand it?

Trip: Are you sure there’s nothing we could do to convince you to
stay?

Alien #1: Hire some freaking writers!

Archer: Some people are just never satisfied. Well let’s go wander
around the galaxy again and see what happens.

Act 1 - Giant CGI Plot Cliche sneaks sensually on board as two redshirts
stand under a conduit.

Redshirt #1: Oh no looks like the conduit is broken. Go inside that
haunted hous…I mean conduit and fix it.

Redshirt #2: Didn’t we do this exact same scene in First Contact?

Redshirt #1: Yes and next week we’ll do it again on CSI and Law and
Order. Just be glad these are speaking parts.

Giant Plot Cliche: Need Brains! Brains!

Two minutes later both redshirts have been swallowed by the Giant
CGI Plot Cliche

Redshirt #1: Is thus stuff what I think it is?

Act 2 - Meanwhile in Archer’s quarters. Archer is staring blankly at his
computer screen. Trip enters.

Archer: Oh My God! It’s full of stars!

Trip: Hey I know what’ll cheer you up, half-naked men playing with a
ball.

Archer: Ah, the good old days. No decisions. No aliens. Just some
water and a ball. Things were so simple back and then and sensual too.

Trip: So why did you get into space travel again?

Archer: Because those damned Vulcans screwed my father!

Trip: Oh right. Say there’s a Giant CGI Plot Cliche in the cargo
bay. Want to go and get swallowed by it?

Archer: Can’t be any worse than the Andorians, the Tandarans or any
of the other many, many aliens who’ve captured me before and will go on
capturing me week after week after week.

Act 3 - Cargo bay is coated with pale slime as the CGI Plot Cliche covers
the two redshirts.

Archer: Hmm that slime looks potentially dangerous. Let’s go wander
right next to it and see what happens.

Trip: I’m with you. At least this time I’m not in my underwear.

Giant CGI Plot Cliche: Need Brains! Brains!

Five Minutes Later Archer and Trip are also swallowed up by the
Giant CGI Plot Cliche.

Archer: My God, how could this have happened and who could have seen
it coming?

Trip: We did take every possible precaution, none. I’m as baffled
as you are.

Giant CGI Plot Cliche: Where are the Brains I was promised?
B-R-A-I-N-S!

Act 4 - The rest of the crew stand around watching the Giant CGI Plot Cliche
on the monitors.

Dr. Phlox: I’ve determined that this creature has formed neural
links to its victims and is transforming them into one giant entity.

Mayweather: Oh My God! It’s draining Captain Archer of all his
personality! We have to do something before it’s too late.

Giant CGI Plot Cliche: So Hungry! All Crust and No Filling! Need
BRAINS!

In the Cargo Bay, Archer, Trip and Redshirt #2 are delirious.

Archer: So one time in water polo I had this ball and…

Trip: Would you shut up about your water polo allready!

Archer: But it was the highlight of my career and it taught me
everything I needed to know about commanding a Starship. Get captured early
and often, wander around with no purpose or direction and treat everything
as either self-righteous cause or a joke.

Trip: That explains a lot.

Redshirt #1: Whee I have more lines!

Giant CGI Plot Cliche: Oh My, this was a big mistake. I had the
chanche to crawl onto a Vulcan ship, but no I had to go for the flashy
nacelles. So Hungry! Need Brains!

Back on the Command Bridge

T’Pol: I have determined what course of action we shall pursue. Reed,
first throw together a hastily conceived rescue attempt that will only serve
to antagonize the creature. Afterwards you can trump all of human science by
developing the force field on your own in a few hours. Then Hoshi, you and I
will work together on an improbable method of communicating with the
creature during which we will clash and then bond and learn to work together
and in the process of which put our cultural differences aside to work as a
team.

Dr. Phlox: No need for any of that, the creature is growing thinner.
It appears to be starving to death.

Mayweather: Why in the world would that be?

Dr. Phlox: Well you see the creature feeds off neural energy and when
it can’t get enough neural energy from brain activity it begins starving to
death.

Hoshi: So you’re saying that because the Captain’s brain is
incompatible with the creature’s biological makeup, the creature is starving
to death.

Dr. Phlox: No, I meant that the creature’s food supply is practically
non-existant in its chosen victim. But you can believe whatever makes you
feel better.

Mayweather: Oh by the way I located the aliens who infected us so they
can give us the coordinates to take the poor creature home.

Reed: Ahem, shouldn’t we consider perhaps killing it?

Hoshi: No it’s just a poor misunderstood alien brainsucking leech!

Alien #1: Before we give you the coordinates, we demand an apology.

Mayweather: An apology for what?

Alien #1: For this episode, for starters.

Montgomery: Very well, on behalf of Viacom, Paramount, UPN, Rick
Berman, Brannon Braga and all the cast and crew, I sincerely apologize for
this episode!

Alien #1: Now apologize for Fusion! Apologize! We demand an apology!

Montgomery: Never!

Act 5 - The creature is put in a box and released out on a planet’s surface
where it immediately attaches itself to an earthworm.

Giant CGI Plot Cliche: Ah finally, Brains! BRAINS! I can feel the
Sweet nectar of inteligence running through me. Finally I can put this
nightmare behind me.

Act 0 - A man with heavy eyebrows steps out from behind the camera against a
background of stars. The stars are dim and clearly most of the galaxy is
dead or dying.

Rod Serling: Flash forwards FIVE BILLION YEARS. Earth’s star is a
faint glowing red ball and the homeworld of man is a wasteland on which no
living being has walked upon in a long time. The Federation is long
forgotten. Starfleet’s starships are dust and the human race has joined the
dinosaurs in that great theme park we call extinction. Not a single of
Rembrandt’s paintings or Michelangelo’s sculptures or Rod Stewart’s songs
have survived. Every accomplishment of man from the iron knife to the
transporter is vanished. All except for ONE.

Camera pans down to show the same planet covered now with Giant CGI
Plot Cliche creatures. From space the planet appears as a series of
geometrically perfect dots filled with water.

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #1: Hello Captain Archer.

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #2: Hello to you too, Captain Archer.

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #1: Do you wish to play water polo, Captain
Archer?

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #2: Of course Captain Archer. Say do you know
where Water Polo comes from?

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #1: I never thought about it Captain Archer,
let’s go ask Captain Archer. He’ll know.

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #3: Hello, Captain Archer and Captain Archer.
What can I do for you?

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #2: We were just wondering where Water Polo
comes from?

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #3: Ah yes, the age old question. Many
theologists speculate that at one time our distant ancestor came into
contact with a being known only as CAPTAIN ARCHER. It absorbed this Captain
Archer’s mind but could not divest itself of this identity because by
ingesting Archer, it had also ingested Archer’s stupidity has deprived it of
the ability to think and so it became Captain Archer and all its asexually
budded children after it were also called Captain Archer and that is why
today we are all called Captain Archer.

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #1: This is certainly interesting but what does
it have to do with Water Polo?

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #3: Well there are further speculations that
this Captain Archer being was rather stupid and the only contents in its
mind reffered to Water Polo and thus this was the only knowledge we possess.
Perhaps had this Captain Archer’s mind contained great works of literature
or technical information we might have built a great civilization that could
have taken us off this world so that some form of life might survive the
death of the milky way galaxy.

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #2: So instead we built our civilization around
Water Polo and turned our whole planet into a bunch of Water Polo pools and
we play Water Polo all day, thus dooming the last civilization in the galaxy
to extinction!

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #3: Exactly, this Captain Archer being formed
us too well in his own stupid image!

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #1: So Captain Archer, still want to go play
water polo!

Giant CGI Plot Cliche #2: Why not, we don’t know how to do anything
else. Do we?

Camera turns sharply to show Rod Serling standing to the side and
trying to smoke a hypospray, with Brannon Braga by his side

Rod Serling: There is an ancient Chinese saying, a civilization built
on water will endure, but one built on Water Polo will not survive. Thus
ends the last civilization in the galaxy and along with it dies the last
work of man and also the very thing that killed it. Water Polo.

Ironic isn’t it?

Brannon Braga: Ironic perhaps, but sensual…most definitely. So, so
very sensual! I think I’m going to play some…Water Polo too.

Braga runs off chasing the Giant CGI Plot Cliche creatures who run
away from him shrieking in terror.

Rod Serling: And now I think I’m going to be sick…in the Twilight
Zone!

“Silent Enemy”

Written by long time Star Trek science advisor Andre Bormanis and directed by long time Star Trek director Winrich Kolbe, Silent Enemy is a quality production which is one of the Enterprise episodes to fulfill the promise of a well-imagined look at isolated deep space exploration. From some of the best visual FX shots of the Enterprise yet, to long interior shots that emphasize the size of the ship and the isolation of the crew within it, Silent Enemy’s production merges the episode’s themes on visual and script levels.

Though Silent Enemy does feature an alien menace, its real emphasis is on the bonds that hold the crew together this far out from Earth, and for the first time we really get a sense of the mechanism that is the Enterprise. We get department meetings, birthday parties, hands on operation of weapons and a problem-solving process that persists throughout the bulk of the episode, instead of being a last minute afterthought as it often has been.

It is quite a step from the standard technobabble-in-engineering solution to the script’s Trip/Reed departmental meeting discussing the installation of the phase cannons and interdepartmental competition with Jupiter Station. We see the first often enough as a plot device meant to move the story along, but the second turns a plot device into something that provides context and depth for the characters and the engineering department and the attitudes of these people.

From the launch of a communications amplifier satellite meant to communicate with Earth, to the closing scene where the crew successfully discovers reticent Reed’s favorite desert, Silent Enemy is an episode about communication. Indeed Enterprise’s crew are the only important characters in this episode. The silent enemy of the title are unseen for most of the episode. They even communicate with recycled footage of the Enterprise’s crewmembers reflected back to them. The communications with Earth are limited to failed attempts to learn about Reed from his friends and family and this communication is itself cut off when the aliens destroy the amplifiers and the crew once again finds itself cut off from Earth and having to rely on each other.

The crew’s ability to come to know Reed in a way that neither his parents nor his friends and family were able to reemphasizes the crew’s interdependence and independence from Earth. As does Archer’s aborted attempt to return to Earth. Even the attempt to communicate with the Vulcan High Command fails, leaving the crew with no resources but their own and using those resources they persevere in the old TOS model of a starship alone against the entire galaxy. In this case it’s literally so as Enterprise faces an enemy they have to devise and build a weapon against, an enemy who seems to represent the silent menace of a dangerous galaxy that is willing to attack them simply because the Enterprise crew are inadequately prepared to face the dangers that are out there.

For an Enterprise episode, which so far have been rather simplistic and devoid of content, Silent Enemy is rather complicated. There is a continuity reference to the pilot which allows Archer to reflect on his decision to launch Enterprise prematurely. A tossed-off comment about the launch of another new starship fits in with Favorite Son continuity. We even have an historical continuity reference suggesting that England was still a separate nation with a monarchy and a navy less than a century ago. While Enterprise is clearly attempting to be fixed in a current cultural context with its baseball caps and religions, you have to wonder if the producers really thought out the implications of all that. The Doctor’s solution to the favorite food mystery is moderately clever and more common sense than you would normally expect from a Star Trek episode. Reed’s parents and sisters are cliches but still well-played cliches that have the resonance of real people.

The only flaw involves more references to the tiresome Vulcan-Human bickering storyline which we are apparently destined to see more of soon. Archer’s constant concern about showing independence from the Vulcans comes off as childish. It doesn’t betray hostility so much as it betrays a deep and fundamental insecurity. However Silent Enemy doesn’t go so far as to have Archer refuse to consider asking for help when the lives of his crew are at stake but uses a plausible enemy tactic to avoid that problem. Since in Breaking of the Ice, Archer nearly refused to do so, Silent Enemy at the very least shows that he has grown somewhat.

One of the best ways to measure where Enterprise is at this point is by looking back at where previous Star Trek series were at this stage, just ten episodes into their first season.

TNG at this point had produced several disastrous episodes such as “The Naked Now” and “Justice” that would haunt the series in reruns. Its ninth episode, “The Battle”, featured the introduction of the new series menace, the Ferengi, that were doomed to become comic relief for a decade to come. And it ended with “Hide and Q”, one of the more mediocre Q episodes of the series. By this point many Star Trek fans had decided that the attempt to create a Star Trek series without Kirk and Spock had failed miserably and they had justification for thinking so. TNG’s pilot was ambitious but it was also deeply flawed. Many of the episodes suffered from an attempt to recapture TOS’s sprit, but instead were painfully serious blunders featuring ham handed and joyless philosophical meditations. At the same time there were hopeful signs if anyone cared to read them. Code of Honor pointed towards the strength that TNG would find in its Klingon themes. Q had already become a fixture of the series and would go on to serve as an effective foil against Captain Picard. Still no fan could have been blamed for giving up on the series at this point. Fortunately most fans chose to keep watching and TNG increased its viewership despite being in syndication, it became one of television’s dominant series.

DS9’s first ten episodes also had no shortage of embarrassing and clumsy material such as “Past Prologue”, “Babel” and “The Passenger.” Like TNG, its key strengths were also becoming visible in its reliance on characters. Odo’s isolation in “A Man Alone”, O’Brien being forced to choose between the rules and what had to be done in “Captive Pursuit”, Sisko’s relationship with his son in “Babel” and the complexity and diversity of station life itself. In both series, the strengths and weaknesses that would prove to both attract and repel viewers over their seven year runs were already on display ten episodes in.

The question is, where does Enterprise stand on this scale? For the most part Enterprise has consisted of episodes that painstakingly reexamine standard Star Trek plots under the guise of Birth of Space Exploration episodes. Enterprise has stripped away the complexity of the usual Star Trek material and instead attempted to bring them to life by examining the mechanisms of exploration and taking a look back into the past of Star Trek continuity, rather than creating more complex plots based around showing us what we haven’t seen before or the political and military intrigues of a crowded galaxy. The result, though, has often been episodes with little content based on plots that aren’t particularly original. With the exception of Suliban arc episodes such as “Cold Front”, these episodes had nothing new or original to offer us. They do not stand out in memory and make uninspiring rerun viewing at best.

When such plots are linked to character growth of the other crew members as in Fight or Flight or Fortunate Son, they can work. However, so far most of the episodes linked to Archer’s character growth and Trip’s relationship to Vulcans: Civilization, Strange New World and Andorian Incident have failed rather badly. Enterprise seems to have adopted human contact with Vulcans as a major theme, but it is a theme that has simply failed to take off and seems rather forced. Though humanity has supposedly been in contact with Vulcans for some time, Trip had a Vulcan teacher and Archer even served aboard a Vulcan ship; they are bafflingly clueless about Vulcans. Despite all this experience in “Breaking the Ice” Archer appears to be unaware that Vulcans will not engage in small talk or have lunch with him. As such it relies more on minor cultural blunders to define the relationship, which would have long been overcome by this date, rather than focusing on divisions produced by more fundamental issues and agendas. Enterprise’s view of the Vulcans is one-dimensional, as is its view of humans and the resulting collision is not particularly interesting. As such the Vulcan theme, on a par with TNG’s Ferengi menace, may need to be dramatically retooled.

A further aspect of the problem is the essential blandness of the two Enterprise characters, around whom most episodes revolve, Archer and Trip. Some Star Trek Captains may have been offensive and widely hated, but up until now they have never been bland. But that is the best way to describe Captain Archer. He lacks any of the quirks or flaws of a Kirk or a Picard or even a Sisko or Janeway. In the aftermath of such controversial characters, he is simply the result of an attempt to produce a character who is thoroughly amiable and inoffensive and whom no one could possibly hate. But that very attempt has produced an uninteresting character, a bland leading man with no distinguishing characteristics. There is essentially nothing interesting or unique about Archer. Nothing to set him apart as a memorable character like Kirk or Picard.

While some blame for this may be laid at the door of the producers, ultimately character actors like Shatner and Stewart gave their characters life, resulting in what for better or worse were unique characters imprinted on the American pop culture psyche. On the other hand, Archer is eminently forgettable. He is distinguished by nothing except his very quality of inoffensiveness. Archer has come closest to making an impression in episodes such as Fight or Flight or Cold Front, where he was forced to struggle with difficult choices that helped define his character and led away from blandness and towards defining moments that helped place his character on a moral geography. Those were good episodes, but realistically speaking most episodes will not be up to their standards and a Captain should ideally make an impression whenever his character is on screen. For better or worse, even Sisko and Janeway managed to do that. Archer feels more like a blank space titled ‘Insert Starship Captain Here.’

To some extent that charge can also be levied against the general crew makeup, which is heavily white anglo-saxon male with the minorities serving as junior officers. Traditionally, alien characters have become a series’ breakout characters. Spock\Data characters for instance have often taken over the series as the Doctor and Seven of Nine did on Voyager. For now, however, the producers have designated Archer and Trip for the bulk of the airtime. Hopefully this will begin to change and more interesting characters such as Doctor Phlox, T’Pol and Reed who are played by more talented actors will begin to get more airtime.

Ultimately the key difference between Enterprise ten episodes in and TNG, DS9 and Voyager ten episodes in, is that the failures of those shows often came from testing the limits. Enterprise’s failures on the other hand are produced by conservative and derivative plots and a failure to take chances. Star Trek series have tested the limits early on, defined them and used them as parameters for the rest of the series. Enterprise is doing its best to be inoffensive and giving viewers nothing to object to and nothing that might alienate them. The viewership numbers showing less of a falloff suggest that this may be working, but it has also resulted in a less interesting and less compelling show; at least thus far.

“The Andorian Incident”

Summary: Enterprise does Hogan’s Heroes and Archer channels the spirit of Janeway.

Quite a few Star Trek fans became excited at the news that Enterprise was going to bring back the Andorians, but they might as well have not bothered since their appearance contained little more material and depth than the average Voyager alien of the week. The entire plotline pitting Vulcan non-violence and logic against Andorian arrogance and paranoia and human pragmatism and ruthlessness might have made for an interesting exploration of three races and three cultures; but instead we are given a Hogan’s Heroes plot in which Trip sneaks around looking for hidden radios under the noses of his captors. The Andorian culture is not explored, nor is their identity expanded on in any way. In fact, eliminate the Trek pre-history and the Andorians would just be another weird-looking Voyager alien of the week. Their only function in Andorian Incident is to play Colonel Klink to Archer’s Hogan, be violent and threatening and then suddenly passive. They have no depth or complexity, they simply exist and act to move the plot along.

We learn little about the Vulcans either, except for more awful ’smell’ jokes. Considering that Vulcans have the discipline to suppress emotion, it’s doubtfull that they would really be bothered by smells. Nor is this particular joke actually amusing in the first place. The final revelation is not expanded on in any way and the scene of the Vulcan monk being punched out is dubious at best, especially after we see an Andorian beat Archer and Trip at the same time, and we know that Vulcans are stronger than humans. This episode’s entire appeal is to the knowledge of Trek history but seems to be completely uniformed by it.

Produced from the pen of Fred Dekker, formerly the director of Robocop 3 and a veteran of Tales from the Crypt, Andorian Incident is a long journey to nowhere, of which every minute feels as agonizing as Scott Bakula’s torture at the hands of Jeffrey Combs, who seems to have become Star Trek’s filler alien actor. And Combs is allowed to do nothing to make his character stand out in any way, which essentially makes his role that of Andorian #2. This essentially disposes of the Andorian aspect of the Andorian Incident, which might as well not be there.

This leaves us with what is essentially a story about a hostage situation, that has been done a very nearly infinite amount of times on virtually every action series on television. The only thing original about this take on the material, is Archer’s transformation into Janeway as he fumbles for something to do, most of which consists of being beaten into a bloody pulp. His final decision to hand over the information to the Andorians smacks of Janeway’s arrogant and mindless interventionism in other people’s affairs and is downright bizarre in a universe where the humans are outgunned by superior races and their only putative allies are those same Vulcans Archer dislikes so much.

Archer’s first problem begins with the fact that he had no real role in intervening in the situation in the first place, especially if the monks did not want him to. His second problem is that his intervention was disastrous at best. As in Terra Nova, he seems borderline ignorant of elementary military tactics. For example, it is mind boggling to see Archer and Trip realize that the monks are being held hostage and so direct all their attention to one attacker, never even taking into account the possibility of other attackers or bothering to retrieve the downed Andorian’s weapon; almost as mind boggling as Archer leaving Reed behind in the tunnels on Terra Nova. The exact same organization we see on the part of Malcolm Reed, when dealing with the crisis, is the same kind of organization so thoroughly and bafflingly lacking in Archer’s actions. At times it seems as if the wrong man is in command here.

Archer’s final problem is the notion that he has any right to tell either side what to do. It’s not clear why he thinks this, but it seems a legacy of Janeway’s Voyager-era rampages in which she ordered around people on alien worlds, e.g. Natural Law. Except that Janeway at least had a powerful starship while Archer’s is vastly out-of-date. Nevertheless, Archer has insisted on involving himself in situations where he’s vastly outgunned. In Broken Bow and Fight or Flight, he at least took the right side and had some justification for his actions. In Unexpected however, he unnecesarily annoys the Klingons and squanders their debt to him and in Andorian Incident, he intervenes in the conflict of two races, either of whom could crush Earth without barely trying.

Indeed, Andorian Incident could easily have been a Voyager episode. It offers no insight into the races it depicts; its plot and the actions of its characters make little sense and the only joy in it comes from seeing Reed take command and nearly take care of business. Not only has Enterprise’s take on the Vulcans grown tiresome after a handful of episodes, but the series really needs to inject a certain amount of competence into the portrayal of its Captain and look for episodes based on material more original, than Hogan’s heroes.

Next week: Revenge is a dish best served cold and it’s very cold on an ice comet.

“Unexpected”

Summary: An alien impregnates the always fascinating Tucker leading to wacky hijinks.

Unexpected’s first problem is that it isn’t prepared to be either a straight-forward comedy episode or an in-depth exploration of inter-species contact; instead it tries to be both and fails. Star Trek has made such errors in creating episodes before, but what is distinctly odd about Unexpected is that it seems to split the episode in half, with the first half coming off as an earnest look at inter-species contact in the style that Enterprise has adopted over the past few episodes; the second half is a series of fumbled gags in the broad style of Arnold Schwartzenegger’s Junior… without the subtlety.

The result is neither consistently funny, nor consistently enlighting. It’s like a public speaker who spends 30 minutes talking about the global situation and then begins delivering 30 minutes of jokes about the global situation. Where “Strange New World” managed to weave comic situations seamlessly together with the drama of exploration, Unexpected plays like two different approaches to the same story merged clumsily together with Frankensteinian precision. This style of switched gears is unsatisfying and confusing at best and fails to resolve the earlier material. Up until now, Enterprise has set itself the goal of exploring the mechanisms of exploration itself. But with Unexpected, Enterprise takes a look at that mechanism and can’t deal with it and resorts to gags that make the Three Stooges routines seem underplayed.

Part of the problem is that the treatment of the aliens and their ship is so serious and the treatment of the events on the Enterprise and the resulting consenquences of that visit is material for broad gags that even the writers of Junior would have been ashamed of. Neither Archer nor Tucker or the rest of the crew seem particularly disturbed by the idea of an alien parasite implanted inside Tucker and its potential chest-busting consequences. After all, this is a new lifeform with unknown potential health impacts. One would expect such a casual attitude from Dr. Phlox, but considering that such a delivery brings up images from ‘Alien’, you would expect the crew to treat it as something other than a joke and that Tucker would take the threat a little more seriously.

No one seriously seems to consider the idea of just removing this thing from Tucker’s body, presumably because that would touch off controversial political arguments the show’s producers are not ready to deal with; but wasn’t the whole point of Enterprise to get back to the legacy of TOS and among other things its political commentary? Instead of resorting to gags about Tucker’s extra nipples and child-proofing engineering, Unexpected could have actually had the courage to take a stand or look at the issues. Instead it moves from Phlox’s admonition to T’Pol’s about trying new things, Tucker’s earnest exploration of the alien holodeck and the wonder of meeting new and different lifeforms, to the kind of material that has made episodes like Spock’s Brain a byword for the bottom barrel of Star Trek.

Even the plot of Unexpected has striking resemblances to Spock’s Brain. Namely a crewmember whose body has been tampered with by aliens whom they must find to help that crew member, a broken piece of technology the aliens cannot fix and a resolution that involves an accommodation between two divergent parties. You can almost expect T’Pol to ask at some point, “Brain, brain, what is brain?”

Unexpected’s second problem is, oddly enough, technical. Even at its lowest points, Star Trek series generally had no shortage of resources for makeup and set design. Unfortunately something seems to have gone wrong, resulting in makeup and set design that dates back to the TOS era or an episode of Andromeda. Broken Bow’s Suliban makeup was rather weak, but Unexpected’s alien makeup is Halloween $9.95 dollar mask awful. The sets continue the retro impression with flat color cardboard walls, a sparky console raided from a local children’s science museum or an old episode of the Outer Limits and the holodeck’s iridescent wall was borrowed from ‘Lost in Space’. They’re not just tacky or bad, but mind-bogglingly so. I’ve seen fan-made Star Trek episodes with better production values.

Even at its worst, Voyager generally had high quality production values, and while production values can’t save a bad episode, they can make it more watchable and by contrast bad production values can make a bad episode even more unwatchable and highlight its bad points. Unexpected’s awful production values manage to achieve just that, making the Spock’s Brain resemblance all the more acute.

Finally Unexpected’s third problem are the Klingons. While the Klingons generally come off pretty well and they’re closing on a clearly hostile note suggests that they won’t be a pushover, nevertheless their in the first place indicates desperation on the part of the producers in resolving the storyline. Having begun with a straight-forward look at exploration, continued into male pregnancy gags, their resolution of having Tucker meet the alien and having him politely ask her to remove the parasite just doesn’t pack the necessary punch. Hence we have gratuitous Klingon footage: a common solution to problems of plot and story in the later Star Trek series. But simply bringing in an unrelated Klingon vessel and Klingon plot in the hopes of covering up the essential weakness of the resolution, only emphasizes it the essential weakness of Unexpected itself.

The result is an episode that is a muddle of different sections, none of which fit properly. A Frankenstein’s monster of an episode combined with a set that looks as if it could have been used for the original Frankenstein movie.

Next week: A mysterious planet hides a mysterious secret. Find out what the mysterious solution to the mystery is… next week.

Summary: Hoshi adjusts to life on a Starship and Captain Archer struggles with the nature of the mission of the first Starship to explore deep space.

In a way, Fight or Flight may be one of the best demonstrations of the paradigm shift that is Enterprise. It is not the kind of episode that any prior Star Trek series could have done, because ultimately every Star Trek series has viewed its characters as semi-mythological creatures beginning with TOS’s perfect trio. Fight or Flight instead spins the viewer around and looks at its crew as being simply biological organisms in an artificial environment.

From the moment the episodes begins with a worm taken from its native home and dying in its glass cage, even as Hoshi Sato struggles with her adjustment to life on a starship; it is a study of the crew as biological organisms in a foreign environment. The first human starship serving as a test tube and the first real thrust of the human race into the foreign environment of space. Fight or Flight uses Dr. Phlox and T’Pol as the resident aliens to drive the point home over and over again to the humans.

Phlox views Enterprise itself as a laboratory with the crew as his subjects, as his mealtime chatter demonstrates. From his messy and strange sickbay to his views on the crew, Phlox’s perspective is experimental and advocates exploration for the sake of the new things that will result and what the encounters will reveal about the real nature of the subjects and their capabilities. T’Pol on the other hand has nothing but distaste for the biological and prefers a Vulcans sense of order. From that perspective humans simply don’t belong in space. They’re a foreign substance coloring outside the lines. We know who will win this argument, but that doesn’t make watching it any less compelling.

Fight or Flight’s title, a reference to a biological impulse, ultimately refers also to this test of the human presence in space. Unlike every previous series, what is at stake, really is the future. Captain Archer’s role is to pave a way for the human presence in deep space, but it is also to define it, by doing so. Every single decision, every single act and the entire nature of Starfleet itself does not yet truly exist, but must be defined by the decisions the first explorers have made. Much as the standards and practices of the United States of America were born often out of necessity and by men working more for the present, than the future, Archer’s actions are creating precedents that will resonate through the future yet unborn.

In Fight or Flight, Archer’s key decision will define that human presence in space as a positive one, as a means of bringing a human-centered moral order to the stars. And though Fight or Flight is a biological term, Archer’s decision is ultimately a moral one. It is a third choice, not flight but not to fight merely for the sake of fighting, but to define space through the moral imperatives of human character, rather than letting space define them as biological organisms would. And Starfleet and the Federation, those characters of future shows who seem more mythical than real, are defined by that third choice and their world is created out of it.

Hoshi’s trouble adapting to life on a starship is cast as a biological struggle, by identifying her with a worm, perishing out of its natural habitat. But that aspect of biology which is shown as a weakness, by the end of the episode is revealed as a strength; the ability to transcend the native environment. And what holds true for Hoshi, also holds true for the Enterprise and the human race. With Broken Bow, the human race has broken out of the test tube and with Fight or Flight, it has begun to reshape the external environment according to its own innate nature.

Star Trek has often been criticized for appearing as an unreal utopia with no connection to real life and Enterprise has made its mission to provide that connection. Where Star Trek has shown us strange new worlds, Enterprise has shown us the microscopic mechanisms that go into the act and practice of exploration itself. It is the equivalent of a medical show set in a busy and bloody emergency room, to one that shows us the first years of medical school, the first incision on that first cadaver. In Fight or Flight, this connection is viewed at the biological level and the way our moral nature provides the mechanism to transcend that biology and our world into the distant world of the Federation.

The Nation by Michelle Greenberg

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“Oasis is a potentially interesting exploration of women’s liberation
and homosexuality on Star Trek before being thwarted by reactionary
fascist patriarchalism.

Oasis tells a story about the struggle for the possession of a women
between her father and a potential lover, Southern engineer Trips
Connors. As is typical of this type reactionary pabulum, the woman
herself of course has no mind of her own and her only independent
action is to liberate her lover.

Actor Rene Auberjonois who as Deep Space Nine’s Odo was widely
believed by fans to be gay, is brought back specifically to hammer
home his heterosexuality to fans by casting him as a father, yet at
the same time managing to keep him thoroughly asexual. Though there is
of course clear sexual tension between him and his ship’s Captain,
such tension cannot be acted on in Enterprise for fear of alienating
the conservative core demographic and so the Captain is revealed to be
merely another hologram and thus the love between these two men must
remain unrecognized because of society’s intolerance.

Even the relationship between the Southern engineer and the engineer’s
daughter is itself kept strictly sterile with flavors of ice cream
used to symbolize their attraction to each other. By switching her
from ‘vanilla’ flavored ice cream to the more complex ‘rocky road’,
Oasis is suggesting that Trips has introduced her to more
sophisticated varieties of sexual experience. In the tradition of hack
space opera of course, Trips cannot be tied down to one woman and she
conveniently chooses to remain as her father’s property at the end of
the episode. Yet Trips provides her with an ice cream maker for her
trip, which using Oasis’ coded symbolism suggests that he has
impregnated her thus finally putting the ‘woman’ in her place as a
mother even while keeping her locked up in her father’s starship thus
completing the cycle of phallicentric tyranny and ending her freedom
permanently.

While on the surface, Oasis claims to be a story about a father’s love
for his daughter and a woman’s liberation; it is in fact an episode
which views a woman as merely property and ends with the reaffirmation
of the patriarchal status quo.

From the moment we first see the white male dominated Enterprise crew
dressed in uniforms that but for their color would be reminiscent of
Hitler’s Waffen SS, it becomes clear that this Star Trek is no longer
the revolutionary breakthrough series it once was. The Enterprise crew
is itself dominated by a white male Anglo-American patriarchal power
structure that relegates women and minorities to such an extent that
it might almost be called Aryan.

Where the original series was a progressive dream of a socialist
future, Enterprise is an exercise in reactionary nostalgia for a
better time when white males ruled the world as is demonstrated in its
promo full of white males exploring the oceans, diving underwater and
going up into space. There is of course no place for women or people
of color or homosexuals in such a future.

Oasis merely reaffirms this nostalgic status quo in ways both subtle
and gross beginning with the gynophobic and homophobic plot and subtly
with Archer’s invocation of Christian attitudes and morals even as his
crossed fingers appear to secretly making the sign of the cross.
Furthermore the names of three of the ship’s holographic characters,
Tevol, Cuper and Nabi is actually an anagram for “Vote Republican”, a
hidden subliminal message that the reactionary producers of Enterprise
undoubtedly expected that no one would notice. From this it is clear
that there is no extreme to which Enterprise’s producers will not go
to get their message across from oppressing women, subjugating
homosexuals and secretly supporting the Republican party. And it is a
message of hate, prejudice and vile bigotry which no right thinking
person should tolerate.