Month: April 2013

Trip and Hoshi catch a really nasty alien virus. An ambitious episode that ultimately falls short of its goals. It was interesting to see these observers inhabit different people, and assemble their views on humanity. But it’s not at all clear what they were trying to learn from this, or why this will tell them…

The inventor of the transporter comes aboard for a mission. The first entirely standalone episode Enterprise has done since *Bounty*, 35 episodes ago. Let’s just say they should stick to the bigger stories. For a large part of this episode it danced on the edge of ‘awful’, before plunging over the edge with a dreadful…

The Vulcan High Command launches an attack on Andoria. With the exception of administrator V’Las, I thought this worked very well as the reconciliation between TOS and later Vulcans and the Vulcans of Enterprise. V’Las, though, just goes too far over the edge. Maybe that’s meant to be a hint to his affiliations, but he…

Archer becomes the Vulcan Martin Luther. Well, it’s a good thing this appears to be the ‘Vulcan reset button’ story. Because if it wasn’t, I’d be pretty annoyed by the portrayal of the high command. They simply are not acting like the Vulcans we know from later series. Apart from being plainly based on the…

Vulcan terrorists blow up the Earth embassy. The portrayal of Vulcans in Enterprise has been controversial. They are, with no question, not the Vulcans of later series – they don’t act the same, or have the same beliefs. Personally I’ve been happy to let that be, on the basis that the writers were going somewhere…

Archer has to stop the augments before they destroy a Klingon world. In the great debate of nature versus nurture, this episode comes down relatively solidly on the side of nature. We’re told that the augments are this aggressive and dangerous because of their genes, rather than their upbringing. I would have preferred a bit…

The Augments raid a research station to retrieve their frozen embryo siblings. The one thing harder to write about than a two-part episode: the dread three-parter. Most of what is interesting or good, or bad, or strange, was set up in the previous episode. And nothing is really resolved here. At this point I’m actually…

Enterprise has to track down a group of augmented humans who attacked a Klingon ship. It’s comforting to be back into plots that feel a lot more like Star Trek. As annoying as the Klingons can be, you know where you stand with them. Plus it helps to have a great guest star, and Brent…

Everyone goes home. Except Phlox. Another of the ‘anthology’ episodes that Enterprise seems to enjoy so much. The best was Archer trying to deal with his actions – I like seeing the psychological consequences on the crew, it grounds the show in reality. It’s handled reasonably well, even with the gratuitous rock climbing sequence. The…

Archer defeats the Space Nazis. A bad plot that was resolved about as well as could be hoped. The plot runs all over the place for not much result, such as the Trip subplot – a lot of effort, no real storytelling. The most ambitious bit was the opening newsreel, but that fell pretty flat.…