Category: Trekathon

Enterprise ferries a Vulcan ambassador home. One of the struggles Enterprise has had this season is the Vulcan plots. There’s a great idea there – what was it like before the Vulcans were the firm allies of Earth – but the implementation so far has left something to be desired. There was a great moment…

A strange goopy alien sneaks on board. To summarise the episode: T’Pol is kind of a jerk to Hoshi, Hoshi is a bit uncertain of herself. Most of the rest are stuck to a wall. Hoshi and T’Pol work together and the day is saved. It’s flat and relatively dull writing, but enlivened by what…

Star Trek Masterpiece Theatre presents: The WW2 Japanese Internship Camps. In case you couldn’t guess, this is one of those episodes where they didn’t exactly go for subtlety in hiding their theme – it was even namechecked at one point. That doesn’t necessarily make for a bad episode, but it doesn’t help. The content was…

Enterprise finds a haunted ship. I was worried about yet another ghost story, and so I was quite relieved when it went in a different direction. But that different direction doesn’t supply enough plot to fill an episode, so there’s far too long a stretch to the main plot elements. And then the reveal happens…

No, not the Ferengi. Anything but that. Couldn’t we find a way to include Lwaxana Troi instead? Things this episode did wrong: * Had Ferengi at all. Seriously, it conflicts with the timeline, and I don’t like them. * Forgot that torpedoes weigh quite a lot, and so probably can’t be easily pushed by a…

Some of the crew go hunting with some aliens. Bleh. Dull and predictable. It’s established so early on that the aliens are hunting something a bit more sentient than they’re letting on that it’s mysterious. The siren that appears to Archer doesn’t so much seduce as make us question her judgment. And the final resolution…

Enterprise meets a ship of Vulcans who reject the teachings of logic. Boring, and fails to deliver on the small sliver of promise. We’ve always had hints at the ‘primal nature’ of Vulcans (along with some very inconsistent explanations about how this primal nature if controlled). Here it’s reduced to someone being a little bit…

Reed and Tucker are stranded, convinced they’re going to die. Rarely enough for this kind of episode they stay more or less on target the whole time. The cuts away to the Enterprise are kept to the minimum needed to make the plot work, and we spend the vast majority of the show on the…

Vulcan bureaucracy finally catches up with the events of eight episodes ago. The ‘larger plot’ bits of this episode were good – growing tensions between Vulcan and Earth, T’Pols growing divided loyalties, the dangerous but honest Andorians. There’s a good story being told. I suspect some traditionalists are enraged by the portrayals of Vulcans in…

Enterprise rescues a ship lost in a gas giant. A nice little action-exploration story, which managed to not get sunk on the shoals of ‘stupid Klingon stuff’. The material with Reed, T’Pol and Hoshi on the ship was particularly good. The earlier ‘Hoshi is scared to go on missions’ stuff was boring, this is much…