Category: Trekathon

Doctor Phlox writes a letter to colleague. An interesting story, which for me highlighted the strength of this character at least. Doctor Phlox is one of the most fully realised aliens we’ve seen on Star Trek – alien, with different physiology and culture, but also with his own distinct personality beyond a cultural dictat (*cough*…

Enterprise decides to step up its defences, because of a run-in with some mysterious aliens. There’s been something missing from a lot of the plots so far in this show. I can’t quite pin it down, but there’s a lack of interesting stakes, or perhaps its just a lack of reaction to the stakes. The…

An observation mission turns a lot stranger as the plot arc kicks into gear. Well, clearly the pathetic security of Starfleet ships was part of standard operating procedure from early on, as visitors wander the ship completely unescorted. At least Lieutenant Reed noted that free access might not be the greatest idea. The temporal cold…

The Enterprise responds to a distress call. Another developing theme – it’s the frontier, but things are changing. The tensions between the ‘new way’ and the ‘old way’ are made clear enough, without too much resort to beating the viewer over the head. The freighter officer comes across as a bit too obsessed, but there’s…

Archer explores an alien planet, falls in love, saves the day. Y’know, Captain (Kirk) stuff. The lightest outing so far. While there’s an attempt to create some stakes, we never get a really good feeling for the aliens suffering from the disease (compare, for instance, with *The Quickening* in DS9). So it’s more of a…

T’Pol turns out to be the ‘cool’ Vulcan, at least by comparison. The other developing theme of the show, other than the ‘space is dangerous’ message, is ‘we don’t trust the Vulcans yet’. It makes sense – a whole lot more sense than the relationship we see in TOS and beyond. Relationships are based on…

The Enterprise gets caught in the middle of some Andorians holding Vulcans hostage. Now that is not a twist that I was expecting. Everything we know about Vulcans tells us that the Andorians are the ones going over the edge – finding out that they were right, and the Vulcans were hiding a military base…

The Enterprise investigates the site of a lost Human colony. Well developed, with a nice presentation of the ‘fallen humans’. The SF idea of ‘only the children survive, what did they grow up to be’ is one that is so old as to border on cliche, but it’s nicely handled here (primarily due to some…

Tucker gets a little surprise from an away mission. The episode largely manages to rise above the idea, which had the potential to go quite wrong. But the pregnancy is played fairly seriously, and isn’t used for a lot of comedy. But it’s a more uneven outing than the previous four episodes, with less of…

The away team comes down with a case of the hallucinations. This story wouldn’t have worked as well in the other series. Everyone turning on each other would have made the viewer go ‘Oh, they’re drugged’ almost instantly. But there’s enough distrust established with respect to T-Pol that what seems to be going on initially…