I’m not sure what frontier this is we’re exploring, but I don’t think it’s exactly final. A semi-fatal frontier, maybe, since every post I publish gets less and less traffic. How long until no one is reading GameSpite at all? I predict July. That doesn’t give me much time to get through all these DVDs! So I’m wrapping three episodes together.
Unexpected: In this episode, Commander Tucker visits what is basically an Asari ship and unwittingly conceives a child with Liara T’Soni’s big sister (not through sexual contact but rather through sharing emotions and indirect physical contact — seriously, Enterprise is basically the Mass Effect bible). The difference between this and that one episode of The Next Generation where Counsellor Troi accidentally gets space-pregnant is that it’s a male character who carries the child. (Sadly, this doesn’t keep to The Cosby Show canon on male pregnancy, so Trip doesn’t deliver a 12-inch sub and two-liter of orange soda at the end.) What isn’t different is that it’s still a pretty crappy episode and premise, and further cements the previously established notion of Tucker as a complete twit who has no business making first contact. And people wonder why this show bled viewers even faster than this website!
Terra Nova: Chronologically, I guess this is the first of Trek‘s recurring missions to make contact with lost human colonies, which is a pretty neat idea. However, it’s pretty much completely rote — however will the crew manage to gain the trust of the suspicious lost colonists and save them from themselves!? — and all I could think about while watching this was how terrible a race of people who have lived underground for 70 years must smell.
The Andorian Incident: Ah, this is more like it. This episode, which sees the crew wade into the thick of a planetside terrorist incident, is by-the-numbers Trek, but at least this time the crew bumbles into somewhere they didn’t belong in the first place with good intentions. What makes it more interesting is that the core dispute is between two of the franchise’s mainstay “good guy” aliens, the Vulcans and the Andorians. The latter are those blue-skinned, white-haired dudes with the little antenna stalks; one of them served as president of the Federation in one of the films. Seeing them embroiled in a bitter dispute is actually kind of interesting and finally gets to the core of what gave Enterprise potential in the first place: Not an hour of watching humanity stumble through space each week, but rather a chance to explore the roots and evolution of the better-known Trek universe. If the show goes more in this direction, I’ll be OK with it.
But… given the track record so far, I predict the next episode is going to be about Tucker spilling beef broth on T’Pol and causing her to have a near-fatal anti-meat allergic reaction, which the crew will then mock her about. Then Captain Archer will spend a week in sickbay after accidentally stepping on a rake that someone left laying in engineering and smacking himself in the eye with the wooden handle. Meanwhile, Hoshi meets a sexy alien strip-dancer and learns there’s one language she’ll never fully understand: The language of love.
Actually… I would watch that.
It gets worse. Nobody will fault you if you skip to the watchable season 3, the entertaining season 4, or maybe go straight to Kirk.
That said, I’m going to read each of these entries you write. I am slightly hopeful that there’s some good Enterprise episode I missed that you’ll discover for us.
I always pitied the guys playing Andorians, having to try act convincingly with those ridiculous deely-bopper antennae on their heads. It’s a design which the Original Series could just about get away with, but one that looks totally absurd in the supposedly “grittier” world of Enterprise.
Hey, these are always entertaining to me, even though I’ve never watched any Star Trek, and your food posts make me indescribably hungry.
Oh, please keep These making these Trek-posts… Its a Great Read and besides, I also Fell back into old Habits and started watching TNG again on tv. Of course the production values are slightly hokey, but its Great Fun. Makes me Feel much younger again.
I started watching Enterprise thanks to this, and I only got to episode 5 before quitting.
I like reading your Star Trek posts too.
Your recaps are now firing on all cylinders!
I too enjoy these recaps (if not the show). In fact, I think they have also been responsible for my wife and I firing up some Trek as well – though in our case it’s DS9.
More Enterprise episodes on this site? Are you trying to get me to stop visiting the front page?
Yes. Go away and leave me alone!
Your predictions are eerily close to actual plot points in future episodes. There is literally an episode called “One Night in Sickbay” (though no rakes are involved).
“Then Captain Archer will spend a week in sickbay after accidentally stepping on a rake that someone left laying in engineering and smacking himself in the eye with the wooden handle.”
I suddenly had a Simpsons flashback there…
It doesn’t get better, then it gets worse and never gets better, then there’s a great Mirror Universe two parter, and then it ends suddenly in a spoiler.
Well, I plan to continue reading gamespite unless you say something really disagreeably sexist and I delete the blog from my rss feed in disgust. I don’t really see you doing that any time soon, though, and I am really enjoying the star trek posts.
I love these Trek-posts! If only so I can completely disagree with them.
Yeah, the Enterprise crew do come off as pretty bumbling early on. But that’s kind of the point. When the show starts off, they’re basically glorified astronauts. They’ve been sent out to explore shit without the benefit of hundreds of years of experience and protocol to fall back on like Kirk and Picard had, or the same rigorous Starfleet Academy training (since Starfleet is a shell of it’s future self). If you read into the histories of Earth’s actual explorers, a lot of their adventures sound just as haphazard and ridiculous as the ones on Enterprise – maybe even worse (I mean, ask Magellan how well his stay in the Philippines went). That’s just how real exploration is – shit happens that you don’t or can’t account for. A lot of the stuff that happens to the Enterprise crew looks avoidable, but only because we have the benefit of watching these shows for decades and we can spot a plot-arc from a mile away. And honestly, if you go back to TOS, Kirk and company have just as much, if not more reckless abandon than Archer and co.
As for the criticism that Humans are idiots and that Vulcans always know better, “The Andorian Incident” should be a good indicator of things to come on that front. Needless to say, once the Enterprise crew gets their space-legs, so to speak, things begin to balance out a little bit more.
I’m not a big Trek fan, I’ve seen a decent chunk of the original series, the new movie, and Wrath of Khan (I found it boring so I don’t think I’m ever allowed to call myself a Star Trek fan), but I’m enjoying these pieces. So there’s one more person reading them.
More people need to step on rakes. Brings me back to Tom and Jerry. It always works on me.