Giant probe thingy is destroying the world, and the question Starfleet is asking is not how to destroy it, but how to talk to it and politely ask it to stop.
The probe, while en route to Earth, had demonstrated itself capable of casually disabling Starfleet vessels without breaking stride, so they pretty much had to look at an alternative solution.
The probe, while en route to Earth, had demonstrated itself capable of casually disabling Starfleet vessels without breaking stride, so they pretty much had to look at an alternative solution.
Hey, I would watch the shit out of "Reed, T'Pol, and Trip make only sensible decisions as they go exploring a new and uncharted galaxy, conscious of the immense responsibility that lies vested in them as the officers in charge of Earth's first Warp 5 ship."
Meanwhile, Archer is currently back at Earth sitting in jail on charges of public exposure, ruing his decision to urinate all over a memorial tree at the center of a busy park, in broad daylight.
The probe, while en route to Earth, had demonstrated itself capable of casually disabling Starfleet vessels without breaking stride, so they pretty much had to look at an alternative solution.
The probe, while en route to Earth, had demonstrated itself capable of casually disabling Starfleet vessels without breaking stride, so they pretty much had to look at an alternative solution.
In addition, the mode of Earth destruction the probe was using was pretty clearly an attempt to communicate.
A poorly engineered attempt that, in the event of no reply would increase the gain and try again (or, in other words, "if at first they don't understand you, shout louder").
It's just that Star Fleet needed an extinct species to respond in a timely manner, which, eh.
He says about the movie where they go back in time by flying really fast around the sun in just the right way and then recharge the ship by holding a doohickey against a nuclear reactor.
He says about the movie where they go back in time by flying really fast around the sun in just the right way and then recharge the ship by holding a doohickey against a nuclear reactor.
He says about the movie where they go back in time by flying really fast around the sun in just the right way and then recharge the ship by holding a doohickey against a nuclear reactor.
If nothing else, the writers creating a threat that can't be blown up and is only avertable using diplomacy and outside the box thinking is, itself, peak Star Trek. Regardless of what the characters do (blowing it up was, in fact, attempted by them).
Sorry for the delay, been working but going to update after my birthday which is this weekend.
If you've been enjoying things so far, there's a lot more to come, including a Reed focused episode in which we learn nothing about him, an episode where they conclude genocide is morally correct if it's for eugenics and an episode where Archer indirectly causes T'Pol to get Space AIDS. Going to do a double header on that one since a later episode so changes what that episode is about that it has to be discussed.
Anyway, more coming soon and if you want to support this in any way, just posting my Kofi again even though it's not required or expected you know?
T'POL: I'm not familiar with the early years of Human space exploration."
TUCKER: Really? Every school kid on Earth had to learn about the famous Vulcan expeditions.
T'POL: Name one.
[Exceedingly long pause lasting over 7 seconds as Tucker awkwardly looks to Archer for help and he gives a look back of "Can't help you there Bro"]
TUCKER: History was never my best subject.
Having only just found this thread, I know I'm behind and this was probably already commented on, but Enterprise writing is utterly bizarre. They clearly want us to take the side of the crew against the Vulcans, but if that was true why would they write the humans as such incompetent, hypocritical chucklefucks? They didn't have to be ignorant morons, the writers chose to make them that way. They could have written it so Trip or even Archer remembered something here, even if it took some time and effort. It'd be hackneyed but it would get across the 'Vulcans are arrogant' doctrine they're trying to push. Instead, nope. They are 100% possessed of the same ignorance they just accused T'Pol of, which makes them look worse than her, because T'pol didn't make a big deal and get all accusatory about it, so they're hypocrites while she isn't. And this is just one example of a numerous multitude that's beyond counting.
Don't get me wrong, I think making the Vulcans antagonists was a big mistake but the writers are so terrible at it that it's embarrassing. Even bad children's programming is usually better than this.
There's a slug that they abducted from a random planet hanging out in sickbay, but its been doing poorly. It's slowly dying before Hoshi's helicopter pet mom eyes, no matter how much she worries about it. Its a metaphor of course, for how Hoshi is completely unprepared to actually serve aboard a starship.
There was something off about Fortunate Son that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I mean aside from bad characterization, no sense of stakes, pointless canon cameos and the dreaded ANTHROCHAUVANISM, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it until my playlist switched to my Master Filk List and I realized with every song what the problem was
♫ Now it's two months out and it's two months back When you're pushing the speed of light Twenty years on your homeworld's track Pushing the speed of light And your friends are gone and your lovers too And there's damn-all left that you can do And you try to lie, but you know it's true ♫
Oh, a fellow Julia Ecklar fan. She's done some good filk, I haven't heard all her stuff but I liked her Horsetamer album. And I had realized the space truckers didn't work but I hadn't realized they were trying to ape other sci-fi here. That puts everything into a much clearer perspective.
Just in time for Halloween, I present a SPOOOOKTACULAR Enterprise. Well, ok, its not actually that spooky. Its more that they want to project spookiness as a substitute to original or creative aliens. They're instead terribly mysterious, with no defined goals, personality or characterization. But gosh, are they Mysterious. I cannot stress enough, this was the intent as they were looking to branch out a bit more:
André Bormanis said:
And I was very happy with the first script I wrote for Enterprise, "Silent Enemy." We took a bit of a risk by never revealing the motivations of the aliens who attacked us, but that was my favorite aspect of the story. I think our earliest encounters with alien life forms will leave us utterly baffled.
Sure we could try to create motivations for them that would provoke thought or be interesting or be actually unusual and make you think. Maybe even something that says something about society or something. Or we could have this episode I guess. While I will assume that their actual intent lines up with what they say it was, the episode instead reads like what you would get if you forgot you were supposed to write a script for work and showed up the day it was due and had to write it up real fast in the parking lot. What are their goals? I don't know, I need to get this turned in an hour or I am so fucking fired. Brannon Braga will eat my fucking heart.
We begin with a [TEMPORAL PARADOX] because this episode takes place before the previous episode despite being written and aired in order. I don't know how you do this, I don't understand it. Normally its because the network has fucked around with the order but no, they did this to themselves. They're dropping comm bouys to increase their subspace range when a terribly mysterious ship shows up.
REED: A vessel is dropping out of warp, Captain. Twelve kilometres dead ahead.
ARCHER: Put it up.
(A sleek, flattened shape with green highlights comes into view.)
ARCHER: Look familiar?
T'POL: I don't recognise the configuration.
ARCHER: Good.
Archer. Archer shut the fuck up. This is some petty shit bud. I rolled my eyes so hard I heard something tear. I get that being a weird human supremacist is your sole characterization aside from "Dangerously Unhinged." but come the fuck on. I would be more concerned with the fact that an entirely unknown ship just came out of warp right the fuck on top of you. I know, I know, visual scifi has a distance and scale problem but come on!
ARCHER: Good. Hail them. This is the Starship Enterprise. What can we do for you? My name is Jonathan Archer. We're on a mission of exploration from the planet Earth. Hoshi?
HOSHI: The channel's open, sir.
ARCHER: Do you need assistance? If you don't want to talk, that's fine but, you dropped in on us. (the mystery ship turns about and goes to warp) Was it something I said? Did you get anything on sensors?
Ooooh, oh no, they're being terribly mysterious. It can't be that Archer handles First Contact like a drunk guy talking to the speaker box at an Arby's and handles silence from them just as well. Why aren't they, an alien race we've never communicated with in an era where Universal Translators are allegedly so unreliable we need a dedicated translator to fine tune them, not answering me and why are they not letting me order a Half Pound Beef 'N Cheddar. God, they're so mysterious! So Mysterious that the sensors detect absolutely nothing about them. At all. Nothing. Oooooooh.
They have a meeting where Hoshi points out that they're basically just blasting vaguely translated garbage at aliens via who the fuck knows what mechanism the UT works on and T'Pol says maybe you're just fucking boring. Both are valid explanations if I'm honest. I wouldn't talk to Archer if I could help it either. A wild subplot appears however, to continually torpedo the tone of the episode.
Its our favorite Starfleet Sad Boy's Birthday! Given the threat that they face, I can only assume this is them making Hoshi hold a bucket full of sand while everyone else fights for their life for the entire rest of the episode. I will however get it over with quickly: They want to give him something special for his birthday but nobody has taken any time to actually learn a single god damn thing about Reed. No-Fucking-Body. They call his parents in Malaysia interrupting what I can only imagine is some colonialism since they are the most British people you can imagine. They don't know anything about what their son likes, they have delivered him boiled slop on a regular basis. He eats his Wiggan Kebobs and Smack Barm Pea Wet without much complaint. Even Archer thinks its fucking weird that his own parents don't know anything about their kid after he does some light racism:
ARCHER: Where were you at dinner?
TUCKER: I ate in my quarters. Now that we've got the amplifier working I wanted to answer a few letters.
ARCHER: You missed T'Pol's latest bout with chopsticks.
TUCKER: Damn. Dinner and a show.
Dear writers, you had her carefully saw a breadstick through, I think she can figure out Chopsticks. Oh no wait, we in fact know that she can use Chopsticks, she has already used them in an earlier episode:
Looks like she's using them just fine Archer, so my canon is you're just a fucking liar.
Anyway.
Even Archer thinks its weird. Hoshi over the course of the episode asks his sister, his roommate at Starfleet Academy and more and nobody knows what food he likes. Her attempt to interrupt him while he's eating a meal in between tasks just results in her coming off as awkwardly hitting on him, which he rejects. She finally has Phlox violate Space Hipaa to get his allergies list and finding that he takes shots for a specific allergy for a chemical in Pineapples, meaning that Pineapples are his favorite food. They make him the shittiest pineapple sheet cake I have ever seen.
Even ignoring how insulting this looks in universe, you guys could have afforded a better cake. You don't even have to insert Marina Sirtis into it. For your own sake, just spend even twenty bucks more on the cake! And that's it. That's the entire subplot. Dr Phlox breaks space Hipaa and just releases his medical records knowingly, a major violation of medical privacy in order for Hoshi to just get him a shitty sheet cake from the Space Kroger after having learned almost nothing about him. Bo-ring.
This episode combined with Fortunate Son makes me realize they absolutely fucked up on an amazing character concept for Malcolm Reed: Ill Gay Child (Spaceborne). He's allergic to fucking everything, he's super secretive about his personal life to the point that people just realize they don't know anything about him and he loves weapons systems. Is this his life story or half the trans women I know?! He went to space instead of joining the Royal Navy (?!!!) to escape TERF Island! We learned in the dumb cargo hauler episode that they operate on reduced gravity and my god, take that story beat away from Travis Mayweather who "just got used to" high gravity and we have ourselves a fucking stew!
Malcolm Reed should be a spacer borne and bred. His body wracked by the effects of a life at low gravity causing reduced bone strength, blood volume and cardiovascular issues when exposed to normal gravity combined with all his other canon illnesses. They joke about him being gay behind the scenes? MAKE HIM GAY! A closeted person on a spaceship where you're permanently stuck with the same fifty people? Oh my god, the characterization writes itself! He could have made a name for himself with expert gunnery and weapon modifications since this episode has him using a seldom used feature of the structural integrity field to act as a recoil buffer for phase cannons. He could have been the one fighting off Nausicaan pirates instead of Travis Mayweather playing Desert Bus on a starship. His secretive nature, his deference and respect of authority, him constantly advising more useful courses of action, all of it would have come together. Travis Mayweather is a real Harry Kim of a character, replace him outright with something better, but you could have had something interesting. My ideal version of this would be a trans Reed but I think that might be too much too ask of 2001 but Gay would have been possible. Except for that whole Rick Berman thing and the fact that a lot of the American cast and crew were very casually homophobic. But societally, you could have been BOLD god damn it!
Oh well, back to the boring main story where the alien ship zooms in, performs a hard scan that damages everyone's hearing and just blasts their ass with superior weapons before zooming off again, absolutely disabling the fuck out of Enterprise but not finishing them off because they're TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS. They barely survived one encounter and had it been slightly off, they would have sucked Tucker out to space. We get some information about the armament of the Enterprise.
ARCHER: This ship just isn't equipped to handle some of the threats we're coming up against. It's time we do something about that.
T'POL: What are you suggesting?
ARCHER: Enterprise was fitted with phase cannon ports, but since we left Spacedock a few weeks ahead of schedule the cannons were never installed.
ARCHER: I think it's time they were. We should head back to Earth.
Ah! So. They never bothered to even install their primary weapons along with not letting Reed calibrate their torpedoes. Excellent. No Notes. Great job. It even turns out that they could have been working on building and installing them this entire time but haven't for some reason. Trip and Reed have to basically trick Archer into even letting them start after they got rolled in one shot by some aliens.
REED: Just give us two weeks, Captain.
TUCKER: I know we can do it. Most of the stuff we need is already on the ship.
ARCHER: The Armory team at Jupiter Station is trained for this kind of work. If we're going to do this let's do it right.
TUCKER: My engineers are just as good as they are.
ARCHER: I know that, Trip, but we have other systems that could use overhauls. Look at the bright side. You'll got a chance to say goodbye to Natalie.
(He starts to leave.)
REED: Sir, with your permission, we could at least begin the work, get a few things started for Jupiter Station.
TUCKER: It'll cut down the time we'll have to spend in Spacedock.
Great work Archer. Also he just assumes after they basically just got cored by some guys for no reason that they can just head back and be fine. Those guys? Why worry about them? Its not like they're going to attack us again or anything, it would break the Space Bro Code.
Anyway, they get attacked again and the warp core shuts down, dropping them out of warp and taking every single ship's function off line down to the lights. Oops! The Aliens launch a shuttle and T'Pol uses a tricorder to tell Archer that they're opening up the shuttle bay. Archer tells her to seal it while he's sitting in the dark while his XO hacks together a basic picture of what's happening and she has to explain that obviously, she can't fucking do that now can she? Meanwhile, the alien ship docks and ambushes some random guys doing A Little Night Maintenance by flashlight, completely owning them, being 3-0 against this dumb crew. They skulk around, mysteriously one might say, and get caught doing weird shit to those guys by Archer and his armed party and we get a good look at the aliens at last.
View: https://i.imgur.com/TROec0V.mp4
Ahah...ahahahahaha. This. This is their mysterious alien. I can practicaly hear them WOOP WOOP WOOPING out the room like Zoidberg! They look like shit! I showed Dissmech these and she was like "What the fuck is that supposed to be?" and my answer is "Someone high as fuck trying to draw Momaw Nadon".
In response to being phasered multiple times, they just leave. You can just walk out when being fired on by security. Fully DaShareZ0ne it out of there. They also blast the nacelles completely fucking the ship but leaving, again, MYSTERIOUSLY. In Sickbay, we find out that they did invasive medical scans on the crewmen doing neurological damage and-These are the Streib. These are the Streib from B5. Terribly mysterious, do weird medical tests on people, fairly powerful. Only the Streib were a subversion because the Minbari heard about what was going on and went "Oh those assholes? We beat them like a rented mule years ago, guess they're back on their bullshit!" and go beat the fuck out of those nerds. These guys are just absolutely devoid of characterization. Why are they doing all this? Who knows. Who fucking knows!
Anyway they turned out to have installed spyware on the ship and Archer decides to make a speech to them with the nearest camera.
RCHER: Activate visual sensor J-15. I assume you planted that device because you wanted to learn more about us.
ARCHER: I'll be happy to give you a quick lesson. We're not here to make enemies, but just because we're not looking for a fight doesn't mean we'll run away from one. You may think you've left us defenceless, but let me tell you something about humans. We don't give up easily. We'll protect Enterprise any way we can.
*Getting punched repeatedly in the kidneys and peeing blood*
"Let me warn you, I can defend myself quite well if I have to!"
Archer buddy, they've gone full Globetrotter on your Washington General ass. The only reason you're not dead is because they're TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS. YOU GET THAT RIGHT? THAT THEIR MOTIVES ARE TOTALLY INSCRUTIBLE RATHER THAN NONSENSICAL! The ship is absolutely in danger but two things are going to save it. The fact that your crew immediately started pulling double shifts to install weapons faster because Reed and Tucker tricked you before you let them actually cut loose and because the Aliens accidentally unlocked the Enterprises Chakras and gave it an Anime Finishing Move that exponentially increases the damage of the phase cannons while doing recoil damage to the ship and Malcolm figured out how to actually compensate for the recoil. The aliens show up to play a message they've edited together from Archer's absolutely limp threats in Premiere saying that the Enterprise is defenseless and demanding they surrender before they owned by the Enteprise using its exponentially more powerful phase cannons (that they will never use again) and retreat before they take further damage. So I guess they're just out there, in the wind. Able to take revenge or continue to do whatever bullshit they want since they haven't been defeated, only inconvenienced. Luckily they never show up again because this show has the memory of a stoned golden retriever.
Look I know that I drove it into the ground, but this show wants us to find these aliens inscrutable when they're just assholes who do inexplicable things entirely for the purpose of feeling mysterious rather than being mysterious. At the end of the day, its just a bunch of jerks trying to take the ship, something that happens like 5 times this season. I remember when this episode was called "Q Who" and a million times better.
Yeah. I commented on it being Babylon 5 because of some of the implementation, but this is just Q Who again. Only bad. The Borg are interesting and come back, even if Voyager eventually watered them down, and are a new, interesting threat for the Federation. These guys could get a second or third ship and steam roll the entire Earth, which they are a couple weeks from. Heck, remember the cheery, light hearted, Star Trek 4? Remember how the communication equipment on the probe just knocked out ship after ship without knowing it, because their friends stopped talking to them hundreds of years prior?
The guy saying that they're trying to come up with a way to maybe not die from lack of power for life support scared the shit out of me when I was a kid! This isn't scary, both on its own merits and on the fact that it cuts from a life or death battle for survival to Hoshi ordering Dr Phlox to reveal what Reed's medical records reveal about his favorite foods. Absolute Z-Tier Episode.
SFDebris' review of this episode pointed out the supreme irony of having this episode come right after "Fortunate Son." In that episode, aliens attack a civilian ship and put a member of the crew in a coma, and the aesop is that they shouldn't try to fight back. In this episode, aliens attack the NX-01 and put members of the crew in a coma, and aesop is that they need to fight back. Make up your mind, show!
Oh damn. When you started describing this episode, I immediately knew which one it was. Except not, because I was combining it with Fight or Flight for some reason. Probably because this one was so incredibly light, and both involve the Enterprise remembering that their weapons aren't up to real use yet.
I recall that being jerkasses does not count as "mysterious intent." It is a shared trait no matter what your race or species is.
A more plausible alternative characterization is that they're doing it for some vague tautological reasons like say prognosticating that the ship and its crew will cause further trouble if not stopped at that particular time.
I've seen the episode like four times now with @Athene and on my own. Every time the scene of the slug aliens walking away makes me laugh so hard I cry.
Yeah, Archer is kind of at the epitome of unlikable, uninteresting, and incompetent characters. Trip, T'Pol, Reed, and Hoshi are all far more interesting, likable, fun to watch, and better acted than he is. I would say Phlox too, but he's kind of Doctor Genocide, so...
Were I to write Enterprise fanfic, step two after ditching Archer would be to basically cast Phlox as a superficially charming, less bitter Doctor House: completely amoral and frankly a menace if not kept in check by those around him, but such an absurdly and encyclopediacally skilled doctor that it's worth the effort. It fits nicely with the repeated lack of empathy he shows in the series and puts an interesting twist on the group dynamics without requiring anyone to intentionally be an asshole.
Sure we could try to create motivations for them that would provoke thought or be interesting or be actually unusual and make you think. Maybe even something that says something about society or something.
No, that's the brilliance of this episode. In a franchise that normally presents itself as being about exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and boldly going where no one has gone before, only Enterprise dares to ask "what if mysterious stuff is actually scary and dangerous? And we need to shoot it to make it go away?"
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