Tonight’s ST:Enterprise
After seeing the first few episodes of the season, I began to feel quite good about where the third season was going…
But tonight’s episode has eroded almost every bit of that optimism.
The first thing I’ve got to get out of my system is that this is clearly an alternate universe from the original Trek, because if this is how stupid, helpless, and generally candy-assed humanity was at this point in time, as a race we clearly didn’t survive to see the 2260’s. Good lord, obviously the only reason the Klingons didn’t wipe us out is that (as the movies and Next Gen shows have demonstrated in many specific instances) despite their battle prowess, as a race they’re dumber than we are.
Good lord! T’Pal’s now been raped twice in two seasons. Next week she apparently goes mad; is she now following in the footprints of Pavel, Geordi, Miles, and Harry to become ST:Enterprise’s official whipping boy? (Or girl, as the case may be.)
Our highly-trained space marines can’t keep us from being boarded through a single airlock. Damn, how do you miss when you’ve got five guys with beam weapons and the targets all obligingly line up for you? Don’t these guys even play Quake 3 in their off-hours?
Our captain nearly spaced an enemy a couple episodes ago to get a bit of information, now he practically hands the ship’s tactical databases to someone just because she has boobs. Oh yes, we got plenty of gratuitous sexual titillation in this story. Thank goodness it’s 2003, because that means the fanboys got to see the alien spy’s hands all over Hoshi and T’Pal as well as Tucker and Archer.
And well done to the bad guys for hiring the alien version of Lara Croft. She can seduce half the ship, take detailed bio-scans of us with her palm ridges, and then tuck and roll around the engine room with phase pistol a-blazin’ to burn holes through another couple of redshirts. (Redcollars. Redtrims. You know what I mean.) On the other hand, the way the bad guys bitch-slap her around for her success makes it clear that she’s a returning character. Too bad the writers didn’t take the time this episode to make her interesting as a person in any way.
In fact, the aliens weren’t having a good day either. Clearly the girl could have destroyed Enteprise – she had free access to the warp core with a phase pistol. Even throwing that out, the reptile aliens can board us at will, ignore hits from our pistol weapons, and walk off with whatever they please. Why didn’t they just blow us up and go home? Their report to their superiors should have been, “Hell, we don’t need to wipe out their homeworld. Whoever wipes us out in a couple of centuries must be some other race, one that’s a threat or something.”
*takes a very very very deep breath* Well. At least it wasn’t as dumb as “Spock’s Brain”.
I think.
I didn’t watch this weeks because it’s up against Smallville now, but I’m surprised you liked last weeks episode. I thought it was probably the worst episode of any Star Trek that I’ve ever seen.
Well, I wouldn’t say “liked”…
I didn’t mean to imply that they’ve all been winners so far. Actually, I wasn’t impressed by last week’s episode… the basic idea was derivative of “The Inner Light”; from a biological standpoint, “our DNA is being re-written to change us into a different species in 15 minutes – but we can fix it afterwards with an injection” plot is ridiculous; the hunting aliens were completely one-dimensional; and there was no payoff to the whole thing, it just kinda petered out.
But some of the earlier episodes this season had shown some promise. I’m just hoping they had a bad couple weeks.
Enterprise; the continuing story
Personally, I think this is all a plot by the Sulaban. think about. They go to the Zindi and tell them that this evil race called humans are coming to kill off their entire race, so they best send something that will either kill them or at least slow them down until they can find something that will commit genocide.
While on the flip side, they then go to Archer and tell of this evil race called the Zindi, who are building a mass weapon to commit this genocide. So this then makes Archer all paranoid and he goes racing off to save the world.
Meanwhile, the Sulban come and take over everybody. What a perfect Trojan horse.
Re: Enterprise; the continuing story
Yeah, but a few more eps like this, and I won’t really care if the Sulabon win….
Re: Enterprise; the continuing story
I think you are most probably right, and that this is destined to be the classic “self-fulfilling prophecy” where somebody tells the Xindi we’re going to wipe them out, they go all genocidal on us, and to protect ourselves, we wipe them out. The Suliban would be excellent candidates for “somebody”.
It’s really pretty good story-arc material, if the writers will only do intelligent things with it.