You realise the sort of technology we are playing about with in this series when Trip suggests excitedly that they will be able to reach warp 4.5 in the next week. This is a series that wants to catalogue the struggles humanity had getting to level of technology we are used to seeing in the other Berman era Trek shows. It’s a neat concept, seeing characters pulling together miracles with the limited technology they have to deal with and watching humanity strive to make its name in the Quadrant amongst the big players already out there. I can see why Berman and Braga were excited by this idea because it allows them to be really cute with their tech whilst suggesting the dangers of the early days of space travel. Creatively that comes packed with suspense and surprises.
Character – Let’s talk Archer, played by the ridiculously charismatic Scott Bakula. He’s such an instantly great casting choice as a Starfleet Captain to head a Trek series you have to wonder why it has taken this long. What then do Berman and Braga decide to make him as frosty and distant as this, with anger boiling under the surface and a penchant for xenophobia every time he opens his mouth. There is a feeling that he is always right and that those he opposes are automatically wrong that sits really awkwardly with me and what this story needed to do was to bring him down a peg or two to inure himself to me, or to at least see him characterised with some level of humour or humanity. It’s all about the mission, the mission, the mission and anything to the contrary is a little irrelevant. On paper they have gotten this character right as a Starfleet Captain; determined, hungry for space travel, ready to assemble a crew but they fail to give him any positive, humane details that add colour and lightness of touch. It’s a real problem as the ship pushes out of dock into the great unknown. I have never not liked the Captain of a show at the end of a pilot. It’s promising that he admits that he has preconceptions about the Vulcans and that he holds grudges at the climax and that he needs to let them go in order for the mission to be a success. It’s just a massive shame that we needed to wait two hours to get to that point.
One of the first things that comes out of Reed’s mouth is also a racial slur, but this time towards Tucker. Are they trying to make this crew as hard to enjoy as possible? He also spends his first scene whinging like a bitch. To be fair he does that throughout much of this series’ run so it is not an unfair first assessment of who this man is. Few Star Trek characters have I had as much difficulty with as I have Reed. He’s just not my kind of man. Humourless, a jobsworth, far too in love with his style of doing things and keeping everyone at arm’s length. I really dislike Dominic Keating’s performance too, even in the episodes where they are TRYING to make him approachable. You know how some actors just rub you up the wrong way and you have no real idea why? Hello, Mr Keating.
Our ‘space boomer’ Travis Merriweather (I know that isn’t his real name now, but it has taken me years to realise that, such is the focus this man has across four seasons and I can’t be bothered to learn his real name) gets more attention in the pilot than he does for practically the rest of the series. He’s sweet and naïve and it is a winning performance and so he is probably one of the more promising characters to step from the pilot. What a shame that that promise would never come to fruition.
Hoshi seems to be having a whale of a time on Earth in an exotic location teaching children alien language. Why would she give that up for a posting on the greyest, dullest ship in the galaxy especially when the idea of space travel turns her stomach? She has a love of language, which is ultimately what sells the idea to her. The thought of being exposed to so many rich, alien languages. There’s something very lovable about Hoshi being nervous about every shiver and wobble that Enterprise makes.
Tucker is the character that I enjoyed the most but he is written in as stubborn and as obdurate way as his captain but Connor Trineer is such a charismatic performer that it is impossible not to be charmed by him at some points in the episode. He has a way of eyeballing the other characters that lets you know he is only taking the more unpleasant shades of his character half seriously and he gets warm moments with Archer, rubbed up and down by T’Pol and faces the criticism of Reed – all of which really managed to warm him to the audience. Interestingly, my instincts about him would prove to be correct, he does turn out to be the most effective and sympathetic human character on this show.
It is worth saying that by the end of the episode the entire crew is working together to save Archer and ensure that the mission is completed but the trouble is although they are made to appear highly competent in that regard it is all achieved without any humour or charm. This would be the template for the show for the next few seasons, which is a great pity. Smiles between characters, witty asides and amusing character conflict are the meat and potatoes of Star Trek and for some reason on the whole those things tend to allude Enterprise.
Porthos the dog is the best character on this show. There, I said it.
Performance – Bravo for John Billingsley. Singlehandedly propping up this cast with his good humour and zaniness. Phlox is a lovable, quirky character and Billingsley manages to find a sweet spot between warmth and quirkiness. His eccentric method of performing medicine by essentially keeping a menagerie of creatures and using them to cure and treat various illnesses by latching them to people or secreting their fluids and such is quite delightful. The show would get some decent mileage out of this notion.
Great Dialogue – ‘We can’t be afraid of the wind, Ensign.’
Terrible Dialogue: ‘So take your Vulcan cynicism and bury it along with your repressed emotions.’
Production – There’s a firefight in the snow, which is rather novel but for some reason it doesn’t quite come off as one of the more memorable shootouts in Star Trek. I think the music is the problem, it feels quite flat and uninterested in the action. James Conway is throwing everything he can at it (the wind and snow machines are working overtime and the lighting is great) but this is the man who brought us The Way of the Warrior firefight and comparing the two leaves one in the dust. Scott Bakula looks a little embarrassed firing his phaser pistols.
Bizarrely one of the things that I really didn’t enjoy on first viewing is one of the few things I do find quite pleasing now; the aesthetic of the ship. There is a real nuts’n’bolts element to Enterprise, like it has just been put together and the unflattering gunmetal grey that permeates everywhere means that the cocktail lounge fashion is still centuries away yet. It does lend a more functional look to the show but at the same time it does feel more like a real ship and not a flying middle-class party in space. It’s not quite the visual misery that DS9 vomited up in Emissary but it is much more convincing than the beige leather and flat lighting offered up in Encounter at Farpoint. The space grapple hooks are a way cool additional and much more fun than the tractor beam.
Enterprise loves leaning on CGI (and why wouldn’t it…it was the most advanced form of special effects work at the time) and as a result many sequences are ambitious and have a real scale to them. Unfortunately, they also look very primitive and unconvincing at times. I always admire ambition over success in special effects work and I’d say this show has a 50/50 hit rate in that regard.
Best moment – The chat between Archer and the Suliban, in which the temporal cold war is first mentioned. It sounds like three words that have been thrown together for the sake of science fiction word peril but the effect is an enticing prospect of a conflict that is taking place over both time and space. That is something very new for Star Trek. At the moment it is just exposition but let’s hope that this is a war that is explored with as much depth as the Dominion War on DS9.
Worst moment – Five seconds into the title music when you realise that this is genuinely going to be the title music. For a few seconds it feels like some mad, feverish dream that Russell Watson has invaded and then reality solidifies and you realise no, this is actually what they are going for.
The first scene between Archer and T’Pol on board Enterprise is so uncomfortable but not for the reasons they are going for. Archer makes a racial slur about the Vulcan sense of smell and Tucker joins in taking the piss out of her. Two male Starfleet officers ganging together to insult and cajole a new female officer. Are they trying to make us dislike these people? There are ways of suggesting that these people are flawed characters and this just isn’t it. I genuinely think this is supposed to be a funny scene. This is usually where I switch off.
A delirious, pained Klingon is greeted with the human kindness of ‘shut up!’ Later on the Klingon makes a racial slur and Trip retorts ‘I don’t particularly like the way you smell, either!’
In one moment that really made me question what humanity is doing out amongst the stars we actually hear a woman being raped on Rigel Ten and Trip, initially concerned, just walks away from it. I think this is supposed to show that this show is going to go to some pretty troubling locales but it is so tonally misjudged that I fail to understand its inclusion.
Trip starts screaming at a woman who is trying to wean her son off the breathing apparatus he needs to survive from a young age. He’s abusive and arrogant. Humanity has so much to learn. If this has been the only point where humanity had made this kind of mistake in the pilot then it would be a pleasing one but on top of everything else and it has a cumulative effect of suggesting that the Vulcans are right. Humanity just isn’t ready.
I wish they hadn’t done that – I have a huge issue with how this show presents the Vulcans because they take all the least enjoyable characteristics of the species (the conceit, the underhandedness, the political cowardess) and fails to give us a Spock or a Tuvok where we can see the lighter, friendlier side of the species. T’Pol at this point is as cold as ice and the Vulcan politicians on Earth are as unpleasant to be around as the human beings they are dealing with. It’s scenes of terribly dreary, unpleasant people arguing. For one hundred years the Vulcans have been holding back humanity from their dream to take their place amongst the stars…but we never really find out why. However, responding to that restraint with ‘you have no idea how much I am restraining myself from knocking you on your ass’ from Archer is hardly the most useful response.
I don’t object to the objectification of men that this series promotes but the method that Enterprise chose to try and sex up the franchise by having characters smearing decontamination gel all over each other’s bodies in a seductive light. It’s looking for a bizarre science fiction reason to get these characters excitable rather than simply accepting that people like to have sex. Look at DS9’s Looking for Pah’Mach; the DS9 crew simply couldn’t keep their paws off each other. When Dax wanted to bed Worf, she threw him on the floor and jumped on his chest. This oily, smeary sensuality is trying a little too hard to avoid the truth; human beings want to paw at each other.
A reason to watch this episode again – I’m going to let you in on a little secret that isn’t going to surprise you at all: I loathed this episode on first broadcast and I still struggle with it now. However, I don’t want to turn this into a bitch fest (which some of these reviews can verge on sometimes) without reason but try and elucidate my feelings intelligently. My biggest problem is the causal racism that runs through the entire episode, which might show that humanity is just as flawed and imperfect at this point as we are now but suggests a level of arrogance in our new crew, especially our new Captain that makes him very unlikeable from the off. Archer is a big problem in general because he doesn’t seem especially competent at this point, but he does come across as opinionated, stubborn and rude. To hand the walking ball of sunshine that is Scott Bakula such an unlikeable role is perhaps Berman and Braga’s strangest creative mistake. I also had big problems with the bizarre mix of old and new continuity, the way this story seemed to want to have its cake (the new style Klingons) and eat it (the pre-TOS technology). It’s not the last time that that would happen to garner ratings (The Borg show up at some point). There’s too much ugliness on display here (the rape scene, T’Pol being hideously mistreated, the Klingon being tortured) and not enough wonder and imagination. The temporal shenanigans haven’t plagued the series too much yet so that is an intriguing new aspect and the Suliban and their athletic, gravity defying abilities certainly offers some visual excitement. Visually it isn’t particularly impressive either and that is where a lot of Star Trek shows hit it out of the park with their pilots (even TNG) but the pallete is all greys and pastels, functional sets and moody lighting. All I want in a first episode is a chance to get to know the new crew and to have some idea od the tone and premise of the series. Emissary and Caretaker did that with real skill. The dialogue from Zefram Cochrane feels like an appropriate way for Enterprise to leave space dock although I couldn’t help but think (given what we had seen in the first 20 minutes) ‘the space racists are coming…’ as the ship edged out into space. It doesn’t bode well for the rest of the series. It bothers me that humanity is so abusive and bigoted in this story and yet has the arrogance to think they have the right to optimistically head out into the space at the climax.
*1/2 out of *****
Performance – Bravo for John Billingsley. Singlehandedly propping up this cast with his good humour and zaniness. Phlox is a lovable, quirky character and Billingsley manages to find a sweet spot between warmth and quirkiness. His eccentric method of performing medicine by essentially keeping a menagerie of creatures and using them to cure and treat various illnesses by latching them to people or secreting their fluids and such is quite delightful. The show would get some decent mileage out of this notion.
Great Dialogue – ‘We can’t be afraid of the wind, Ensign.’
Terrible Dialogue: ‘So take your Vulcan cynicism and bury it along with your repressed emotions.’
Production – There’s a firefight in the snow, which is rather novel but for some reason it doesn’t quite come off as one of the more memorable shootouts in Star Trek. I think the music is the problem, it feels quite flat and uninterested in the action. James Conway is throwing everything he can at it (the wind and snow machines are working overtime and the lighting is great) but this is the man who brought us The Way of the Warrior firefight and comparing the two leaves one in the dust. Scott Bakula looks a little embarrassed firing his phaser pistols.
Bizarrely one of the things that I really didn’t enjoy on first viewing is one of the few things I do find quite pleasing now; the aesthetic of the ship. There is a real nuts’n’bolts element to Enterprise, like it has just been put together and the unflattering gunmetal grey that permeates everywhere means that the cocktail lounge fashion is still centuries away yet. It does lend a more functional look to the show but at the same time it does feel more like a real ship and not a flying middle-class party in space. It’s not quite the visual misery that DS9 vomited up in Emissary but it is much more convincing than the beige leather and flat lighting offered up in Encounter at Farpoint. The space grapple hooks are a way cool additional and much more fun than the tractor beam.
Enterprise loves leaning on CGI (and why wouldn’t it…it was the most advanced form of special effects work at the time) and as a result many sequences are ambitious and have a real scale to them. Unfortunately, they also look very primitive and unconvincing at times. I always admire ambition over success in special effects work and I’d say this show has a 50/50 hit rate in that regard.
Best moment – The chat between Archer and the Suliban, in which the temporal cold war is first mentioned. It sounds like three words that have been thrown together for the sake of science fiction word peril but the effect is an enticing prospect of a conflict that is taking place over both time and space. That is something very new for Star Trek. At the moment it is just exposition but let’s hope that this is a war that is explored with as much depth as the Dominion War on DS9.
Worst moment – Five seconds into the title music when you realise that this is genuinely going to be the title music. For a few seconds it feels like some mad, feverish dream that Russell Watson has invaded and then reality solidifies and you realise no, this is actually what they are going for.
The first scene between Archer and T’Pol on board Enterprise is so uncomfortable but not for the reasons they are going for. Archer makes a racial slur about the Vulcan sense of smell and Tucker joins in taking the piss out of her. Two male Starfleet officers ganging together to insult and cajole a new female officer. Are they trying to make us dislike these people? There are ways of suggesting that these people are flawed characters and this just isn’t it. I genuinely think this is supposed to be a funny scene. This is usually where I switch off.
A delirious, pained Klingon is greeted with the human kindness of ‘shut up!’ Later on the Klingon makes a racial slur and Trip retorts ‘I don’t particularly like the way you smell, either!’
In one moment that really made me question what humanity is doing out amongst the stars we actually hear a woman being raped on Rigel Ten and Trip, initially concerned, just walks away from it. I think this is supposed to show that this show is going to go to some pretty troubling locales but it is so tonally misjudged that I fail to understand its inclusion.
Trip starts screaming at a woman who is trying to wean her son off the breathing apparatus he needs to survive from a young age. He’s abusive and arrogant. Humanity has so much to learn. If this has been the only point where humanity had made this kind of mistake in the pilot then it would be a pleasing one but on top of everything else and it has a cumulative effect of suggesting that the Vulcans are right. Humanity just isn’t ready.
I wish they hadn’t done that – I have a huge issue with how this show presents the Vulcans because they take all the least enjoyable characteristics of the species (the conceit, the underhandedness, the political cowardess) and fails to give us a Spock or a Tuvok where we can see the lighter, friendlier side of the species. T’Pol at this point is as cold as ice and the Vulcan politicians on Earth are as unpleasant to be around as the human beings they are dealing with. It’s scenes of terribly dreary, unpleasant people arguing. For one hundred years the Vulcans have been holding back humanity from their dream to take their place amongst the stars…but we never really find out why. However, responding to that restraint with ‘you have no idea how much I am restraining myself from knocking you on your ass’ from Archer is hardly the most useful response.
I don’t object to the objectification of men that this series promotes but the method that Enterprise chose to try and sex up the franchise by having characters smearing decontamination gel all over each other’s bodies in a seductive light. It’s looking for a bizarre science fiction reason to get these characters excitable rather than simply accepting that people like to have sex. Look at DS9’s Looking for Pah’Mach; the DS9 crew simply couldn’t keep their paws off each other. When Dax wanted to bed Worf, she threw him on the floor and jumped on his chest. This oily, smeary sensuality is trying a little too hard to avoid the truth; human beings want to paw at each other.
A reason to watch this episode again – I’m going to let you in on a little secret that isn’t going to surprise you at all: I loathed this episode on first broadcast and I still struggle with it now. However, I don’t want to turn this into a bitch fest (which some of these reviews can verge on sometimes) without reason but try and elucidate my feelings intelligently. My biggest problem is the causal racism that runs through the entire episode, which might show that humanity is just as flawed and imperfect at this point as we are now but suggests a level of arrogance in our new crew, especially our new Captain that makes him very unlikeable from the off. Archer is a big problem in general because he doesn’t seem especially competent at this point, but he does come across as opinionated, stubborn and rude. To hand the walking ball of sunshine that is Scott Bakula such an unlikeable role is perhaps Berman and Braga’s strangest creative mistake. I also had big problems with the bizarre mix of old and new continuity, the way this story seemed to want to have its cake (the new style Klingons) and eat it (the pre-TOS technology). It’s not the last time that that would happen to garner ratings (The Borg show up at some point). There’s too much ugliness on display here (the rape scene, T’Pol being hideously mistreated, the Klingon being tortured) and not enough wonder and imagination. The temporal shenanigans haven’t plagued the series too much yet so that is an intriguing new aspect and the Suliban and their athletic, gravity defying abilities certainly offers some visual excitement. Visually it isn’t particularly impressive either and that is where a lot of Star Trek shows hit it out of the park with their pilots (even TNG) but the pallete is all greys and pastels, functional sets and moody lighting. All I want in a first episode is a chance to get to know the new crew and to have some idea od the tone and premise of the series. Emissary and Caretaker did that with real skill. The dialogue from Zefram Cochrane feels like an appropriate way for Enterprise to leave space dock although I couldn’t help but think (given what we had seen in the first 20 minutes) ‘the space racists are coming…’ as the ship edged out into space. It doesn’t bode well for the rest of the series. It bothers me that humanity is so abusive and bigoted in this story and yet has the arrogance to think they have the right to optimistically head out into the space at the climax.
*1/2 out of *****
2 comments:
The baffling thing is that this was filmed before the 911 attacks. If it came afterward I could almost understand the shift in tone as many people involved in the production lost people in the attack, the Voyager was already shifting a bit toward conservative politics in its inspiration for the Kazon. But the fact that we needed not one, but two avatars of George Bush thumbing his nose at the international (or intergalactic) community is worrying, and sort of confirms to me that American Exceptionalism was at its apex during this period. Sorry if this sounds partisan, but I lived through two Bush terms, and I don't understand how that smirking goon serves as a model for a Starfleet Captain.
And I clearly remember the roll-out for Enterprise. There was this big spread in TV guide talking about they were introducing a new Kirk, Spock, and Bones. And of course these characters don't interact like the TOS crew at all. That was probably the pitch to UPN, but it's false. This is Braga reveling in his worst excesses and Berman just going with the flow to keep his job.
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