So if this were Le Femme Nikita (the mine foreman with the finger was in the Vietnam episode today) they would have implanted a tracker on the alien they released to the sphere.
What velocities are involved in impulse speed? They seem to be moving on. They don’t take three days to travel 250,000 miles to the moon. 
And the range was 3,000 kilometers. In The Search for Spock it was 3,000 kalicams. Is 3,000 a trek number. like 47 was in Voyager?
Full impulse is defined as a quarter c in the Star Trek Encyclopedia but like all speeds in Trek, it’s really just however fast or slow the writers want it to be.
.25C is movin’ on.
How fast is voyager (ours, the NASA probe that left the solar system) moving?
39,000 mph or .000058c.
I agree with what some of y’all have said. I like the long story arcs rather than stand-alone episodes. This ep had some cool stuff (the Death Star, the hard-ass Archer, Porthos!), but it didn’t advance the story too much, except for the Xindi file they gained at the end.
My biggest complaint about this weeks show is no Panda!
There was a touch of panda as the hottie marine was getting dressed to go over to the death star.
Also, nice ass-shot of T’Pol.
I loved the episode. And yes, I will be man enough to admit that it’s just because of the rapid fire phasers of the alien ship.
More space combat! (The big deal in last year’s finale was that the ship was being upgraded for combat…not that they were taking on marines.)
… which explains how the ancient Xindi planet in last week’s episode got pulverized.
Okay, everybody and his brother is ragging on the new Main Title music mix right now, but you know what? I liked it. I liked it better than the old Patch Adams version of the theme song they had during the 1st and 2nd seasons.
So there.
I thought they were gonna go all Starship Troopers for a moment with the co-ed showers.
Good episode, i rate it 8.5 out of 10 Topless Hoshis.
Which means they would’ve been moving at 1/16 c for most of this episode, because the spatial anomaly damaged their engines so badly that their top speed was “one-quarter impulse.”
(Assuming that one-quarter impulse scales to exactly 1/4 of full impulse, that is – which, given the hokey way the warp speed formulas work, might not be a justifyable assumption.)
When they first encountered the gutted alien ship, it was 8 million kilometers away, and they approached at one-quarter impulse. Assuming that one-quarter impulse really is 1/16 of the speed of light, it would take them 7 minutes, 26 and 2/3 seconds to reach the alien ship.
This is perfectly reasonable. Archer’s decision to proceed deeper into the Expanse at one-quarter impulse – and T’Pol’s objections – were not at all reasonable. At that speed, it would take them over half a century to cross one lousy parsec.
This episode was actually kinda okay. In fact, I think, with a little tweaking, they should have switched this one and last week’s season premiere.
I thought the last couple of minutes weren’t so hot, and could have benefited from a stronger ending. It would have been easy: The bad guy Panglossian (or whatever the hell they were) scoffs at Archer, and says, “Mercy will not serve you well in the Expanse.” Archer nods and says, “Y’know, I said almost exactly the opposite to your captain. He’s waiting for you.” The alien dude blinks, and then slowly realizes what Archer means. Archer: “I think he agrees more with you than with me.” And hold on a shot of the alien’s face while the door closes on him.
Okay, maybe not exactly like that, but something.
(By the way, this doesn’t count the database thing, which was a nice indication of a continuing arc.)
The other thing that bugged me was Archer’s out-of-control-ness right before he dragged the alien from the brig. He’s leaning against the door, not just angry, but ranting. I don’t mind a captain with balls, but a loose cannon who can’t focus his anger effectively? I dunno, he just struck me as weak in the scene, like he was losing his shit not because it was a good tactic but because he couldn’t keep his shit together.
Other than that, actually not too bad, all things considered. There were a few cliches (e.g., Trip doing the T.J. Hooker Cop Drop on that one pirate alien, and some of the dialogue was flat, as usual), but there was some good stuff. The mysterious sphere was legitimately mysterious: ancient, with an unknown purpose, and left unexplained. And the battle at the end, with the alien ship scraping off the sphere: cooooool.
Next week’s preview, though? :rolleyes:
… to say nothing of the concept of universally-understood “hailing frequencies”. (Frequencies of what? Subspace carrier waves? Does every species in the galaxy use subspace for communication? And if so, why have they all miraculously settled on the same modulation scheme, the same frequency bands, and for all we know, the same character encoding scheme as each other without some of them ever even having made First Contact yet? Hell, we humans have to jump through hoops just to be able to read a text file on a PC that was written on a Macintosh, yet all the aliens apparently use exactly the same computer and communication protocols galaxy-wide.)
Oh, and one more thing: Last week, I absolutely hated the remix of the theme song. On this, my second hearing, it felt like my ears were being attacked by those giant scorpions from Clash of the Titans. I can’t imagine what this musical atrocity will drive me to by the end of the season.
tracer, okay, that’s three of us that actually like the theme music. (Aesiron and me, to be 'pacific.)
Question about Archer’s coffee glob (soon available at your nearest Spacebuck’s): He put the cup down on the table but did nothing with the glob. I would have trapped the thing in the cup just to get it out of the way so it wouldn’t splash all over me later when things went back to normal. Does it remain hot while in that “stasis” too?
Funny that those pirates couldn’t hit Trip at very close range in Engineering. But bad guys are usually lousy shots.
I liked this one, especially the very different music they used throughout it. Not the usual Trekkish tunes.
Good first scene between Archer and the prisoner. Sussman wrote some decent dialogue.
I liked the ending with the blue/green Xindi readout reflecting on Archer’s face. It shows how obsessed he is.
Well, they had to do something. He was angry for the entire episode, even before the space pirates attacked them. Hell, he was angry all last episode, too. He’s just Captain Ticked Off Archer nowadays. I guess to show that he was really really angry, moreso than his usual level of seething pissed-offedness, they had to have him rant.
Incidentally, the movement during the scenes where Archer was manhandling the prisoner looked kind of jerky to me. So, I freeze-framed my VCR and stepped through the scene where they opened the airlock and let the prisoner breathe again, one frame at a time. Sure enough, every fifth frame was an exact duplicate of the frame before it.
This was probably happening because the show was being simulcast in progressive-scan HDTV. The show is filmed (at 24 frames per second), but shown on American TV (at 30 frames per second). Normally, this is accomplished by a “2-3 pulldown,” where every 4th interlaced field is repeated once as the 5th field. However, in the progressive-scan modes of HDTV, you don’t have interlaced fields, you have full-blown frames with no interlacing, so you can’t do a 2-3 pulldown.
Such is the price of technological progress. Take two steps forward, and one step backward.
At the end of the season, you’ll just take a deep breath, lean back, and say to yourself, “You know … it’s been a long road, gettin’ from there to here.”
tracer : I thought that was a photographic technique, because I’ve seen it before. They even did it in the movie Open Range during the final shootout.
Happy Birthday to the most aptly named tarragon918!
viva’s right about the photography, tracer. It’s kind of a trendy thing now, ever since Saving Private Ryan. They had a specially modified camera, as did Ridley Scott in Black Hawk Down. On a lower TV budget, they wouldn’t be able to do that; it looked to me like they were using a fast film and a quick shutter so there’d be less motion blur.
The every-fifth-frame thing you noticed is actually the case for any film-to-video transfer. Enterprise is shot on 24 frames-per-second film, but transmitted in 30 fps video. In order to keep them in sync, frames are regularly duplicated. You can pull any videotape of a film source off your shelf and verify this.
Must put / before second b. Duh. :smack:
Well, it’s very late. No, early. Must hit mattress soon.
Anyone want to do some Vulcan neuropressure on my fifth vertebra(e)?