Chef is Future Guy.
I haven’t read this thread yet (will after this post) but just wanted to say I’ve finally gotten to see an episode of Enterprise after a year or more.
The last one I saw before this was one about some hunting planet and a shapeshifter that Archer had the hots for or something. Bleh… it sucked but this show was halfway decent. I finally feel like a Trekker again! Whoo!
Just a few notes and questions from a relative neophyte:
-Who’s Daniels? They talked about the dude ad nauseum and it was annoying 'cause it was obvious it was geared towards regular viewers and I wasn’t one. Boo, hiss.
-Why the hell does Archer have a database of the next nine centuries in some room on the Enterprise and they haven’t turned it over to Earth or even Vulcan?
-If they have the future database, why is T’Pol adamant about the ‘impossibility’ of time travel?
-Speaking of which, is T’Pol always so emotional? She seemed visibly annoyed and angered at Archer. Is it part of her character or is Jolene Blalock just a horrible actress?
-Is Phlox always so annoying and Neelix-y? If so, I found the character to hate for Enterprise. It was Worf and Wesley for TNG, Odo and Jake for DS9, Neelix for Voyager, and, so far, Phlox and T’Pol for Enterprise. When he was in the Mess with the Ice Queen, I wanted to punch the smile off his face. Ugh.
-While I’m on characters… I like Reed and Trip. Archer’s okay, Hoshi’s unbelievably hot, and Mayweather’s rather vanilla.
-Aaaaand finally, did Hoshi and Mayweather seem really wooden to anyone else in this episode? It seemed to me like they were just staring off into space and then suddenly remembered they were on set. All their lines were delivered as if they wanted to be anywhere else and they seemed to be picking at their consoles much like a kid who was told he had to finish his brussel sprouts or else.
Daniels is a 29th-century guy who was sent back in time to fight for the Federation in the temporal cold war, kind of like a spy. He brought that equipment with him when he took on the role of a Starfleet officer and got aboard Enterprise. He was killed (at least, sort of; he’s still alive in the future or something) and left that stuff behind. He has communicated to Archer about roughly how to use it, but it has to be kept secret, since it’s from the future. You’ll see when you read this thread that I found that somewhat inconsistent with Archer’s willingness to turn over the future pod in this episode.
T’Pol is holding out for some alternate explanation of where Daniels came from. You can tell it’s getting harder and harder for her to do this, and I don’t think that the apparent emotions she’s having are the artifact of a bad actress.
Yes, IMO, Phlox has always been very Neelix-y. In fact, I asked on this board, right after the pilot, why so many people hated Neelix, but Phlox seems well-liked. I still don’t know. FTR, I thought Neelix was okay.
Thanks, Archernar.
Okay… read the thread and I don’t really understand the love that this episode’s getting. I think it was Jonathan Chance that said nothing happened and he’s right, the whole show seemed like it had no real purpose. Don’t get me wrong… I did like the show but it seemed like it had no real danger. I can’t explain it much further than that. Sorry for the ambiguity.
Most of what annoyed me about the show’s already been trounced, like cutting open the ship and going in without any sort of thorough scan. T’Pol ran her tricorder over it for maybe fifteen seconds and that was that… hello? Unknown virii and pathogens?
And then there was the fact that we didn’t get to see the Tholians. Hmph… I’m not even a fan of TOS other than the movies but don’t tease a Trekkie. We might have to go Klingon on you. Or just whine incessantly. Either, or.
With all that being said, I liked all the not-so subtle foreshadowing like the possibility of Vulcans and Humans interbreeding. (I always disliked how it was never mentioned how difficult someone like Spock would be to conceive. He had to have been a test tube baby but no mention of that was ever made. The same for B’ellana, Troi, and other polyhumanoids), the mention of bio-neural technology, and even the missing Zephram Cochrane. It’s little touches like that that make me happy.
It’s “viruses” not “virii”. Virii is h@><0r 5p33k.
I’ll stick to haXX0r then. Virii looks cooler.
Yes, and I was reminded of “Dead Stop” when Malcolm and Trip did some unauthorized spelunking down the inside of the ship. It was Trip’s idea again, of course, with his convenient excuse of having to go get his spanner. The same folks wrote this episode and that one, so it must be some kind of theme for them.
Western literary tradition and criticism often uses the ‘other’ and ‘self’ concept. It’s a system that allows the readers to distance themselves from the terrible acts that befall those defined as ‘other’. Contrariwise, when the reader is encouraged to view a character or group as ‘self’ then the reader can take personally events occuring to that group or character.
Actually, there is some subtlety in the writing of Enterprise in that the Vulcans as a group straddle of line of ‘self’ and ‘other’. They have a certain ‘self’ because we the viewers know them through the positive history of human-vulcan relations through the previous shows but frequently in Enterprise they’re defined as ‘other’ because they’re antagonistic to the central characters of the show. Deft.
Also, while the Suliban and Andorians are ‘other’ certain members of that class are ‘self’ through character development.
Not that I’d think the writers would define it that way. I agree that they’re stumbling around in the dark.
And here’s a starter course (literally)
SD Intellectual watching Enterprise unite!
In Jadzia Dax’s last episode, they mention protein resequencing or something that they are doing to Jazia so Worf’s Klingon sperm can fetilize her eggs. Why the Klingon sperm can’t just Bat’leth their way into the Trill eggs is a mystery to me. But then Jadzia goes and dies, so that’s the end of that story.
Oh, then you haven’t read Spock’s World, by Diane Duane. She does quite a good job of covering this.
Jonathan Chance, I’ll read up on it later, but it just sounds to me like “self” and “other” are different ways of saying “protagonists” and “antagonists”. And yeah, there are good reasons why the protagonists share similar goals and the antagonists share different ones; it wouldn’t be a story otherwise. Maybe to illustrate, you could give an example of a Star Trek tale or other well-known story in which the self/other synthesis does not apply but the protagonist/antagonist synthesis does, or vice versa?
So, Enterprise picks up a strange probe and right away (no scans, hull scatters it) people walk up to it, pry it open, all without EV suits. Hooray for no safety precautions! I’m not sure that Archer was completely unchanged by the gas inside, evidently he was a lot more sane for the rest of the episode.
Is it just me, or has the sickbay lighting changed considerably? It looks a lot darker inside now than before. Me like. A bit of gratuitous Zephram Cochrane name-dropping there, but it’s bearable.
The ship’s bigger on the inside than the outside: goody. I don’t know if it’s been said, but in all of the future stuff (including other ST lines) there has been little improvement. Ships get slightly sleeker, technobabble gets more improbable, but ever since TNG, there has not been too much change in the basic technology structure. This is a real improvement: space saving technology. I guess Earth gets pretty overcrowded in the 31st century…or maybe the idea was from Denobula.
Daniels ex machina…bearable. The “it’s unlikely that we could reproduce…humans and Vulcans, I mean” put me back in A night in sickbay mode, but it did make this episode much better in comparison.
Suliban cloaking devices are sure handy: they can cover up idiotic moves by the command of the ship. Anyone notice the similarity of the Suliban and Tholian ship? I guess all Future Faction ships have that design…
I liked the Phlox/T’pol scene, showing the differences between their cultures’ thinking. Phlox’s snorting seems a bit more than usual, though. Subtlety is at a premium in B&B Land, I suppose
Oh yes, before I forget, I really liked the new music in this episode. Maybe it’s just the novelty factor, but still. I was rather jarring to hear the “panic theme” in the cutting-through-the-door scene.
Temporal discombobulation with the ship, well done. I also liked the future-knowing conversation. But, yes, I suppose pens will be called trans-phasic writing utensils in the future. Doesn’t bode well for Luddites.
I expected a Vulcans-to-the-rescue ending as well, although as soon as the damages ship popped up, I thought that Archer would play the two species off of one another. Guess they did the work for him. Lucky bastage.
The ending was a remarkable show of sci-fi restraint. The ship’s disappearance was much more eerie (well, sort of) and effective.
The dinner-cum-wrap-up scene was a mixed bag. Trip’s “they sure did it fast” was really quite heavy handed, as was Archer’s response. I suppose that the producers were trying to cater to a broad audience, but if people cannot figure out that time travelers can take all of the time they need, they probably would not be watching Enterprise (unless for the decon scenes).
On the other hand, the last few lines were very nice. Archer apologizing to the High Command shows that he is more willing, at least, to work with the Vulcans, which will probably be a story arc until the founding of the Federation. This may be a key point in reducing Vulcans to “the intellectual PUPPETS of the Federation” a la STIV.
One major gripe, though. If it is possible for species to mate and not produce sterile offspring (was Spock sterile? No sarcasm in this parenthesis) they are no longer considered separate species. A species is defined as a group in which all members can successfully reproduce. Humans, Vulcans, Klingons, and (I guess) most other low-budget-aliens-with-forehead-modifications would be considered one species.
Whoo-hoo! the tape actually recorded this episode. After tests and what not, i might actually get to watch it Wed.
Athelas– I didn’t see the ship as being extradimensional so that they could save space; I thought they built it that way, with most of it in another subspace and just the teensiest bit of a periscope peeking out so that they could fly around and spy on things, virtually undetected.
There was a geometric solid in Calculus that had an infinite volume and a finite surface area. A sack that you could put everything in and still carry around.
They must have figured out how to build one.
Maybe you didn’t have to move all that mass around or something equally cool.
Bag of holding. I got one in my current D&D campaign…
::d&r::
Probably borrowed that sack from Santa…
Impulsive BUMP
I used to know a girl who…never mind. Damn snow!