What Kn*ckers said. Nice that they’d make an attempt at fleshing out Travis’s heretofore nonexistent character, but half-ass execution. Not a horrible episode (like those Klingon marauders or the amazing disappearing Hoshi), but not terrifically exciting, either.
Re the writer: The script was by Andre Bormanis, who started out as science advisor on TNG before contributing to a few teleplays on DS9 and Voyager. Earlier in Enterprise, he wrote that shitty episode where Hoshi spends a ship-threatening crisis trying to figure out what Reed wants for his birthday.
Some pretty good acting by Anthony Montgomery, but it’s wasted on a boring story. Here’s the big emotional scene. Here’s the reunion that doesn’t go exactly smoothly. Here’s the tension. Here’s the conflict. Here’s the crisis of confidence. Here’s the resolution where the hero saves everybody’s lives. Here’s the heartfelt goodbye that indicates everything’s going to be okay. Like Kn*ckers said: Yawn.
I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’ve been harping all along on the false suspense in the show, where they try to convince us Archer will die when the mine explodes or Archer will be executed by the fascist government or Archer will be stuck on a Klingon prison world forever or Archer gets his arm cut off when he falls against a helicopter rotor — uh, sorry, wrong show.
The point is, it’s nice to see them attempt to give the characters some depth by exploring their emotional conflicts. We don’t learn anything about the characters as human beings if they’re totally sure of themselves and they have all the answers and all they have to do is outrace a threat or figure out a puzzle. Instead, characters have depth when they don’t know what to do, or when their decisions go haywire and they have to live with the consequences, like in that episode where they muddled around in that war and probably accidentally triggered worldwide genocide. Or better yet, characters become real when their relationships change, and they think differently of one another in the long term. Right now on Enterprise, every storyline between Archer and T’Pol goes like this: One of the two thinks he/she knows better how to cope with something, the other gently mocks the first, the first decides to trust the second after all, everything works out okay. How is that interesting?
So “Horizon” makes an attempt to change the dynamics between people, which is of course much more interesting dramatically than trying to follow the steps of a mechanical procedure in order to (1) disarm a mine (2) recalibrate a torpedo (3) fill the ship with happy gas (4) fill in the blank, but it makes the same mistake it made with the Klingon trial episode: It puts the emphasis on the supporting characters. How does Travis change in this episode? At the beginning of the show, he’s happy in Starfleet. He gets bad news. He visits home. He sees his brother is screwing up his first command. (Why wasn’t mom promoted instead?) He knows what his brother is doing wrong, and he has all the answers about how to make things better. He is proven right. In the end, he goes back to Starfleet. The people who change in the episode are his brother and, to a lesser extent, his mother. We don’t care about them. We want to see Travis changed by his experience. He’s the one in whom we’re supposed to have the long-term investment. He learned nothing from his experience, really. His brother had an excellent point about who’s going to be responsible for repairing the upgraded systems, and Travis blows him off and goes and works on the weapons anyway, without any negative consequences. If this show were smart, we’d come back to Travis’s family in two seasons and learn that the weapons blew up while the freighter crew was trying to do maintenance, and Travis’s brother was killed; then there would be repercussions and character growth and learning from life’s mistakes. That won’t happen, though. As it is, it’s just another placeholder episode in the adventures of the self-righteous and pure.
So they finally tried to do exactly what I’ve been asking them to do for months, and they screwed it up, because they don’t know how to think about their characters long-term. Hell, I don’t think they even know who Travis really is. We just spent a whole hour with him, and he’s still a cipher.
Think about it: We learned more about Captain Malcolm Reynolds on Firefly in the five seconds it took him to walk up the ramp and without blinking shoot that bad guy Simon was wrestling with in the head than we learned in a whole hour’s episode focusing on Travis. That, folks, is inadequate writing. More and more, I think Berman and Braga simply don’t know what they’re doing. The team is working really hard, but they’re working on the wrong things. There’s lots of fireworks and kafuffle, but we don’t know anything about these characters we didn’t know after the pilot episode. That’s truly disappointing, because the whole reason to engage in series television is the characters. In rare instances, we watch for stories (the inventions of Twilight Zone or the legal convolutions of Law and Order, for example), but much more commonly we decide to dedicate an hour a week to a show because we like spending time with the people. We can forgive a subpar episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer because we got to see Xander pop off or Willow share that shy smile or Buffy make a horrible pun before launching into combat. When we get a subpar episode of Enterprise, there’s nothing left to fall back on, because these characters have barely more life in them than their action figures.
(By the way, Firefly will be released on DVD within the next couple of months including the three unaired episodes. No solid date yet.)
Now, I’m ranting, when I didn’t mean to. But I can’t help but be frustrated, week after week, with the overwhelming sense of missed potential. They’ve got a good setup, and a rich mix of prospectively colorful characters — but they keep missing the boat. They keep putting the focus on the supporting cast instead of the primary players, and they resolutely refuse to let anybody make lasting mistakes and learn from them. It’s like that scene in Life of Brian where a thousand centurions hustle into a room, conduct a search, hustle out, and report they found a spoon. They’re obviously highly organized and motivated and worked really hard at what they thought their job, but they had no clue what they were doing and produced something totally irrelevant.
Oh, and I also noticed T’Pol eating with her hands. That bugged me.
Sigh.
