Enterprise Kir'Shara Spoilers

Cafe Society
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I watched the episode again. And again, I liked it. Corner’s comments about the characters, and the show in general, feeling reborn is right on the money. The way the story played out didn’t have a lot of surprises (except for the Andorian torture sequence), but it was satisfying anyway.

Nitpicks:

I agree. The nerve pinch is a neat touch, but there’s no way he should have been able to stand up to those trained security officers mano a mano.

In addition: Did anybody think it was weird that the Forge is just a two-day walk from the High Command’s facility, which is presumably in or near the capitol’s downtown? If you pretend our UN Headquarters in New York is our global capitol, it would be like the worst place on Earth being in south Westchester County. But I guess this is the same sort of thing that puts the Klingon homeworld within four days of Earth at mediocre warp speed. Uh huh.

The one thing that really bugged me, though, is that Archer insisted on going after the captured T’Pol, when it was clear that T’Pol was deliberately leading the search parties away from their planned route. She made a strong and stragetic choice to sacrifice herself in the short term in order to make the mission possible, and Archer takes a huge and stupid risk that makes her very sensible action meaningless. Yeah, he’s an emotional human, but he’s supposed to be smarter than that. (No snickering now.) That’s especially true with the Vulcan influence, or it should have been. Anyway, this irritated me a lot. Archer and T’Pau should have gone straight to the High Command and left T’Pol behind; it’s not like it would have made a difference in the story anyway.

Oh, and I also want to see if Trip gets hammered (heh) by Earth’s political leadership. He went way out on a limb by disregarding a direct order and turning over an ally’s military secrets to their enemy; his reference to a court martial (but wait, they aren’t military… oh never mind) at the beginning would be, I think, understating the possible consequences. There has to be some fallout here; just because he turned out to be right doesn’t mean he skates by the whole dereliction-of-duty thing.

All the same, nitpicks aside, the difference between the show now versus what it was just a year ago is simply astonishing. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Trek again. Maybe not perfect, and definitely not measuring up to the heights reached by previous incarnations, but I’m no longer embarrassed to be watching it.

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Did Archer know that? I remember T’Pau telling him where they were headed afterwards. (She was pointing out T’Pol’s cute little footprints) If they knew she was leading them away rather than being taken somewhere would T’Pau need to tell him where they were going?

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[QUOTE=Corner Case]
[ul][li]I suppose the Syrranites, having lived in the Forge, would know more about Gallicite, but it still seemed odd that the Vulcan police were caught unawares in that canyon.[]A puny human fighting the Vulcans seems ludicrous. []Surak had holographic technology 1800 years ago? []Koss’ divorce didn’t seem to fit. []I liked T’Pol’s green bruise; good makeup.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]

I think the Vulcan security guys just didn’t know the gallicite was there. The third guy tossed his lurpa aside when he saw what happened. And what’s with the sissy boy lurpas? THey were larger in Amok Time.
Vulcans ain’t what the used to be. Archer helped Arev pick up a big ol’ TOS styrofoam boulder that Spock could have tossed around with one hand.
The Ambassador told Admiral Forrest Humans rebuilt in 100 (or 50?) years what the Vulcans rebuilt in 1500. Those who followed the raptor had warp drive to travel to Romulus, so I presume Vulcan had technology for 1500 years and was kind of stuck killing each other off and not having Science Fairs.
I think they were just cleaning things up with the divorce. I think it was a mistake; if Trip continues a love interest with T’Pol it will kill some story lines.
Yeah, good makeup. I just wish they would blush green. ^:)^

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I just want to thank y’all.

After the end of last season with more time travel crap and no attention to getting to where TOS came from with interesting twists, I had given up on this show and not bothered taping it on Fridays or Sunday. Then I lurked here and heard the good reviews of the first three parter with Spiner. Now I’m back taping and loving what I’m seeing. Sure there are nits to pick, as have been pointed out, but this is more Trek than Panda and its about time.

Anyone know if it is going up in ratings as a result, or just pleasing us? Especially in their lusted for young denographics?

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UPN: Please send the checks to my PO Box.

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I hate to break the news to you, but Trek has been full of Panda since day one. (Orion Slave Girl, anyone?)

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[QUOTE=Corner Case]
Technical nitpicks:[ul][li]A puny human fighting the Vulcans seems ludicrous. He may have some Vulcan knowledge, but he’s winded, sunburned, and should not be able to stand up to Vulcan physiology. :([]Surak had holographic technology 1800 years ago? :frowning: I thought Vulcan technology would have advanced a bit faster than that. Okay, someone could have transcribed it, but the conversations were along the lines of the Kir’Shara being the real original.[]Koss’ divorce didn’t seem to fit. Since he blackmailed T’Pol into it in the first place, what would it matter to him if mom died?[/ul][/li]Remember that Archer just came back from a week or so of rock climbing at high altitude. He’s supposed to be in pretty good shape. Also, Surak died as a result of radiation poisoning because the Vulcans nuked themselves back to the stone age. It took 1500 years to get back to where they were before the war began. And the divorce makes perfect sense. It was a marriage in name only, pon-farr notwithstanding. To remain married for the stated purposes would have been illogical. ^:dubious:^

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No, getting rid of the time-travel stuff is a lot of what is saving it. :wink:

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Am I the only one not surprised by the upswing in quality?

Does anyone remember how truly bad the first couple seasons of TNG and DS9 were?

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Odinoneeye–do you remember a little thing called a “writer’s strike?”

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TNG was execrable its first season (pre-strike, Ethilrist) but DS9? Hardly. While it took two years to get sure footing and I agree that seasons three through seven were its prime days, season one and two gave us some magnificent episodes and only a few truly horrible ones.

A Man Alone? Progress? Duet?

The Homecoming? The Circle? The Siege?

All are just as good as anything TNG gave us in its prime.

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I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks that! I haven’t been participating in these threads lately, but I was really surprised how many people liked the 2nd show. The 1st show was, IMO, one of the best so far. I’d grade them:

1st show: A-
2nd show: D
3rd show: B

Too much mumbo-jumbo in the 2nd show for my tastes. I think Trip did a great job in command during teh 3rd show, and was wondering if things might not be better with his character instead of Archer in the captain’s chair.

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Well, yeah, that was what I was getting at; sorry if it wasn’t clear. Sequence: T’Pol gets clocked; T’Pau thrusts Archer into the slippery stone anus; at bottom (heh), Archer sez he’s going to find T’Pol; then in a later scene T’Pau explains the footprints and Archer continues following them. I was talking about that second scene, with the tracks, where Archer should have said, “Hey, T’Pol’s doing something smart to help us, let’s not be stupid and screw it up.”

Oh, and I meant to follow up on something I said last week, where I referred to the political parallel (V’Lass’s “pre-emptive strike” strategy based on intelligence about Andorian weapons development) as “ballsy.” I withdraw that, seeing as how the third episode in the arc failed to pay it off in any substantial way. I was suggesting that (as Jonathan Chance speculated) setting up a political and military dilemma analogous to our own without trying to pay it off immediately was a risky choice, but that it could work really well if it turned out they had some fresh ideas about the situation and were drawing it out on purpose to heighten the effect of a socko climax; but as it happens it just sort of fizzled. So, never mind.

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Yes, please.

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Say. Didn’t somebody on the Andorian ship send Enterprise a full scan of the Xindi prototype just before they warped out of the expanse?

If so, either there’s a continuity error, or somebody (Shran?) is surpressing some vital information.

Oh, and doesn’t Starfleet still have those plans? What do you suppose they’re going to do with them?

And when is somebody going to sell the humans force field technology?

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He didn’t know she was leading them away; they may be taking her to Mt. Selaya for a physics experiment for all he knows. 9.81 M/sec/sec, although Vulcans probably use more significant figures.

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It’s been between 3.1something and 3.7something for November as far as I can tell…actually better than it was doing on Wednesdays due to the conflict with Smallville. These numbers would have been higher if UPN had not pre-empted it in so many markets for sports through Nov.

There are two more ratings sweeps months to go: February and May.

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A human at his peak should not be able go hand to hand with a Vulcan security officer. But a little high ground for Archer, some Vulcan techniques channelled through Surak, luck, writers, etc…

Good point to account for lost technology. I think I remember Spock commenting that Surak died while being a go-between in a negotiation (re: The Savage Curtain) While not inconsistent, it seems rather imprecise.

The marriage was honoring the pact made when they were children. The reinstatement of T’Pol’s mom was extortion. Divorce because mom died would be irrelevant. Divorce because he didn’t want his house tainted by a mother-in-law who was a Syrranite seems logical.

A Season One episode (?) showed Reed working on Starfeet’s latest force field technology. The field wasn’t stable but was getting there. I would think they would keep the plating until after the Romulan War. This way they can have the war fought in a nebula or somesuch, have energy fields dampened, and thus require conventional nukes to fulfill canon (or canons to fulfill canon).

NB: When T’Pau, T’Pol, and T’Archer encountered the Gallicite, I’m glad the zippers of their uniforms weren’t made of metal, they had no pins holding broken bones, no metal fillings, no iron in their blood, etc. :D.

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I think he died metaphorically in Archer’s head. He was explaining things, not literally recounting events.

I think that’s why she discharged it. If it wouldn’t hurt them she was just grandstanding…besides, they have copper in their blood. ^:)^

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Oh, that reminded me of another nitpick in this episode: the way the Andorian ships were “hiding in the nebula.”

Most casual viewers don’t really know this, but nebulae are huge. I mean, like not just huge, but skull-crushingly ginormous. We see them as a cloud of dust and gas, but that’s because we’re standing way way back and seeing the whole gigantic formation.

The closer you approach, though, the thinner it gets, or rather its truly thin density becomes more and more obvious. Consider a fogbank: Looking down at a fog-shrouded valley from a neighboring hilltop, it looks like impenetrable cotton, but if you actually get down to the valley floor, you’ve got anything from a few dozen to a few hundred feet of visibility. Extrapolate to a much, much larger phenomenon, and it’s obvious that a real nebula wouldn’t have an “edge” like they showed it in the episode (and in pretty much every other SF show where a nebula appears, no less).

An actual phenomenon as depicted in the show — thick dust with a perceptible boundary — would be basically impossible. Since a nebula is generally agreed to be the remnant of an exploded star, it contains the mass of the star plus whatever planets, ice bodies, and whatever else composed its solar system, spread over an impossibly huge volume. In order to have the density necessary to make an opaque cloud that close up, the nebula would have to contain the masses of dozens if not hundreds of star systems, the gravitation of which would cause the phenomenon to collapse upon itself in short order, becoming, most likely, a supermassive black hole. And it sure wouldn’t be safe to fly a starship into.

But like I said, this kind of error is quite common in popular SF. Wrath of Khan cemented the misconception of what a nebula would look like, just as Empire Strikes Back totally got wrong what an asteroid belt really is. (Sitting on one asteroid, you’d be very lucky if you managed to catch a glimpse of the next closest asteroid with a telescope, let alone with the naked eye. The density of a real asteroid field is something like one M&M per football field.) Down here on our crowded, busy planet, we have no reference point for how staggeringly huge and empty outer space actually is, so nobody notices when movies and television get it wrong. We think of a nebula as a cloud of dust, and we think of a fogbank; we don’t realize that if the sun is the center of the nebula, the outer perimeter would be a hundred times further away than Pluto currently is. That’s huge. But we can’t imagine that, so we imagine the fogbank. It’s wrong, but it’s understandable.

Still bugs me, though. If the public doesn’t care one way or the other, you’d think clever writers would be able to get drama out of reality, y’know? (“Captain, we are now at nebula perimeter plus fifty thousand klicks. Another fifty thousand klicks before it’s dense enough to interfere with their sensors.” Or whatever. Even that isn’t strictly accurate.) And the question in my mind is whether the writers know they’re getting it wrong, and don’t care because the public doesn’t care, or if the writers don’t really know the difference because they’re working off the popular imagery without doing any further research.

I know, I know, dramatic license and narrative shorthand. Blah blah blah. It’s still wrong.