tracer, that was a beautiful deadpan right out of South Park. Being “skittish about ethical issues” is an amusing way to say “nobody wants to fuck monkeys.”
Anywho, I loved the episode, and as far as the inter-breeding thing, well, that just goes back to whole “Why the hell do all aliens in Star Trek look alike?” Because, as explained in an ep of TNG, practically all huminoids in the galaxy evolved from the same crop of jizz spewed all around by some whackey ancient alians as a big experiment.
[Chef]
You can’t get a human and Skog drunk and expect them to mate! You have to set the mood!
[/Chef]
Anyway, this is the first ST:Enterprise I’ve seen in several weeks. I, too, was envisioning a cross between “Spectre of the Gun” and “Fistful of Datas,” or possibly the “parallel Earth syndrome,” but it was thankfully better than that. Archer is one tough hombre after taking a bullet and getting hit on the wound, but he’s still no Jack Bauer (of 24 fame). I wasn’t expecting it to be as graphic as it was, though.
SciFi’s Taken! I knew the schoolmarm looked familiar! She’s cute as a redhead… 
Given the general quality of Enterprise, I was more afraid it would be a cross between “A Fistful of Datas” and that “Planet Texicana” episode of The Super Friends, in which Green Lantern had a walk-down gunfight and the villains rode mechanical horse robots.
I’m sure the crew cleaned up after themselves and recovered everything. They left those PADDs (and hopefully a solar recharger) as educational items.
I also heard that there was a deleted scene (with Mayweather of course). Mayweather was impressed with the frontiers-people so much that he gave them a book to help them catch up with their history. In return, the people were so grateful that they renamed the planet, but unfortunately in a miscommunication it was after Mayweather’s grandfather’s college fraternity. They renamed the planet Sigma Iota II. And strangely they were still commenting on that book as Enterprise left. Why anyone would be so interested in “Chicago Mobs of the Twenties” no one could figure out.
I was waiting for someone to mention the Sigma Iotians.
i think next week they should make 2 baby Trips and have them fight to the death!
Your SDMB Biography says you deplore killing. What gives? … Then again they are just babies after all. :rolleyes: 
Dive on in! Sha Ka Ree knows I make a blathering spectacle out of myself too often. 
[intentionally vague and probably grammatically incorrect] I’m noticing more of what you asked me about last week, this week, viva. [/ivapgi]
That’s a holdover from when a certian wintery poster suggested that because i did not start a thread condemning every suicide bomb attack in Isreal i supported them, so i preemptively condemned them all, because i was tired of dealing with that stupid logic.
Now a cloned baby knife fight, that would rule…
Oh yea! Quad and Quint. Five bucks on Quad.
Enjoy,
Steven
Like between cloned Ally McBeal babies? Or Terminator-2 babies? … What happened as the Jenga Fett babies were growing up? Do you suppose they had regular training sessions and knife fights? Maybe like Yoda fighting around in the air. Or maybe like the Matrix.
Just think of it: thousands of babies converging, the theme from West Side Story playing, diapers flying, “Ah, I love the smell of poo in the morning.”
If i only had a holodeck…
Yeah, rolled my eyes at this one. Archer can go mano-a-mano with a Klingon warrior for minutes on end, but one swipe from a tin-badge twerp in a top hat and he drops like a tipsy cheerleader. Then he turns around at the end and one-handedly beats the hell out of a virtually identical thug while arterial blood spews from a crater in his shoulder. Uh huh.
Re the episode, I don’t think it was great, but it sure didn’t suck the way it could have sucked. Some decent moments, like Trip trying to nudge the horse into motion, or Reed blasting T’Pol and snickering at the bad guy, or Archer burning through the walkway from below.
My observation is that this is the first episode that clearly and successfully throws back to Kirk-era Trek the way the Bermaga originally said was their intention. It’s not a realistic scenario, and they don’t go overboard trying to convince us it’s plausible; they just set it up and leave it alone.
The real point, just as it was for Kirk-era Trek, is the metaphor: It’s about the sins of the ancestors being visited on the descendants, and about how progress cannot be made as long as the great-great grandchildren are still being scapegoated and punished for the crimes of their long-dead forefathers. Given how today we’re still bogged down in the debate over reparations for American slavery, the position taken by the episode is unambiguous and somewhat controversial. Metaphorically, it presents an alternate reality in which the Black Panthers managed to win their revolution, take over the country, and subject Whitey to the same oppression as they believed their slave ancestors suffered; and the episode says, rather clearly, that anyone still nursing those sorts of resentments is stupid and stands in the way of progress.
That’s the kind of bold stand Kirk & Co used to take; sometimes it was a big dumb sledgehammer (“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”), and sometimes it doesn’t date very well, appearing to be an obvious product of the philosophy of the time (“A Private Little War”), but that was the original show’s bread and butter. It worked because the characters were boldly drawn and they could focus on the stories.
Next Generation started out that way, but eventually it turned into a rather insulated world and focused its stories on the characters and their reality. Sometimes the material was relevant (the torture scene in “Chains of Command,” for example), but more often, whenever they’d try to make a social point, they messed it up (“The Outcast”). Most of the really good episodes have little or no recognizable intersection with our world; they explore the characters and let them navigate their own crises (“Best of Both Worlds,” “The Nth Degree,” “Tapestry,” etc.). DS9 and Voyager continued the same trend.
When the Bermaga conceived Enterprise, they described it as going back to the original in many ways, and it’s obvious they’ve tried to do that. A fair number of the episodes have been thinly-veiled analogies for human problems, as in"Stigma," the show about Vulcan prejudice against people with a specific incurable disease. These don’t really work because the writing hasn’t been very good, and because the characters are drawn with tentative little scribbles instead of huge bold strokes, but at least the intent is clear. But then on the other hand, there are whole episodes that don’t do this at all, like “Singularity,” the one where Trip spends the whole hour thinking about Archer’s ass. This back-and-forth indecision, in my opinion, has contributed greatly to the show’s hugely inconsistent tone. Some weeks, it’s like there’s no break from TNG and Voyager; other weeks, it’s like they’re trying to make a complete break from the last several years. The whole Xindi thing, it seems to me, is a reflection of the West’s desire for revenge against the Islamic zealots who are causing so much stress and damage in the world right now but who don’t really have a country of their own and are therefore hard to find and combat; but the show doesn’t have any more insight into the problem than the average Slashdot discussion, and so they keep spinning their wheels and resorting to shallow, goofy episodes about zombie Vulcans. It seems evident that they want to take a page from Roddenberry’s book and use the show to make a point, but I don’t think they have a point to make, most of the time.
“North Star” is one of the old-style shows, and it does have a point to make, whether you agree or disagree; and on that level it works reasonably well. If they’d just make the decision to stick with one approach or the other, either metaphorical episodes like this one or pure SF vehicles like last week’s “Twilight,” they could get down to business, instead of juggling the mission week after week.
I’m gonna take off on this point. The Suliban were originally based on the Taliban (hence the name, the Kabal, the large amount of none Kabal Suliban). But then 9-11 happened, and the producers probably paniced at their bad guys being similar to the backers of the hijackers. They couldn’t come out and have a big terrorist war in the middle of the Temporal Cold war (which is what i think one of their intentions were). They did get to use the Suliban round up in camps thing as a metaphor for internment camps, but can’t rightly have Sillik crash his spacepod into Starbase 1 or something.
The Xindi are not a direct counterbalance, Earth gets threatened from intergalatic thugs constantly, so it is not a new threat for us to see. It is a new threat for that universe, as this is the first one chronologically. The Xindi were probably split up into races to add different levels of drama and mystery to their species. Writing about racial strife makes the Xindi more interesting than a typical vanilla “We hate the hunams!” guy with a lump of clay on his forhead. And it is convienent for dragging the mission out over a whole season without having to get all super complicated. If they wanted to make this more relevant, then the President of Earth would use the Xindi attack to justify invading Dilithium rich Tellar or something.
Since Archer rescued T’Pol in Shadows of P’Jem then she’s Jessica Lynch, so Larry Mudd will appear with nude photos of T’Pol to sell, right?
Not bucks–Quatloos.
Five Quatools on the big breasted, pointy eared barbarian!
Aes: [ivapgi] ???
Yer tape went out this mornin’, pardner. Prah-ority.
Hello to my birthday buddy tarragon.
Some spoilers for “Similitude”:
http://www.treknation.com/episodes/season3/similitude.shtml
and mine:
Yes, that kiss between Trip and T’Pol would have to involve the Sim. I don’t know if they tell him he has only a 15-day lifespan. Either he’s trying to make the most of his time or he doesn’t realize that his warranty expires very soon.
He hit a metal object. Remember the wound on his head?
But yeah, Kirk would have had his shirt ripped and consequently kicked ass. Janeway would have had her hair mussed and told Chakotay to kick ass.
But I digress.
I was thinking Nat Turner.
OK, akward question. Any people of Color here? What is the contemporary opinion of Nat Turner, who killed families in his rebellion?
Hpw did Archer convonce MacReady? Did he tell him about Bethany being part Skag?
How did Archer get a spell checker?