[ul][]Archer shirtless for viva.[]Big Laser? What happened to the supposed Bio-Weapon?[]Quantum gets a Romulan haircut but nice wrinkles on the eyes.[]12 years and T’Pol calls him “Jonathan”.[]I saw “Rosemary’s Baby” just the other night on AMC.[]So Phlox says, “When did you last speak to Commander Tucker?” and Quantum never says, “What? Has something happened to Trip?” What would you have said?[]How did a garbage scow get the same radiolytic signature?[]Why didn’t they have some rapid hypno-teaching to bring Quantum uptodate each day? Or even some videos made by Quantum, for Quantum, ala Total Recall?[]The Xindi dispatched [Chekov]two wessels[/Chekov]? I mighta sent a tad more ta stop the earthers!.[]Still need to close bulkheads and vent during a boarding.[]Archer goes Conan! Too bad he forgets.[]Shouldn’t the Xindi use thrusters during the ramming? And weren’t they destroyed and not disabled as Malcolm said?[]Trip to T’Pol, “One wrong turn after another.” Uh… Cite?[]Even alone, Vulcans speak English.[]Why haven’t the Xindi attacked Ceti Alpha? Is it behind a really big bush?[]T’Pol anticipating/reliving Quantum’s thought of an “elaborate deception” was good.[]Since Quantum forgets rather quickly, how did he get chummy enough with T’Pol over 12 years to tell her about Margaret Mullin and the proposal?[]T’Pol’s looking after Quantum isn’t justified by any scenes or dialogue in the series.[]Mayweather still gets the short shrift.[]Antimatter is at a premium but you still start Quantum’s treatment? And when the ship is going into a dangerous situation?[]Everyone is promoted! Yeh! And still doing the same job! Yeh! At the same station! Yeh![]12 years and still they have to stand at the con. Yeh![]Let’s take the strange ship into the launch bay! Maybe he won’t blow it up or shoot![]T’Pol owes Quantum a debt for saving her life! 12 years? Crap! :)[]Be sure to give Quantum a headache-or-something so we don’t have to write a scene with Quantum actually talking to people at the reception.[]Reed still has a big mouth - tells the Yridian he knows of them from the “Vulcan database” and when the Yridian says he’s following the Denobulan, Reed says, “Phlox?” Yridian, “Hah, hah, made ya reveal his name! Hah hah.” The info’s known but it’s the concept, Reed![]T’Pol is awfully eager to accept the idea of time-travelling parasites. I guess the Vulcan Council has affirmed that time travel is impossible - except for parasites.[]When the old scans started to change because Quantum was being treated, wouldn’t some history start to change right then and cause differences?[]Finally Shields! Now they have less syllables to shout![]When Hoshi reports “The Intrepid just lost their port nacelle” She should be a little more precise. “Lost” as in “lost power” or “lost” as in “Blown Up!”[]Why doesn’t Quantum ever forget what’s going on while he’s awake? Couldn’t they just give him No-Doze?[]Nice Blow-Up of the bridge. The hull’s too thin. And maybe you’ll think about putting the important parts of the ship in the middle? Nah![]Archer and helpless T’Pol in the Jeffries Tube. I thought Vulcans were stronger than humans.[]Glad the plasma injectors weren’t moved in 12 years when Quantum tells Phlox where to go.[]T’Pol is knocked out by one blast and Archer can take two and still push the reset button. Mensch.[]Cut scene: T’Pol, “Get your own f***ing pillow and lights.”[/ul]I liked it as fun stuff, but it didn’t move the arc and didn’t develop the characters except in dreamland.
The Statue?? That’s the best part!
It’s the Cochran Award that Archer won. It’s even in the pose described in ST:First Contact. You can see it in the quanset hut in the colony, high on a shelf. And that he uses it to to viciously rip up a Xindi neck is just funny!
I liked the episode, although it reminded me very much of Voyager’s Year of Hell.
What’s the fascination with garbage scows? Why would you need a spacecraft to haul garbage? Organics should be recycled (most spaceships are closed ecosystems) and toxic waste can be left in interstellar space where no one is liable to encounter it. It just doesn’t seem right.
Loved Hoshi’s “old” look. “Mirror” Reed was cool, too. I thought the three tries to hit the reset button was cheesy, but when Archer laid his head on T"Pol as he went down was cheesier.
The floating perspective of the one Xindi battle was very impressive. At least the space combat is visually interesting.
I liked it alot. Probably the best episode in 2 years.
Next week though-- Oy.
What can I say-- I’m a sucker for SciFi, especially Trek. Even if it’s bad SciFi. Never say never…?
One thing that confused me about this episode was when Quantum was pouting to T’Pol about being cooped up in his quarters all the time and she replies (paraphrase from memory), “You sometimes take Porthos for walks by the classrooms on D deck. The children like to hear the stories about our past missions.”
Classrooms? CHILDREN?!?
Since when does this ship have either of those? I suppose it is possible that this scene takes place after Earth was destroyed, in which case I suppose it is feasible that there would be kids on board with the rag tag fleet. I will admit I kept getting confused of where they were in time, although I think this scene occurs before Earth is blowed up real good. When I heard that I thought Quantum was under some kind of influence a la “Frame of Mind”.
Can anybody clear this up?
The bioweapon was Plan B, in case the council wasn’t able to finish their li’l Death Star before Enterprise shows up and destroys their construction plant.
I thought this was one of Enterprise’s best episodes. “Year of Hell,” though – that was a total piece of crap.
–Cliffy
They were escorting refugees to Ceti Alpha V, so they may have some on board.
It’s so sad that the writer’s don’t let the characters make any choices and grow![list][li]Anomaly effects never call for jettisoning crew or even sealing off parts of the ship.[]Quantum wakes and T’Pol says, “Whew! We got out of those Anomalies and didn’t have to make any hard decisions.” Quantum, “Anyone hurt?” T’Pol, “Not a nick … But I haven’t seen Mayweather in a while. I wonder if he’s dead?”[]Everyone is in a slow ship and can’t make it to the Earth-FOOM party - “Oops, at least it’s not My fault.”[]We don’t see the Vulcans coming to the Humans aid after Earth is destroyed so I guess that’s a choice.[]T’Pol chooses to resign but she doesn’t do anything with that. We needed to see a young boy come in to the house and say, “Hi mom!” {cut to Quantum’s face} {fade to commercial}[]No one else seems to create a new relationship in 12 years either.[]Phlox just kept looking for a cure and received all the advice and help he needed. He didn’t become ostracized or wind up destitute or anything.[]Reed chose a beard but he needed to have lost an arm … and an eye … and have gotten a parrot.[]They never had the chance to fight or run, just fight the Xindi.Even at the end, Quantum was conveniently given the blowing up of the Bridge so that he didn’t have to choose whether or not to blow up the ship.[/li]
The only good choice was T’Pol ramming the Xindi ship. A bit reckless but it showed she could use Vulcan cold-blooded-logic and take the big chance. It doomed Earth but did we see her fret over it?
Like myself, I suspect most of you fix these things in your mind. But it would be nice to have them done right on film.
Really? I think I’ll have to go watch Raijin again. I had gotten the impression that this was for the main weapon they were building, although at the time, that didn’t seem like a necessary idea, seeing how they had already dug a big tunnel down Florida with the first probe attack…
Yup. During the council scene at the beginning of “Rajin” one of the lizard-xindi suggested developing a bioweapon. The head primate-xindi said that as the lizards well knew, the council had rejected that option in the past because it would be too dangerous to try to get detailed biometric scans of a human. The consensus was that the council would continue work on the big bomb, but the lizards seemed disgruntled. As the rest of the episode illustrated, of course, they went ahead and tried to get the biometric information anyway and were successful. The primate-xindi was unhappy about this but recognized that the damage was done and there was no reason not to use the information now that they had it.
–Cliffy
I still haven’t gotten last week’s tape but I did get the repeats, viva.
Also, I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who literally takes notes during Enterprise to discuss later. Not that I bother anymore, with the week delay and all. Anything worth mentioning has already been nitpicked about ten times by then.
Nitpick: “Rajiin,” not “Raijin.”
Re the episode: Eh.
It’s a reset button. Those almost never work. They hit a home run years ago with Yesterday’s Enterprise, but they apparently have no idea what makes that episode so cool, so they keep trying to go back to it, and missing the point.
I’m also starting to recognize what’s wrong with T’Pol’s performance. Last season, I bitched about the costume, that it was disrespectful both to the actor and the concept of the character, and said it was hard to look past it to see whether or not the character was working. But during last night’s ep, when they put her in a couple of different outfits, the character came into much clearer focus, all of a sudden.
And here’s the thing: They don’t get Vulcans. I know we keep talking about this, that they’re being played too emotional, too snarky, or whatever. But that’s just a symptom. No, the fundamental disconnect is that they haven’t properly defined what it is to be Vulcan as its own experience; instead, they keep showing T’Pol (and various and sundry other Vulcan supporting characters) as humans with something missing.
The genius of Spock’s character is that he was a complete entity in and of himself, and yet he was set apart from the other Vulcans, T’Pring, Sarek, and all the rest. They weren’t handicapped humans; they were complete individuals, just different. T’Pol is being presented as a human with an emotional limp, and it’s just plain wrong.
Okay, back to the episode:
The beginning was okay, and the ending just sucked. Another reset, yawn. Archer takes a couple of shots to the body and keeps fighting even while T’Pol gets nailed in the shoulder and drops like a wet towel. It makes no sense that the parasites (that :rolleyes: “exist outside spacetime”) would disappear from the past medical scans as if they never existed, but that the characters would remember them. They could have been a hell of a lot more clever about that: “Wait a second. Why were we targeting that area again? There wasn’t anything there.” “I don’t know, we must have had a reason.” “Let’s try it again on this one over here.” “Okay, we’re shooting at an empty area again. Why are we doing this?” “Hey, I get it, they must be disappearing from our memory.”
Basically, I roll my eyes any time the big climax of a Trek story, the crisis that must be solved in order to avert disaster, can be assumed to look like this in the script:
T'POL
According to my preliminary
scans, <tech>.
PHLOX
Are you certain? That would
suggest <tech>.
T'POL
Unless <tech>.
TRIP
Why don't we <tech>? Then
we can <tech> before the
<tech>.
PICARD
Excellent. Make it so.
T'POL
Who the <tech> are you?
With, of course, the stuff to be filled in later by one of the science consultants. (You knew this is how it worked, right? That’s what the Trek scripts look like in early draft form.) The choices made by the characters have to be based in personal, moral quandaries, with emotional consequences, for them to matter. Otherwise it’s just a choice of clipping the blue wire or the red wire.
That could easily have been fixed in this episode with just a couple of lines of dialogue. To wit:
T'POL
We can't get the power for
the procedure.
TRIP
Those were my orders. We
need the power for combat.
T'POL
You can't stand up to the
Xindi, and besides, if this
works, all of this will be
irrelevant.
TRIP
I'm sorry, I can't take that
risk.
*(Now, here's the new bit.)*
T'POL
*(urgently)*
Captain Tucker, we have
known each other for a
very long time. And I am
asking you, begging you,
right now, to trust me.
Trip appears to be wavering.
T'POL
One hour. That is all I ask.
Trip looks in her eyes. For a moment, we
think she's won him over. Then:
TRIP
No. And don't ask again.
He leaves.
Why is this important? Because it tells us something about the relationship between Trip and T’Pol, something that will still matter after the reset button has been pushed and the rest of the plot has evaporated into irrelevance. It plants a seed of emotional development that can be capitalized upon by future episodes. The way they did it in the episode, by contrast, they had Trip make a practical decision and they glossed over the implications of the personal emotional relationship between the two characters. Yawn.
Another thing that bugged me: Where the hell were the Vulcans when the Earth was destroyed? It’s one thing to try to remain neutral, but when an atrocity of that magnitude is committed, it beggars belief that even the hyperrational Vulcans would be able to stand idly by. The Enterprise has clearly returned from the Expanse and can share information about the Vulcan allergy to that alloy, so there’s no reason at all the Vulcans wouldn’t be able to mobilize a massive armada to at the very least contain but more likely defang what is inarguably a dangerously irrational enemy of civilization. That the ambassador dude could show up on Enterprise without even mentioning an apology for not helping the Earthers in their struggle is an unforgiveable oversight, in my opinion.
And the way they dispensed with Mayweather was just shitty. They can’t even give him a line of dialogue, and then suddenly he’s on the ground with a caved-in skull. For all we know, for all it mattered, it wasn’t even the real actor; it could have been a stand-in with a jar of Smuckers strawberry glopped onto his face.
Now, all of that being said, I must say that I quite liked the middle of the episode, showing the aftermath of the humans’ flight as refugees. There’s a nicely elegaic tone to these scenes, especially after Archer stumbles outside and sees the spit-and-baling-wire colony around him, or as Trip is flying off the handle at the prisoner. The episode captures, briefly, a strong emotional tone, in which we see that events have actual consequences, and that the characters have been changed by what’s happened to them. Too bad that, in the end, none of it really matters, and that the episode chickens out and puts everything back to boring normality in the last couple of minutes.
In fact, the power of this middle section is such that I’ve changed my mind about what I would do if the Powers That Be knocked on my door and asked me to take over the Trek franchise with a new series. Up to now, I’d been thinking about a dark parallel in Starfleet’s Black Ops division (Section 31, I think it’s called), with missions and political intrigue and that sort of thing. Not any more; I think a better idea was suggested in “Twilight.” I’d call it Star Trek: Wayfarer, or something similar, and it would be set thirty years after TNG/DS9/Voyager, in a world following a devastating, civilization-erasing conflict. Both sides have been nearly wiped out, so it’s not like a resistance-type battle of the Bajorans under the Cardassians; everybody’s pretty much on their own, with no home planet, no Starfleet, no Prime Directive, and no technology-based solutions or distracting bureaucratic hierarchies. The story is about a vessel traveling from isolated colony to isolated colony, its crew made up of hard-headed yet idealistic visionaries, who are trying to rebuild a civilization, reminding people what really matters, and working to get past the natural reactions of fear and pain and distrust after a horrible catastrophic war.
But that’s a hijack. “Twilight,” for me, was a briefly intriguing but ultimately unsuccessful departure.
You, sir, are absolutely right. And they’ve done it better in earlier Trek episodes – like Yesterday’s Enterprise. Perhaps they just forget about them thar details when they recycle the story nowadays.
And as for story recycling… Well, how many times has next week’s been done? Group of humans found living on an alien planet, displaced from Earth. Amelia Earhart was in the Delta Quadrant. I wonder if Billy the Kid is in the Delphic Expanse. What is it about Earthlings, especially pre-space program ones, that makes aliens want to keep abducting us? And did these wild west people get anal probes first?
Why, thank you, Cervaiise. 
T’Pol, “Soval, please let us offer you our hospitality. I will send a shuttle pod over to pick you up immediately.” {later} T’Pol, “I’m so sorry. I forgot that pod is coated with Trellium-D. Can I get you a drool bucket?” Good thing nothing else has been coated with Trellium-D in 12 years!
It seems as though the more famous you are when you die, the further out in space you’re found. That must be why they never found Elvis. He’s in Andromeda!
NoClueBoy, I still laugh at “Stupid Vogons” - perfect!
Cervaise, great point about each spot of cure affecting the character’s mind as well as the scans!
Apparently the Future is really unstable. Quantum gets Spacehiemers and the Future is wiped out and there is no Daniels - or - Daniels doesn’t think destroying the Earth is reason enough to intervene.
It might have lent to more character development if Daniels had intervened crudely and helped the future Enterprise contact the past Enterprise to correct the parasite problem at the root. This would have allowed the present crew to see their future selves and retain some character development.
Assuming we keep the chrono-parasites (which is pseudo-science-crap) what could we do with the story?
The Future detects the ripples in reality and dispatch Daniels Daniels can only go back in time to where the parasites first dissipate - Quantum’s death from old age of natural causes. He appears in a ghostly time bubble and starts to undo the parasites. Bit by bit he can push further back in time. We get to see the crew go from a far future of coping and expanding and getting on with life, back to struggling and scavenging, back to fighting and hiding from the Xindi, finally to when Quantum wakes one time in the house on Ceti Alpha V.
Daniels cannot finesse the cure any further and needs help. He helps them create a time-video-phone back to the time of Quantum’s infection. As the their future selves work with their past selves they construct the right equipment to cure Quantum. In the process (the-past)they interact with (the-future)themselves and learn about who they could become.
Make the construction of the cure take a few days, a Xindi battle, and an Anomaly incident, and (the-past)crew could see changes in (the-future)themselves. Have Quantum be taken care of by T’Pol and after a cure-ripple-in-time see T’Pol and Quantum married. Have (past)Trip see this and after another ripple see (future)Trip and T’Pol married taking care of Quantum. Have each characters glimpse of the future alter the future when the next ripple occurs. Then have the cure work and they get on with their mission, all confused because the future has all these possibilities but they don’t know what is in store.
Aes, I just sent you a tape Priority this morning. I hope the one with “The Shipment” shows up. I sent it last Thursday but standard.
I wouldn’t go by UPN’s promos for next week’s show. They make it look like the wacky wild west, but it’s probably more serious than that. Remember the dorky sexed up promos for “Cogenitor”? That’s what I mean.
Trek has a long history of making their previews totally irrelevant to the episode itself. Voyager made it a fine art.
As Fr. Debosier proclaimed in English class when a student remarked that “according to the back of the book”, “they live forever in Shangri-La”:
“Mr. Hilton did not write ‘the back of the book’. Some idiot at the publisher wrote ‘the back of the book.’”
Silly boy – nebulae aren’t formed by Novae, they’re formed by Red Giants when they run out of gas and shed their outer layers. Or by Supernovae when they go BOOM.
Regular old garden-variety novae are white dwarfs in a mass-exchange binary system with a red giant “host star.” The white dwarf sucks up material from the red giant, depositing thicker and thicker layers on its surface, until the pressure and temperature of this accreted material get so high that it undergoes thermonuclear fusion. No known nebulae have been formed from such an outburst.
Oh yeah?!
I’ve got one!
[starts flinging stuff around, looking for close binary/trinary novae nebulae that I picked up in Mexico and put somewhere…]