Tom Salinsky

ENT S03E19 Damage (). After 700-odd episodes in which the lead characters of the various Star Trek series showed us what we could be if we listened to the better angels of our nature, someone on the Enterprise writing staff seems to be continually saying “This time, what if our lead characters were all doofuses instead?” No-one has escaped this brush so far, whether it’s no-space-legs Hoshi, waste-of-space-Travis, let-them-die Phlox, I-work-alone-Malcolm, three-genders-I-don’t-think-so Trip or shoot-first-ask-questions-later-or-never Archer. The sole exception has been T’Pol, so now’s the ideal time to have her freeze up on the bridge, the first time she’s given official command of the ship. Great. And yes, I can tell they’re setting up a bigger story arc for her, but I still prefer my Star Trek cast to set goals for me to aspire to, rather than to leave me thinking “Honestly, I could do better on a bad day.”

When the attack is called off, she gives a better account of herself, assessing the damage, triaging the repair works and keeping order, but it’s still a relief to see Archer returned home (and not brought before the council as requested). And honestly, I feel bad about dunking on the characters here, because it’s show-level problem and in this story, when their backs are against the walls, they all a) come through and b) gain some much-needed dimension – even Hoshi (not Travis of course, don’t be ridiculous). The promise of being cut off from Earth and Starfleet really starts to pay off here, and there are more tough choices coming for Archer, and further trials for T’Pol. I don’t like the idea of weakening her in this way, but it couldn’t happen at a worse time, and that’s a lovely complication. She’s essentially getting hooked on emotions, which is a fascinating version of the Vulcan persona.

Archer’s decision to nick an innocent ship’s warp coil in order to save his own sorry skin is a ghastly one, but at least it’s given some moral context by T’Pol and Trip who point out what a huge jerk he’s being. Strong stuff, but as noted I’d still rather have my optimistic science-fiction fables centred on a captain who’s less of a jerk.

ENT S03E20 The Forgotten (). Year of hell indeed. Enterprise is still all kinds of screwed up and it looks like it’s staying that way for now at least. That’s a commitment to consequences and making things matter which is brand new for this show at least. Connor Trinneer is really good here, making Trip’s exhaustion, determination and emotional disengagement believable and effecting. His bitterness towards the Xindi is further evidence of his unsuitability for the role of first officer, but it’s quite understandable. Archer’s sour inspirational speech is stirring stuff too, but the smash into the new jangly guitar-pop version of the theme has almost never been more jarring.

Degra was behind Archer’s return to Enterprise, which does make some kind of sense, but really we should have had the explanation last time. Now, finally, we start to develop the Star Trek version of this story. Intrinsic enemies who learn to understand each other and find common cause. Trying to forge a new alliance, Bakula falls back on his disappointed headmaster style of acting, when something rather more warm and compassionate might have worked better. It’s a false note in an otherwise strong episode.

And this is a very strong episode. It isn’t a headline-grabber, it doesn’t represent a major left turn in the season arc plot, there aren’t any old favourites making return appearances. But pretty much everything works, from T’Pol’s attack of the yips, to Trip’s visitation from his dead comrade, to the Xindi’s understandable skepticism regarding the wild tales told by these crazy humans, and their eventual decision to turn on their own. I doubt this is a true fan-favourite, but as the Xindi arc really starts to pay off properly, I’m delighted to finally be able to dish out five stars, not least because here all of the characters sound and behave like people, instead of plot contrivances. Of course, there’s nothing for Travis or Hoshi to do, but let’s not ask for miracles, eh?

Star Trek celebrity super-fan Seth McFarlane shows up in a tiny role. A dozen or so year’s later, he’d get his own science fiction series The Orville on the air, which many have interpreted as a love letter to the franchise in general and The Next Generation in particular. It takes a while to find a consistent tone, but I really enjoyed it.

Archer wishes he could thank the eighteen crewmen who were lost, but he can’t alas (because he doesn’t know their names). Accordingly, Trip has to write the letters of condolences.

ENT S03E21 E² (). Despite all of the recent episodes starting with “Previously on Enterprise…” the commitment to serialisation is still a bit half-assed. Basically there’s enough arc-plot for a modern ten episode season, but there are twenty-four transmission slots that need filling, so when Degra says to Archer “See you in three days” he means “See you after the next batch of filler episodes.” And the early sight of Jolene Blalock under half a ton of Michael Westmore’s most crinkly latex is an early clue that this time out from the season-spanning narrative will be – oh goody – a time travel story.

In fact, it’s not that long until we see Randy Oglesby again, but all he and the other Xindi gents do is to rehash information from earlier episodes. Once more, the all-powerful aggressors are rendered impotent by their own silly quarrels. But quickly, Archer’s ship is warned off by another Enterprise, which was sent back in time over 100 years. T’Pol, who refused to believe in time travel for years, became the expert, asserting that travel back through the anomaly was not possible, and so the ship became a generational vessel, waiting for the chance to stop the Xindi attack.

Rather than the usual rules, as stressed by Daniels and his ilk, which involve not altering the past, the descendants of the original crew can’t wait to tell everyone on board who married whom, who was horribly killed and when, and how everything turned out. It’s meant to shine a light on their different personalities, but it only comes off as silly. Then the twist is that T’Pol’s creepy son is going to do to Archer what Archer did to the Illyrians in Damage – nick his engine and leave him stranded, but this is rapidly abandoned. It feels like no-one is really sure what this was supposed to be about. Honestly, you could skip this one and you’d lose nothing.

Women only make up a third of the crew on Enterprise. Why?

ENT S03E22 The Council (). Archer thinks he’s found a way into the spheres and Degra is keen to see whatever they can find. Accordingly, Malcolm recruits one of his hated MACOs to accompany him. I wonder why he didn’t ask Travis or Trip? Meanwhile the almost-all-male rapidly-becoming-more-reasonable Xindi council is being pressured by the all-female Guardians who appear to have been taking fashion lessons from the Borg Queen.

So, the big showdown is approaching, and I’ve been tracking the progress of this multi-episode storyline from its initial we-will-enact-our-bloody-revenge beginnings to a more compassionate and, well, Star Trek version in which those who claimed so many lives on Earth will yet become allies. The price we pay for that is a transition from exciting space battles to people in rubber masks talking in rooms. The challenge now is to make us care about who they are and what they’re saying. That would normally come from how well we know the regular characters, but, you know…

The combination of this story arc and Randy Oglesby’s sensitive portrayal actually means that Degra’s character has been pretty well defined, but Archer’s morality has ebbed and flowed according to the demands of the plots of different episodes, T’Pol has become little more than a medical case history, and Trip hasn’t been given anything important to do so far, so this is going to be hard to pull off.

The early going isn’t promising with the Insectoids being relentlessly belligerent with zero nuance, and Hoshi just there to translate (“I’m doing it… I’m repeating the computer…”). The action-adventure quotient meanwhile is up to T’Pol, Malcolm and Lt Deadmeat, who are attempting to penetrate a sphere. (Travis stays behind in the shuttle because of course he does.)

Ultimately, this does the job it is intended to do, all the pieces move one step further down the chessboard, but the grace and detail and feeling for character in The Forgotten has been… well, unremembered.

ENT S03E23 Countdown (). With Archer face-to-face with his enemies, it now just becomes about stopping them from squabbling with each other long enough to get them to listen. Alas for him, and for us, Degra has left us, which means Archer has lost an ally and we’ve lost a character with genuine dimension. Instead the Insectoids have kidnapped Hoshi and expect her to fire the weapon for them. T’Pol seems to be taking this harder than anyone and has to apologise to Commander Tucker – whom she calls “Trip”! – for her outburst, and then ask him for help. That’s the stuff. She almost smiles when he tells her “I’m all ears”.

And now finally the monolithic Xindi Insectoids start to become suspicious of their creepy time-travelling advisors, even as they’re pumping Hoshi full of space sodium pentothal and putting her to work for them. This is getting close to being the kind of vast space opera which Star Trek has occasionally flirted with, but never really landed on. It’s more fun than all the endless recapping of the same information in different rooms which has dogged the last few episodes, but – T’Pol and Trip aside – the character stuff is generally restricted to more of that tedious Malcolm vs the MACOs stuff, about which I really struggle to care, even when Big Chief MACO nobly bites the dust saving Hoshi.

Nobody seems to miss Degra. He’s barely even mentioned.

ENT S03E24 Zero Hour (). As is so often the case, when an aggressive alien race builds a complex interlocking web of deadly devices, it is sufficient to destroy only one and the rest fall like dominoes. Why aggressive alien races build their complex interlocking webs of deadly devices this way isn’t clear, but it sure is convenient that they do. Thus, Archer and company need only knock out one sphere in order to permanently neutralise the Changelings (sorry, Guardians).

Some awkward dialogue papers over various cracks in the plotting regarding how close the Xindi can get to Earth, how fast they can fire the weapon and so on. Recall that the original weapon was deployed almost instantly. It does rather seem as if all of this time was taken to produce a second weapon that isn’t anything like as effective. But, as if protecting his home planet from imminent annihilation wasn’t motivation enough, time travelling Daniels finds it necessary to show Archer the future of the United Federation of Planets in order to make sure that he knows how gosh-darned important he is. This feels like a last desperate attempt to prove that the Temporal Cold War was part of this story all along – but if so it fails, since Archer tells Daniels to get knotted and then does just what he was going to do anyway.

But if the plotting is ropey, those little strands of character work are paying off. There’s a genuine feeling of doom hanging over proceedings, and a lovely scene between Phlox and T’Pol about preparing for the worst. (Her attacks of the vapours seem to be in the past now.) Even Hoshi starts to feel like more of a person and less of a plot function. It’s clear that Linda Park deserved much better than she got in this series. I wish I could say the same for Anthony Montgomery, but it’s impossible to say either way on the basis of the four purely functional lines he gets each episode.

This is basically good solid, four-star stuff, but I have to knock off half a star for that dopey ending, which I fear is going to tie up the early episodes of next season getting it reset.

This was one hell of a bumpy road, making it blatantly obvious that the Xindi threat was being rethought from episode to episode. We did get some sharper character work than we’ve had in a while, and a handful of really excellent instalments, but the attempt to tell one story over 24 episodes was often botched, and might have levelled the ship but it still isn’t soaring. Maybe this uncertain series needs reinventing yet again. Nice hero shot of Archer running away from the ’sploding Xindi weapon.

Season 3 wrap-up

• Everything about this season feels like hard work. Nothing flows, nothing expands naturally to fill story vacuums. The overall arc advances in fits-and-starts and it’s often hard to connect the different strands into a coherent whole. Compare this to DS9 in its pomp, when narrative ideas cascaded from one episode to the next in a completely organic fashion.
• And I’m banging the same drum over and over again but the crew are almost always either useless (Malcolm, Trip), anonymous (Hoshi) or both (Travis). Only Phlox and T’Pol really work as characters, although Scott Bakula often manages to get by on sheer leading man starpower. I say “the crew” but apart from the new intake of cannon-fodder, essentially none of the other people on board the ship gets as much as a single line of dialogue. But then again, often neither does Travis.
• And yet, in the second half of the season, and after some truly execrable episodes early on, we finally got something which felt real, and true, and like it mattered. The little trilogy of Azati Prime, Damage and The Forgotten is absolutely excellent stuff, with the last of those earning the full five stars for the first time since Voyager’s In the Flesh.
• This contributes to a pretty decent season average of 3.37 which is about the same as DS9 Season 3 and better than any season of Voyager except its excellent Season 4. So Enterprise still has some work to do, but it’s not out for the count just yet.
• That is, unless you’re the numbers people at UPN. Voyager’s finale had been watched by 8.8 million viewers, and Broken Bow had pulled in over 12 million, but that was already down to 5.2 million by the end of Season 1 and only 3.9 million for the end of Season 3, of whom only 2.9 million came back for the first episode Season 4. This is a show that’s running on borrowed time.

ENT S03E13 Proving Ground (). Andorians are now searching the once-deadly-now-merely-a-bit-wibbly Expanse for any sign of the (sigh) “pink-skins”. And the Xindi Rotary Club is ready to test its new prototype weapon – not on Earth, the way they did the last one, but on an uninhabited planet instead for… reasons. Shran is almost too eager to help out the Earth ship with their repairs and it’s all Malcolm can do not to chuck their Lt Talas out the airlock.

The politicking is nifty, and the amazing Jeffrey Combs continues to add layers to what could have been a much more simplistic character. The arc-plotting continues to be soggy, if not actually nonsensical, but the story-of-the-week stuff is really good here, managing to deliver a series of rug-pulls that continue to surprise, make sense and not just be frustrating. The push-pull between Shran and Archer is very real. As usual, this is the Archer and T’Pol show with Shran and Talas getting more lines than several regulars, but that’s just what we’ve come to expect by now.

Archer is back to a close shave, but Jolene Blalock’s real eyebrows can clearly be seen growing back under her pointed ones. That and the bare-bones Andorian bridge set (which feels awfully Lost in Space) contribute to a tiny nagging feeling of “will this do?” but there’s plenty to enjoy elsewhere – and even some nice character stuff for Malcolm.

ENT S03E14 Stratagem (). Cover-of-a-comic-book time as Archer and Xindi Quartermaster Degra have escaped together after three years in an Insectoid prison. Something about this whole set-up gives me Mission: Impossible vibes – and yes, that’s exactly what it turns out to be, a glorified flight simulator in which the Enterprise crew hopes their prisoner will spill his guts. But even if the reveal isn’t much of a surprise, it is nice – and very Star Trek – to have mortal enemies have to work together and learn to empathise with each other just a little, even if it is only pretend. This seems a far better method of interrogation than those airlock shenanigans from a couple of episodes ago, and Randy Oglesby is good value as Degra. Once he figures out the deception, the air goes out of the balloon somewhat, and it’s also true that the once terrifying and unknowable Xindi here deteriorate further into a bunch of squabbling dummies who are constantly outwitted and outmanoeuvred, by outsiders and by each other. But overall, this is good solid stuff and it’s nice to see Phlox again, he’s been AWOL for several episodes now. Second (and last) script for future Picard showrunner Terry Matalas and it’s another impressive piece of work, setting us up for the Xindi endgame at last.

ENT S03E15 Harbinger (). Watching Royal Navy brat Malcolm Reed bellyache pointlessly about having to work with the militaristic MACOs makes me long for Roddenberry’s no-conflict-on-the-bridge rules. And that sets the tone for a dull, unfocused and sour episode, which sees the return of a lot of Enterprise’s bad habits, after a run of very strong stories. Once again, Trip is written as a horny teen rather than an experienced officer, and Malcolm like a playground bully. Once again, Archer uses painful torture to extract information from a prisoner. About half the run time is devoted to massage sessions with scantily-clad women. And I guess it’s now officially too late for me to keep saying “Stop trying to make Trip and T’Pol happen,” pon-farr or no pon-farr.

ENT S03E16 Doctor’s Orders (). You can’t make a dull story captivating by telling it out of order, but that doesn’t stop hopeful writers from trying to conceal weaknesses by shuffling up the sequence of events to create fake mystery where none intrinsically exists. It’s becoming a go-to move for this show, and when it’s used to underline a deception as in Stratagem, it can be very effective, but more often than not, it’s used as here, to create an artificially strong opening to a flabby script. Phlox lying in bed, doomscrolling and talking to Porthos, is an image which has become far more potent with the passing years. Overall, I preferred this story when Voyager did it and it was called One. There it was about digging into just who Seven of Nine is. Here it’s the Doc going nuts because that’s more interesting than him not (just about). The big scene between Phlox and T’Pol earns this an extra half star, as the two best actors in the show give it everything they’ve got. I almost took it off again for the very silly closing twist, but if you didn’t see it coming, that’s your good fortune and my bad luck.

ENT S03E17 Hatchery (). This is all good solid Star Trek stock. Our crew of intrepid explorers, led by the brave captain, goes prowling around in some moderately convincing caves, somebody (probably the brave captain) gets whammied by some belligerent local biology – and then we go out of our way to protect the aggressors. With a show that’s struggling to find its identity as this one is, it’s downright reassuring when familiar story shapes start to reassert themselves. Saving the insectoid nest requires fixing their technology and as usual the ship’s chief engineer recruits the tactical officer and helmsman to help him with this engineering problem (as he doesn’t know the names of any of the other engineers on board). When it comes to Malcolm vs MACOs vs Trip, instead of being able to see everyone’s point of view, the way you can in good drama, I find everyone equally childish and stupid, which is disappointing to say the least. But the most disappointing aspect of this episode by far is the revelation that Archer’s moral decision to protect the Xindi eggs was the product not of his own enlightened ethics but instead being zapped in the opening minutes. So – he only fought to save all those innocent lives because alien venom was eating his brain? My hero! Nice to see T’Pol in uniform again. And as usual the sharpshooting, militaristic MACOs are all bested by the science officer and her pals.

ENT S03E18 Azati Prime (). At long last we arrive at the Xindi Gentlemen’s Golf Club where, as luck would have it, the superweapon is ready to be deployed. This is all procedural problem-solving stuff, but the stakes feel incredibly high and the problems genuinely epic. This little ship, years from home is going to try and save the world. And there are ethical conundrums too. Archer is forced to destroy an entire Xindi facility to give Travis and Trip a chance as they try and sneak through the detection grid on their reconnaissance mission. That leads to a Star Wars style bomb run to take out the superweapon, which Archer insists on flying himself, whereupon bloody Daniels shows up with more stories from the future. The frequently dumb Xindi storyline and the faintly irrelevant Temporal Cold War storyline here get braided together, and remarkably the combination manages to somewhat strengthen both, when it could equally have fatally weakened either or both. The trouble is that again we have gung-ho, shoot first, kill-the-bugs Archer who has to be talked out of his murderous ways by T’Pol (her “I don’t want you to die,” is lovely). But in his absence, even Trip of all people manages to step up, giving T’Pol unwanted but accurate leadership advice. Her snarling at him when he attempts to stop her from going after the Captain is genuinely shocking.

It’s only when kidnapped that Archer attempts a diplomatic solution using the information he learned in Stratagem, and the further byplay between Bakula and Randy Oglesby is just as engaging as it was then. And we end on pretty much the best cliffhanger since The Best of Both Worlds. With just a touch more of that open-hearted Star Trek optimism, this would be a five-star show, but I can’t overlook Archer’s kill-or-be-killed philosophy, which – as the Xindi point out – he only abandons when it is no longer viable, and not for any more noble reason. Xindi prisoner protocols seemingly do not included searching captured combatants. These Xindi are crazy.

ENT S03E07 The Shipment (). The Xindi have a new weapon to test (funny, that first one seemed pretty damned efficient to me) and it will be ready in a matter of “weeks”, so Archer had better hope his new intel is kosher. Because our crew is finally turning up on the Xindi’s doorstep and making off with a suspicious alien thermos flask from some Planet of the Apes-style squabbling scientists.

I don’t really get the Xindi. Over on Deep Space Nine, the complex overlapping and intersecting beliefs, approaches, loyalties and rivalries between the Founders, the Vorta and the Jem’Hadar made the Dominion fascinating opponents. But as far as I can tell the Xindi are just generic baddies who happen to have five different makeup jobs. So what? And remember, we’re introduced to them by means of a massive weapon delivered to Earth which claims seven million lives in less than a minute. That means they’re nearby, single-minded and ready to go. Exactly one episode later, they are debating among themselves, skulking on the other side of the galaxy and still building their super weapon. Both things can’t be true at once.

But in Archer’s refusal to destroy the weapons complex and start a war, we get a glimmer of what Star Trek used to be about. Peaceful solutions. Curiosity about other cultures and species. Diplomacy over aggression. And the different styles of the different Xindi do begin, slowly, to mean something. We still get plenty of “Let’s Kick Some Alien Ass” together with “Headmaster Archer Will See You After School” but there are some welcome shades of grey here. Doorbells that go “bing-bong” are a universal constant apparently.

ENT S03E08 Twilight (). We haven’t had very many cover-of-a-comic-book teasers in Enterprise so far, but here’s Archer, confined to quarters by “Captain” T’Pol, arriving just in time to see the now fully-operational Xindi super weapon unconvincingly reducing Earth to molten slag. One or other of these concepts on its own might have worked better. As it is, we know that none of this is real, so we just waiting to find out if it’s a hallucination, simulation, bad dream or video game (the effects look pretty video game-y). T’Pol looks great in uniform and it’s a mystery to me why Archer doesn’t just give her a field commission now she’s no longer part of the Vulcan High Command and he’s out of contact with Starfleet.

Anyway, it’s always fun to enjoy these counter-factual narratives and it lets us do things like bump off Travis (hard to imagine he’ll be much missed), put some talc in Scott Bakula’s hair, reduce the galactic population of humans to a rump of some 6000. All good stuff, but the question is not “what will happen next?” It’s “how will this be undone”. It’s a forty-minute deleted scene, and yet it’s never less than entertaining while it’s on, and even moving when Phlox gently probes the extent of T’Pol’s love for the shadow of her former captain, who is essentially a victim of space-Alzheimer’s.

“The helm’s not responding,” reports Travis. “Alter course,” suggests Malcolm, obliviously. This somehow solves the problem. Once-logical Vulcans now make catty comments about other people’s fashion choices.

ENT S03E09 North Star (). We’re in a western setting, and a rough one at that, with lynchings and pauper’s burials. Trip and T’Pol have to barter for horses, while Archer asks questions in a local tavern. For American television shows, summoning up the old west comes as easily as corsets and bonnets for the BBC, and the production values here are top notch, with a desaturated colour grade adding to the atmosphere. These good ol’ boys are celebrating their victory over the “skags” in what seems like an unnecessarily sadistic manner, and before long, we get a riff on the famous Jack Palance “Pick up the gun” routine from Shane. It takes a while before we discover why this conflict between aliens and primitive humans is any of Enterprise’s business but the drama is well maintained even if the mystery is more annoying than engaging. Fundamentally, this is a reversion to type: our crew lands on a planet, finds a wrong and rights it. It has nothing to do with the Xindi or the Temporal Cold War, or any other ongoing story strand, but it’s good solid stuff, even if our regulars are just names once more.

ENT S03E10 Similitude (). Enter Manny Coto who gets sole screenwriting credit on this episode and who will have a very big role to play as this series continues. Someone has carked it. And because it’s one of the six people that Archer could reliably pick out of a police lineup, there’s a whole big funeral and everything (MACOs and redshirts are expected to make their own arrangements). In what’s becoming quite a frequent trope of Enterprise, we flash back two weeks to a pre-rigor morris Trip Tucker who is giving T’Pol a foot massage (he’s the foot fuckin’ master). When the warp core goes kablooey, we’re off the Dr Phlox’s Medical Ethics Wonder Emporium, where the latest cure for mild cases of death involves growing a twin Trip and harvesting its brain. One can imagine Rick and Morty having gleeful fun with such an idea, but here it’s all hand-wringing and brow-furrowing, but this doesn’t at least make sense, and mean something, and the barnacles on Enterprise’s hull make for a nice ticking clock. Speaking of which, the fifteen-day lifespan essentially solves the moral conundrum, unlike the very similar situation in Cogenitor. The irony that it’s the same Trip who “freed” Charles now benefits from his own walking, talking dish of the day, although this goes unremarked upon. Alas, the twist ending is rather too easy to see coming and there isn’t really enough story for 45 minutes, but we’re an awfully long way from drivel like Rajiin.

You can tell things are serious early on, because Archer hasn’t shaved for a couple of days.

ENT S03E11 Carpenter Street (). This isn’t so much a cover-of-a-comic-book opening as an is-this-even-the-right-show opening, but the horrid theme tune is there to reassure us. That aside, for the first eight or so minutes, our optimistic science fiction series about exploring strange new worlds is replaced by a seedy, contemporary and entirely Earthbound story of kidnapping incapacitated sex workers. It’s all a bit grim. Maybe not surprisingly given this opening, time travelling Crewman Daniels is the one of the main guest stars, who despatches Archer and a sceptical T’Pol back to 21st century Detroit to put right what once went wrong and soon they’re stealing cars, robbing ATMs and generally blending in pretty well. But tracking down three vampiric Xindi is never all that interesting and Archer is back to his brutalising Jack Bauer-esque ways, more’s the pity.

ENT S03E12 Chosen Realm (). Enterprise’s latest passengers see the hazardous anomalies as the breath of the creator, but who have other things on their mind than simple devotion and prayer. In fact, this 9/11 parable has taken a left turn into hijacking and suicide bombing. This is pretty tasteless, but if you can overlook the real world parables, it’s good exciting space adventure stuff. Enterprise gets another hole blown in its side, and we’re going to be facing the same problem that we saw on Voyager pretty soon – once the ship starts taking real damage, you either have to pretend that it didn’t, or pretend that it’s just as easy to repair way out here as it would be at home, or have your super-duper-hero vessel getting increasingly feeble as the season progresses. There are actually some big advantages to option #3 but somehow I don’t think that’s where we’re headed. Nice to see the religious nutjobs giving Archer a hard time about his Jack Bauer shenanigans a few episodes back. Quite right too, nutjobs. Archer’s feint with the transporter is pretty nifty, and is given a little extra fillip when you consider that the wonky thing might very well kill him. And how about that nasty squeeze of vinegar at the end. This is very, very strong stuff.

ENT S03E01 The Xindi (). The season-long arc kicks off with “Last time on Enterprise” setting us up for the epic story to come. The crew of the NX-01 are coming to kick some alien ass. The episode proper starts with a council of bugs and fish, so if you were wondering who sent the initial probe (whose sole purpose seems to be to alert humans to the fact that an ill-prepared enemy has us in their sights and give us time to get our act together) you aren’t kept in suspense for more than five seconds.

When the titles start, that dreadful theme song has been augmented with more percussion and I think maybe tambourines and now sounds significantly worse, which the appearance of the words “Star” and “Trek” does little to alleviate (at least on my DVD copy, for broadcast they turned up a few episodes later). Further changes are in the offing. Enterprise has had a new command centre retrofitted, which the Captain and Malcolm helpfully remind each other about. And Jolene Blalock’s naturally arching eyebrows have finally been made to look like every other Vulcan. And rather than have her rolling around in her undies, this episode simply goes for broke and has her topless.

Plodding around the galaxy asking if any dive bars have heard of these “Xindi” of which you speak seems like a lot of shoe leather to accomplish very little. The invincible, unstoppable, unknowable threat we faced at the beginning of The Expanse is now being written more like someone’s disreputable brother-in-law who skipped down after burning down his car wash. Meanwhile Trip is suffering from generic nightmares in a misguided quest to add depth to his character and specificity to the disaster. There are finally some more characters on the ship, notably Steven Culp and Daniel Dae Kim. But since these are soldiers, they are almost all required to be American male humans. These new space marines get to rescue Archer and Trip, further undermining the qualities of our screw-up regulars – not that any of them are particularly well-serviced. T’Pol and Phlox get a couple of scenes each. Hoshi gets to do her Henry Higgins act. Was Travis in this episode at all? I don’t remember.

The Xindi arc was a last roll of the dice by producers. Enterprise had debuted to something like 12 million viewers. By the end of Season 2, it was down to 4 million. Everything was riding on ordinary Americans flocking back for this episode, but they continued to stay away in droves. The death knell of the show was sounded right here.

ENT S03E02 Anomaly (). So we’ve been promised that this terrifying “Expanse” is going to prove highly problematic for the ship – and indeed in the last episode we saw some crates in the cargo bay jumping around – but like the Briar Patch, or the nebula in Wrath of Khan, or the whatever it was called in Nemesis, this is just about making our super-duper futuristic ship and crew have to slow down and solve trivial problems while they plod towards the main plot. And as if revealing that the terrifying super weapon which claimed 7 million lives on earth was just a trial run, with the rest of the Armada still being painstakingly assembled countless light-years away, hadn’t sapped enough suspense from the scenario, now we put quicksand between our heroes and their goal because that buys us another episode. I’m not here for it.

Having given up on character development for the main seven, we are returning to the space marines in hope of finding some engaging personalities. At least Archer knows the names of more than six other people on board I suppose. Someone else who seems impatient to get to the main plot is Archer himself, barely blinking at the sight of his ship being turned into gelatinous rubber. He makes a quick stop off to examine some alien corpses, and then is all like: full-steam ahead, we’ll patch up the ship on the hoof.

Still, if you can forget about the season arc, and you can tolerate the usual junk science, this is at least exciting, with boarding parties, alien corpses, floating coffee cups and plenty of running and shooting from all concerned. and exploring the death star which they find upon following the ion trails of the departing pirate ships does have some of the majesty and wonder which I associate with some of the stronger parts of this franchise. What I don’t associate with Star Trek is the 24-style torture deployed by Archer, which is hateful.

Funny kind of spatial anomaly which seems to preferentially affect foodstuffs and their containers.

ENT S03E03 Extinction (). Taking a leaf out of Steve McQueen’s book, Trip attempts to seduce midriff-baring T’Pol with soft fruit. This kind of happy ending male fantasy wish fulfilment is toe-curlingly obvious and possibly my least favourite aspect of what’s a pretty soggy episode. Stop trying to make Trip and T’Pol happen! If this is cringe, what happens next is absolutely mortifying as the landing party goes all Mike Westmore noses and scary grunting. It’s all utterly derivative and violently uninteresting.

ENT S03E04 Rajiin (). Who’s playing Star Trek trope bingo? Over the last few episodes you’ve been able to check off Zagbars vs Zoobles, space porn, spatial anomalies which look weird but leave no lasting damage, the crew transformed into monsters and Earth under attack. Anyway, this episode is centred on a beautiful slave woman on the run. Somebody must have a line by now? If not, then here’s another dose of bartering for information with nefarious alien traders for you. Even the arc plot is botched here. The terrifying probe which tore up Earth in The Expanse has been retired in favour of a bio-weapon which is still under development. Great, I was beginning to worry that they had more than one of those probes. Guess I’ll just relax. One star for using “exotic” Earth spices as currency, or this would have been my first zero.

“Season Three is where it gets good” is something that fans of Berman-Trek hear and say a lot. Well, it hasn’t held up for Enterprise so far. This has been about the poorest run of episodes I can remember, making me nostalgic for rubbish like If Wishes Were Horses or Too Short a Season. More than anything, I get the sense that nobody on the writing team has any real idea what to do with the Expanse, the threat to Earth or the Xindi, the details of all of which seem to shift from episode-to-episode. Brannon Braga fired the entire writing staff at the end of the first season, but it didn’t seem to help. No-one seems to understand how to put together a multi-episode narrative. Where’s Ira Steven Behr? Where’s Ron Moore? Where’s Michael Piller?

ENT S03E05 Impulse (). Teasers on this show seem to fall into two categories – calm people having ordinary conversations for longer than would seem necessary, or incredibly brief snatches of chaos and hysteria. This is the latter, seeming more like “this week on Mission Impossible” than the traditional curtain raisers, and features T’Pol having an attack of the screaming ab-dabs which requires her to be physically restrained. It seems a day earlier, Trip planned to screen a Bob Hope / Bing Crosby picture. Maybe that’s the cause.

Of rather more interest is the distress call from a Vulcan ship. Vulcans, you’ll remember, were full of ghastly tales about the hideous nature of the Expanse, exactly none of which have been bourn out by Enterprise’s experience so far. Archer takes a shuttlepod to investigate while Travis (hey Travis) tries to land on an asteroid to mine it for unobtanium. Old hand David Livingston does lovely work behind the camera, making the distressed Vulcan ship genuinely creepy, even before the survivors turn out all to be murderously nuts. Luckily, Archer thought to bring along one of those space marines for protection, even if he’s the first one to be seriously injured.

Once again, the main characters are just a bunch of guys trying to solve a problem. It scarcely matters who they are, or what beliefs they hold – except that one of them is T’Pol. And it’s not just that she’s Vulcan and therefore subject to the same Expanse hoo-doo that nobbled the existing crew, it’s that we can see how hard she’s trying to conceal her mounting anxiety for the sake of the mission, her professionalism and her silly Vulcan pride. When she loses it, it’s terribly affecting, and Jolene Blalock is even more amazing than she’s been previously. Combined with the strong thriller plotting, strong direction and atmospheric lighting, it makes for a thankfully very impressive episode, with a very disturbing unresolved ending.

First script credit for Terry Matalas, who returned to show-run the widely-acclaimed Star Trek Picard in 2022. When Trip, Travis, Malcolm, T’Pol and the Captain leave the bridge, all their stations are unmanned. Hoshi’s there on her own!

ENT S03E06 Exile (). It’s our Hoshi episode for this year, and because this is Enterprise, that means we open with her walking about her quarters in her scanties, and because this is Star Trek, she’s being menaced by a mysterious male voice in her head. At this point I’m just praying the episode doesn’t go full Sub Rosa. The hilariously named “Tarquin” (presumably his alien telepathic buddies are called Jules and Sebastian), promises he has all sorts of handy-dandy info about the Xindi, but he’ll only work to generate it (huh?) if Hoshi sticks around to brighten the place up. She agrees, and he proceeds to invade her privacy, creep around her, bully her, and she still refuses to fall in love with him, the silly cow. Sigh. I guess this is the story we tell with female regulars. Welcome to the club, Hoshi. Beverley Crusher, Deanna Troi, Kira Nerys, B’Elanna Torres and Seven of Nine are here to show you the ropes (in fact one of them directed this episode). And poor old Maury Sterling has so much prosthetic gubbins in and around his mouth he sounds like he’s saying his lines while undergoing a dental exam. Half a star extra because the Expanse actually has some teeth this week. Even fake hallucination Archer only knows the names of six other crew members.

ENT S02E22 Cogenitor (). Archer meets that sitcom stock character, the more able version of himself, whose ship can get closer to astral phenomena, who has fancier sensors and who smoothly invites himself to dinner. Hanging a lantern on how undramatic these teasers are, Trip comments that nobody seems to be charging weapons. Deliciously, this benevolent counterpart is played by Tomalak himself, Andreas Katsulas – it’s been too long – and pretty soon, Enterprise is crawling with smooth-talking guests, with their liberal ideals, their photographic memories and their third sex, which gives the episode its title.

Nothing seems to baffle Trip more than this feature of their biology (and – despite observing that two sexes is the universal norm – nothing baffles the guests more than Trip’s bafflement). He refuses to let Phlox explain what’s going on, but then starts asking everyone else on board to help him understand. I’m more used to, and greatly prefer the enlightened crews of the Enterprise-D or Voyager who don’t tend to sit in judgment (or who at least earnestly debate the ethics first). Trip’s very twentieth century confusion is unimpressive, and of course it comes back to: in a few hours, the crew spots and tries to solve a systemic injustice which has existed for countless generations. “I’d expect this from a first year recruit,” comments Archer, once everything has gone to hell, and it’s hard to disagree. After years of watching a highly admirable crew work together to solve complex problems, it’s simply not as engaging to watch a supposedly likeable screw-up flail around clumsily and then face no consequences for his clodhopping actions. Whether we agree with Travis’s choices or not (and Archer’s fairly baffling decision to refuse asylum) this is poor storytelling, lacking the moral dimension it’s groping for. But it’s nice to see an alien culture which feels like it makes sense, and the final squeeze of vinegar helps a little (although it also makes for a grimly neat and tidy ending). Malcolm’s storyline doesn’t end, it’s simply abandoned. Travis and Hoshi are both MIA and we only see T’Pol lying about her age and organising a film show.

ENT S02E23 Regeneration (). Having helped itself to the Ferengi, which were clearly first encountered by the Enterprise-D, Enterprise now helps itself to the Borg, which were even more clearly first encountered by the Enterprise-D. I’m not 100% sure what “sweeps” are, but I suspect they were happening around the time this aired. The scene in which the drones wake up and assimilate the hapless scientists is predictable, sure, but it’s well-mounted by director David Livingston and it’s more exciting than a lot of things which happen early on in Enterprise episodes. And I appreciate the patience of a story which spends this long on setting all this up, without needing to cut back to people with their names in the main titles.

Once we do get to Archer, T’Pol and so on, we essentially get a cover version of Q Who, only this time the Borg are mysterious only to the characters and not to us. This show is so keen to portray the crew as different from the 24th century characters that it keeps erring on the side of showing them as doofuses. Having them clueless in the face of antagonists we know so well does not help correct this tendency – so it’s gratifying when Archer realises that he’s dealing with some serious shit and takes unusually brutal but effective action. Having Phlox infected with nanoprobes is a great turn, and what much of the rest of the episode is focused on. His dispassionate assessment of his own mortal plight is rather touching and Billingsley shows again why he’s such an asset to this serious (Jolene Blalock has been rather underused lately).

As much as this tries to tie in with First Contact, it can’t be easily squared with other televised Borg stories, which calls into question the very idea of a prequel series, plugging gaps in the lore. But I’d much rather have a really exciting, well-told adventure that didn’t mesh perfectly with existing continuity than a box-ticking exercise which was dramatically inert.

ENT S02E24 First Flight (). Here’s some speculative cutting-edge science which hasn’t dated too badly. Dark matter is almost certainly a thing, and still a mysterious one, which makes it a good topic for an story. Alas, rather in the vein of Carbon Creek, the bulk of this episode isn’t about bombarding an exotic nebula with made-up particles, but in the manner of Deep Space Nine, a long shuttle journey is used as a pretext for Archer to reminisce about an old friend who has just died unexpectedly. Once again, the supporting cast isn’t simply in the background, they’re completely absent, as this episode is laser-focused on whether or not Archer has the, er, “right stuff”.

It’s impossible to wring much tension or suspense about much of what happens because of the flashback structure, so this is going be highly dependent on how interesting the details are and how richly realised the characters are. Sadly, this is mainly people reciting technobabble at each other or spelling out the subtext for the hard of feeling. That said the Mission Control/experimental flight/pushing the engineering limits is a pretty solid premise, working as well here as it does in Apollo 13, or the opening of Top Gun Maverick, to pick just two examples. The pilot error/lousy engine debate in the bar degenerates into fisticuffs, further cementing Archer’s position as the least enlightened captain the franchise has ever centred.

Maybe not surprisingly, it’s the framing story – where we don’t know the ending – which is most successful, as once again Jolene Blalock shows her immense class, gently probing Archer for more details as her understanding and appreciation of his efforts slowly grows. Remember that Berman and Braga’s concept for Season 1 of Enterprise was basically going to be twenty-six episodes of this. Might have been more effective in that context.

ENT S02E25 Bounty (). A particularly sixties looking alien teddy bear makes off with Archer and MVP T’Pol is stuck in quarantine (and in her scanties) after an away mission. It seems he is still wanted by the Klingons after the events of Judgment and there’s a price on his head. His bonding with his captor is all pretty routine but Jordan Lund manages to carve out something like a character under all that latex and fur, even if the ending can be seen coming from a light year away.

The combination of tactile gel application (seriously, have they never heard of showers in the twenty-second century?) and T’Pol’s premature Pon Farr makes the usually fairly pervy decon scenes look like the something out of the Red Shoe Diaries, and although played perfectly by Blalock and Billingsley, the shooting makes it clear that this is another laughable attempt to “keep the dads watching”, something which no previous series ever worried about (much). Roxann Dawson handles the tense pursuit of an escaping T’Pol rather better. But T’Pol’s absence from the bridge doesn’t affect the main plot at all, so it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the only point of this plotline was to have Blalock writhing around half-dressed. It’s also very weird that T’Pol claims never to have been through Pon Farr before. It’s supposed to happen every seven years. Has she been an adult for less time than that? Surely not. Archer’s oral skills would leave Houdini reeling.

ENT S02E26 The Expanse (). If you can overlook the crummy video game-style effects, this dialogue-free teaser does have some impact, depicting as it does a weird alien ship which carves a metres-wide swathe of destruction across populated areas of planet Earth. Wow. After the titles we’re back to the pursuit of Archer by the Klingons which feels rather like letting the air out of the balloon. And there’s a feeling that the production team doesn’t trust either of these potentially massive plotlines, because now, only about five minutes into the episode, the Suliban are back and have abducted Archer.

After a set-to with the Klingons and an awful lot of rather arid debating, Archer is allowed to use the info from the future and is despatched to the Delphic Expanse in pursuit of the death-dealing Xindi. T’Pol has to decide whether to stay onboard, and helpfully Phlox is there to spell out the nature of her dilemma, just in case we can’t figure it out for ourselves. Archer doesn’t even bother to pick out a new science officer – partly because he doesn’t know the name of anybody else on board, partly because he (and I) know she isn’t really going to be dropped off on Vulcan. Trip’s thick-eared bloodlust is yet another stain on what’s rapidly becoming my least favourite regular character in the franchise. And this one doesn’t end, it just stops. To be continued… Archer on the bridge in a cardi is not a good look for him.

Enterprise S2 overview

• Season 2 doesn’t feel like a massive improvement over Season 1 and this is reflected in the scores. A very similar average of 2.87 with still no 5 star classics, and plenty of “will this do?” episodes hovering around three stars, plus or minus one half.
• Jolene Blalock as T’Pol is revelatory, far more than another Seven of Nine or Number One, and her relationship with Archer is the backbone of this show. But Scott Bakula seems stuck playing the Captain as a pissed off headmaster, and who can blame him, with this crew full of dopey screw-ups to contend with.
• That’s really Trip and Malcolm I’m talking about. Phlox is good at his job (and Billingsley at his) but Hoshi and Travis have barely been in this season, and when the scripts refuse to recognise the existence of any member of the crew who isn’t in the opening titles, not even giving them a chance to show us what they can do is pretty unforgiveable.
• I could also do without the retconning of the Vulcans. The noble, compassionate, logical and dignified characters of TOS, TNG, DS9 and Voyager have been replaced by a snotty gang of precious and blinkered school bullies who are full of pride, jealousy, snobbery, secrecy, prejudice, treachery and various other toxic emotions. And a series which is filling in the past really ought to be taking more care over things like the use of mind melds.
• Maybe part of the problem is that Berman and Braga are writing So Many Scripts. A full 14 out of 26 shows this year have their names on them, and for seven they are the sole credited writers. For a franchise used to spreading the load, that’s putting a lot of pressure in a small space.
• And Enterprise still isn’t sure what show it’s trying to be. Does it want to be Star Trek But Nobody’s Got Their Act Together? Does it want to be Here’s A Hole In Future History Plugged For You? Would it be better off being Time Travel Adventures In The Future? Nobody seems to know, and to be honest, none of these are great ideas for shows. Star Trek in the mid-twenty-second-century could work, but you need to back off from the idea that everyone before Kirk’s time was a dope for that to work.
• The best shows this year just concentrated on strong adventure plotting, where we don’t notice how thin the characters are and where we aren’t being distracted by either Star Trek’s own past or it’s newly-imagined Temporal Cold War future. In episodes like Minefield, Regeneration or even Marauders we can just enjoy the Thrilling Escapes From Death and go along for the ride. But even that displays a lack of ambition which is very surprising after the massive serialisation of DS9 and the bonkers big swings of Voyager.
• So maybe it’s not surprising that this episode is being used to upset the status quo. Maybe in Season 3, Enterprise will finally grow the beard.

ENT S02E17 Canamar (). Archer and Tucker are held prisoner by a bunch of pirates whose make-up design makes them look oddly New Romantic. Being the victims of someone else’s penal system is hardly a new idea (we saw it as recently as Detained, at the end of the last season). Whereas it might be interesting to see how Spock, Picard, Kira, Seven or even – at a push – T’Pol might react to this situation, here it’s just two guys exchanging problem-solving technobabble.

ENT S02E18 The Crossing (). Enterprise is swallowed by a rather video game-looking maw and pretty soon the crew’s bodies are being tried on like cheap suits by the glowing balls of light which inhabit the giant ship. It’s a strong sci-fi concept but being prematurely released from the belly of the whale threatens to crater the stakes, and the situation asks rather more of the regular cast than is ideal, even before Archer’s murderous solution to the problem. And even non-corporeal entities have T’Pol sex dreams it seems.

ENT S02E19 Judgment (). Archer is standing trial. Again. Seriously, didn’t we just do this? A couple of times in fact. This is a Klingon court (patterned after the one in Star Trek VI) which adds some interest, and old hand JG Hertzler is here, back in the forehead ridges and Fu Manchu facial hair, bringing unexpected depth to his aged defence counsel. Enterprise doesn’t seem to be exploring far-flung galaxies this week, which has been a major plot point recently, so one wonders how long it took them to get back to familiar space and why they needed to. The trial is seemingly conducted in English even though they threaten Archer with removal if he doesn’t keep quiet.

ENT S02E20 Horizon (). Attempting to prove that nothing and no-one is beyond salvation, this is a Travis episode. The one thing we know about him is that he grew up on one of those freighters we saw in Fortunate Son, and so that’s what we return to. Why add layers when you can always include repetition? Anthony Montgomery does a decent job here, but he’s only given a situation to play, there’s nothing individual or surprising here, no grit in the oyster. In a show known for its limp teasers, this one is a piece of tissue paper that’s been left out in the rain. And the Frankenstein subplot suggests that nobody on the writing staff has ever read the book.

ENT S02E21 The Breach (). Travis is an expert caver – as you would expect from a young man born and brought up on a space freighter (why add layers when you can always include random bullshit?). There being no other people onboard with similar experience, the young ensign has to teach Malcolm and Trip how to do it. Don’t worry, he’ll be invalided out of the story in short order. In a more interesting strand, Phlox has to convince an ancient enemy of the Denobulans to allow him to operate, and John Billingsley does wonderful work here, exploring his personal conflict and the long political enmity between the two cultures.

ENT S02E12 The Catwalk (). An actual problem for the crew to solve (instead of a morbid fantasy or silly sex dream). A deadly wavefront is approaching and as they can’t outrun it, the crew needs to shelter in the ship’s nacelles. I note that “can’t outrun it” means that this “wavefront” is approaching at something like 350 times the speed of light. Hell of a wavefront. As usual, the only people tasked with solving the problem are the seven whose names are in the opening titles (Travis is on latrine duty). Mike Vejar creates some nicely claustrophobic images as the ship is shut down, but the people in trouble are just their jobs, as usual – when Starfleet’s finest aren’t bitching and whining about the food like little kids.

ENT S02E13 Dawn (). On paper, Archer makes a decent fist of building an alliance with today’s lumpy-faced aggressor who’s trying to get these damned kids off his lawn. But I can’t help thinking than a little of Picard or Janeway’s charm would have gone a long way. Bakula, so effortlessly easygoing in Quantum Leap, seems to imagine that being a captain means always being angry and plays even this scene as if he’s giving his opposite number a telling-off. Trip makes a better job of making a new friend on his first day at big school, despite the fact that it seems as if other spacefaring species can’t make or don’t want universal translators. If you liked Darmok (or The Enemy – or Arena!), you’ll hate this.

ENT S02E14 Stigma (). Mind-melds it seems are not merely out of fashion on Vulcan, as we learned in Fusion, but actually spread disease, and T’Pol is a sufferer – again as a result of events in Fusion. Far from applying logic to the situation and realising that increasing the sum of knowledge about a disease, how so ever transmitted, can only be of benefit, they act like blinkered and prejudiced humans in what I assume is meant to be an AIDS metaphor. As usual, it’s John Billingsley and Jolene Blalock’s sensitive playing that makes this work at all – I’m furiously uninterested in the subplot with Phlox’s second wife flirting with Trip. Once more, Trip’s choice of movies is resolutely 20th century. Bakula is still stuck in angry headmaster mode. Travis and Malcolm are both virtually MIA.

ENT S02E15 Cease Fire (). More ret-conning of the Star Trek’s most celebrated alien species. This show is so keen to create friction between humans and their more experienced galactic tour guides that the curious and enlightened Vulcans – who brokered risky peace deals with both Romulans and Klingons in past iterations of the show – are now presented as obsessively secretive, warlike, suspicious, bigoted, prideful and petty. The one thing they are never portrayed as is logical (T’Pol aside). One could be forgiven for thinking that Berman and Braga had never actually watched Star Trek. Once again, the Andorians come off as far more reasonable and pleasant. The once subtle and complex P’Jem storyline is now all colouring inside the lines, and repetitive combat sequences, sad to say. And once again Jolene Blalock is the MVP of the episode, while Travis, Malcolm and Hoshi get almost nothing to do and Trip only gets to complain. This episode even manages to waste Suzie Plakson!

ENT S02E16 Future Tense (). In a galaxy awash with humanoid-looking aliens, it takes T’Pol a few seconds’ visual inspection to conclude that the Norman Bates’s mother-looking dude on the derelict craft that the Enterprise happens upon is definitively human. Is she a walking tricorder now? (She’s also wrong, as Phlox later determines.) In any case, the Acne lads want the ship back so this is a Temporal Cold War story. Those often feel higher-stakes and have an energy that other episodes lack, but it can also feel like our characters are making a guest appearance on someone else’s show. This time, the focus is mainly kept on the Enterprise, which suddenly finds itself the prettiest girl at the party, thanks to the contents of launch bay two. This is much more exciting stuff than we’re used to, with some great race-against-time/thrilling-escape-from-death material, but nothing that our crew tries has any effect, so once again, they’re reduced to helpless patsies and a promising story turns out not to have an ending.

The commitment to including only seven crew members in any operation becomes actively ludicrous here. Needing to solve an engineering problem, Chief Engineer Tucker selects the ship’s Chief Tactical Officer to assist him, resulting in no tactical officer on the bridge in a combat situation during which it’s up to communications officer Hoshi trying to lock alien meddlers out of the computer system. Later when Malcolm wants help monkeying with a torpedo, it’s the motherfucking Captain who lends a hand. Where’s the rest of the crew??

Star Trek: Nemesis (). Insurrection was a disappointment at the box office. There are various numbers floating around the internet but the budget would have been somewhere in the region of $60m. A $117m worldwide gross meant that it might just have scraped into the black, but would probably show as profitable overall once it came out on DVD. A long way from the big money First Contact had made. Unwilling to continue with the same team, Paramount went looking for fresh blood. In as writer was John Logan, then best known for Any Given Sunday and especially the multi-Oscar-winning Gladiator. In as director came Stuart Baird, whose CV in the main chair was pretty thin, but who had worked as editor and second unit director on same acknowledged classics including the original 1978 Superman. He had also never seen a single episode of the show. Well, you could say the same about Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer and Wrath of Khan had turned out pretty well. And besides, John Logan was a fan (maybe too much of a fan…?), Rick Berman was still there, overseeing things, Brent Spiner had contributed some story ideas, so we were probably in good hands. And I remember the advance word on this one being really thrilling. Berman had missed his chance to put out a new science fiction movie in the iconic year 2001, but surely the extra twelve months would guarantee success.

The movie we got is… poor.

All the usual problems are there – it’s the Picard and Data show with five other guys just sort of hanging around the place (including Worf, whose return to the Enterprise is never explained). Afraid of being stodgy and slow-moving like The Motion Picture, it’s full of irrelevant “action beats” which are meant to attract the Die Hard or James Bond audience, but it can’t be just a simple chase movie, so we have a plot which ties itself in knots with doppelgängers of both leading men for entirely different reasons, countdowns to certain doom, and so many things which we’ve seen done better in prior movies – Data’s sacrifice is a reprise of the death of Spock in Khan, finding his head recalls adventures with Mark Twain from the telly show, his having a brother is obviously familiar, Picard goes through old photos like he did in Generations, the Bassin Rift is another version of the Briar Patch (or the Badlands, or the nebula from Khan), and the whole climax is a rip off of the end of Star Trek II, with a much less interesting villain, except when it feels like the end of the previous film, with Picard alone on board the enemy ship trying to stop it from doing the thing. That’s the drawback of hiring people who don’t know Star Trek. They don’t know when they’re falling into well-worn grooves.

Once again, we start with the telly cast in their white togs, enjoying some downtime – in this case celebrating Will and Deanna’s wedding. Neither of them actually gets a line – in fact only Data and Picard speak at all in the first half of the scene. Whoopi Goldberg shows up, and contributes nothing of meaning – the point of the second half of the scene is apparently to hear Brent Spiner singing. Yay. Wil Wheaton filmed a cameo as Wesley Crusher, but it ended up cut. He’s not the only one getting short shrift. Troi and Crusher are in the pre-mission briefing and never speak. In fact, Beverley Crusher gets 11 lines in the whole movie – barely more than Admiral Janeway who appears on a viewscreen and sends the Captain Picard off to meet the main plot.

Remember Jean-Luc Picard – the cultured and curious diplomat who led his crew thoughtfully and compassionately through high-minded adventures for seven years? You can still see him if you squint at the bewildered family man in Generations, the traumatised soldier in First Contact, or the lonely romantic in Insurrection. Here, he’s been replaced entirely by a juvenile thrill-seeker who likes fast cars and gadgets, makes dick jokes to publicly humiliate his bridge officers, and whose idea of respecting the Prime Directive is strafing the locals from the back of his 4×4. Picard is such a lynch-pin of the show that you undermine him at your peril, and there’s almost nothing of him left here. Much of Brent Spiner’s time meanwhile is spent pulling faces and doing silly voices as “B4”. Hope you like that because (along with Picard’s dick jokes) that’s your lot as far as humour goes in this movie.

This all looks good, with decent CG spaceships, strong make-up (mainly, Dina Meyer’s sallow complexion seems to stop at her jawline) and a pounding Jerry Goldsmith score, but the new bridge has a cramped and awkward feel with the first officer’s chair miles away from the captain, and the helm and ops stations hemming in the officers in question. And the character of Shinzon pretty much dooms the whole sorry affair. Tom Hardy has never been worse, and the notion that he was cloned from Picard proves completely irrelevant (people keep telling Picard they’re not the same), and would have been even if Hardy had been able to do a better job (or if they’d got Patrick Stewart to play both roles).

His early scenes negotiating with Picard go nowhere. We know he’s the bad guy because we saw the opening scenes of the slaughter of the Romulan senate. And Picard seemingly does too, because he doesn’t do anything Shinzon wants him to. Good thing too. Then he’d be a dummy as well as reckless and coarse. Compare this to Star Trek VI, where a Starfleet captain sets aside his personal feelings in order to broker a risky peace with the Klingons. Here, a lying Romulan fails to convince a rigid Starfleet captain to attempt a lasting truce with the Romulans. Who comes out of that looking good? And does Shinzon think that dream-raping Troi (another familiar and deeply ick image from the TV show) will increase his stock with Picard? If not, why the hell’s he doing it?

How is the Enterprise able to detect a form of radiation thought impossible? Why does Shinzon invite Picard to tea, let him return to his ship and then transport him back to exactly where he was against his will? In fact, why does any of this happen, because after ten minutes, Picard escapes and gets back to the Enterprise. Why does Shinzon refer to B4 as “bait” when Picard’s trip to Romulus was ordered by Starfleet and has nothing to do with their recent discovery of bits of android? In fact, what does Shinzon want, full stop? How does blowing up the Enterprise with Picard on it help him get the blood he needs to survive? And what does any of that have to do with the coup he organised?

I liked this one even less than Star Trek V. William Shatner’s attempt is a mess, and very very dumb in places, but it feels like Star Trek. This one feels like a straight-to-DVD knock off, in which characters run down space corridors firing guns with both hands. When it tries to be exciting, it’s deeply silly, and when it tries to be dark, it’s just sour – a very far cry from the franchise’s trademark optimism about the future. Brent Spiner’s performance (when he stops playing B4 like a Looney Tunes character) is pretty much the only thing worth watching.

Fans stayed away in droves. It’s the only Star Trek movie not to make a profit, reviews from the mainstream media were unkind, and fans lambasted its lack of understanding of what had made the TV show work. It killed off the adventures of this crew on the big screen. Most of them were never seen in any further Star Trek stories until Star Trek Picard began in 2020 (and the big reunion in 2023). And Star Trek wasn’t seen in cinemas again until JJ Abrams reinvented Kirk and Spock in 2009. You can see why I didn’t want Volume I to end here. Even Stuart Baird never directed another movie.

ENT S02E07 The Seventh (). T’Pol is running a secret Vulcan mission and she’s taking Travis seeing as he hasn’t more than about six lines in the last four episodes (rather than say a trained security officer). Wisely, she adds Archer to the gang, freeing up Travis to do what he’s best equipped for – mutely following the other two around. Their pursuit of and verbal fencing with Bruce Davison’s Menos is exciting enough, and the backstory is intriguing – but back in orbit, the general lack of maturity and professionalism extends to acting-captain Trip abusing Archer’s privileges, while proving himself incapable of committing to even the most trivial of decisions. “How very Vulcan,” comments Archer when presented with T’Pol’s completely illogical orders based on irrelevant notions of honour, without which the plot doesn’t work.

ENT S02E08 The Communicator (). Given that the mid-second season of a new show isn’t going to have five years of rich backstory to fall back on, and given that this show in particular is oriented mainly around fairly low-stakes adventure-of-the-week stuff, this is the kind of simple-seeming problem which should suit it perfectly, even if the plot is kicked off yet again by one of Starfleet’s finest being a total doofus. And it largely does work, as a straightforward get-captured-and-escape story. It’s just a shame that it’s a communicator that’s been left behind. Shouldn’t a communicator of all damn things be particularly easy to track down? It’s the thing they use to pinpoint people’s locations before beaming them up for pity’s sake. How can they possibly not be able to find it? Plus, they’ve used the transporter in less dire situations than this before, and this seems like it would have been a great time to give it another go. In fact, why not just beam the communicator back?

ENT S02E09 Singularity (). After a run of very soggy teasers, this one opens with the crew unconscious except for T’Pol whose mission log is near-apocalyptic, fearing that neither crew nor ship will survive much longer. When we flash back, Archer’s fretting about his chair, Hoshi’s cooking up a storm, Travis has an ouchie. It’s all pretty trivial stuff. The gag is that these minor fixations gradually become full-blown obsessions. It’s a sitcom style plot, but the explanation is a giant space wibbly thing rather than the characters’ own natures. Or in other words, it’s The Naked Time again, only with poorer pacing. Are we supposed not to see the disaster coming? Even though this is a story being told in flashback…

ENT S02E10 Vanishing Point () This is another of those plugging-a-hole-in-Star-Trek’s-history stories, exploring how the transporter went from dangerous and experimental technology to routine part of Starfleet kit. But focusing on Hoshi means that we’re seeing the character we know is disappointingly unsuited to space exploration being unsettled by something we’ve already come to know as reliable (except when it isn’t). So, it sends her character into reverse, but we already know how the story ends. We’re also stuck with nobody-believes-the-person-to-whom-weird-things-are-happening, which TNG had ditched by Season 3, noting that it serves only to slow down the (achingly familiar) plot. And what’s the resolution? It was all a dream. Give me strength…

ENT S02E11 Precious Cargo (). For some reason, something about the opening shots of Travis playing the harmonica as the ship glides through space puts me in mind of an advert, maybe for a credit card. Anyway, as usual, that’s all the drama you get in the teaser to hook you into the programme. Who could resist the lure? Speaking of which, the cargo which two bumpy-faced males are carrying turns out to be a smooth-skinned and very foxy chick in suspended animation. Shades of TNG’s The Perfect Mate (it’s the same species) and this is just as ick, if not more so. Just as dull as Vanishing Point, but that didn’t make me want to throw up in my own mouth, hence the score. I’m not alone. John Billingsley gives this episode the credit for turning off the faltering audience for good, which will end up sounding the death knell for this show and Star Trek on television for twelve years. Aliens on this show have baths, eat the same food as humans, and give their height and weight in SI units, but the universal translator gives up entirely when faced with the word “car”. Go figure.

ENT S02E02 Carbon Creek (). From Broken Bow to Carbon Creek (maybe Diamond Ditch was planned to be next). Relations between the Vulcan and human crew continue to improve – to the extent that T’Pol is willing to show them some of her family snapshots. Alas, inserting Vulcans into the 1950s isn’t half as much fun as Ferengi on an airforce base, and since this is just an old anecdote, it doesn’t do anything to advance the story of Archer and Enterprise. But as T‘Mir (who shares her great-granddaughter’s oddly rounded eyebrows) spends more time amongst humans – for months rather than days or hours – it becomes deeply engrossing. The dates don’t quite work (Velcro was patented two years before Sputnik) but the Vulcan’s name does pay tribute to the real inventor.

ENT S02E03 Minefield (). Once again, an attempt is made to make Malcolm Reed’s lack of any defining characteristics (apart from “British” and “always looking like he’s just sucked on a lemon”) a feature. The trouble is, we have T’Pol, so this just looks like laziness. Luckily, it isn’t long before a dirty great hole is blasted in Enterprise’s saucer section – a shocking image, but one which doesn’t mean as much as maybe the producers hoped, simply because we’ve spent barely thirty episodes with the NX-01. And, lo, there are no fatalities which seems surprising given the scale of the damage. The plot of this one is barely any more than its title – the ship has to make its way through a minefield – but this kind of lean, high stakes storytelling is a good use of this inexperienced crew and the set pieces work well. It makes absolutely no difference whether Malcolm watches football or not, I still want him to defuse that bomb successfully, even if the climax is the usual unscientific gibberish. Also – Romulans!

ENT S02E04 Dead Stop (). With a rare nod to serialisation, Enterprise still has a chunk taken out of its saucer and repairs are going slowly, and so Archer sends out a distress call. Malcolm also still has a chunk taken out of his leg and Phlox’s treatment regime tests even his stiff upper lip. A Tellarite floating garage in space welcomes them in, with passive-aggressive attention to detail, but without the personal touch. Archer, T’Pol and Trip agree a price for the repairs, play with the station’s replicator and generally hang out. Again, as so often with this show, it’s relaxed to the point of tedium. And when Trip and Reed go sneaking around and Archer has to tear them off a strip, it’s pretty feeble and unconvincing. Naturally, the benevolent automated pit stop has darker secrets. It even manages to kill Travis (not really). But Archer and T’Pol seem happy to liberate their one crewmember and incinerate all of the other victims, which is less than ideal. As usual on a starship with a crew of nearly a hundred, all of the things of interest happen to the same seven people. I can’t believe nobody on the production team ever noticed how silly that was. Also silly – Hoshi wanting to pay her last respects to Travis during his autopsy (as opposed to say at his funeral).

ENT S02E05 A Night In Sickbay (). We’re back to the mutual-lathering-in-our-scanties scene which is not made any more interesting with the addition of Porthos the dog, whose plight does little to make this teaser any kind of attention-grabber. And from the expert statesmanship of Captain’s past, we’re now faced with Archer’s impatient and petty brattishness in the face of one failed negotiation. Once again, there’s a balance to be struck between wanting this exploration to feel raw and dangerous, and wanting our team to be able and admirable – and once again, in this episode, they come off like putzes. Phlox calling “Freudian slips” “Pillarian slips” is rather neat – and presumably a nod to Michael Pillar.

ENT S02E06 Marauders (). With plasma injectors back up and running, Archer’s now in search of fuel, and is given the brush off by a bunch of very human looking miners wearing t-shirts and jeans. It just feels like no-one’s really trying any more. On which subject, deuterium is treated as a precious substance which has to be carefully mined and refined. In fact, it’s an isotope of hydrogen which can be electrolysed out of ordinary water. Why pick that name for your unobtainium if you don’t know what it is or how abundant it might be? Klingons show up and start demanding deuterium with menaces and these are very generic thugs with little of their TNG texture and dimension. After a suitable pause for agonised indecision, our team sends all seven of them packing, and for no very good reason, they agree not to come back.