{"id":3546,"date":"2023-10-18T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T11:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3546"},"modified":"2023-10-09T16:57:26","modified_gmt":"2023-10-09T15:57:26","slug":"trekaday-112","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2023\/10\/18\/trekaday-112\/","title":{"rendered":"Trekaday #112: Carbon Creek, Minefield, Dead Stop, A Night In Sickbay, Marauders"},"content":{"rendered":"

ENT S02E02 Carbon Creek <\/strong>(\"4). From Broken Bow to Carbon Creek (maybe Diamond Ditch was planned to be next). Relations between the Vulcan and human crew continue to improve \u2013 to the extent that T\u2019Pol is willing to show them some of her family snapshots. Alas, inserting Vulcans into the 1950s isn\u2019t half as much fun as Ferengi on an airforce base, and since this is just an old anecdote, it doesn\u2019t do anything to advance the story of Archer and Enterprise<\/em>. But as T\u2018Mir (who shares her great-granddaughter\u2019s oddly rounded eyebrows) spends more time amongst humans \u2013 for months rather than days or hours \u2013 it becomes deeply engrossing. The dates don\u2019t quite work (Velcro was patented two years before Sputnik<\/em>) but the Vulcan\u2019s name does pay tribute to the real inventor.<\/p>\n

ENT S02E03 Minefield <\/strong>(\"4). Once again, an attempt is made to make Malcolm Reed\u2019s lack of any defining characteristics (apart from \u201cBritish\u201d and \u201calways looking like he\u2019s just sucked on a lemon\u201d) a feature. The trouble is, we have T\u2019Pol, so this just looks like laziness. Luckily, it isn\u2019t long before a dirty great hole is blasted in Enterprise<\/em>\u2019s saucer section \u2013 a shocking image, but one which doesn\u2019t mean as much as maybe the producers hoped, simply because we\u2019ve 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 \u2013 the ship has to make its way through a minefield \u2013 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 \u2013 Romulans!<\/p>\n

ENT S02E04 Dead Stop <\/strong>(\"3.5). With a rare nod to serialisation, Enterprise<\/em> 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\u2019s 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\u2019Pol and Trip agree a price for the repairs, play with the station\u2019s replicator and generally hang out. Again, as so often with this show, it\u2019s relaxed to the point of tedium. And when Trip and Reed go sneaking around and Archer has to tear them off a strip, it\u2019s 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\u2019Pol 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\u2019t believe nobody on the production team ever noticed how silly that was. Also silly \u2013 Hoshi wanting to pay her last respects to Travis during his autopsy <\/em>(as opposed to say at his funeral).<\/p>\n

ENT S02E05 A Night In Sickbay <\/strong>(\"2). We\u2019re 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\u2019s past, we\u2019re now faced with Archer\u2019s impatient and petty brattishness in the face of one failed negotiation. Once again, there\u2019s a balance to be struck between wanting this exploration to feel raw and dangerous, and wanting our team to be able and admirable \u2013 and once again, in this episode, they come off like putzes. Phlox calling \u201cFreudian slips\u201d \u201cPillarian slips\u201d is rather neat \u2013 and presumably a nod to Michael Pillar.<\/p>\n

ENT S02E06 Marauders <\/strong>(\"3). With plasma injectors back up and running, Archer\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s an isotope of hydrogen which can be electrolysed out of ordinary water. Why pick that name for your unobtainium if you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 to the extent that T\u2019Pol is willing to show them some of her family snapshots. Alas, inserting Vulcans into the 1950s isn\u2019t half as much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[539,19,79,528],"class_list":["post-3546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-enterprise","tag-reviews","tag-star-trek","tag-trekaday"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-Vc","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3546"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3548,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3546\/revisions\/3548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}