Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One Minefield The best part of this episode, and the heart of it, was Malcolm and some of his interactions with Archer. The downside is that it’s not terribly engaging outside of that, but it is nice some time was spent on Malcolm and his history. Grade: B minus
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One Minefield went from being fairly dull to me the first watch through to being a very interesting Malcolm centric episode with subsequent watch throughs. Malcolm ended up being one of my favorite characters and this episode shows us a lot about him.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One It's one of the times when Reed comes across as more than just a guy who likes to blow stuff up.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One Reed was one of my favorite Enterprise characters. He struck me as one of the more competent members of the crew, and him and others didn't get the screen time they deserved since Enterprise mostly had a Big Three of Archer, T'Pol and Tucker. So... more changes to the timeline in this episode being for all we know Enterprise should have been destroyed or more damaged in that minefield since they're not supposed to have the cloak detector thingie. Amazing how Kirk and crew were SOOO surprised about the Romulans having cloaking devices too. The Romulans are consistent jerks no matter what century it is. Overall, I did like this episode. Rare a cast member outside the Big 3 gets the spotlight and this one was a nicely done character piece. And it leads into next episode nicely.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One Dead Stop There are a couple of nice lines in here. One instance is where the doctor tells Malcolm that it’s unethical for him to harm him but he can inflict as much pain as he likes, and the other is when T’Pol describes the tellarites (sp?) as a disagreeable species that nevertheless is usually trustworthy. It’s like, aren’t you describing Vulcans? To add to this, I do think we found out the difference between the Tellarites and Vulcans in the end, though. Grade: B ---------- A Night in Sickbay Okay, I don’t understand why Archer took Porthos with him in the first place. Why take the chance, especially with those people? Dogs are very curious and can be very playful, or need to relieve themselves, or bite when they feel threatened… It just doesn’t make sense other than it being part of the basis for the episode. Once again I’m glad T‘Pol was there to be the voice of reason. The good thing is that I did get a few laughs out of this episode, so I’ll cut Archer a bit of slack. He’s doing the “breast” he can, after all. Grade: B
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One I've exhausted my ANIS commentary so I will just say that Dead Stop was a decent sci fi episode.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One I loved the production design of Dead Stop - first time we had some 2001-ish look in trek for years - and Roxann's voice as HAL-ish computer. And not terrible ep, nice breather after Minefield. But ending sucked. Big time. Apart from coda, which was kinda cute.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One Dead Stop was a fun episode and something certainly different. The concept, while a bit extravagent is unique. A Night in Sickbay... Archer shows how inept he is. A dog is more important than diplomatic first contact with an alien race... yeah. Good call.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One ^ I agree. Marauders I applaud what this episode was supposed to accomplish dramatically, but it just didn’t get there for me. My only question is when they moved everything, wouldn't the Klingon ship be able to detect that the longitude and lattitude of their location was a little different? I mean, if they're being beamed down, that has to be to a specific set of coordinates, right? If they were beamed to the same coordinates as before, then things would have looked different because everything moved. I don't know if I missed something or not. It's just odd that their first indication that something was off was that the pumps were silent. Grade: C minus --------------- The Seventh Archer gets on my nerves. T'Pol, as a courtesy, tells him that he's going to be contacted by his Admiral. He then presses her for details beyond what he knows he's supposed to know (at least from her), because if the Admiral isn't going to tell you, then it's probably not information you absolutely need to know. I honestly think that Archer lets his emotions govern his way of doing things way too much, and it sometimes is the cause of poor decision making or, in this case, placing his first officer in a very uncomfortable and unfair position of having to choose sides when that's not necessary. She could have been instructed not to give out classified information, like in the past, but Archer wouldn't care about that because he feels like he should know, like in the past. I can understand not liking being left out of the loop, especially when you're the Captain of the ship that's being relied upon, but then go through the appropriate channels for that; don't abuse your science officer by placing her in positions where you're pressing her to violate orders she's been given by her other superiors. At least she held her own and didn't budge one bit, at first... Oh, and then there was the rest of the episode... Grade: D plus
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One Minefield/Dead Stop were a really, really fun pair. Oh, how enthusiastic I was after those two! And how loooong of a drag it was until the show reached those heights again. Cogenitor, maybe? First Flight? That second season, man... not an easy slog.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One You can't hear me, but I'm whistling innocently right now. Never fear, I'm sure your mileage may vary. A lot of people liked The Seventh and Vanishing Point a lot more than I did. Plus I forgot all about Future Tense, which was excellent. Someday I'll go back and see how well this stuff holds up. Kinda going by memory here. Hard to believe it's almost been ten years now...
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One What I liked about the Seventh was it gives us a very different Vulcan to think about.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One Why was Marauders made? Did we really need this story told in the trekverse? It's episodes like this that make it hard to defend ENT.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One Marauders was the most... flat, for the lack of a better term, that I've ever felt after an episode. It was like I turned on my TV at 8PM, was abducted by those missing-time lizard aliens that took Riker in TNG's Schisms, and then spat back out into the real world at 9PM like nothing had happened. It's a shame, too; by all rights, Kurosawa plots should fit in just fine with Star Trek, specifically TOS or pre-TOS Star Trek. Not the biggest missed opportunity the franchise has committed over the years, but still pretty baffling.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One uhh.. I liked the encampment. It was a pretty cool portable village in the desert.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One My problem with Marauders wasn't the execution but the fact that the story has been told so many times and ENT didn't even try to give it a twist or something to make it more interesting. It's like they had a deadline and one of the writers was watching 7 Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, A Bug's Life, ect and just said "screw it" and threw this together. The first time I watched ENT was a few years ago over a couple months on DVD so when I would finish an episode like this I would just roll my eyes and move on to the next one but if I was watching while the show was airing I coud see myself wondering "is this really all they could come up with"? and no longer tuning in. Luckily with DVD their was an end in sight so I pushed through the first 2 mediocre seasons and got to the awesomeness that is seasons 3 & 4.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One Some stories have to be done very very well or with some incredible twist to ever be told again. That didn't happen this time. Still, lots of Trip.
Re: My Trek Through Enterprise: Season One Paris threatening to eat this kid always makes me laugh for some reason. It's not even cannibalism. It's an alien brat.