Flight or fight
This was an interesting episode. Despite their unfriendly encounter with the Suliban the crew of the enterprise is still enthusiastic about exploring and meeting new people. They’re also still incredibly naïve. Broadcasting the location of their homeworld to the first aliens they meet despite knowing nothing about them. Its interesting to note that T’Pol has the ability to face palm without the palm. That is to say she has a facial expression that conveys to exact same sentiment as the face palm gesture. I predict she will be using it a lot around Archer.
Hoshi gets some development but not the good kind. I can understand the nervousness at being in an unfamiliar environment and unsure of ones place. And I can definitely understand the claustrophobia that would be an interesting trait to have around given the rather cramped ship design. What I don’t understand is why Hoshi, who was presented in the pilot as a little nervous but also excited and, most importantly, confident in her own linguistic abilities, has suddenly degenerated into a child jumping at shadows. She practically oozes low self esteem and lack of confidence and its ridiculous that Archer had to cajole her into talking to the nice but grumpy alien man whilst the bad guys were practically drilling a hole into the ship! In Broken Bow she was practically salivating at the opportunity of speaking to an alien race in their native tongue. It’s such a drastic change of character for Hoshi that I’m annoyed at the writers.
I love how when they cant open the door Reed is all yaay explosives and then looks like someone kicked his puppy when Archer figures out the opening mechanism. I do think it would have been interesting if the good aliens had randomly shown up when the enterprise had first found the ship and gone aboard rather than wait for the distress signal. It would have been interesting to see how Archer and co talked their way outta that one when they had no time to prepare for their encounter.
My parents joined me in watching this episode (they also watched Broken Bow with me) and afterward both voiced their idea (that they arrived at separately) that Hoshi has a crush on Archer and is gonna hook up with him and maybe get married by the end of the series. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen since the episode E2 is on one of my fan collectives and they weren’t hooked up then.
Anyhow I award this episode 3 stars I like the ideas in it but the writers made Hoshi so different and annoying from what she was in the pilot.
Strange New World
And the crew is still quite naïve. Not that that’s a bad thing its quite refreshing to see a star trek crew being naïve because they genuinely are naïve and not just because the plot requires it. Whats even more interesting is that this episode is specifically about the crew being naïve and suffering the consequences and possibly learning form it.
I really like this episode especially how the away team manage to go completely loopy just from some unseen spore that has a psychotropic affect on humanoid life forms. Archer really should have followed T’Pols advice regarding doing planetary survey before heading down there.
Sure they were all excited at the prospect of exploring an uninhabited alien forest and she seemed to be pulling a Debbie downer by saying they should wait and do some research before jumping in a shuttle and heading out but what she said was basic common sense. It might just be me but Archer declaring shore leave and arranging an expedition to leave soon as possible despite T’Pols advice made it seem like he was doing the opposite of whatever she said just to spite her. That was the impression I got from the look he kept shooting her.
But it was really good that he trusted her when things started going whacko down on the planet with the psychotropic spores and badly animated imaginary rock aliens. It kinda made up for his childishly ignoring her advice earlier in the episode and the away teams gradually building paranoia was interesting to watch especially how Trip seemed the most severely affected of the away team. Travis and Cutler were also affected but were content to merely voice their psychotropic spore induces fears/suspicions from a comfortable seated position whilst Trip became quite aggressive and more than willing to act upon his beliefs regarding Vulcan/imaginary rock alien conspiracies. Archers solution was good thinking on his part though I wonder did T’Pol really forget how to speak english or was that a ploy on her part since she seemed to still understand Trip even when she seemed to have reverted to speaking only Vulcan. Also Hoshi was back to being confident in her own abilities yaay
I hereby grant this episode four and a half stars since I enjoyed all of it and there were only minor annoyances like Archer purposefully ignoring T’pols advice and wondering why they brought the chief engineer along on an away mission to an uninhabited totally organic planet?