S2's "Horizon"-the make or break moment for Mayweather?

[Trekwatcher]

Having just re-watched S2's "Horizon" I got the feeling this was the "make or break" moment for Mayweather.

Watching this episode, which I liked overall (I find the cargo ship culture interesting), I was struck by how limited a range of emotion Travis showed overall. Granted, they showed Travis crying when Archer meets with him at the "sweet spot," but other than that he was flat, flat, flat.

I felt like there were a lot of missed opportunities for Travis here: His arrival on the ship after 4 years could have been more emotional, his interactions with his Mom could also have been better (i.e. if she had been at least a little conflicted about his joining Starfleet). I did like the scenes with his brother, as they were well done, but mostly as the actor playing the brother really conveyed hostility with a tinge of envy.

During the combat scenes, when his family is in danger of being killed and in the shadow of his father's death, he was largely without an apparent emotional response. It would have been a great chance for Travis to have gotten angry, perhaps taken some of his anger at himself (for having not been there when his dad died) or his brother (for giving him a hard time about leaving for Starfleet) out on the space pirates. THAT would have been a good scene, and would have been a chance for him to show some range. It would also have given some resonance to his final scene with Archer where he tries to hide what happened on the Horizon, but he could have been doing it out of shame for his hot headed actions.

I dunno-they did a good job overall and the story in this one was interesting, but IMHO this could have been a much more powerful episode that would have allowed Travis to really show us a new aspect to his character. Thoughts?

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Mayweather should have been rewritten from the feet up. The whole concept was bad - a green cadet-type, blergh. Who cares about someone like that, really?

Instead, they had a golden opportunity to make him more like Jayne Cobb from Firefly, not quite that much of a rogue, but similar - the Boomers being the only humans who had lost their naivety about space, someone like him would be essential to Archer's mission, to give them the first clue about what they were getting themselves into.

Since T'Pol was also a "guide" of sorts, then she and Travis might have had interesting interactions because of their widely divergent points of view.

 

[JiNX-01]

Temis the Vorta said:
Mayweather should have been rewritten from the feet up. The whole concept was bad - a green cadet-type, blergh. Who cares about someone like that, really?

Instead, they had a golden opportunity to make him more like Jayne Cobb from Firefly, not quite that much of a rogue, but similar - the Boomers being the only humans who had lost their naivety about space, someone like him would be essential to Archer's mission, to give them the first clue about what they were getting themselves into.

Since T'Pol was also a "guide" of sorts, then she and Travis might have had interesting interactions because of their widely divergent points of view.

I agree. Travis was very poorly drawn.
It's ridiculous to have the most experienced space traveler on board -- he was BORN on that cargo ship, for crying out loud -- being dismissed as nothing more than a pilot. Archer never sought out his counsel. Never asked HIM if he was familiar with this species or that.

And yet despite having spent his entire life on a space ship, he's an expert spelunker...

Just plain stupid.

 

[warriorsfan]

JiNX-01 said:
It's ridiculous to have the most experienced space traveler on board -- he was BORN on that cargo ship, for crying out loud -- being dismissed as nothing more than a pilot. Archer never sought out his counsel. Never asked HIM if he was familiar with this species or that.

I believe he had only been to a handful of alien worlds though, due to the fact that his family's cargo ship was limited to speeds well below Warp 2. Didn't he say that the ship's low warp capability meant that it took them months to get to their destinations? Enterprise probably encountered more alien species in a month than Travis did in his entire life aboard that cargo ship.

 

[JiNX-01]

Yeah, it might have taken months to get from one planet to another, but they could still be coming across aliens in space. They know about the Nausicans (Fortunate Son); they visited Draylax (Broken Bow); they've had contact with the Orions (Horizon).

My point is, that in the course of living his entire in space, he would have been familiar with alien species and yet the captain never asks if he knows anything about the aliens they meet; the ships they see. He always asks T'Pol, who almost always has to refer to the Vulcan database.

 

[MrPointy]

Yeah, Horizon pretty much broke Mayweather.

 

[TeutonicNights]

I think Enterprise made humans in general too boring and the space boomers were especially disappointing.
Here was our only glimpse at what humans were doing for the past 100 years and what do we get? Boring dudes that don't even care they're out in space, who value the time aboard more than those alien worlds they are visiting.
I think it was a bad Idea to have Archer break the Warp 2 barrier so late. Humans should have had Warp 3 for at least a generation before ENT, and even a society maintaining a system of colonies and remote outposts with Warp two drives could have been made interesting (ENT should have been like the early Alien universe imo anyway).

And that is imo a big problem on Enterprise. They were so determined to stress the "boldly going to uncharted regions a hundred times faster than before" aspect that they totally neglected the "basics"
- what was humanity doing in the past century, how are those colonies and outpost like?
- how many species do the humans know? Must be at least 20 or more judging by some episodes, but that raises several questions.
- How does humanity interact with those races?
- Why is humanity so seemingly "ignorant" about aquiring information and technology from those people? Why would they need a Vulcan star chart after 100 years of warp travel and alien contacts?

Still I enjoyed the space pirate episode, the trick would have been to make a freighter episode *without* space pirates and fighting and kaboom and still make it interesting (and would it have been so hard?).

I'm wondering why they created the weak Travis Mayweather character.
Maybe to show the guy that Young Laredo from Galaxy Quest was a parody of?

 

[Nebusj]

TeutonicNights said:
I think Enterprise made humans in general too boring and the space boomers were especially disappointing.
Here was our only glimpse at what humans were doing for the past 100 years and what do we get? Boring dudes that don't even care they're out in space, who value the time aboard more than those alien worlds they are visiting.

The guy who was the responsible and thus mostly off-stage Captain from that first season episode with the Boomer ship, the one where Archer tries to argue that we can't go fighting the Nausican pirates because that would just make Nausican children sad, was interesting. If they'd written the Boomers more like that, particularly Mayweather, then it would have strengthened the show considerably.

I think part of the problem too was that they didn't have a solid model on what cargo this was being shipped, and who they were shipping it to, and why. What's it worth shipping that you need to get from another star system but also don't mind waiting two years for the supply to come in?

So all we got to see of the Boomers was them under attack by Space Pirates, and the economics of Space Piracy are kind of ... well, I'm skeptical of them, anyway. (Modern piracy, in the era of containerized cargo, is mostly about getting hard currency from the ship's safe and ransoming crew. Of course, this is under circumstances where a response from a local navy or coast guard will be reasonably prompt.)

 

[Tralis]

Travis Mayweather is the great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of Hera Agathon, which is why he is a boomer. Think about it, it explains why he is so mechanical.