SPOILER WARNING: This post and its fellows contain spoilers for episodes of the first season of Enterprise (and the first episode of the second season). If you're concerned about any episodes being spoiled for you, I suggest skipping this post.

Let's get down to brass tacks: How good have the episodes and their stories been? Well, I've seen 22 of the 25 first season episodes, and I discuss them below. I missed two episodes because I had decided to stop watching the series following "Civilization", and then changed my mind a couple of weeks later. Then I missed a late episode because my VCR was only set up to tape the 8 to 9 pm hour, and two new episodes were aired back-to-back, so I missed the one shown from 9 to 10 pm. Still, putting aside the possibility that I missed the three best episodes, 22 of 25 is a good sampling. Certainly more than a casual viewer interested in just trying out the show is likely to watch.

I. Storylines and Themes

For summaries of all the first season episodes, see http://www.startrek.com/library/episodes_ent.asp

Enterprise has continued in the Trek mold of being a sequence of very loosely-connected standalone episodes rather than having a tight ongoing storyline. This is, of course, the norm for a television series; something like Babylon 5 is the exception. Enterprise doesn't seem to have advanced much beyond NextGen in its handling of ongoing storylines, though: They feel like more of an afterthought ("Gee, we haven't seen the Suliban in a while; let's do an episode with them!") than a central piece of the series. I suspect this is because second-generation Trek has always fancied itself an "ensemble cast" series, even though that mindset was a complete disaster in handling the characters of NextGen. Not wanting to give any of the cast a short end of the straw when it comes to screen time, more deserving storylines get less time so that less interesting characters can get a higher profile.

It's probably reasonable to cut Enterprise some slack in its first season, though. After all, even though - say - Hoshi probably ought to be written out of the series, it's not going to happen until after the first season has been put behind us. (Of course, it's probably not going to happen anyway, but that's another can of worms.)

Enterprise is rather conflicted in its self-image. At its core, it's striving to be a "humanity's first major exploratory mission to the stars" series, but those elements are often diluted by the astoundingly bad choices that Archer and company make in their mission. The irony is that this element of the series perhaps distinguishes it the least from its predecessor series, especially since Classic Star Trek also had this as a key theme, especially early in its run. Again, I wonder whether Enterprise is the creators attempt to "do Classic Trek right this time" or something - which would be ironic, if so, considering how far from the mark they are.

Related to this is the "humanity finding its place in the cosmos" theme, which is more successful, although of necessity somewhat preachy. At its best, this theme has involved putting the Vulcans in their place: Finding out that they're flawed and demonstrating that humans are qualified to act in the greater interstellar community. Of course, this theme strongly evokes the central "coming of age" themes of Babylon 5, which is unavoidable since both series take place at the point when humanity is integrating itself into the interstellar community. It's fun to see the humans "stick it" to the Vulcans from time to time (assuming one can get past the peculiar and IMO out-of-character behavior of the Vulcans), but it's not wonderfully executed.

Finally, there's the "temporal cold war" storyline. This feels very strongly like the creators sat down and said, "How can we make this more than just what people are expecting it to be?" And, well, while it nominally succeeds at that, it does feel a bit tacked-on. After all, where exactly can they go with this storyline? Decided not to found the Federation? Uh-uh. Change the timeline we know in some significant way? It's possible, but hard to imagine, unless they were going to do something lame like retcon Classic Trek away. The only really satisfying result would be to reveal elements of the farther future to us, but why bother to do so in the context of an "earlier" series like Enterprise?

J. Michael Straczynski (creator of Babylon 5) has noted that in stories it's not where you end up, but how you get there. That's partly true, but ending up somewhere interesting - whether or not it's a surprise - is a necessity. Ending up somewhere boring is not engaging. I admit it's possible that the Enterprise creators have some bang-up ideas in store for the "temporal cold war", but based on their track record with previous second-generation Trek series, it doesn't seem terribly likely. While this is perhaps the most engaging ongoing story in Enterprise, it falls short of being a real attention-grabber.

It's always the thing to do ratings (or at least it was way back when I was a regular on these newsgroups!). I've mentioned many episodes already, but here are some capsule summaries of my opinions of each episode I've seen, with ratings on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best. (This for easy comparison with Tim Lynch's ratings! :-)

"Broken Bow"

An enjoyable pilot episode, with its diversion to Rigel X (oddly featuring many aliens I don't think we ever saw in later Treks) and siege of the Suliban base. The expression on Bakula's face when he was beamed aboard the ship during the escape from the Suliban base was the high point of the episode, and darned near the high point of the whole season. My big beef with the episode is the tedious "let's gather the crew together one-by-one" scenes which occupy most of the first half of the episode. If I want to see that stuff, I'll go watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture again.

Rating: 6

"Fight or Flight"

There's not a lot to like about this episode. It's the nadir of the Hoshi storyline, and has not one but two random aliens which our heroes have to figure out to survive. Pedestrian stuff. The early moments, with our heroes in space suits and boarding the derelict alien ship the old-fashioned way and handled like a serious and potentially deadly situation, were the high mark of the episode. But an Alastair Reynolds novel it ain't.

Rating: 4

"Strange New World"

Is there a high point to this episode? Archer declines to determine whether the alien world is safe, and sends a party down without environment suits (including his dog!). Then he leaves them there overnight without a means of getting off the planet. T'Pol was absolutely right every step of the way, and Archer completely wrong. It gets a point for the tension of the showdown between Trip and T'Pol, and the honest, raw acting by Connor Trinneer, but that's it. Really bad stuff.

Rating: 2

"Unexpected"

The worst hour of television I've seen in the last few years. Trip gets sent to an alien ship, again without an environment suit, and gets sick because of it. Then he gets pregnant and develops nipples on his wrist, which makes about as much sense as Spock getting Kirk pregnant. Even the encounter with the Klingon ship can't save this pile of cow flop.

Rating: 1

"Terra Nova"

A diverting episode about a disappeared human colony and the strange aliens left in its vicinity afterwards. The investigation of the truth was enjoyable enough, although the result was basically similar (though far inferior) to Stephen Leigh's excellent novel Dark Water's Embrace. From there it turned into a fairly routine hostage situation followed by trying to win over the natives through good deeds. Ho-hum.

Rating: 4

"The Andorian Incident"

The one episode which produced a "Yeah!" moment in the season for me. The vindication of the Andorians' claims that the Vulcan monastery is hiding a spy outpost is not rewarding just because it shows the Vulcans to be machiavellian, or because T'Pol comes through and does the right thing when confronted with her divided allegiances, but because it raises the Andorians above the level of mere thugs and makes them a race with a genuine beef which deserves to be considered. Of course, most of the episode is a typical hostage situation leading up to that, which makes it not quite perfect, but it's the best episode of the season.

Rating: 8

"Breaking the Ice"

Inoffensive little "let's go explore something" episode, winding up with Archer swallowing his pride to accept help from the Vulcans when he can't accomplish everything on his own. Sort of a "Q Who" lite in its theme, when you get down to it.

Rating: 5

"Civilization"

Do the writers of Enterprise know how to title their episodes, or what? Right: Not really. The story advances the "temporal cold war" plot a tiny bit, but the Archer/Riaan scenes are pretty tedious (I can imagine the writing brain trust sitting around saying, "Hey! Let's have Archer meet an attractive alien woman and not sleep with her! That'll show 'em that he's not just a 22nd century Kirk!"), and the story as a whole is pretty pedestrian.

Rating: 5

"Fortunate Son"

Haven't seen it.

"Cold Front"

Haven't seen it. I kind of regret missing it.

"Silent Enemy"

Entirely routine alien contact story which includes the twin lamentable elements of magically getting the ship's phasers to work, and a ridiculously tedious and uninformative investigation by Hoshi into Reed's background.

Rating: 4

"Dear Doctor"

A "storytelling gimmick" episode, narrated by Dr. Phlox as a letter to a colleague. Phlox is as amusing and endearing as always (despite crewman Cutler's crush on him, a predicable and tedious aside), but the moral dilemma of curing the Valakians at the probable expense of the Menk is handled in an entirely perfunctory manner. This is too big an issue to shunt aside in a one-hour episode (for a contrasting portrayal of a similar issue, see Mary Doria Russell's top-notch novel The Sparrow) and it leaves the story feeling empty.

Rating: 5

"Sleeping Dogs"

Another straightforward puzzle/board an alien ship story, combined with the "do good deeds to win their trust" angle. The scenes on the Klingon ship and Reed's ingenuity are both pretty gripping, but it's a bread-and-butter episode at best.

Rating: 6

"Shadows of P'Jem"

A rather messily-plotted episode which basically serves to have Archer continue to work to gain the Andorians' trust. The ends were fine, but the means (threatening to return T'Pol to the Vulcans, the haphazard plotting of the hostage situation) were kind of baffling.

Rating: 4

"Shuttlepod One"

Urgh. Trip and Reed alone in a shuttlepod facing (as far as they know) certain doom. A contrived situation, and agonizingly bad dialogue between the pair. And in the end we don't really learn much about them. Blake's 7 had a similar episode, "Orbit", involving Avon and Vila in a similar situation, but those well-defined characters made that a tour-de-force of character and dialogue. This one was just terrible.

Rating: 2

"Fusion"

"Hey, let's show T'Pol in bed with another Vulcan!" Sheesh. The notion of a Vulcan splinter group like this one is interesting, and the intellectual exchange of ideas between Vulcans and humans is interesting, but the storyline - such as it was - was painful to watch.

Rating: 3

"Rogue Planet"

"Night Terrors"? "Identity Crisis"? This episode seemed evocative of any number of mid-range NextGen thriller episodes. It wasn't bad, but it didn't distinguish itself either.

Rating: 5

"Acquisition"

Having an alien ship capture the Enterprise, all told from the aliens' point of view, was novel and interesting. The big problem is that it was the Ferengi, as bad an idea for an episode as there is. Seeing them get their comeuppance was entertaining, but only to a limited degree. I mean, if the Enterprise crew can't handle the Ferengi, maybe the Vulcans are right that they're not ready for the stars.

Rating: 4

"Oasis"

A kind of obvious "survivors of a starship disaster" story with what seems to be very early Holodeck technology. 1 point off for yet another instance of magical holodeck-like technology without really exploring the ramifications of it.

Rating: 5

"Detained"

The best of the late-season episodes, as Archer and Mayweather are captured by alien Tandarans fighting a war with the Suliban. The Suliban seem to be a strange race, fighting a war with no apparent front, unable to easily conquer even a minor race such as the one seen here, but working on many fronts at once. This mostly spells "poorly thought-out" to me. The moral dilemma here is well-presented (especially the comparison to Japanese detention camps in the US during World War II), but the episode is most successful in the maneuvering the crew performs to rescue the captured and uninvolved Suliban and escape from the Tandarans.

Rating: 7

"Vox Sola"

Lame "alien takes over the ship" episode reprising Hoshi's role as having to break the alien's language to solve the challenge.

Rating: 3

"Fallen Hero"

This episode smells to me a lot like one of those "acting tour de force" episodes that NextGen liked to put on from time to time to wow the viewers who swoon at the sight of great acting. In short, it's the sort of episode which ranked among the favorite of NextGen fans, but felt to me hollow, if not downright pretentious.

"Fallen Hero" had all those earmarks, but fell well short on the "good story" and "strong acting" suits. Putting aside the peculiarities of the Vulcans entrusting the safety of one of their agents to the humans, the episode's drama largely stems from being an extended "chase" sequence, which in Star Trek mostly devolves into repeated exchanges like, "The engines canna take any more!" "You've got to give me more, Scotty!" with occasional phaser fire in between.

The episode's crippling quality is the astoundingly unconvincing performance of Fionnula Flanagan as V'Lar, though it felt like she was intended to be the acting supernova to anchor the episode. Not for a moment was I convinced that she was an unemotional Vulcan; powerful emotions seemed to emanate from her face and body language with every sentence, especially in the climactic moment when the Mazarite boarding party's gullibility has been exposed. An extremely ineffective guest star, especially contrasted with a similar role in Classic Trek; Mark Lenard far outshone Flanagan's performance here in his turn as Sarek in "Journey to Babel".

Ultimately this was merely a mildly diverting episode, and a big misfire compared to what I suspect it was intended to be.

Rating: 4

"Desert Crossing"

Haven't seen it.

"Two Days and Two Nights"

Trip and Reed get mugged by women they try to seduce. Mayweather gets deathly ill while Phlox is hibernating. Archer gets involved with a woman who turns out to be a Tandaran in disguise. The Archer thread was not bad, but everything else was essentially pointless at best. Too many plot threads, not enough actual plot.

Rating: 3

"Shockwave" Part 1

[NOTE: I'd hoped to get this critique posted before Enterprise returned for its second season, but I didn't make it. However, I decided to leave my review of this episode as it was, having written it before seeing the concluding installment. See below for my review of part 2.]

Is "Shockwave" a gripping build-up to a thrilling second part coming next season, or is it a clumsily hacked-together string of occurrences with no emotional impact? Well, it's a lot of both. While our heroes are admittedly being manipulated early on, Archer's reaction to the destruction of the colony seems entirely out-of-character. Sure, his despair is natural, but his urge to completely give up - particularly in the face of evidence that they'd taken all necessarily precautions - was not believable to me, particularly since Bakula's one-note performance didn't try to sell me on Archer's attitude.

The episode is dramatically weak because our heroes are never given any tough choices to make, until Archer is forced to decide whether to be captured by the Suliban or try to fight his way out of it. But it's not really that tough a choice, once it's determined that fighting would be futile. Other than that, Archer is handed answers by Crewman Daniels, and the execution of the plan to strike against the Suliban is mechanical at best.

The episode only redeems itself at the end, when Daniels pulls Archer into the future, which proves to be a disastrous decision for all concerned. But this is all only set-up for the second half of the story, and the success of "Shockwave" will be entirely dependent on whether the conclusion actually shows us something about the characters, and allows them to control their own destinies. Because this episode has none of that.

In a small sense, "Shockwave" is much like the NextGen episode "The Best of Both Worlds", whose first part was largely set-up (albeit much better done) for a big resolution. Let's hope that "Shockwave" has a more satisfying conclusion, since "TBOBW" managed to weasel out of providing much emotional payoff, especially where Riker's career decisions were concerned.

Rating: 6

"Shockwave" Part 2

As it turns out, I thought this was a very predictable episode: Archer gets back to his own time and extricates everyone from the situation. The prospect of a deeper look at the far future, changing the timeline more permanently, or a longer stay in the future for Archer were all dashed - and all because Daniels is able to hack together a time transmitter with "stone knives and bearskins". How disappointing. The episode's high points are T'Pol's interrogation by the Suliban, but the mechanics of getting away from the Suliban are pretty tedious.

By the end, the status quo has been restored, and the Vulcans humbled into letting the humans continue their mission. No permanent changes to the status of any of our characters, just standard episodic television. Could have been a lot more, but lack of ambition kept this episode from sailing high.

Rating: 5

Overall:

Enterprise's first season has a lot of episodes in the 3-to-6 range, which is not unusual for a second generation Trek series. There are a number of watchable episodes, and a number of episodes which are slightly less interesting than boiling corn. Mixed in are a couple of flawed gems and a few complete disasters. All of this adds up to a series which is watchable but which doesn't really add anything to my life.

How does this compare to other series' first seasons? Well, I don't watch a lot of television, and in particular I avoid most sitcoms (I did like Sports Night, but it's unclear that that was really a situation comedy). But a few comparisons seem valid:

Babylon 5 has pretty firmly established itself as the class act of science fiction television throughout the history of the medium, but it got off to a slow start, with a bunch of 5-class episodes mixed in with some gems like "Soul Hunter" and "And the Sky Full of Stars". B5 was a bit different in lacking truly terrible episodes (even "Infection" was not truly awful), and by the last 4 or 5 episodes it had found its voice and was ramping up for some truly great television. Enterprise hasn't given me that feeling.

Homicide: Life on the Street is an oft-overlooked police series which hit the ground running, with hard-hitting storylines involving its main characters and the lives of the folks they investigated. It maintained an astoundingly high level of quality through its first 3 seasons (though only the third season exceeded 10 episodes) and should probably be recognized as a classic of television. It's a perfect example of how it's entirely reasonable to expect a TV series to be good (if not great) from day one. Only the original Star Trek even approached this level of quality on a regular basis at any point in its run. Enterprise isn't even close.

The West Wing is comparable to Homicide, with vivid characters, sparkling dialogue, and powerful episodes. It has a very different agenda from any of the other series, and has slid somewhat in its next two seasons, but I still feel it's a cut above Enterprise even now. The first season was outstanding.

Finally (and perhaps most aptly, as they're both episodic shows with only a loose framework of overall story and direction draped around them), Smallville's inaugural season was also last year, and I think it, too, is a big step up from Enterprise. Granted, I'm a serious comic book fan and enjoy the in jokes in the series, and I also did not have high hopes for it when it premiered. But it's been working at developing its characters, providing them with substantial conflict among one another, and seems to be slowly breaking out of its "menace of the week" pattern. Enterprise, on the other hand, didn't grow much during its first season.

The essence of drama is making hard choices, and seeing how characters deal with those choices. Even in its cheesier episodes ("The Immunity Syndrome"), Classic Trek generally understood this, and it became a good series because of it.

Second-generation Trek has consistently failed to grasp this, instead having its characters make choices that don't make sense, conveniently removing the choice the character has to make (Riker and his command dilemma in "The Best of Both Worlds", one of the fatal flaws of that episode), or simply not presenting a choice at all. In a way, the quintessential second-generation Trek episode is the NextGen episode "The Inner Light", which is an acting bonanza for Patrick Stewart fans, but is essentially plotless, as if it's trying through sheer force of will to convince the audience that it's dramatic. It's not.

Enterprise seems to lack a voice of its own, started slow out of the gate, and hasn't grown much since then. It's watchable, but I find that my life is too busy to stick with merely "watchable" shows. Especially once I feel like I've seen this episode before - and I often feel like I could easily watch NextGen re-runs rather than watch Enterprise and come away just as edified either way.

As many of you may know, I think that the Star Trek franchise went belly-up sometime during the run of The Next Generation, and has mostly been picking over the remains since then. Enterprise hasn't given me any reason to feel otherwise: This is a big-name commercial franchise, and Job One for the producers is protecting the value of the franchise. And unfortunately that shines through all-too-well in this series.

Following the predictable resolution of "Shockwave, Part II", I decided to put Enterprise away. I'm happy to let it toodle along without me for the rest of its run, because, frankly, there are other and better things out there to occupy my time (Smallville, Alastair Reynolds' latest novel, the new CD by Spock's Beard [coincidentally enough]).

Good? Bad? At this point, the Star Trek franchise just leaves me indifferent.

And in a way, that's the worst thing a TV series can do.

hits since 4 November 2002.