LizstarTrek - Enterprise Season 1 episodes 1 - 5

Every Sunday my Twitch subs and I watch Star Trek in my Discord. Here are my reviews and thoughts on each of the episodes as I see it. If you’re curious about a nerd’s views on Star Trek episodes, please read on, I go quite in depth with some of these episodes! I’ve watched some Star Trek before but not all of it!

STARTING ENTERPRISE NOW! I know NOTHING about this, other than it takes place very early in the timeline, has a guy named ARcher and a guy named Phlox, people smother gel on each other naked a lot, and a lot of people get a lot of opinions.

Broken Bow - ENT 6/10

We start with a kid being racist towards Vulcans, complaining that if the Vulcans were actually helping them, they’d be going at Warp 5 by now. We then jump cut 30 years later, and it’s now the opening of Star Trek. Some aliens drop down, a Klingon blows them up, and then a farmer blows him away with a blaster shotgun.

Then we get the opening theme song. If you were wondering, this is was my watch club’s reaction to it:

So apparently the plan for Enterprise was that Voyager’s rating were falling by the end, so they’re trying to make a new kind of Star Trek. Something Modern. By modern, we mean dated as fuck, and kind of boring, I guess? Also the CGI is very, VERY dated too.

Anyways, the Vulcans are here. The Klingons are upset a Klingon got shot. He’s still alive, but the Vulcans are ready to just kill him. Their logic is nonsense. Then we’re introducd to our ‘hero’.

Captain Archer’s ship is ready to be launched, but the Vulcans are like “Don’t launch yet and go out and meet other people in space, you’re not ready”. They’re all kind of dicks about it. Whoever wrote this doesn’t know how to write Vulcans. A Vulcan woman tries telling him to wait until he’s ready, and he threatens to beat her. Captain “Would beat a woman” Archer. The Earth Admiral is like “alright fuck these guys, we’re launching after all”.

We then get scenes of all the crew. It’s kinda hard to tell who is and is not important in these scnees, but I’ll try and explain them all. We’ve got Archer, he’s kinda smug and I’m not sure how much I like him so far. Then Phlox, the doctor working on the Klingon who seems like a friendly guy, Reed, the Armory Officer. I can’t tell what his deal is. Mayweather, the resident Black Guy. We’ll see how he is. So far he seems young and friendly. He’s also really horny for aliens. Sato, a Linguist who’s really excited to learn Klingon, she’s kinda cool so far, but she has a character trait of being anxious about being on spaceships and it’s slightly annoying. “Trip” Tucker, the Engineer, who’s kinda belligerent and rude. He yells a lot. I cannot tell Tucker or Reed apart.

And then we meet T’Pol.

She’s assigned to the ship, the Enterprise, by their Vulcan superiors. No one is happy about this. When she entered in, I was like “is Archer gonna be racist in this?” and then he opened his fucking mouth, and yes, he is. AND Sexist! I think the idea is that he’s annoyed at the Vulcans cause of history and personal things, and the idea is that we’ll eventually grow as people and our cultures and civilizations will grow closer. That’s the idea. But it’s not pleasant to watch the start of that!!

We also get a scene where an alien talks to the Emperor from Star Wars about the Klingon being takne by the Humans. This guy’s alien species then comes and steals the Klingon away. The alien’s species is the… Suliban. Which is inspired by the Taliban. Yeah. sigh. The Suliban is genetically enhanced, which is strange for their species. T’Pol tries to tell them to go back home. She’s told to shut up. They go to the last known place the Klingon, Klaang, was known to be. A planet called Rigel. Everyone is pretty much immediately kidnapped. T’Pol gives a “told you so” look. Alright.

We learn that this girl, Sarin, was who Klaang met before hand. She kisses Archer because apparently though kisses she can gauge how truthful someone is being. It feels like Berman was just horny, and also thought kisses would sell more. It’s dumb. She agrees to help them, then gets killed and tells them to find Klaang. Okay, sure. She tells them about The Cabal, and something called The Temporal Cold war. Whatever that is. On the escape, Archer is shot in the leg and T’Pol decides to take command of the Enterprise. Dude, he just got shot in the leg, it’s fine.

We then get the most infamous thing in Enterprise, at least to me. T’Pol and Trip get into the decontamination room and rub gell on each other. It’s extremely over sexual and the smell of Berman is thick all over it, and I hate it. They exposit over this sexualization, or sexposit I guess, and T’Pol ends up actually not taking advantage of this situation to make them go back to Earth, but instead do what Archer would have wanted and go after the aliens. It’s a VERY sudden turn around, there was no… anything there. Maybe that’s just what sex gel does to a woman.

They’re attacked by the aliens but are hiding from them. They steal one of their ships, and go down in it, Trip and Archer. Why is he bringing the chief engineer for this mission? Instead of the guy who can actually fly the ship, Merriweather? I dunno. They enter the alien vessel and rescue Klaang, but leave Archer behind. I have no idea why they left Archer behind. So the story can happen? I dunno, it makes no sense to me. Archer tells Tucker tells Trip not to come back for him, but then lies and is like “How DARE you all not go back for him! IT’S AN ORDER OF HIS!” and I think Trip is supposed to be the good guy in this situation.

Archer talks to The Bad Guy, some dude named Silik, and they fight in a temporal anomoly room, and then in a flashing room. It’s… a little rough.

He’s teleported out just as before he was about to be shot at. The telporter btw is only used for like, supplies and food. It’s SUPPOSED to be safe for Humans but this was the first test of THAT. Yay!

We take Klaang to the Klingons, and find out that apparently Klaang was carrying some data in his DNA. Oh boy. This is technically Klingon First Contact, and it seems to go… kinda well.

Archer then openly admits he’s been a racist and is looking to move past that, and wants T’Pol to stay on board. She offers to contact High Command and ask them herself. Again, the pacing of this character development feels slightly off but it’s not a bad payoff.

Over all, the episode is fine. It’s fine for setting up over arching plot. But as for the character setup, I dunno. I have NO clue what Reed’s deal is, he has no personality so far except he’s English, and there.

Broken Bow - ENT 7/10

Hoshi Sato starts our episode off by being sad her pet slug they found on an alien planet is dying. Oh this’ll be good. They apparently haven’t had very much luck meeting aliens out here yet.

Reed is grumpy that they left stardock without testing their weapons, which is the closest we’ve gotten to a character trait for him. The tests go poorly. A lot of this early episode is just… people talking about how nothing is happening, and very little happening. Though we do get to see more Phlox. He’s fun. He’s also VERY horny. He and T’Pol are the only two non-Humans on this ship, and he’s here cause he wants to learn as much as he can about other Cultures and peoples. Even, and possibly especially, their mating habits.

THey find a spaceship floating around out in space, and venting air. It seems to be damaged. They decide to try and find out what’s wrong, going over to it. Trip is pissy and like “I should go on the mission with you! I came here to explore, not sit in Engineering and Engineer!” Then why the fuck did you sign up to be an Engineer? Meanwhile, Hoshi is like “I don’t want to go over there sir, I’m claustrophobic”. Then why did you sign up to be on a spaceship??? These people don’t seem to know what they’re doing here.

They find some corpses on the ship being drained of something. T’Pol now suggests they leave. Archer is like “we should stay and find out who did this so we can stop them!” It’s an interesting argument in this case actually. And the first time T’Pol is written for giving an argument and it actually being any kind of reasonable.

Hoshi screamed at the corpses, and she’s talking with Phlox about it. He’s VERY chill. “It’s honestly a good thing you’re not used to rooms full of corpses?” and basically politely suggests she should take care of herself, and not be here if it’s not what she wants.

Archer decides fuck this and goes back to try and find out who the corpses are. Apparently the attackers are harvesting their blood, which has a special compound in it. As the aliens come back, surprise surprise, Archer blows up the harvesting pump and heads back to the Enterprise.

They’re tractored in by the murderers, and then another ship shows up, this one one of the murdered aliens. He thinks they did it, and is angry at them. They need Hoshi to talk to him, but she’s all in her head about it. And you know how they take her out of it? “We need you to do this”. That’s all it takes to make someone no longer self conscious and afraid. She talks to him directly, not through her translation app, and it works out and they blow up the attacking aliens. Yay, more examples of why we need more fucking translators on ships.

And then while making a metaphor about Hoshi finding her place on the ship, they brought an invasive species to an alien planet. The end!

This one was okay too.

Strange New World - ENT 2/10

But we already watched SNW this week!!

While flying around, they find an Earth-like M-class planet. They decide to go down and check it out, cause it seems nice. T’Pol thinks they should spend a week scanning it instead. They refuse, put on these dumb hats, and go down with an away team. They also brung the fucking dog. Archer’s DOG is on this away mission. Do they have any idea how dangerous space is?!?! Like, yes, T’Pol is kinda a bitch at this point, but when she’s like “We were scheduled to rendevous 15 minutes ago, where are you?” and they’re like “Gosh get off my ass mom, we’re just enjoying our time here”, we’re not supposed to… empathize with her??? Also why are the people sent on the survey mission the engineer and the pilot???

They camp out on the planet. Is that why they’re out exploring? To go camping? These people are too lax. Merriweather tells a ghost story, which is cute. Very suddenly, there’s a storm that rolls across the planet. They hide out in a cave, and now it’s a fucking ghost story. Merriweather goes back out and sees some forces walking around outside. Oh boy.

Scans still show nothing. One of the redshirts they took with them freaks out and runs out into the storm. These people are not prepared to be in space. They’re not prepared to be on a HIKE, let alone in space. They choose the wrongest, dumbest things to do, and then get pissy when their babysitter (T’Pal) tries to help them in any small way.

One of the other redshirts sees T’Pal talking to aliens, then later when she asks her about them, T’Pal is like “…what are you talking about? I’ve seen no one else here.” The first Redshirt tells Archer to “go to hell” when Archer is like “We’re landing to take you out”. They’re struggling to land the shuttle though. Gosh, if only they had their fucking pilot up there instead of ON THE SURVEY MISSION. Archer crashes the shuttle like he’s Captain Olimar and has to fly out.

Trip gets all up in T’Pal’s face and is racist and assumes she’s evil and trying to hurt them. He pulsl a fucking gun on her when she’s like “Let’s go get some water”. I think they’re trying to make him a Bones kinda thing but he’s like… very, VERY aggressive and irrational and frankly, awful. I kind of hate him? I hope there’s SOMETHING on here that’s making him go nuts, but this isn’t really THAT far from what we’ve seen before.

Our first teleporter incident! He lives, though. THis is the first redshirt who ran off and told Archer to go to hell. According to Phlox, he’s filled with a psychotropic compound. Okay, that explains it. It’s the LSD Bad Trip Planet. Archer calls Trip, tells him to stop being violent, and explains what’s going on. “You trained for this, y’all?” but the training means jack squat.

Trip: “Hey aliens, we’ll teach you that she lied to you about Humans! We’re actually wonderful, pleasant people!” as he waves his fucking gun around and shoots at the wall. Also there’s poison now so they need to act MUCH more quickly. But Trip is too far gone. They first try to explain it to him, but he’s too paranoid. They then trick him into letting them talk to her in Vulcan, and basically tell her “fucking shoot him”. It works.

It all works out in the end. I didn’t like this episode very much. It was mostly stupid and unpleasant to watch.