Enterprise stumbles into a cloaked minefield, taking heavy damage and getting an undetonated warhead attached to the hull. When Reed tries to diffuse it and winds up trapped outside the ship, it falls to Archer to take over. But time runs short, as the mysterious alien owners of the minefield arrive and demand that Enterprise leaves their space.
Way back in the 1960s, the original Star Trek conceived of an alien race that happened to look like the Vulcans. The Romulans were a one-off allegory about the red scare of communism and the paranoia of traitors in your midst. There was no anticipating the decades-spanning franchise that would build out that story, making increasingly implausible the notion that the Vulcans could have spun off another space-faring society, with an extensive shared heritage, and yet have no knowledge about them. That all poses a particular problem for a prequel show like Enterprise, whose answer to the issue was probably the only one possible (other than: "don't use the Romulans") -- honor the fact that "no one prior to Kirk, Spock, and company knew what a Romulan looked like," and sort of hand wave the rest.
If you accept that approach, then this episode does well by the Romulans. They're certainly portrayed as xenophobic and unreasonable. They're secretive to the point of being inscrutable. (What was so valuable on this uninhabited planet that it was worth putting up all these mines anyway?) They're all the things that longtime Trek fans expect from Romulans. I do question a bit the decision not to make them deadlier. We see the Enterprise with a nasty "bite" taken out of its saucer by the Romulan mine... but there are no lives lost. Still, I'd say overall that making the aliens of this episode be Romulans ultimately works well for the episode.
Besides, this episode itself puts other nitpicks much more in your face. The minefield is ultimately shown to be so dense that it's unclear how Enterprise could have gotten through it as far as it did without tripping one. You would think the Romulans would have some means of detonating them remotely -- like, say, the one attached to Enterprise, after they refuse to leave. Why are shuttlepod hull plates made out of some sort of explosion-resistant material that the Enterprise hull plates apparently are not?
If you get past the quibbles, the episode is all about Malcolm Reed -- and in these respects does the character just as dirty as previous first season episodes. The main thing we learned about him last season is that he's so boring that nobody actually knows anything about him. The same joke plays out again here, as Archer invites him to breakfast and he can't talk about anything but work. When Archer later tries small talk to distract Reed from an injury, Reed curtly maintains that senior officers and subordinates shouldn't fraternize.
Finally, we get a little background on Reed's family background in the navy, his own fear of the water, and an ancestor's death by drowning. But this quickly morphs into a repetition of the one other thing we know about Reed from season one: he's obnoxiously fatalistic. He's ready -- even eager -- to sacrifice his life in this situation (and pretty much any other), which doesn't exactly create narrative tension when Dominic Keating's name is there in the main titles every episode.
But as is so often the case on Enterprise, a shaky script is produced with top notch production values. I mentioned the look of the damaged Enterprise already. Also great is a version of the original Romulan "bird of prey" design. The outer space set of the Enterprise hull is nicely detailed, and the prop of the Romulan mine is excellent, full of widgets the actors can interact with in a series of bomb-diffusing scenes.
Other observations:
- I devoted a whole post to why "Faith of the Heart" makes for a bad theme song for Enterprise. This episode really highlights yet another problem: it never plays well against a dramatic teaser. This episode establishes a nasty threat with huge danger in the opening minutes... and then smash cuts to "It's been a long road...." Does not work at all.
- It feels like this episode must have run short. We get a rather long sequence of Reed suiting up to go outside the ship. It's the sort of thing that might have felt appropriate the first time we ever saw spacesuits on Enterprise -- but it's been more than a year now.
The episode looks pretty great, and it uses the Romulans about as well as you could in a prequel, given the weird constraints of Star Trek lore. But nonsensical writing, including the refusal to make Reed anything but boring or annoying, drags it down for me. I give "Minefield" a B-.
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