Upon Closer Inspection

I have a pile of "backlogged" television shows and movies I'd like to watch, longer than I'll ever get through. And yet still, somehow, I'll find myself with a couple of hours to watch something and find that nothing sounds quite good. So I'll let somebody's algorithm guide me to a suggestion. (One example: I've found that Movielens.org has me pegged rather accurately.) That was how I came to watch a movie I'd never even heard of before, An Inspector Calls.

In 1912, a wealthy British family is hosting a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of their daughter. The merriment is interrupted by police inspector Goole, who arrives to question them about the suicide of a young woman. Each member of the family, it's revealed, had some connection to the poor woman, and may have contributed to her decision to take her own life.

Since I hadn't heard of An Inspector Calls before sitting down to watch it, I was unaware of its considerable pedigree. Originally, it was a stage play written in 1945 by J. B. Priestley. The play's critique of the "haves versus the have-nots" has maintained currency for decades, with theater companies worldwide staging versions. Filmed adaptations have been fairly common too, from a 1954 film to a 1982 mini-series to versions in other languages (such as a 2015 Hong Kong film).

From the synopsis I've read of the play, this version of An Inspector Calls that I found changes little -- only opening up the flashback structure of the tale to make the story more cinematic than a one-act play set in a single room. It feels like the right choice, because while the specifics of the story may be dated (it's set now over 100 years in the past), the themes remain topical. Put simply, it probably just felt like time to tell this story again, time to assemble a new cast to tell it.

And they assembled a very good one. The version I happened upon was a BBC television adaptation mounted in 2015, starring David Thewlis as the titular inspector. In the way of so many British casts, there are faces you'll recognize from all sorts of other places. Miranda Richardson is the one you'd most likely know by name, though you've possibly seen Ken Stott as Balin in The Hobbit films, Kyle Soller in Andor (or Bodies), Sophie Rundle in Peaky Blinders or Bodyguard)... the list keeps going.

The story is quite heightened, to the point of seeming artificial at times. You might well expect this of a period piece, and certainly could expect it knowing that it's based on a stage play. Still, I mention it since the performative whims of the characters did occasionally take me out of the moment. Plus, there's a final twist in the story that I personally didn't feel added much to the well-articulated central themes: we're all connected, and you never know what other people are going through. Then again, it may well be this final twist that lifted up the original play among so many written decades ago to keep in people's minds and hearts to today. I did enjoy the message overall, and again, I found the acting to be top-notch.

I give An Inspector Calls -- this version of it, at least -- a B. If you like a proper British "upstairs/downstairs" story, or the cast seems intriguing to you (or both!), you might consider it.

Enterprise Flashback: Singularity

One of the staple story archetypes of Star Trek is the "everyone on the crew starts acting strangely" story. Enterprise took at run at this with "Singularity."

When Enterprise explores a black hole in a trinary star system, the crew begins exhibiting unusually obsessive behavior. And when everyone but T'Pol is rendered unconscious, it falls on her alone to save the ship from destruction.

Forgive me starting with a diversion, but I want to talk about writer Ronald D. Moore. After starting his career on Star Trek, he went on to create several other television series, including the revival of Battlestar Galactica. During the original run of that series, he hosted a weekly podcast about each new episode, which I always made a point of listening to it after the show. His commentary was always shockingly frank, and I will always remember a bit of behind-the-scenes info he revealed about a particularly disliked episode. ("Black Market," if you're a BSG fan.) He admitted that it was a bad episode with little suspense, and he copped to trying to help it in the edit by stealing a scene from the climax to place in the opening teaser, followed by a "48 hours earlier" on-screen cut. It was a cheap trick, he admitted, but they had to do something to improve the slow pace of the first half of the episode.

Since then, I've been especially aware of television episodes that use that trick. Perhaps they're written that way, or perhaps they're edited that way after the fact (like "Black Market"). But I always find myself asking: is the opening section of this story legitimately interesting? Or have they tried to trick me into overlooking a few dull acts?

That question nagged at me as this episode of Enterprise opened with T'Pol alone on Enterprise, recording a desperate log entry... before then flashing back for a truly slow Act One. Hoshi Sato is taking over in the kitchen for the oft-talked-about-but-never-seen Chef. Archer is writing a foreword for a biography about his father. Travis Mayweather has a headache. Trip is tasked with fixing the captain's chair. Reed is going to do his job for once, looking into improved protocols for ship emergencies. None of this seems particularly engaging.

By Act Two, it's becoming clear that everyone is obsessed with these trivial activities. And they kind of have to be trivial activities for the audience to begin to suspect anything is wrong; the characters have so often been depicted as being bad at their jobs that the behavior has to be extreme for anything to seem amiss! 

I find the origin and spread of this contagion to be quite murky. When Chef fell ill, was he patient zero for it all, or was that an unrelated plot contrivance to give Hoshi something to do? Is T'Pol actually immune to the obsession contagion? She says she is -- but frankly, I don't believe her. She seems more irritable than usual with her human shipmates, and withdraws to her quarters to analyze stellar scans, an apparent manifestation of her own obsession. And her own logic seems quite compromised, when she chooses to awaken Archer to help her escape the black hole -- rather than Travis, or any other ship's pilot.

Whatever all these shortcomings total up to, though, I have to admit that the episode is pretty fun. It's the rare episode where everyone in the cast gets something to do, and that "something" involves them all getting to behave out of the ordinary. Reed's story line may exist only to justify an admittedly funny joke about inventing a "Reed Alert," but blessedly, at long last, we get to see him succeed at something. Archer's obsession is bad for poor Porthos, who skips a meal and sulks cutely for the camera. And you can always count on John Billingsley to deliver; Phlox's mad scientist obsession with curing Mayweather's headache makes an effective turn from goofy to harrowing.

There may be a few muddy plot points, but the dialogue is notably sharp. Trip gets most of the best lines, from his characterization of Reed's alert noises as "a bag full of cats" to his wicked retort when Archer accuses him of not knowing anything about writing. ("I'm not the only one!")

Other observations:

• When Archer mentions that you have to perch on the edge of the captain's chair rather than properly sit in it, I thought to myself: "yeah, I see T'Pol sitting in it that way all the time!" And then I thought: "I'll bet this is the show making a story point out of a real world production complaint." I was expecting that they'd use all this as an excuse to actually remodel the captain's chair. But no, in the end, nothing changes; we're told Trip lowers the chair one centimeter, but obviously that's not a real thing. (The change, not the concept of a centimeter.)

• Back in season one, one of the maybe two things we learned about Malcolm Reed is that he'll eat pretty much anything. So it's inconsistent here to have him be the character complaining to Hoshi Sato that her meal is too salty.

I feel like this episode lacks clarity on several important plot points. But it is fun to see the entire cast cut loose with strange behavior. It reminds me a bit of an early Deep Space Nine episode, "Dramatis Personae" -- though in a rare occurrence (perhaps even a unique one), I actually think the Enterprise episode is a touch better. I give "Singularity" a B-.

Here There Be Dragons

I was getting ready to write a review of the new board game Finspan -- a fish-themed spin-off of the popular Wingspan -- when I realized that I'm actually one spin-off behind! I never posted my thoughts on Wyrmspan.

Wyrmspan tweaks the core gameplay of Wingspan, the engine-building game about birds. It adds a fantasy theme (ever a popular choice), making the game about dragons instead of birds. Mechanically, it brings in the concept of "guilds," a track where players advance to earn rewards and compete to score points at the end of the game. It does away with Wingspan's dice, giving players more control over the food they gather, and thus more ability to engineer card combos. Add in a handful of other minor changes -- some merely cosmetic, others subtly nudging the nature of the gameplay -- and you have something clearly meant to be a slightly more advanced take on Wingspan.

I've got no problem with board game spin-offs. Maybe that's motivated thinking, given the board game company I work for. Still, the most subtle changes in a game can cause real ripple effects throughout its ecosystem. So when a designer or publisher actually changes things up with a spin-off, rather than just re-themes them, I'm open to treating it as a new experience. (To those who claim this sort of thing is just a "cash grab," my answer is simple: you can just not let your cash be grabbed.)

To me, Wyrmspan retains enough of the core of Wingspan that I don't find it massively better or worse than the original game. The fun still comes from the hundreds of cards (bird or dragon) that combine in new ways every time you play. Building an engine, then exploiting it, is still the core loop -- and I find that fun in either form.

But Wyrmspan has highlighted at least two things about my own gaming tastes. The first, I already knew: with each passing year, my tastes are drifting toward less complex experiences. I was never the kind of gamer eager to dive into a 4-hour game preceded by a 1-hour rules teach. I've always been the sort of gamer that would rather experience two different 2-hour games in that time. Except... it seems more and more like I'd actually rather fit three 90-or-so minute games in that time. (Or four 1-hours!)

The original Wingspan, it's important to note, doesn't actually feel like a "crossover" game. The super-accessible bird theme helped it rocket to the top of the hobby, helping it land in Target stores and on plenty of tables that otherwise host only the occasional Monopoly game. But it's easy to forget all that when experienced gamers pick up Wingspan so quickly: it's already a gamers' game. Try teaching it to non-gamers, and this is what you'll get.

All that is to say that, for me at least, I didn't necessary need a "more complex Wingspan" -- even an only incrementally more complex one. I don't mind Wyrmspan, because it is only incrementally harder to wrap your head around if you've experienced Wingspan. But Wingspan was scratching a particular itch just fine. The reason it had become less frequently played in my group has nothing to do with its complexity (or a perceived lack thereof).

The second thing Wyrmspan taught me is something I've recently begun to notice about my gaming habits, and something that's definitely changed over the years: theme matters. It used to be that when a game was being explained to me, I'd gloss right by the flavor of it. We're spreading civilization in ancient Greece? Trading artifacts at high-class auctions? Building castles in the European countryside? Whatever, what are we -- the players -- actually doing when we play this game? But increasingly, I've come across games where I feel that the theme does vastly improve the experience for me.

Without checking the rulebook for Wingspan, I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to represent. Simple birdwatching? Some sort of conservation effort? I'm not sure, but I do know that I find playing birds (and reading little factoids about them on each card) to be inherently more interesting than playing made-up dragons with goofy, made-up names. If all the gameplay about Wingspan and Wyrmspan were exactly the same, I'd still prefer the birds of Wingspan to the dragons of Wyrmspan.

But ultimately, I think the two games feel something like 80-90% similar when you play them. They're different enough to each "justify their existence," and different enough that I think most gamers would have a preference between them. But they're both enjoyable. Suggest either on game night, and I'm likely to say yes. If Wingspan has settled around a B+ or A- in my view, Wyrmspan slots in at a B or B+.

Enterprise Flashback: The Communicator

The classic Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action" ended a comedic story with one last goofy slide whistle of a joke: Dr. McCoy accidentally left his communicator behind on a mission to an alien planet. The prequel series Enterprise took up this exact baton, with a more dramatic approach, in the episode "The Communicator."

Returning from an undercover mission to observe a pre-warp society, Malcolm Reed realizes he accidentally left his communicator behind. When a new mission to retrieve it goes wrong, cultural contamination is just one problem in the mix; Archer and Reed's lives are endangered when they're taken prisoner by one local government who suspects them of being spies for another.

To get this story going, someone needed to leave a communicator behind on an alien planet. But did it really have to be Malcolm Reed? Screwing up again?! I can only conclude that not only did the writers of Enterprise know that Malcolm Reed was their most unlikable and incapable character, but they actually delighted in pushing the boundaries of just how insufferable they could make him.

Even setting aside season one, the first third of season two has already shown Reed being bad at shooting, unable to circumvent alien security, pessimistic to the degree where you'd think maybe he has a death wish, and not someone you'd think to bring along in pursuit of a fugitive. And all this failure without us even getting what I'd call a "Reed episode." Now, with "The Communicator," he sucks even at basic "opsec." (Like, not "invite a reporter to the group chat" bad... but this is fiction and thus has to maintain some degree of plausibility.)

When Archer and Reed go back for the communicator, the time for innocent accidents is over, and the bad decision making begins. They go back to search the tavern where they think the communicator went missing without any advance discussion of a cover story. They explore a clearly "employees only" back hall without even trying so much as a "just looking for the bathroom" excuse. They go in with a bunch more advanced technology that is promptly confiscated.

Fearing the consequences of cultural contamination, Reed and Archer decide that revealing themselves as aliens would somehow be worse than escalating a cold war into a hot one. They claim to be genetically modified super soldiers working for the other side, an unthinkably threatening technological leap for the local population. Only the prospect of becoming an alien autopsy pushes either of the two anywhere close to thinking rationally. (Not that they actually change their minds.)

It would be one thing if Archer and Reed were standing up for some ideal they've strongly identified with before now. But if anything, this is a total reversal of Archer's ideals as we've come to know them. The closest thing to his north star has been "if the Vulcans are for it, I'm against it." So this steadfast commitment to non-interference with alien cultures feels quite out of character for him. Am I glad to see Archer open to actual learning and growth? You bet! But nothing about this situation feels like it's been a "teachable moment" for him -- nothing that would suggest a conversion to the point where he's willing to lay down his life. (Reed, on the other hand, has demonstrated a willingness to die for pretty much any reason, at any time.)

We do at least get an action-packed rescue sequence. Trip, Mayweather, and T'Pol swoop in on a cloaked Suliban ship (even more cultural contamination). We get fun cloaking effects (including a running gag about Trip basically spilling cloaking juice on his arm). There's a huge shootout. Running, dodging, going back to scoop up any traces that might leave behind. The ride was ridiculous getting to this point, but it delivers on all the roller coaster thrills you could ask for.

Other observations:

• Fans of Shameless may clock actor Dennis Cockrum, Mickey Milkovich's dad, as the barkeep at the alien tavern.

• For my money, the antics surrounding Trip's disappearing -- and slowly reappearing -- arm provide the best moments of the episode. But they certainly undermine trying to treat an idea from "A Piece of the Action" seriously.

• ...though not as much as the silly moment near the end where Archer thinks he's now left something behind, only for Reed to find it dropped inside the shuttlepod.

Enterprise can do action better than any Star Trek series that came before, and does so again here. Still, the continued incompetence of the Enterprise crew -- and Malcolm Reed in particular -- is really starting to wear me down. I give "The Communicator" a C+.

"Best" Picture

A few months ago, I wrote that The Substance was the movie that may have finally broken me of needing to see Oscar-nominated movies just because they're Oscar-nominated. Well... it turns out that was just the first blow of a one-two punch that might have cured me of needing to see Oscar-winning movies as well. The year's Best Picture winner, Anora, hit streaming recently. I decided to watch it and see what all the fuss was about. And I still have no idea.

Anora (who goes by Ani) is a young stripper who one night, because she speaks Russian, is tapped to entertain Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch. Vanya begins hiring Anora outside of her club with increasing frequency -- and soon, the two get married in Las Vegas. But this rash action brings down the wrath of Vanya's parents, who send in goons to detain the couple and annul the marriage.

I've heard Anora described as Pretty Woman crossed with The Godfather -- though I struggle to see how a fan of either would like the combination here. If you're up for the light rags-to-riches story of a sex worker clawing out a new life for herself, I think you'll find neither enough "rom" or "com" in Anora. The movie has moments that seem to be intended as dark comedy -- but even if they make you laugh, they would seem like curdled milk next to the bubbly champagne of a typical feel-good romance.

The first 40 minutes of the film feel like borderline pornography, as Mikey Madison secures herself a Best Actress Oscar seemingly by a willingness to be even more naked, simulating even more sex, than when Emma Stone won for Poor Things in the previous year. And at no point does any genuine romance appear to blossom between Ani and Vanya. I don't think it's supposed to... and yet the rest of the movie seems to turn on Ani's investment in the relationship, not merely what she gets out of it.

If I'm dubious of what the rom-com audience would make of Anora, I'm even more skeptical about what fans of gangster films would find here. Bear in mind, please, that gangster stories in general usually leave me cold. (I'm one of the few heretics who dislikes all the Godfather films as much as most people seem to hate Part III.) I imagine much of the appeal stems from the intersection of violence and domestic life, the sense that criminal danger is a true threat at any moment. (At least, that's what I feel in the handful of stories that do work for me, like Breaking Bad.)

I felt an odd lack of danger in Anora. I grew too bored to keep close track, but I believe there's not a single gun anywhere in the film. Of course, violence can take other forms -- and in particular, brutish men don't need a gun to menace a vulnerable woman. But at no point does Anora ever really come off as a vulnerable woman. Maybe that should be seen as a credit to both the character and the movie. And yet once the "gangster" section of the story kicks in, it takes only minutes for it to become clear that even in situations where Anora isn't in control, she isn't in any danger. While I'd like to think I'm not looking for only the cheap thrills of danger in this movie, I would like some source of suspense or tension in the ensuing hour-and-a-half.

Instead, I found Anora to be deeply boring at best, actively off-putting at worse. (Seriously, what's with the repeated homophobic slurs that don't do anything to further plot or differentiate characters?) By the time the end credits mercifully arrived, I was sure I'd watched what had to be the worst Academy Award Best Picture winner I'd ever seen. Although a moment's reflection made me realize, "nope, I've seen The English Patient," the fact remains that it's close competition.

I don't usually make time these days to blog about entertainment I dislike. But I figure I have to make an exception for an Academy Award-winning Best Picture. And because I wish others had been blunt enough to have saved me the two hours and 20 minutes, I'll mince no more words. I give Anora an F.

The Gang's All Here (and All In?)

When someone first tells you about the game The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, you're likely to wonder how it would even work. A trick-taking game that's somehow cooperative? But it does work, brilliantly. And the innovation has spawned a sequel, many imitators, and a bunch of new games trying to apply player cooperation to inherently competitive gameplay.

The Gang is a cooperative game for 3 to 6 players, who try to pull off three successful bank heists before tripping three alarms. The mechanism for this is poker. The group plays a standard hand of Texas Hold 'Em, but at each moment where there would normally be a betting round, each player instead selects a chip with a number on it. This is the only way to pass information to the other players, who otherwise cannot discuss the contents or quality of their hands. After the final round of "betting" (chip taking), the players reveal their hands in order. The player who took the lowest-valued chip in that final round must have the worst hand, and so on up to the player who took the highest-valued chip, who must have the best hand. You succeed or fail completely as a group, playing a "best of five hands" format to win or lose the game.

Board gamers -- especially the ones trying to maintain a smaller, curated game collection -- will often talk about whether one game "kills" another, offering the same thrills and more in a new package that displaces some earlier release. I don't think that The Gang is a "Crew killer." But I think it does show that there's room for more games following in The Crew's footsteps.

For one thing, a lot more people are familiar with poker than, say, Hearts, or Bridge, or any of the trick-taking games commonly played with a standard deck of cards. If you're looking for a game that's easy to teach, and accommodates players with a wide range of gaming experience, The Gang feels like the far more approachable option to me over The Crew.

As a practical matter, the fact that The Gang takes up to six players is notable. The Crew caps out at five (and, realistically, is far better with four). Not only can The Gang take more, it's actually better (or at least, more of a challenge) the more players you have. And thanks to the simultaneous, cooperative play and people's likely familiarity with Texas Hold 'Em, it's still a fast game with six.

That said, if you're bound and determined to have only one game in your collection -- this, or a version of The Crew -- I'd say you're unlikely to choose The Gang. First, there's not as much variety here as there is in The Crew. The different goals you pursue in The Crew (especially in the Mission Deep Sea version) can make different hands feel wildly different in strategy. The Gang has less variety; you're always trying to rank the strength of your poker hand. Sure, the nature of Texas Hold' Em itself can make that trickier some times more than others, but you're always thinking about the same basic possibilities.

The specific thing you wind up doing in The Gang can feel quite similar too. When another player takes the lowest chip, and you're convinced you have a worse hand than they do, you're allowed to take the chip from them for yourself. They're allowed to take it back. You can "debate" through the passing of chips as much as you want -- so long as you don't actually say anything about the cards in your hand. And since you can't actually make any persuasive arguments -- as you could in, say, other cooperative games like Pandemic where players find disagreement -- you kind of just wind up having one player eventually say, "okaaaaaay" in a tone that clearly says they don't think it's okay.

In other words, the gameplay of The Gang can get a little repetitive over time. I think in recognition of this -- or at least to inject more variety generally into the system, the game includes a series of "temporary rules" cards you can optionally use. Whenever you fail at a hand, you reveal a condition for the next hand that helps out. Conversely, when you succeed at a hand, you reveal one that makes the next hand more challenging.

Regardless of whether you use those optional conditions or not, the game generally stays interesting throughout its quick play time -- especially if you're playing with a new player or even a new mix of experienced players. Each person has their own estimation of the strength of their own poker hand, which simply might not match how any other player might estimate the same hand. One player might use "betting" along the way to try to indicate potential (a "drawing hand," in poker parlance), while another player might always be trying to state simply how good the hand they have right now is. These quirks of communication make The Gang a different experience for each group that might play it.

I give The Gang a B+. There's a chance that playing it might just make you want to play Texas Hold 'Em or The Crew instead. But taken on its own terms, it's a fast-paced, fun enough experience.

Enterprise Flashback: The Seventh

The seventh episode of the second season of Enterprise was the cheekily titled "The Seventh."

T'Pol is tasked by the Vulcan High Command to capture an escaped fugitive: a surgically-altered Vulcan who refused to return home after the completion of his undercover mission. This is a mission she failed at once before, decades earlier. But it soon becomes clear that T'Pol has repressed certain memories about her earlier mission.

This episode is pushing hard on the door the writers tried just recently to open, the notion that Archer and T'Pol might become a romantic couple. For no reason more than "I trust you," T'Pol invites Archer along on her secret mission. As things unfold, it's suggested that the information T'Pol hides from Archer is really just information she's hiding from herself. Ultimately, Archer has to help her face emotions she's not used to grappling with. And, I guess we're supposed to believe, the two become closer for it.

Except that Archer is acting quite out of character throughout the episode. Sure, he gets pissy early on about being jerked around by the Vulcans. But once he and T'Pol are on the mission and it appears that the Vulcans have lied about the fugitive they're chasing, it's T'Pol who questions her superiors and not Archer. Where is Archer's ingrained distrust of Vulcans?

That's just one of several weird inconsistencies throughout the episode. Much is made of an acid-drenched landing platform that the characters can't cross, stranding them on the planet for a few hours. But when a fire destroys their shelter, they DO all somehow get across (though we aren't shown how). The final climax centers on a classic "you won't shoot me" standoff -- as though phasers don't have a stun setting that undercuts the tension.

And more importantly, there's a huge hole at the core that's never adequately addressed. There are no doubt countless intelligence agents who could have been tasked to bring in this Vulcan fugitive. Where's the logic in asking T'Pol to do it? She specifically had her past memories of this target tampered with, so it's not like she has reliable special knowledge she can draw on. Why risk having the buried memories resurface (which, predictably, is exactly what happens)?

Perhaps above all: why structure this whole episode as a mystery, only to give it a title like "The Seventh" that's a total giveaway? The first time you hear that T'Pol once chased down six fugitives, you pretty much know what the big secret is going to be.

The episode is slow to get going. A situation that would have been set up in a single briefing room scene on Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Voyager takes an entire act to unfold here. First, T'Pol won't tell anyone anything about her secret mission. Then she confides small details to Archer. Then it's Trip's turn to complain about all the secrecy. Finally T'Pol provides her personal backstory. None of this feels like a slow revelation of context that's the hallmark of skilled writing. There's no actual suspense, and little new context as more information is revealed. It just feels like the episode is being stretched for time.

But the episode does have a couple of things going for it. One is guest star Bruce Davison, a real "that guy" of an actor who plays the Vulcan fugitive Menos. His career has included a wide enough variety of characters that you can never really be sure whether this one is telling the truth. He seems awfully convincing when he says he's being persecuted by the Vulcan High Command, and guilty of no actual crimes. But when he's ultimately revealed as a truly bad guy smuggling bioweapons, that feels equally as plausible.

Another strong element of the episode is the subplot following Trip taking command of Enterprise. While this would have been better to see in season one (after all, I'm pretty sure Trip's taken command before this), it's fun to watch him struggle. First, he's putting on airs, watching water polo and inviting crew to dinner because that's what the "cap'n" would do. Then he's overwhelmed by the demands of the job, wanting to put off every consequential decision until Archer is back to make it. Finally, he has to put an extra pip on his collar and actually pretend to be Archer on a call with the Vulcans.

Other observations:

• I really do like the way Vulcan writing looks. It's just a nice bit of design.

• At one point, we see a sulking Archer bouncing his water polo ball off the wall of his quarters. Whoever lives on the other side of the wall must hate being next to the captain's quarters.

• Star Trek has had its share of scenes in alien bars over the years, and often struggles to include music that feels appropriate to the setting. Here, they don't even try. The bar in this episode has no music at all.

I feel like putting Archer and T'Pol together overrode all other story considerations for this episode. I think a much better version of the story would have been just leaving the mission at T'Pol and Mayweather, as is suggested at the outset. Watching Travis struggle with helping the emotional breakdown of a superior officer could have been quite compelling. As it stands, though, I have to take the fun where I find it in the "Trip in command" subplot, and give "The Seventh" a C+.