When a Klingon crash-lands on Earth, Captain Jonathan Archer convinces his superiors that it's time to launch the experimental starship Enterprise to take the alien home to his people. Along for the voyage is a crew mostly of people with limited experience in space, along with a Vulcan advisor whose "advice" Archer is quite reluctant to take. And looming over the entire mission are an alien race called the Suliban, who are receiving instructions from a mysterious figure somewhere in the far future.
Before I get into this episode specifically, I should start by acknowledging my own history with Enterprise. While I'm trying to watch it again with an open mind, I definitely have a couple of big "issues" here that are difficult to set aside. One is simply as a TV viewer. Quantum Leap was one of my very favorite TV series when it ran on television from 1989 to 1993. I should probably rewatch that show to see if it holds up at all, but my memory both now and when Enterprise was brand new was that Scott Bakula was an incredible actor, capable of doing just about anything you'd throw at him -- and Quantum Leap was a formula allowing writers to do exactly that. A show like Enterprise, which restrained him to essentially a single character in a way Quantum Leap did not, was always going to seem like a letdown to me. (And it didn't help that I didn't particularly like his new Enterprise character. But we'll be getting into that along the way.)
The larger issue underpinning my entire experience with Enterprise is that it was (and remains to this day) the one Star Trek series that was never recreational for me. It was always "work." In 1999, I was hired to work at Decipher, an absolutely pivotal moment that set me on my career path and literally changed my life. In short order, I was working as a designer on the Star Trek: Customizable Card Game, having effectively made my hobby my job. I am not complaining about that -- not even a little. But the fact remains that I'd watched Star Trek and The Next Generation purely as a fan, and Deep Space Nine almost entirely as a fan (in part while I playtested for Decipher). Voyager was in its first run while I worked at Decipher, but it began while I was still outside the industry and watching it solely for my own enjoyment.
Enterprise began in 2001 and ran through 2005. From the moment it hit the air, watching it was -- on at least some level -- work. Research. This lasted for almost the entire run of the series for me, until the beginning of 2005, when I was laid off from Decipher and the last half of the last season of Enterprise became something worse to me personally -- a reminder of a job I'd really loved and no longer had. It was a weekly twist of the knife or something, but one I kind of felt compelled to stick with, because the show had actually gotten pretty good in that last season!
But enough about me. Let's talk about the episode.
From top to bottom, you feel how the Powers That Be were trying to make Enterprise -- and "Broken Bow" in particular -- feel different from the 14 consecutive years of running Star Trek leading up to it. It's filmed with different lenses that give a more intimate look generally, and with a few conspicious highlights: an infrared sequence, and multiple instances of split diopter (to keep two different things in focus in the same frame). The sets are smaller and claustrophobic to engender a submarine-like, more "primitive" feeling compared to other Trek sets. Officers dress in astronaut jumpsuits, and admirals wear suits; neither feels entirely like a "uniform," nor does the "active wear" jackets they don when going on an away mission.
To get even more separation from past Star Trek, the show embraces tools that hadn't really been available to this point. Enterprise is the first Star Trek presented in a widescreen aspect ratio (with television beginning to embrace this at right about this time). And while CG had been used for visuals on Star Trek before, Enterprise uses them extensively, from shape-shifting Suliban to an inhumanely smiling alien doctor to the Enterprise itself (which unlike every featured Star Trek ship before it, never actually existed in production model form).
The writing strives to be different, and to depict the characters differently. Our heroes aren't "good at this" yet, with personal issues from travel anxiety to open racial prejudice (that we sense they'll have to learn to set aside). The doctor feels part "mad scientist" with his unconventional methods. Characters curse -- at a TV friendly level, but still, Janeway would never threaten to "knock you on your ass." And this is certainly going to be the horniest Star Trek since the original series; we get talk of three-breasted aliens, see long-tongued alien dancers, have a woman kiss the captain to gauge his trustworthiness, and double down on the cat-suited appeal to straight men that was Seven of Nine (in the new form of T'Pol). Plus, we get the most lascivious scene in the entire Trek franchise, the decontamination chamber sequence that sees two of this "hottest-to-date Star Trek cast" stripping down to their underwear to lube each other up under the leering eye of a camera that lingers on all the naughtiest areas.
And yet, for all these efforts to make Enterprise feel different, there are other ways in which the series seems to be undermining itself right out of the gate. Many guest stars are repeat Star Trek actors, and though all are giving fine performances, the "I know them from somewhere" qualities they bring erodes some of the sense of freshness. (And I don't just mean the cameo from James Cromwell.) Some "differences" about the show mean nothing at all -- like the ship with "polarized hull plating" instead of "shields," or a grappler instead of a
tractor beam. There's the musical score (by Star Trek veteran Dennis McCarthy), which feels like more of the same "beige wallpaper" that has come to define nearly all Star Trek scores since Ron Jones was unceremoniously fired halfway through the run of The Next Generation.
Then there's the story, which shows that this attempt at something new is really only going to be skin deep. We're immediately dealing with Vulcans and Klingons. Right away, they're introducing a Star Trek staple, the transporter, and using it to solve a problem at the climax of the episode. And after going to all the trouble of setting up a prequel that in theory lets you leave recent Star Trek behind? They add a mysterious "Big Bad" who's from the future, trying to have it both ways by hinting to Trekkers that someone/something from 24th century Star Trek might be involved at the heart of all this.
But that said, this is often a compelling episode. It's certainly eye-catching. An enormous rooftop shootout in the middle of a snowstorm feels like one of the biggest action sequences in Star Trek television or film. When the episode reaches "peak submarine movie" in a sort of inverted depth-charging sequence inside a gas giant planet, the tension is palpable. The weirdness of the time chamber, with its audio and visual "echoes," is an effectively bizarre setting.
And I do find myself immediately liking some of the characters. It helps that this cast of seven characters is smaller than any of the recent Trek series before it; there should be more time to focus on and develop each one. Hoshi feels like the most rounded already, simultaneously "good at what she does" and full of relatable neuroses. And it feels like they've actually managed to find a new lane for an alien (Phlox) that isn't "striving to be human" (Data) or "not wanting to be human" (Spock): he just finds humans to be a source of fascination. Plus: come on, Porthos is one of the cutest dogs ever on television.
Other observations:
- Guest star Tommy "Tiny" Lister, Jr. isn't very good at speaking the made-up Klingon language. He sounds like Charlie Brown's teacher slowed down to like .75x speed. ("Wah wah wah.")
- T'Pol gets a "look-in" scanner just like Spock had!
- The villain Silik warns Archer not to try to fire a weapon inside the temporal chamber. And then barely two minutes later, tries to fire a weapon inside the temporal chamber. What an idiot.
- When we reach the Klingon audience hall near the end of the episode, and hear the pounding on the door, I swear that the spoken Klingon response sounds exactly like someone saying "I hear door" in English.
"Broken Bow" looks like a million bucks. (Multiple millions.) Parts of it work very well, and it certainly sets the stage for interesting adventures. But it also feels like many of the creative forces involved, despite wanting to "turn the page" and make new Star Trek, can't quite bring themselves to do that. I give this pilot a B.
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