Enterprise Flashback: Shuttlepod One

One of the best episodes of the original Star Trek's first season was "The Galileo Seven," a survivalist thriller centered around a shuttlecraft disaster. Decades later, spin-off Enterprise used a similar premise for its own first season episode, "Shuttlepod One."

On a mission away from Enterprise, "Trip" Tucker and Malcolm Reed's shuttlepod is severely damaged. As rescue seems increasingly unlikely, the two resort to more desperate measures to prolong the time they have left, and ultimately come to accept that this might be the end.

Though I invoke "The Galileo Seven" as a touchstone, "Shuttlepod One" is actually a very different kind of episode -- almost a two-hand play for Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating. Indeed, this is apparently the only Star Trek episode (of any series) to feature no guest stars, no background actors, and no stunt performers at any point in the episode. (It's also one of the very few to have no scenes on the bridge / command center of its starship / station.)

What the production saves in excluding all of that, it spends in other ways. To capture the freezing interior of the dead shuttlepod, they actually refrigerated the set. (Nowadays, they'd probably put in all the visible breath using visual effects; here, though, they're all the real thing.) There are also plenty of good visual effects shots of the ship navigating asteroids, coming upon what they mistake as the wreck of Enterprise, drifting in space, and more.

There are nice character details sprinkled throughout the episode. Reed shows some national pride, arguing that Vulcans might have been more helpful to humanity if Zefram Cochrane had been European. He and Trip debate the appeal of reading Ulysses vs. reading comic books. As the situation gets more dire, the two characters are really allowed to bicker with one another, and the two actors make the most of the conflict. The episode becomes not only a successor to "The Galileo Seven," but to the emerging friendship between Bashir and O'Brien on Deep Space Nine -- a situation of people who kind of don't like each other becoming the best of friends.

Still, I think the script has some notably weak elements. We're introduced to a strange zealotry the Vulcans seem to have about science: if they haven't discovered it (microsingularities, in this episode), then it doesn't exist. (This continues to be a thing in future episodes, and it continues to be weird.) Trip and Reed make more than a few dumb decisions to facilitate the story: ignoring malfunctions that turn out to be early warning signs, and abandoning the supposed Enterprise wreck immediately without further investigation. And because Enterprise always has to do something unnecessarily horny, we get Reed's dream about an overtly sexy T'Pol, and a later discussion of her "bum."

I think there are some structural problems too. The episode lets the audience off the hook right away, showing scenes aboard Enterprise immediately after the opening credits. (Sure, we all know Enterprise isn't actually destroyed, but they certainly could have left us wondering how damaged it might be for a lot longer.) Plus, it's hard to take how immediately and thoroughly Reed gives up on all hope of survival. Sure, people can be like that. Hell, I might well be that way myself in such a situation. But we're not used to a main character on a Star Trek series being like this; Trek heroes are ingenious to a fault, always chasing solutions, however unlikely. Reed's attitude here is such a turd in the punch bowl, increasingly annoying to watch as the episode unspools -- especially in contrast to the more Trek-typical Trip.

Other observations:

• Another element that makes Reed's behavior hard to take is that the character has been given so little personality and so few traits to this point. All we really know about him is his devotion to duty. Yet here, his constant insubordination condtradicts this only thing we know about him (other than "he likes pineapple"). The conflict is good for the episode, but bad for the character.

• Why does Captain Archer have a bottle of bourbon stashed on the shuttle? Surely his quarters would be a better place to keep it?

• Connor Trinneer does a credible job of acting drunk. (It's not as easy as you'd think.) Though I think the really late-episode "shivering in the cold" is over the top for both him and Dominic Keating. (Besides, don't you actually become quite still as you get really cold?)

"Shuttlepod One" is a solid production, and I think the two key actors do a good job with the script they're given. Still, I think that script could have used quite a bit more polish. I give the episode a B-.