Enterprise Flashback: Precious Cargo

There have been moments throughout the first two seasons of Enterprise that have made me question the taste of series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. But it does seem that Braga at least was capable of knowing "bad" when he saw it. Because in an interview a decade after the episode "Precious Cargo" first aired, he called it one of the worst episodes of Star Trek ever.

Trip boards an alien freighter to assist in repairs, and there discovers a woman being held in stasis. When he revives her, the aliens react by running from Enterprise, leaving Trip and the woman, a monarch named Kaitaama, to fend for themselves. They flee in an escape pod, but bicker constantly as they struggle to survive and signal for rescue.

"Spoiled princess" butting heads with "crass rogue" is such an old trope of film and television that I don't think there's an unexplored way left to tell the story. All you can do is hope to catch lightning in a bottle with casting. But even that feels like a long shot when you're competing against the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, etc. etc.

Needless to say, it's unsurprising that Connor Trinneer would little chance of finding such chemistry with a random guest star in a one-off episode of Enterprise. But that little chance was destroyed with the casting of model-turned-actress Padma Lakshmi, whose performance here is so wooden that it doesn't even rise to the level of parody. Though it's not entirely her fault; the script isn't doing her any favors. "Precious Cargo" plays like Spaceballs, without the jokes.

Actually, it plays a lot like Spaceballs, with Kaitaama complaining constantly like Princess Vespa about the conditions of her rescue. Instead of losing her "matched luggage," Kaitaama must sacrifice her fancy dress when Trip tears it into a mini-skirt. (Of course he does.) Instead of complaining about escaping in a Winnebago, she and Trip share one cramped escape pod, crawling all over each other. Nothing is as fun as it should be. Once they crash on a planet together, it's every bit as stupid as it sounds when Kaitaama orders Trip out of his clothes, accidentally tumbles into a bog with him, and the two just decide "we might as well have sexy times while we're here."

As terrible as all this is, the episode manages not to be a complete loss thanks to a few fun scenes involving Archer and T'Pol. When the alien freighter escapes early on, one of the aliens is left behind as a prisoner aboard Enterprise. The efforts to coerce this guy into revealing information are the kind of fun the rest of the episode should be. They decide to position T'Pol up as a merciless judge, jury, and executioner in an invented Vulcan tribunal -- and if you overlook that T'Pol probably shouldn't go along so easily with such subterfuge, her cool menace (and Archer's staged fear of her) do generate the smiles this episode desperately needed -- in a few too-brief moments.

Other observations:

• When the alien freighter somehow escapes, even after allegedly being hit by a phase cannon shot, it's just the latest in a long string of incompetence by Malcolm Reed.

• The alien provisions found in the escape pod are obviously just a CamelBak and some beef jerky.

This episode is painfully dumb. I found it worse than the worst episodes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager. But since I'd have to admit that The Next Generation occasionally had even worse episodes than this, I suppose I'll give "Precious Cargo" a D+.