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Enterprise
Shuttle Pod One
airdate 02-13-02Something smells familiar. Vulcans have a very acute sense of smell - we should ask T'Pol if the recent relationship development between Commander Tucker and Malcolm Reed smells like something we've seen on Star Trek before.
Being that she's a thoughtful Vulcan, she'd tell us that good stories are built on conflict and relationships between characters. But then, maybe, she'd look in her Vulcan database and remember the oddly familiar relationship between the engineer and the doctor on Deep Space Nine. Of course, the producers can't create a Trek show without there being similarities. This is a spin off, after all. Things like space aliens, computers going haywire and green skinned sex slaves are going to come up. And even some individual episodes are going to reflect earlier shows. But Shuttle Pod One could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship, just like on DS9. The engineer O'Brien HATED Dr. Bashir in the first season, and by the last episode they were crying into their synth-ale about having to be away from each other.
"Oh, I'll miss you ever so much Dr. Bashir - how will I play holo-Alamo without you!?"
Now this could be a miss prediction. Much like the Vulcan data bases, it's supported by a weak theory. But by the end of this episode, Trip and Malcolm were calling each other friends and drinking a healthy dose of bourbon - which makes for the best space buddies.
Another week has gone by, and of course another time we've seen T'Pol dancing around as a Vulcan sex symbol. But this week she kept her breasts out of the captain's face. And that's about as much character development we got from the rest of the crew. Sure, Trip and Reed chatted about how everyone is doing on the Enterprise, and everyone got at least one line on camera.
But it probably wasn't worth the six hour round trip to the make up chair for John Billingsley to be transformed into Dr. Phlox and say two lines. Then again, he's on national TV, as an alien super star, does he really care if he had to have six hours in a chair for two hours worth of work? Probably not. And better still, he didn't have to put his breasts in anyone's face. Well, at least not ON camera. Not to say that Billingsley has put his breasts in anyone's face to get a job - not that he has breasts -
Ah - End transmission.
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