By the time period of the original Star
Trek many modern forms of entertainment had died away.
Thanks to Enterprise we now know the people of the
22nd century will still watch movies. Every week the crew
gathers to watch some Paramount film from the 1960s. But apparently
they don't watch TV, or at least more specifically, no one
has EVER seen any episode of Star Trek.
If they
had, most of this week's episode of Enterprise would
never had happened. People who watch Star Trek, or
any of its spin-offs, would know never. . .
1.
Open the hatch to a mysterious vessel floating in space without
checking for an alien disease inside.
2.
Stick your fingers in alien organic material - especially
when it's networked to a computer.
3.
Crawl into a shuttle pod's shaft that magically extends 20
feet deeper than the vessel's outer hull.
4.
Enter a top-secret room without locking the door behind.
5.
Put the captain in a place where he could contract an alien
disease, be transported through time or otherwise harmed in
any way.
Numbers
one through four could just be because these first humans
in space are dumb (or because they don't like Science Fiction).
But number five raises a rather odd point.
We've
seen Kirk, Spock and Bones wander into the most dangerous
situations, only to have lonely peons die for them. (Picard
was a little smarter and sent his Number One and a robot into
harm's way - of course the peons died for them, too.) That
makes for some interesting TV, but they were the three most
important people on the ship. If they died, Sulu would have
been in command (and don't think George Takei doesn't fantasize
about it). And if his peons had caught fire, there
wouldn't have been anyone to say, "He's dead, Hikaru."
On the
Enterprise Captain Archer has no problem crawling inside dangerous
vessels, or exploring unknown planets, first hand. And that's
one of the countless reasons why the creators brought Star
Trek back to the past - to boost the danger factor in
the name of naivety (or because they're dumb).
But there
are other casting choices that don't make much sense. It's
not a bad idea for Kirk to bring his doctor and science officer,
but why would the armory officer be working on fixing an alien
vessel?
Sure,
maybe he's really good at figuring out alien hardware, but
then why would it be just him and the chief engineer working?
In engineering there is a whole deck of peons running about.
They could help.
***
The preceding
is what is known as NITPICKING. Beyond those minor silly complaints
there isn't much wrong with this episode. In fact it goes
above and beyond the Trek limits. It introduces fantastic
new ideas into the continuum, such as Temporal Radiation -
which forces people to inexplicably repeat minutes. Or the
vessel that's bigger on the inside. We also meet new factions
in the mysterious temporal cold war.
These
sorts of "out there" ideas were the themes TNG
fooled around with in their final season (i.e., Anti-Time
in the final episode). Deep Space Nine dabbled in strange
concepts occasionally, but only after it had well established
itself.
Here Enterprise
is in only its second season and already spinning stories
as complicated and thought provoking as Minority Report.
So maybe
the crew of Enterprise never got around to watching Star
Trek. The creators obviously have. And if the problems
in numbers 1 - 5 are a trade off for excellent storytelling,
then I say we made out like Ferengis.
