It's
a clever name for an episode, if you've ever taken a drawing
class. Otherwise, only the first part of the title means anything
until this week's wacky mystery is solved.
Warning:
This review contains spoilers
We start
out on an alien planet, littered with ancient ruins. Hoshi
and Tripp snap photos of cryptic drawings left by an anonymous
people, when suddenly a polarized storm thrashes down the
mountains. Hoshi fights the Captain's orders to use the unreliable
transporter technology, but is forced to beam up to the ship.
Though she arrives in one piece, she "...doesn't feel
right."
And so
ends the longest teaser in the history of Enterprise!
When we
come back from commercial Hoshi whines "ever since the
transporter I don't feel right" so many times she seems
stuck in some sort of temporal anomaly. No one listens to
her unfounded "feelings" and passes them off as
"transporter anxiety."
The next
morning she oversleeps, and is three hours late for her duty
shift. At this point anyone who didn't think this was a dream
episode is sure of it. The rest of her day is filled with
bizarre happenings. She fails at her job and is kicked off
the bridge, her friends ignore her, and she's got this mobile
mole that seems to have moved a centimeter.
Why wouldn't
anyone listen to her? Dr. Phlox may be an alien doctor, but
he's not dumb, and he knows transporters aren't the most reliable
technology in the galaxy.
The crew's
ignorance may confuse Hoshi, but the audience isn't dreaming,
and we won't fall for such silly tricks. At this point in
the episode we feel lied to. All we can do now is wait patiently
for Grandpa to give us back our nose, even though we know
perfectly well he never really took it in the first place.
Eventually
Hoshi becomes completely transparent. The crew can't find
her cellular residue or her bio-signs anywhere on the ship.
What they
should've been looking for was her shadow. While Hoshi the
character may be floating around the ship, Linda Park the
actress is still on a set filled with lights. Her shadow cast
on people who looked right past her. Perhaps it's too hard
for Hoshi to dream a green screen.
There
were other technical questions before Hoshi became transparent.
In the alien ruins Hoshi catalogued the relics with a camera
of some sort. The thing had a flash on it. Apparently HP doesn't
make it past the third world war; otherwise they would probably
be more sophisticated cameras than the ones Target featured
this Thanksgiving weekend.
Also in
the future, wouldn't it stand to reason there would be a better
way to keep soap? They have the technology to travel through
the cosmos but are forced to get soap from a metal pumping
dispenser. On other Treks people have taken sonic showers
- on Enterprise they take showers in the high school
gym.
Hoshi
finally wakes up. After facing her fears and beaming on an
alien transporter pad, she rematerializes in the transporter
room, and learns that much like a season of Dallas,
the entire episode was a dream.
Her molecules
were suspended within the machine for eight and a half seconds,
and during that time her subconscious created the entire scenario.
Hence the "Point" part of "Vanishing Point."
It's ironic
that the "relay buffers" were the things that forced
her into this fantasy, because it was pretty much a relay
of TNG's "The Next Phase" in which La Forge
and Ro were involved in a transporter accident, and went wandering
around the Enterprise, invisible to the crew.
If you
didn't suspect Vanishing Point to be a dream episode
then you'll want this one to rerun again soon. A second pass
will highlight some of the subtle clues (like hearing the
voices of Trip and Tucker in the turbo shaft, encouraging
her to pull through).
After
which you'll scream at the TV, "You don't have
my nose, Grandpa!"
