Enterprise 1x14 "Sleeping Dogs"

rating: ***

the story: The crew rescues the crew of a Klingon ship.

what it's all about: To this point, Enterprise had cautiously spent most of its time with unknown aliens, even at times so unknown they're never even identified.  The one major instance of deviating from this strategy, "The Andorian Incident," might be said to have basically reintroduced aliens who had all but fit that type anyway.  "Sleeping Dogs" features Klingons.  It's their second appearance in a regular episode, after having been a featured element of the pilot ("Broken Bow"), although in "Unexpected" they were more of a bonus element.  Aside from Vulcans, there are no other aliens more identified with the Star Trek franchise than Klingons.  Having them appear three times this soon, and for all three appearances to be completely different, is a welcome development for a prequel series, especially one that wisely sought to use them early as a sign of early Starfleet development.  The Klingon problem, as it were, is as defining element as the Klingons themselves.  They were the earliest and most enduring threat to peace and stability. 

Yet in all three appearances, including this one, war is not really the topic.  All three times Archer is able to talk himself out of things spiraling out of control.  In the second season, he runs out of luck, but all this material leading up to that feels like the first steps of Enterprise serialization, other than the Temporal Cold War; it's the most obvious material that is repeatedly referenced, a continuing piece of the narrative.

And yeah, it's pretty interesting how they manage to do this story three times.  By this point, it now made sense why all those previous crises where the crew felt threatened never involved the Klingons.  This was the beginning of a relationship, a multifaceted one throughout franchise lore.  And the Vulcans did tell Starfleet about Klingons.  All of this is to say, the crew had been tested, and so "Sleeping Dogs" is its first big calculated risk, and in some ways the start of the next leg of the journey.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Klingons!
• series - The third Enterprise appearance!
• character - Archer finds these encounters incredibly personal, but that comes later.
• essential - At the moment he's feeling pretty damn cocky, because so far he keeps making all the right decisions.

notable guest-stars:
Vaughn Armstrong

Enterprise 1x13 "Dear Doctor"

rating: ****

the story: The crew faces a difficult moral dilemma when they encounter two competing species on an alien world with a medical crisis pitting their futures against each other.

what it's all about: "Dear Doctor" is the first season episode generally agreed by fans to be the first great episode of the series.  It's another foundation episode, in that it's technically about setting up one of the basic elements later taken for granted in the franchise, the Prime Directive, and yet for the first time it feels not only completely natural, but incredibly compelling.

A lot of that is down to Phlox.  As one of two aliens in the crew, and out of the two the one from a race created for Enterprise, so with infinitely more to account for, Phlox had a lot to prove.  If Denobulans themselves never quite seemed to become significant (they're depicted from the start as ready allies of humans, so there isn't even an arc for that), Phlox quickly earned his place as one of the cornerstones of the series.  Enterprise had been from the start posited as Star Trek essentially explaining itself, so that even less could be taken for granted than its predecessor, Voyager, whose crew may have been cut off from home but at least knew what Starfleet's mission was, even 70,000 lightyears away.  This meant that every decision was a hard one.  None were ever as difficult, maybe, as this one.

Phlox unexpectedly becomes the voice of pragmatism.  In the pilot, he famously beams at Archer while declaring optimism to be the order of the day, and yet in "Dear Doctor," he faces a different path entirely.  The Prime Directive is a tricky concept.  Practically, it represents another relic of the Cold War, the growing reluctance on the part of war-weary Americans to interfere in developing countries.  It might also be seen as a metaphor about UFO culture, that ever-present doubt as to whether or not we've been visited by aliens.  Certainly with no definitive proof, we have to assume either that aliens don't exist, or they haven't yet made their presence known.  Why?  Because we aren't ready.  That's what Vulcans announced, right from the start, even as explained in Star Trek: First Contact, and then all the more emphatically in Enterprise.  But what does that look like when applied to someone else?  Kirk never seemed to mind bending the rules, and yet the rules existed.  This is why.

It's told in epistolary format, like two standout Deep Space Nine episodes before it, "Whispers" and "In the Pale Moonlight," as well as Next Generation's "Data's Day."  One almost wonders why it isn't done more often, if the results tend to turn out so well.  Phlox is composing a letter to a friend, his human counterpart in the interspecies medical exchange program, whom we actually get to meet in the fourth season ("Cold Station 12"), and the dominance of Phlox's presence in the episode reiterates not only his importance to its story but in the series as a whole.  He becomes, halfway through the season, one of Enterprise's defining assets. 

What makes the proceedings all the more remarkable is that the series produces a kind of answer to it in the third season, "Similitude," and that one's a classic, too.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - A study of the concept of the Prime Directive.
• series - One of the key moments of learning how some of the classic Star Trek elements came about.
• character - Phlox steps into the spotlight.
• essential - Actually, he downright commands it.

notable guest-stars:
Kellie Waymire (Cutler)

Enterprise 1x12 "Silent Enemy"

rating: ***

the story: The crew shore up their defenses in response to repeated assaults from an unknown enemy.

what it's all about: One of the things modern serialized TV storytelling has sort of ingrained in viewers is the need for everything to be explained.  Some fans won't tolerate this being violated at all.  That makes a franchise like Star Trek, which has traditionally featured aliens-of-the-week for most episodes, a somewhat problematic entity.  "Silent Enemy," which is to say, is an episode that features "an unknown enemy" that remains unknown for the duration of the series.  Regardless of how well it works in the context of the episode, this is a kind of automatic mark against it, even if episodic storytelling remains a valid style and some things can remain mysteries.

Now, these unknown aliens mostly serve as further impetus for the crew to realize the perils of deep space exploration, such as Starfleet hadn't yet discovered, although certainly spacefaring pioneers like the Boomers would've encountered such difficulties as a matter of course.  What makes this different is that Starfleet, thanks to the Vulcans, has been a reluctant organization, quick to doubt itself, fall back and regroup, as the crew considers during this experience.  In a lot of ways, "Silent Enemy" isn't terribly different from "Fight or Flight," the first regular episode of the series, except now the crew isn't just wondering whether or not its mission is a good idea, but whether or not it's actually deadly.  It's another precursor moment, in some ways, to the Xindi arc of the third season, when the stakes are raised considerably.

Of course, it's also an excuse to push Reed into the spotlight.  The episode tracks him on two fronts, professionally and personally.  If Hoshi in "Fight or Flight" was a bundle of nerves, Reed here is presented in an impenetrable cloud.  The crew's efforts in getting to know him better are stymied repeatedly.  This is an insanely private guy!  Reserved doesn't really begin to cover it.  And although this character work ultimately pails in comparison to the later "Shuttlepod One," we also see why he was probably a good recruit for Section 31, a fact we don't learn until the fourth season!  Some fans scoffed at such a late revelation, but it's definitely within character, as this episode makes clear. 

And yeah, it's another excuse to help the crew develop some of the stuff we know from later in the franchise, and maybe that was an overplayed element of the series, in the first season, but when an episode explains exactly why it's doing something, it's easier to accept.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - This is kind of Enterprise-specific, all told.
• series - It's another step in the crew's development.
• character - The first real exploration of Reed.
• essential - In hindsight, perhaps even more revealing than it seems.

Enterprise 1x11 "Cold Front"

rating: ****

the story: Archer is confronted by rival agents in the Temporal Cold War.

what it's all about: The Temporal Cold War proved to be controversial among fans.  They thought it was poor compensation for having a prequel series that looked backward instead of ahead.  And yet it was an obvious extension of the increasingly sophisticated view of time travel in the franchise, building on the Department of Temporal Investigations (Deep Space Nine's "Trials and Tribble-ations") and a future Starfleet that actually policed time travel (Voyager's Captain Braxton, as seen in "Future's End" and "Relativity").  In "Cold Front" we meet Daniels, who comes later still than Braxton, and becomes the second most important figure we meet in the arc, other than Silik, who debuted in the pilot, and the forever-mysterious "Future Guy," Silik's shadowy boss. 

"Cold Front," I always thought, was actually the best Temporal Cold War episode.  Rather than attempt a major event, it merely plays up the "cold war" aspect, in which agents are constantly working against each other, as happened between operatives of the United States and Soviet Union.  It's a spy story, essentially.  It casts the arc back to the origins of the franchise, when the real world cold war was running hottest, and adversarial aliens like the Klingons and Romulans earned their enduring place in Star Trek lore, having been cast in the roles of the Chinese and Russians, the two biggest communist threats. 

Which means Daniels and Silik are actually the best reasons to enjoy the episode, not only for their own sake, but how they play off Archer.  And actually, this is the best Archer showcase of the series to this point, and as with his earlier foreshadowing in "The Andorian Incident," proves that his real importance will be his ability to pivot humans between opposing forces, as would develop in the fourth season, the birth of the Federation. 

criteria analysis:

• franchise - A powerful argument in favor of the Temporal Cold War as an extension of classic Star Trek storytelling.
• series - An explanation for the stakes of a signature Enterprise arc.
• character - The introduction of Daniels, a key player in the arc.
• essential - It not only sells the concept, but it helps contextualize it, once you realize what it's really about.

notable guest-stars:
Matt Winston (Daniels)
John Fleck (Silik)

Enterprise 1x10 "Fortunate Son"

rating: ***

the story: The crew responds to a Boomer freighter emergency.

what it's all about: Mayweather was quickly identified as the weakest character of the series, and he never really recovered from that perception.  According to the structure set up for Enterprise, it deviated from the practice of the three series before it, returning to the original series mold of focusing on three core characters and filling in around them with the rest of the main cast as time permitted.  Now, in the grand scheme of the series, Mayweather certainly did prove to have the least amount of material; like Chakotay before him in Voyager, the more fans saw him as an afterthought, the more he was treated as such.  Perception became reality.  And yet, Mayweather came bursting with potential, and "Fortunate Son" was a readymade vehicle for him, something few of the other characters could claim.

The idea of the Boomers was an Enterprise concept, filling in the void of early human space travel, what it was like before Starfleet came to dominate the scene.  The series was all about the time just before Starfleet accomplished that, and so it was a wonderful opportunity to see what it was like, and Boomers were the intrepid folk making a living in space ahead of the rest of humanity.  Mayweather had been a Boomer before he joined Starfleet.  He provided a direct link to the crisis in the episode. 

In a way, the episode is a kind of metaphor about Archer's crew, and it foreshadows the third season, where Archer found himself faced with this very kind of situation, where it was suddenly necessary to make tough judgment calls in the face of dire opposition.  If the Boomers are merely facing piratical Nausicaans (fans of Next Generation's "Tapestry" will love seeing them again), Archer would face far worse.  A lot of what Enterprise tried to accomplish was explaining why Starfleet ended up operating the way it did in later series.  Sometimes it was fairly obvious, sometimes it was more like this.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Besides the Nausicaans, the situation itself is reminiscent of other episodes, such as Janeway's "Equinox" experience in Voyager.
• series - A big highlight of Enterprise-specific mythology in the Boomers.
• character - Mayweather in a rare spotlight!
• essential - He'd have to wait until next season to reunite with Boomers he actually knew (his family).

notable guest-stars:
Vaughn Armstrong (Forrest)

Enterprise 1x9 "Civilization"

rating: **

the story: An away team discovers meddling aliens in a developing society.

what it's all about: "Civilization" is essentially the first regular episode of the series.  It features a classic-style mission and even features Archer in a kind of Kirk role where he becomes involved with a local woman.  It doesn't really linger, as previous episodes had, on the novelty of the deep space experience.  It's just the crew discovering things on an alien world, in an alien, well, civilization.

And...that's about it, really.  There's a neat bit of franchise continuity, in that the interloping aliens the crew encounters are Malurians, a species later wiped out by Nomad in "The Changeling" (the original series episode that helped form the basis of Star Trek: The Motion Picture).  The role they play in "Civilization" is not dissimilar to the kind of competing role the Klingons ended to occupy, not only in the original series but later in Enterprise itself ("Marauders"), although they choose to hide their actions and even their scaly appearance (we only catch a glimpse).  This kind of sneaking around actually makes them similar to the Romulans, who would also show up later in the series, so it's almost like foreshadowing.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - An episode that will feel completely normal to longtime fans.
• series - Our first chance to see the crew function on a routine basis.
• character - Aside from Archer channeling Kirk, not a lot of distinctive material here.
• essential - Not particularly.  Nothing hugely significant happens here.

notable guest-stars:
Wade Williams

Enterprise 1x8 "Breaking the Ice"

rating: ***

the story: The crew is uncomfortable about a Vulcan ship lingering nearby.

what it's all about: There are some episodes that just can't easily be summarized.  Take this one.  Please!  Because you can read my pithy attempt and not get what it's about at all, although if you take it to mean it's an episode that at least explores the tension between early Starfleet and Vulcans as posited by Enterprise, you'd get a good start.  Because it is that, but it's a lot more, too.  What it is, mostly, is the series beginning to find its sea legs.

The funny thing about Enterprise is that it had learned from Deep Space Nine, and Voyager too.  Deep Space Nine found its greatest narrative strength in deliberate, obvious serialized storytelling, meaning that a lot of times, what you saw in one episode was the result of things that had happened in another episode.  It wasn't quite the serialized storytelling that emerged in later TV programming, where literally the story continues in every episode, sometimes for a whole season, sometimes a whole series, but it was pretty close, at least in comparison to the rest of the franchise.  Voyager was more episodic, but it had serialized storytelling, which was in large part the continued effect of being stranded far from home.  With Enterprise, following an early Starfleet crew meant following the Voyager model, but there was also a persistent attempt throughout the series to keep even episodic material relevant to these experiences.  Sometimes it looked like this, very much the model of a day-in-the-life kind of episode Next Generation loved doing every now and then ("Data's Day" being the most famous example).  One of the highlights of "Breaking the Ice" is a simple presentation by the crew to a classroom back on Earth, and the highlight of that is a repurposing of the early Enterprise attempt to make Trip feel as awkward as possible.  ("A poop question, sir?")  Here you can understand completely why he's feeling that way, unlike "Unexpected" a few episodes earlier.  And he gets even better character material later in the episode, but more on that in a little bit.

It's worth getting back to the Vulcans, first.  The question of how Enterprise would handle its tricky depiction of their relationship with humans had been implanted into the storytelling from the very start.  Some fans thoughts the series got Vulcans flat wrong.  "Breaking the Ice" is a hugely amusing challenge to that assumption.  Here Archer is confronted with a dinner with a Vulcan counterpart, in which the Vulcan is both rude and distant at the same time.  He sees no reason to acknowledge any of Archer's attempts at conversation.  The actor playing him doesn't need to do much of anything to convey the hilarity of the moment, which is exactly what you would expect from a Vulcan.  The franchise had never seen anything like this, and it was absolutely perfect.  Only Enterprise with its unique perspective could've pulled it off. 

Anyway, speaking of awkward Vulcan moments, this is the official start of Trip and T'Pol's relationship.  Some might assume that its roots were planted in the third season, but nope, it's here.  It's also where we first learn of T'Pol's arranged marriage.  Vulcan arranged marriages had a dramatic debut in the classic "Amok Time" from the original series, but that was absolutely an episodic experience, once referenced and never heard about again; Spock ends up completely free of his obligations.  T'Pol's matter continues to haunt her into the fourth season!  It's Trip's inadvertently learning about it that creates the link between them, forget any preceding material, which may have suggested their chemistry but established nothing else.  This begins arguably the most important arc of the series, and certainly the most important character arcs of it. 

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Casual fans will probably miss the significance of what it does with the Vulcans.
• series - Even though it sums up perfectly what they are like in Enterprise.
• character - A seemingly casual subplot involving T'Pol and Trip...
• essential - Ends up defining them for the rest of the series.  So, pretty important.

Enterprise 1x7 "The Andorian Incident"

rating: ****

the story: The crew finds itself in the middle of a conflict between Vulcans and Andorians.

what it's all about: If the first handful of Enterprise episodes seemed tentative, "The Andorian Incident" kicked the door down.  It brought back in sensational fashion aliens who'd appeared in the original series ("Journey to Babel"), unique in their appearance, and yet only glimpsed in the four series and nine films that followed.  Even if this had been a one-off appearance (and it certainly wasn't), "Incident" would still have been a monumental moment.

But let's put aside the Andorians for a moment.  It's the Vulcans who really got the initial benefit from the episode.  The pilot of the series introduced the premise that humans and Vulcans were at odds, a shocking development for fans accustomed to thinking of them as steady allies, that reassuring image of Kirk and Spock as best friends among the most famous legacies of the franchise.  Yet the Vulcans of Enterprise were suspicious of humans, distrustful of their maturity.  But what about the Vulcans themselves?  This was the first opportunity to see them at their own level.  We discover that they are actually on the defensive, more scared of their Andorian neighbors than concerned about humans.  In fact, "Incident" might be said to explain why Vulcans behave toward humans they way they do in Enterprise, because they're afraid they've found another Andorian problem.

All of this is to say, the Andorians are actually good guys in this episode.  Even if you need to trace back from what happens after this episode, the relationship that develops between Archer and Shran and how it helps build the foundation of the Federation, you can see that for yourself.  If "Incident" itself seems to have antagonistic Andorians, it's only because they're trying to expose Vulcan deceit, and Archer gets caught in the middle.  (And even there, you can see the seeds of the future, where the series posits humans as gaining their intergalactic significance mostly for helping solve conflicts like this between the more established players, including the Tellarites.)

It's also well worth talking about Shran himself.  Jeffrey Combs, the actor who plays him, had already had two recurring roles in Deep Space Nine, the Ferengi Brunt and the Vorta Weyoun.  He gave two different performances in those roles, and he produced a third one, a far more volatile one, for Shran, and he gave new energy to Enterprise itself through it.  Without him the Andorians would still have been a notable appearance for the series, but even on his credibility alone he gave them additional meaning, and by portraying Shran with enthusiasm he made the character seem all the more important.  Simply put, he made a big moment bigger, and in a lot of ways he singlehandedly gave the series its impetus to break out into more serialized storytelling, using him as a template in its third and fourth seasons. 

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Reclaiming Andorians as signature Star Trek aliens.
• series - And ensuring their significance to Enterprise itself.
• character - The introduction of Shran, who would become a defining recurring character.
• essential - In a lot of ways, a more important episode than even "Broken Bow" in the early series.

notable guest-stars:
Jeffrey Combs (Shran)

Enterprise 1x6 "Terra Nova"

rating: **

the story: The crew makes contact with a colony that was cut off from Earth seventy years previous.

what it's all about: "Terra Nova" would've been a great episode if it'd chosen to do a few things differently.  The choice to depict the colonists as thoroughly removed from their origins as they are is the biggest failing.  It makes them seem more episodic than they needed to be, and removes any real trace of world-building that the episode otherwise accomplishes, much like Voyager's similar "Friendship One."  In fact, it's hard to think of the two episodes separately.  They might as well be viewed as so intrinsically linked, Enterprise might have been conceived to set up "Terra Nova."  Well, you know what I mean.  "Friendship One" is about a probe that ended up in the Delta Quadrant, and things went poorly.  "Terra Nova" is about a remote colony, and things went poorly.  And then a Starfleet crew shows up to find out what happened, and discovers a crisis.  It's a setup to many other episodes, too, but "Friendship" is from the last season of Voyager, and this one's from Enterprise's first, obviously.  It's hard to imagine the producers not realizing the connection. 

This very well could've been the plot to a whole season, if Enterprise had been launched just a few years later.  A lost colony feeling resentful about its relationship with Earth...it's really not very different from early colonial America, and only a few steps removed from the American Revolution itself.  Did Babylon 5 do something like that, with Mars?  I think so.  It gives you an idea of how broadening the concept just a little could've changed things.

Heck, even having Mayweather, the boomer who grew up in space, be connected could've changed things.  But Mayweather's value was frequently overlooked, throughout the series, and this is just one of those missed opportunities.

But you can see where it wasn't a total waste. 

criteria analysis:

• franchise - That invisible link to one of Voyager's final episodes.
• series - A suggestion of what might have been.
• character - A missed opportunity with Mayweather.
• essential - Seems like just another episode when it could've been much more.

notable guest-stars:
Erick Avery

Enterprise 1x5 "Unexpected"

rating: **

the story: Trip ends up impregnated...

what it's all about: There are things that sound fantastic in theory that when executed...Early in Voyager's run, Tom Paris is convicted of having an affair on an alien world ("Ex Post Facto"), a decision that painted him in a negative light.  The episode itself is similar to an experience Riker had had in Next Generation, and in general linked both of them with Kirk's famous reputation as a ladies man in the original series.  Paris additionally was established as a rogue figure from the start, but what exactly that meant seemed difficult to pin down past his introduction, and again, the affair seemed to further define that negatively, an uncomfortable thing for Star Trek fans to watch, in a franchise that generally kept its characters likable. 

What I'm trying to say is, that brief summary of "Unexpected" above is pretty much the only thing anyone was ever going to take from it.  It's like a gag.  Trip was established from the start as one of Enterprise's most important characters.  He filled the "country boy" role Bones had in the original series, but he was also established as one of the more naïve passengers of this maiden Starfleet voyage, and "Unexpected" revealed just how inexperienced he really was, and how much trouble that could cause.  Later, in the second season, the series would be able to tap into that to much better effect ("Cogenitor"), but early on it just seemed as if embarrassing him was the best way to do it.  In plain words, it wasn't very flattering, if the only thing you took away from it was the most obvious elements.  Like the fact that he got, well, pregnant. 

The story around this works better.  It's fun watching him experience the laborious environmental acclimation process, something that was similar to the infamous decon scenes in the pilot but less uncomfortable to watch.  This was material intrinsic to selling the series as early Starfleet experiences, less streamlined than how things would operate in the original series.  Trip's reluctance and then eagerness to experience an alien ship are much more the story than the pregnancy.  By the time we reach that point, it's really just a metaphor about how awkward and truly alien the experience has really been.

Then of course we reach the Klingons, another callback to the pilot.  Archer reminds them what he did for the Empire, and he gets a terse acknowledgement but then a warning not to expect a continued free pass from it.  It's a nice bit of development, both in terms of what happened previously, what will happen in the next few seasons, and the state of Federation/Empire affairs as it exists in Kirk's time. 

...But of course, perception of the episode is basically, "Trip got pregnant!!!" and the aliens possessing holographic technology, which some fans felt uncomfortable about.  But some fans will never be satisfied unless they're unsatisfied about something, regardless of whether or not there's really something to be unsatisfied about...

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Given the nature of the material, it's hard to recommend to casual viewers.
• series - Yet it makes perfect sense in the context of early Enterprise.
• character - It's also a wonderful spotlight for Trip.
• essential - Even if to the untrained eye it seems less than flattering.

notable guest-stars:
Randy Oglesby

Enterprise 1x4 "Strange New World"

rating: ***

the story: An away team becomes stranded on a planet and begins to grow paranoid.

what it's all about: In hindsight, "Strange New World" would probably have made a better first regular episode for the series.  It addresses the tension of having T'Pol among the crew and demonstrates the limits of the crew's technology, featuring a scenario where the transporter is necessary but problematic, and allows characters to talk freely so we get to know them outside their shipboard functions. 

It's one thing to have a setup where humans are resentful of Vulcans, but another to internalize it, and this is basically the one episode where the series allows anyone to question T'Pol herself, even if there's an elaborate excuse for it.  With everyone's trust being warn away by an infection, Trip gives full vent to his biggest fears concerning her, that T'Pol is only there to further hold back Starfleet's mission.

The campfire scene, before that, when Mayweather's telling a ghost story and we meet Cutler for the first time, is an early defining moment for the series.  This never happens in any series previously.  There'd never been a feeling of such informality allowed in a Starfleet crew, and it's another keen reminder of the fact that we're watching people who have none of the history we've come to rely on, that they're closer to our time than they are to Kirk's.  There's also a nice bit of symmetry there, too, from another campfire scene, one of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier's best moments, in which old friends are merely enjoying each other's company.  If there's one regret for this series, it's that there wasn't another campfire moment in its final season.  Would've been fitting.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - A crew handicapped by its reluctance to use a transporter!
• series - A personable early approach to the crew.
• character - Trip and T'Pol in an early bump in the road for their relationship.
• essential - That's a missed opportunity.  If it had been written as a Trip and T'Pol episode, rather than one that features them in one particular moment, it would have greater lasting impact.

notable guest-stars:
Kellie Waymire (Cutler)

Enterprise 1x3 "Fight or Flight"

rating: **

the story: The crew encounters a derelict ship and attempts to figure out what happened to its crew.

what it's all about: Actually, describing the episode like that is actually a selling point for 'Fight or Flight," and how it relates to Enterprise and contrasts with many similar episodes throughout the franchise.  Usually, it's a setup for an episodic mystery of no lasting importance.  Here, it helps set the series apart and justify its premise.  Granted, in keeping it an episodic experience, never following up on either the mystery assailants or the Axanar they come across (the Axanar are a relatively known species in franchise lore, but never really explored), its impact is diminished.

While the crew's responses to the events are pivotal to the episode, it mostly follows Hoshi, who's depicted as the most reluctant officer to be traveling on this voyage.  Her scenes can come across as obvious (the slug analogy) or even cloying.  But if you can get past that, it really is the crew in general being tested here, and thus the inexperience of Starfleet itself.  It just seems too tentative an episode to be the first regular one of the series.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - It's a nice contrast to similar episodes across every series, but if you don't realize that it is, you probably won't notice or appreciate the fact while watching it.
• series - Which is a good thing, because that means it's successful in drawing on its Enterprise context.
• character - Hoshi has the uncomfortable distinction of embodying the inexperienced Starfleet around her.
• essential - There's a lot of missed opportunities in its wake, in that it ends up existing in a vacuum in a series that was generally good at closing such loops.

Enterprise 1x1/1x2 "Broken Bow"

rating: ****

the story: The budding Starfleet finds itself in a crisis with the Klingons...instigated by participants of the Temporal Cold War.

what it's all about: The pilot of any Star Trek series is almost by definition essential viewing, as it establishes the premise and characters and therefore the context that will set it apart, even when it seems, as even many fans tend to think, it looks like business as usual, a voyage of exploration.  In fact, only one series in the franchise hasn't been one of those voyages, Deep Space Nine, even that one had vast new territory teased in its first episode, the Gamma Quadrant, which would be the source of a lot of later material.  "Broken Bow" immediately established Enterprise as a prequel, first in Star Trek history, insofar as its events are set before the classic adventures of the original series (later, Discovery would become the second, with less than a decade separating it from them). 

Now, a lot of fans, who tended to be upset about just about everything by this point, and had been since about the time Kirk died in Star Trek Generations (though you'd be hard-pressed to find any of them admit that; they're more apt to express "disappointment" in that event, the first stage of fan resentment and then outright disgruntlement), thought that if anything, the timeline ought to be advanced forward.  And "Broken Bow" does that, too, with the Temporal Cold War.  And yet fans rejected that, too, because...I don't know.  I really don't.  I can argue logics all day long here.  I can argue that the very technology that looked futuristic in the '60s was actually in large part in everyday households by 2001.  The cleverest thing Enterprise did was actually to embrace the tech that was still years and years in the future, and how exotic it remains as a concept, even if variations on it had resulted in Star Trek's competition like Stargate: the transporter.  In setting the series at a time when classic Star Trek tech was in its infancy, it allowed a classic franchise fear to meet a point when it was most justified, and it proves a key point in the pilot and throughout the rest of the series. 

And this is probably something that's best appreciated when it's pointed out.  So, too, is the fact that Enterprise actually serves best as a sequel.  Yeah, not as a prequel.  As, first and foremost, it's a follow-up to Star Trek: First Contact.  This was the most successful of the Next Generation movies, and memorably ends with humanity's introduction to the most iconic of Star Trek aliens, the Vulcans.  And yet again, Enterprise serves up a curveball, which predictably irked fans: they didn't become fast friends.  In fact, they didn't much like each other at all.  And again, I don't really see how this tracks; we see humans react with bigotry in the original series, whether in "The Galileo Seven" or "Balance of Terror," which is not even to mention that Spock was apparently the lone Vulcan in Kirk's crew, with only a fleeting reference to an entirely Vulcan crew in another episode. 

So as far as I'm concerned, the logic is more than sound, and bursting with fulfilled (as far as I'm concerned) potential.  We even get to see Cochrane in the pilot (and in the final season, a twist on First Contact's historic moment that creates the Mirror Universe in the two-part "In a Mirror, Darkly").

The rest is adventure and setup.  We meet Archer, T'Pol, Trip (deliberately featured as the three main characters in parallel to Kirk, Spock, and Bones), and the rest of the crew.  Phlox immediately stands out, as he will as the fourth lead, like Scotty, the rest of the series.  We're introduced to "Future Guy" and his minion Silik.  There's also Soval and Forrest, who will have major supporting roles the duration of the series.  And to round all that out, it's also prelude to an enduring conflict with the Klingons.

But yeah, the scene that sticks out most is decon with Trip and T'Pol, which was greeted with outrage.  I don't even know how this happens, except that persistent puritanical regression impulse peculiar to Americans.  The original series is littered with sexual imagery and a shameless ladies man as the lead character, and yet fans became increasingly uncomfortable and embarrassed by this legacy. 

Basically, the first thing you need to overcome in getting into Star Trek is the opinion of other fans.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - See how the legacy of Starfleet begins!
• series - See how the crew launches its voyage!
• character - Aside from Sisko, it's hard to find a main character in Star Trek with their initial motivation spelled out better than Jonathan Archer.
• essential - A fascinating conflux of past, present and future.

notable guest-stars:
John Fleck (Silik)
Gary Graham (Soval)
Vaughn Armstrong (Forrest)
James Cromwell (Cochrane)
James Horan ("Future Guy")
Thomas Kopache