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.