Enterprise 2x15 "Cease Fire"

***

Perhaps the most curious development of the second season was that Shran only appeared once.  A big part of what helped spark the first season creatively was his initial appearance in "The Andorian Incident" and then return in "Shadows of P'Jem."  It wasn't just that Andorians returned to the franchise for the first time since the original series, but that Shran was a significant new character (portrayed by a significant guest actor, no less, Jeffrey Combs).

His appearances also provided Enterprise with the kind of light continuity that balanced the expectations of fans who'd grown to enjoy that sort of thing in Deep Space Nine (and other genre shows such as Babylon 5) and what Star Trek fans knew from other incarnations.  By the time of the second season with its new approach, the crew stumbling along on its own in uncharted territory, bringing Shran back was a crucial proposition, especially the manner of which he appeared.  "Cease Fire" is less about Shran, actually, and more about Vulcan-Andorian relations, which was ostensibly what the prior episodes centered on, even though Shran stole both of them.

To see him sort of take a back seat to the interspecies conflict is softened a little by the appearance of another veteran guest actor, Suzie Plakson (please don't make me tell you who she's famous for portraying, because it will only make us both look bad).  The whole episode is filled with familiar faces, actually, something that was rare for the second season, with appearances by Admiral Forrest and Soval as well.  In the first season there wasn't much reason to like Soval.  "Cease Fire" is also notable in that it presents a different side of him as well.

Part of the point of the episode is also that Archer unwittingly stumbles into a role that he's destined to fill, and the timing of it is another indication of the deliberate shape of the season.  The events of the previous season have almost become a distant memory.  The second season to this point had avoided the familiar while making subtle moves at some of the more procedural developments later generations would take for granted.  The relationships Archer previously formed now come back in new and important ways.  Soval doesn't trust him.  Shran does.  To put Archer in the middle of them at the negotiating table puts all of them in a new light.  Archer benefits from being able to provide a fresh perspective.  Soval finds this refreshing, especially since he and every other Vulcan (except T'Pol) finds Archer to be the epitome of humanity, young and naive and hopelessly useless.  "Cease Fire" is the first time he is anything but in their eyes.  And for Shran, it's the first time his relationship with Archer truly proves beneficial.

It's not a monumental moment, like "The Andorian Incident," but it's an episode the second season needed, the series needed, and even the franchise benefited from.  You can skip it, but you won't regret paying attention.

franchise * series * essential * character

Notable guest-stars:
Jeffrey Combs
Gary Graham
Christopher Shea
Vaughn Armstrong
Suzie Plakson

Memory Alpha summary.

Enterprise 2x14 "Stigma"

****

Paying off from the first season episode "Fusion" as well as touching on real world and fictional topics of great significance, "Stigma" is a standout for any number of reasons.

For one, it's the AIDS episode, which garnered Enterprise a fair amount of publicity at the time, a classic Star Trek social metaphor entry that deals with one of the worst health epidemics of our time.  Formerly one of the things the franchise was best known for, I think awareness and appreciation for it diminished a great deal during the period where fans started to embrace other genre properties and leave Star Trek behind, one of the reasons ratings and interest declined to the point of the first cancellation in forty years.  For that reason alone, "Stigma" is a wonderful reminder of the potential of the franchise to create drama that's not only interesting but topical.

But keeps it grounded in Star Trek, however, is the episode's Vulcan elements.  "Stigma" is a mind meld episode.  In the original series mind melds were synonymous with Spock and by extension all Vulcans.  I think one of the ways Enterprise offended some fans was by suggesting such a strongly established trait of an entire species was not always such a common or accepted practice of its society.  "Stigma" (and the earlier "Fusion") goes so far as to say that the Vulcan mainstream at the time shunned the practice!

So not only is mind melding bad socially but T'Pol has also contracted an illness from it, by the way, and so the episode is about how all of this gets dealt with.  It's strong continuity both for the series and franchise.  If you're still scratching your head about reconciliation of Vulcan society from one era to the next, there's the trilogy of episodes from the fourth season that addresses that, bringing back a more traditional practice of Surak teachings.

I would go so far as to say as Enterprise Vulcan episodes go, "Stigma" may be the essential one.

And that's not even all there is to say about it!  The episode also features a visit from one of Phlox's wives, and so also features the first time we meet another Denobulan.  As a bonus complication, this subplot involves Trip once again stumbling through understanding another culture.  It works as a commentary to other developments in the episode as well as for the character of Trip and a look at Denobulans and and Phlox, who is always great fun to watch.

franchise * series * essential * character

Notable guest-stars:
Michael Ensign

Memory Alpha summary.

Enterprise 2x13 "Dawn"

**

Similar to the Next Generation episode "The Enemy" (and the non-Star Trek movie Enemy Mine), the basic story of "Dawn" is being stuck with someone you really don't want to, and having to survive something other than each other.

This time around it's Trip who gets to enjoy the experience.  Like "Precious Cargo" he gets to enjoy some quality time with an alien with the Universal Translator unavailable to help them communicate with each other.  Unlike "Precious Cargo," that lasts throughout the episode, y'know, just in case things weren't already complicated enough.

I remember when the episode originally aired that a lot of what I was thinking was that "Dawn" was another Trip episode, that there was a definite different tone to the second season than the first.  In the first season a Trip episode would have meant him sharing his experiences with someone else.  Even in "Unexpected" only half the episode was spent on the alien ship where he got impregnated (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you may need to see the episode to really understand what I'm talking about).  Somehow both "Cargo" and "Dawn" leave him on his own to deal with a tricky alien contact situation.

(Of course, he makes that his own problem in the later "Cogenitor.")

It's not hard to see this one-two punch as a large part of the reason Trip started to really stand out for me.  It's rare for a character to end up on their own in Star Trek, and even more rare for it to happen several times in a single season.  (I'm not talking about Quark in Deep Space Nine, mind you.  He normally existed in his own bubble, hence the infamous Ferengi episodes.)  It was an indication to me that the creators of Enterprise had themselves marked Trip out as an unusually strong character, someone they could write into any scenario and need few crutches to support him.  And he really was that strong.

I wouldn't go so far as to say you absolutely need to watch this particular episode to understand his appeal, but you wouldn't go wrong to enjoy it.

franchise * series * essential * character

Notable guest-stars:
Gregg Henry

Memory Alpha summary.

Enterprise 2x12 "The Catwalk"

*

This could have been one of the real standouts of the season.  The crew is forced into an isolated area of the ship in order to survive the trip through an ion storm.  Forced into a confined space, they have nothing but themselves to talk about.  I would have been fine with that for an entire episode.  I realize that not everyone has the same taste I do.  "The Catwalk" dutifully inserts some aliens who seek the same shelter, and who turn out to have a great deal more complication beyond that.  To me, that ruins the episode.

Well, it always has in the past.  Perhaps there is some redemption to the story.  There are ripples to the complications these aliens cause.  They have their secrets.  Bad things happen.  What really happened?  If "Catwalk" is redeemed beyond my original estimation, it may lie within the answer to that.  You may find your own evaluation affected by such answers.

Me, I would have been perfectly fine just letting the crew fill out the episode.  That's all I wanted.  When it became clear that "Catwalk" had other things on its mind, my own checked out.  I used to think the episode was a missed opportunity, even one of those missteps fans kept saying the season and series were filled with.

Well, I'll keep the rating simply as a recommendation for series completists.  There could be more here.

franchise * series * essential * character

Memory Alpha summary.

Enterprise 2x11 "Precious Cargo"

**

I'll make no bones that Charles "Trip" Tucker is my favorite character from Enterprise, and one of my favorites from the whole Star Trek franchise.  He might have initially seemed like a new incarnation of the good ol' country boy archetype originally embodied by Leonard "Bones" McCoy (thus creating very difficult shoes to fill), but he quickly evolved into his own.  His best seasons were the third and fourth, but Trip had notable moments throughout the series.  He didn't really start to assert himself in the second until this episode, and he never really let go after that.

"Precious Cargo" is in many ways a fairly familiar experience.  Kirk ran into damsels in distress seemingly every episode.  Picard had his moment in "The Perfect Mate" (which this one links to).  On that score, even if you're not as wild about Trip as I am, if you like Star Trek you'll find something you'll recognize.

Yet with Trip it's hard to gloss over his upside.  If there's a character who will be able to foul up contact with another species, you can count on him to make the best of it, even if things don't always turn out so well.  Here everything ends up just fine.  Not without a certain amount of hiccups, though.

There's a nice parallel arc for Archer and T'Pol as they attempt to shake another alien for information, with Archer again using his new bluffing skills.  He's grown more confident in the second season.  He doesn't know that it will get more difficult yet.  So this is a fine moment to enjoy a transition that's going in a different direction than he assumes.

Back to Trip.  The eponymous cargo is a princess.  Part of the fun of the episode is how the Universal Translator doesn't work immediately (a running gag for Trip that continues in "Dawn"), which forces a character who already makes plenty of blunders on his own stumble along for the first few beats.  And the princess ends up having an attitude.

Part of the fun of the episode is that it serves as a reminder that the alien worlds in Star Trek don't always revolve on the familiar things we know.  Too often if anyone knows anyone else, they're all connected in expected ways.  In later incarnations that usually means the Federation.  If we know anyone who makes a lasting impression, they're a military figure.  Here they're a princess, who thought everyone would know about her family.  That's the way it'd be with us.  Surely you haven't already forgotten the marriage of William & Kate?  Sometimes I wish the franchise would acknowledge stuff like this more often.  It happened all the time in the original series, but the original series was relentlessly episodic.  Most times the things you learned one week meant absolutely nothing the next.  It doesn't really count.  But then, that's why Enterprise was such a good idea, connecting some of the more abstract ideas to the more interrelated reality of later incarnations.  All those Andorian appearances was just the most obvious example.

Let's get back to Trip again.  It's kind of funny that each of his starring vehicles this season were episodes that thrust him into a situation he thought he wouldn't get in the first season, "Unexpected" not considered.  It explains a lot about his character.  He could usually get what he wanted.  The problem was dealing with the results.  In "Precious Cargo" things turn out okay.  If the series had lasted for more than four seasons, one imagines that this is one of the several episodes that might've eventually seen a follow-up.

franchise * series * essential * character

Notable guest-stars:
Padma Lakshmi

Memory Alpha summary.

Enterprise 2x10 "Vanishing Point"

**

"Vanishing Point" is the Hoshi Sato moment of the season.  Early in the series she was the character who was most uncomfortable entering into an ongoing space assignment.  She was the one who panicked.  (That's what "Fight or Flight" is all about!)  Yet she was also the linguist, the predecessor to the more vivid imagining of Uhura in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek.  Without her it would have been a lot harder for Archer and his crew to communicate with aliens.  In the second season, notably the Trip-centric episodes "Precious Cargo" and "Dawn," Hoshi is no longer the center of that particular aspect of the series.

Instead we get this episode.  It's ostensibly an extension of the skittishness the crew feels about transporter technology, which even when taken for granted in other incarnations of the franchise from time periods later along the scale could cause panic (the accident in The Motion Picture, Barclay's adventures in "Realm of Fear"), though not quite to the point where it was a problem for Archer's gang.

Hoshi faces her continued inability to feel completely comfortable in a scenario that's straight out of a nightmare, stemming from a forced trip through the transporter that ends up making her fade away, her colleagues increasingly unable to hear or see her.

To the extent that it all seems a little perfunctory (like Reed, Hoshi can sometimes seem a little uninspired, even one-dimensional, and while this is an interesting episode it doesn't say anything new about her, which again proves that the writers had other characters on the brain this season), it still mostly works.

franchise * series * essential * character

Memory Alpha summary.

Enterprise 2x9 "Singularity"

**

Episodes in which personality traits become exaggerated are a Star Trek staple, beginning with the classic "Naked Time" in which Sulu famously fences on the bridge.

Still, there's something about "Singularity" that makes it a uniquely Enterprise episode.  Other than how everything spirals out of control, there's worth to long-term viewers to watching Reed refine techniques that would eventually become the Red Alert alarm, Archer working on the preface to a biography of his father, even Trip's tinkering with the captain's chair.

The show often featured smaller moments with developments of this kind, so building an entire episode around them is a welcome change of pace.  Sometimes when an ensemble story becomes an episodic story (as in "The Catwalk"), the results can be jarring.  By the end of "Singularity" each of the characters has reached an appropriate point in the beats that were already developing before they went out of control, bringing it full-circle.  You can watch it either way and derive equal enjoyment.

franchise * series * essential * character

Memory Alpha summary.