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.