Star Trek: ENT Reviews - From Start to ... well, you know

The Iotians were in the infancy of their industrial age when the Horizon left behind Chicago Mobs of the Twenties, and were at machine guns and automobiles a hundred years later when Kirk and company showed up. And it took humanity…about a hundred years between the advent of the industrial age and machine guns and automobiles. Less refined, perhaps, but at most the Iotians got only a couple decades’ head start from having the “blueprint”. It was the social ramifications that were far more dire there.
And that’s really why Archer and Co.’s solution ultimately was so terrible. These guys might have invented the transtator that Spock was worried about 20% sooner, which might not be great…but instead, Enterprise fucked off leaving the aliens thinking they’re about to be obliterated by a technologically advanced foe on their doorstep. Not only are the social ramifications terrible, but chances are good that these guys are now going to slam the accelerator on their own technological development as a result, just as we’ve seen in every major conflict in our own history.

Singularity
We open with an ominous log from T'Pol that suggests that everyone is fucked. Or, uh, is more fucked than usual anyway.

Winding the clock back a bit, Enterprise is going to go to take a look at a trinity star system that contains a black hole. Because of physics, they have to proceed at impulse. So, they all have some down time. Remember previously when they were upset about having down time to take care of shit? Apparently, they've had an attitude adjustment, because now they're all about it. Archer has to write the forward to a book about his dad or something, Trip's been tasked with "fixing" the captain's chair, and Malcolm has decided to come up with an "alert" that will automatically turn on the shields and weapons and tell everyone to stop fucking around - yes, red alert needed an origin story. Oh, and Hoshi is taking over the kitchen since chef is out sick or something, and she's going to make all her family's recipes.

Mayweather and Phlox are, uh, existing, and T'Pol is the only one doing any actual work. Shocking. Trip's being his usual obnoxious self over-engineering the captain's chair, Archer is plum out of gazelle metaphors so he has no idea what to write about his father, Malcolm is struggling to name his alert (don't worry, someone suggests calling it Reed Alert), and Hoshi is getting passable reviews. Mayweather is bored of flying the ship in a slow, straight line or something (he had a job, but it was so unimportant that I honestly forgot what it was), so he goes to see Phlox about a headache.

And then they start getting on each other's nerves. Trip is disassembling the captain's chair with a torque wrench, and is irritated that T'Pol asks if he can work on it elsewhere. Malcom is cheesed that Archer isn't giving enough thought to how much martial law he can enact under his alert status, which compliments Archer's being mad at him for interrupting his five paragraph essay. Hoshi's freaking out that she's getting middling reviews on her cooking and yelling at the steward for carrots, and Phlox keeps coming up with new and exciting ways to try to diagnose Mayweather's headache, all while he wants to go make some upgrades or something?

I'll give the show credit, there's a nice progression between everyone being hyped up about being nerds in space to everyone being nerds in space, but at the same time, it kind of relies on the audience not really finding it unusual that the crew is obsessing over trivial bullshit.

It all comes to a head when Archer yells at Porthos for wanting to be fed, sending the dog crying back to its bed. After Trip blows up at T'Pol over interrupting his work on a captain's chair that I'm pretty sure gives blowjobs or something, she realizes something's wrong. As she observes everyone losing their shit, she goes to Phlox to see about getting a medical emergency declared, only to interrupt him as he prepares to lobotomize Mayweather. I'm not honestly sure anyone could tell the difference, but T'Pol is concerned, and she tries to stop him, only for him to threaten her with the scalpel instead. So she neck pinches him and starts trying to figure out what to do.

Luckily, Phlox's obsession with Mayweather's brain paid off - it helps her realize that the singularity is emitting technobabble radiation that is causing this behavior in everyone, and it'll basically escalate to everyone passing out and dying if unchecked. So, she has to take a shortcut past the singularity, but she'll need help piloting the ship. She goes and basically waterboards Archer into enough coherency to help her pilot the ship, and they skate by the black hole by the skin of their teeth - aided by the fact that Malcolm's alert condition had triggered and given them weapons and shields.

Hooray - they aren't all going to cook in the radiation or get compressed into a commemorative penny or something. Archer thanks Malcolm for, uh, basically doing his job in setting up a process to keep the ship safe, and everyone has a good chuckle about how Trip finally manages to get the captain's chair perfect by just lowering it one centimeter closer to the ground. Freeze frame, laugh track, credits.

It wasn't high cinema, but for a bottle episode, it did a fairly good job of slowly escalating the tension. And "anomaly of the week fucks with the crew" is a staple of Star Trek for a reason. Maybe the past few episodes have left me desperate, but…

Rating: ***

Vanishing Point
OK, I earned that three star review for Singularity, because Vanishing Point is some fucking bullshit. Break out your fucking snow globes.

Hoshi and Trip are in a styrofoam temple cave thing, but there's a storm approaching too quickly for them to hop in the shuttlepod, so they have to beam up. Hoshi is, of course, not about that at all, and she suggests waiting out the storm in the cave. Apparently, there's no difference between her and a four thousand year old pile of rocks or something. Anyway, she's overruled, and Trip volunteers to beam up first to show her that she won't end up full of sticks and shit like that guy in S1. It goes OK, so she beams up. And she's just fine.

Or is she? She feels different after having been disassembled and reassembled, and is basically Barclay-ing out about it. And it's not entirely undeserved - people don't seem to be noticing her, the ship sometimes doesn't respond to her or sound her alarm clock, and T'Pol is awful to her. Well, that part hasn't changed.

After oversleeping her alarm and failing to translate a first-contact, she's basically put out to pasture. Whenever she tries to talk to someone about it, provided she can get their attention, they are gently reaffirming, with Phlox giving her multiple scans, and Trip giving her advice of just trying to get some rest, inspiring her to quip "You men are all alike". Guys literally only want one thing and it's fucking disgusting - sleep. However, she's starting to pull a Back to the Future routine, phasing in and out of existence. And eventually she's phased out enough for everyone to notice she's gone. This occurs when she's in the gym, and somehow, despite her discovering that she can pass her hand through walls and stuff like she's Geordi and Ro, she decides to sleep on the gym floor.

Phlox gives Archer and company the bad news - the scans he did showed some imperceptible technobabble, so Hoshi has been coming apart at the seams. Archer makes the most ineffective call possible to Hoshi's dad to break the bad news that she's died of a stereotypical transporter accident, and Phlox and Trip crawl around some Jeffries tubes until they find what's left of her, all while she follows them around trying to get them to notice her. According to Phlox, she's some green goo, and he scrapes some of it into an envelope explaining "Captain Archer will want Hoshi's parents to have this." Yeah, sure.

After coming to terms with everyone thinking she's dead, Hoshi discovers aliens, similarly out of phase as herself, setting bombs up around Enterprise - they're apparently the aliens she failed to translate, and they're pissed someone went in their cave. She tries to stop them, but eventually they set up their own transporter pad and beam away, leaving her to try to do so as well…

Only for her to end up on Enterprise's transporter pad, just after the storm, having spent a bonus seconds in the pattern buffer. That's right motherfuckers, the entire fucking episode was a goddamn dream. And unlike The Inner Light, which said something deep and meaningful about aging and the human condition, this is just Hoshi confronting feeling invisible and nervous about using the thing that adds rocks and sticks to your body. It's such a fucking mess, with people saying bizarre things and acting melodramatic, and you just know that if you brought it up to the writers, they'd be all "well of course, it's a dream". But that's bullshit, and they know it. What a phenomenal waste of time.

Rating: *

Basically TNG's Realm of Fear if it really HAD all been in Barclay's head.

Not that I've seen Dominic act outside of Enterprise, but I think that Reed being wooden is how the character is supposed to be. He has a few traits -- stiff Brit who is reserved, kind of horny and likes explosions.

Travis Mayweather was on paper supposed to be about as galaxy-wise as any other human, having grown up in space. But beyond him the scene in the sweet spot, the writers and Montgomery never really conveyed the notin that this guy was more savvy about space than the average joe.

And it never really made sense anyway, because Travis' family freighter was only capable of warp 2. Yes, he knew what life on a ship was like - even including some cases where he'd dealt with the kind of crisis that might occur if a critical component failed - but in terms of understanding the galaxy? Those sort of freighters would be spending all their damn time chugging from one star system to another and VERY close destinations or trips would take years. The chances he actually encountered any cosmopolitan alien culture are pretty low.

I think he would still have more knowledge/insight into how things go out in space than 90 percent of folks. To put it in historical terms: sailors who spent years on the trade routes between England and say the West Indies in the 1700s would not necessarily be well-equipped to handle stuff outside that route (and would be bogged down by their prejudices/limitations/etc.) But for darn sure, they'd be better equipped in most ways to handle things in unexplored territory than the British Navy sailors who got assigned to a new high-tech ship but had previously mostly done maneuvers in the English Channel and had little practice sailing.

Precious Cargo
Because he wasn’t enough of a stereotype already, Trip plays the harmonica. Did we know that already? I don’t fucking know. Anyway, he stops because Enterprise pulls up next to a giant ship.

Archer, Trip, and T’Pol roll out the welcome wagon, and it’s some aliens who need engineering help. And they’re kind of assholes about it, but I guess Archer needs to earn his good deed merit badge or something. They’re carrying precious cargo, you see - a passenger that needs to be kept cryogenically frozen or else they won’t have enough food or air to make the trip.

Archer suggests parking their giant fucking ship that was visually shown to be basically the same size as Enterprise in their launch bay. Apparently having a better understanding of physics, the aliens instead just ask to have dinner and baths. Archer and T’Pol take the aliens to go have dinner and baths. I wonder how T’Pol managed to resist commenting on their scent, given the writer’s favorite running joke. Trip stays behind to start work on the cryopod, and soon discovers it’s a pretty lady. I guess trafficking isn’t a thing they warn 22nd century Starfleet officers about, because this doesn’t set off any warning bells at all.

Anyway, I’m sure you can guess what happens next. Trip manages to activate the pod somehow, causing her to wake up and start beating at the glass to escape. One of the alien guys rushes off and tries to beat up Trip as he tries to help her escape, but settles for locking him and the woman in the cargo bag and stranding his buddy on Enterprise as he makes his escape.

After Trip gets the translator working, it turns out that this lady is due to be the First Whatever of Krios Prime. Yes, it’s not just Enterprise ripping off that the episode of TNG where a gorgeous woman is cryogenically frozen, gets thawed early, and hijinx abound, it’s a direct reference to it.

However, this lady isn’t an incel’s wet dream, eagerly imprinting on the first XY chromosomes to walk by. She’s a haughty, entitled, stereotypical princess. And she complains about everything Trip does to try to escape, right down to complaining about how “cramped” the escape pod is, when it’s no worse than the front seats in a Camry or something.

The lunkheads back on Enterprise, meanwhile, are trying to get the other alien to help them find Trip and the princess. And after “asking nicely” doesn’t work, they move on to the only possible Plan B - Archer and T’Pol playing good cop / bad cop. Respectively. Yes, the best course of action is to trot out T’Pol in her Vulcan robes and make the alien think he’s about to be space-keelhauled. He promptly gives in.

Trip and the woman have landed on a swamp planet or something, though it’s obviously a set. Trip takes his shirt off for some reason. The woman’s dress is all wet and clingy. They yell at each other. They fight. They wrestle in the water. They kiss. Shocking. The alien guy finds them, and Trip has a Kirk-style fistfight with him. And once he’s knocked out, Trip and the woman make out some more, just in time for Archer and T’Pol to show up.

I’m sure this was pastiche of some movie, though it reminded me of the point-and-click adventure game Flight of the Amazon Queen except without the charm. Padma Lakshmi played the titular precious cargo, poorly, though bizarrely she seemed to be doing a far better job acting before the translator kicked in than after.

This is another episode that I know I’ve seen multiple times but didn’t remember at all. I think my brain was trying to protect me.

Rating: *

Kaitaama: Is your entire species so ill mannered?

Trip: Nope. Just me.

Mmmmm . . . Padma Lakshmi . . .

As that friend that is too woke, Congenitor is still my pick for the worst of season 2, but I can at least appreciate that an effort was made to tell a Srs Bzns story, even if it missed the mark.

This one? The only reason it wasn't hated more over A Night in Sickbay back in the day is because the Tucker simps oogle him shirtless. Frankly, this one's the worst of the two and it says a lot that whole I've seen people with no goddamn taste defend ANISB and even the finale, no one says shit about this.

It's been ages since I watched Cogenitor (or much of Ent...I think I caught like two episodes sometime in the last couple years), but the consensus back in the day was that Cogenitor was one of the best not just of Ent, but one of the few Ent episodes that could arguably hold its own against the best of the other Trek series at the time.

What makes it so far down on your list?

As for why Precious Cargo wasn't hated more, don't forget us Padma simps, too. Man, she couldn't act, but she was/is hot.

Berman, Braga, and Connor Trinneer look back on "These Are The Voyages...".

https://trekmovie.com/2025/11/03/ri...roversial-star-trek-enterprise-series-finale/

Do they cum on on it? Or are they no longer corporate shills?

@persianmouse had a really great "Steps of denial for TATV" post that has disappeared off the Internet as everything before 2007 from TBBS and the search on this site is complete garbo. God, I miss her wit.

At any rate, yeah, killing off the fan fave, especially when he was a hit with rabid shippers who for better or worst were the show's biggest cheerleaders was a stupid idea. Gundam Wing's creators learned this ages ago: don't fuck with fangirls bc they WILL leave and never look back.

I still blame myself and my stupid, stupid, weak, crush-having heart for skeeving her away.

Still the absolute best way to end that trainwreck of a show. Just wish Berman and Braga would outright admit it was a middle finger to the fans versus their "love letter" bullshit.