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Star Trek Ent - Season 1 - Episode 08

Star Trek Ent - 1x08 - Breaking the Ice

Originally Aired: 2001-11-7

Synopsis:
While the Enterprise crew researches a newly discovered comet, Archer tries to deal diplomatically with a Vulcan ship that is suspiciously watching them. [DVD]

My Rating - 7

Fan Rating Average - 4.33

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Problems
- Why does the comet have Earth-like gravity?

Factoids
- Trip has only been in three relationships. "They all went bust."

Remarkable Scenes
- The children's drawings.
- The discovery of and landing on the comet.
- Archer answering the 4th grade children's questions.
- Trip: "A poop question, sir?" I almost died laughing.
- Phlox talking too much on the recording.
- Travis and Reed building a snowman.
- The discovery that T'Pol's communications were personal, not malicious.
- Trip apologizing to T'Pol.
- Archer to T'Pol regarding Vanik: "Help me make him go away."
- Reed enhancing the snowman with Vulcan ears.
- Vanik's behavior at the dinner.
- Vanik: "Your inexperience and your arrogance are your enemies, not us."
- Trip advising T'Pol.
- The shuttlepod sinking into the ice.
- Trip trying unsuccessfully to use the grappler to retrieve the shuttlepod.
- Archer finally giving in and accepting the Vulcan ship's help.

My Review
And now for some hardcore character development. This episode was most successful because it didn't involve any alien conflict or phaser fights, but just chronicled the ship as they investigated a comet. Rarely do we get something so mundane in Star Trek done so well. I was worried that Vanik might end up having some silly hidden agenda and that T'Pol might be involved in some kind of Vulcan conspiracy, like was revealed at P'Jem last week. But thankfully I was wrong. Instead, we watch as Trip helps T'Pol bridge her cultural barriers. She accepts his advice to make her own decision instead of letting rigid Vulcan custom determine her marriage and her career. She even tries some of Trip's pecan pie in the final scene. Archer learns to back away from his Vulcan prejudice too when he accepts help from Vanik. I'm just glad Archer didn't ask Vanik a "poop question" at the dinner among is many attempts at small talk. And Reed... well, I think Reed's just happy he found something to blow up again. Although I think he (along with Travis) took just as much perverse pleasure in building the Vulcan snowman with the oversized ears too. One lingering question... why do shuttlepods seem to have a dangerous habit of sinking into whatever they land on? ;)

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From joe on 2016-06-21 at 10:10am:
    This was the first episode that demonstrated just how melodramatic ENT would be and how much worse it would be than all of the other series.
  • From dominic on 2016-07-17 at 6:24pm:
    I am just now watching Enterprise for the first time. I think I'm starting to see why it has a poor reputation.

    First I am starting to get sick and tired of the scripts making Captain Archer seem like a dumbass. The rest of the humans don't fare much better.

    Second the plot of this episode doesn't even make sense. Captain Archer is the one that ordered T'Pol's message to be decrypted. So why is Trip left on the hook to apologize? And a point that seems minor compared to the others, but how is an inferior race able to crack a superior race's encryption technology so easily?

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