Star Trek Ent - Season 1 - Episode 02
Star Trek Ent - 1x02 - Broken Bow, Part II
Originally Aired: 2001-9-26
Synopsis:
The Enterprise crew sets on a maiden voyage with a mission to return a wounded Klingon to his people. [DVD]
Problems
- Picard in TNG: First Contact (the episode, not the movie) said that first contact with the Klingons was disastrous. Okay... Archer makes first contact with the Klingons in this episode and I can't say it was very disastrous. Obviously something is going to go wrong between Earth and Klingons sometime between now and TOS, but sure didn't happen during first contact!
Factoids
- The Suliban weapon did no damage to Archer whilst being transported.
Remarkable Scenes
- Archer: "Even if it is Klang, we're going to have a tough time getting him out of there." Reed: "We could always try the transporting device." Archer: "We've risked too much to bring him back inside out."
- Enterprise stealing a Suliban ship.
- Reed: "They're called phase pistols. They have two settings. Stun and kill. It would be best not to confuse them."
- Trip scraping the hull of the Suliban superstructure, just like he scraped Enterprise in part one. ;)
- Archer and Trip disabling the Suliban superstructure.
- The fight inside the freaky room.
- Archer's reaction to being beamed up.
My Review
I'm really starting to like Silik. He reminds me of Scorpius from Farscape. He even calls the captain by his first name, Jon, the same way Scorpius does to Crichton. :) I wonder if the parallel is intentional. Part two wasn't as exciting as part one, mostly because what happened was largely predictable and some of it redundant. I did like more of the smaller details in part two though. We already got a little bit of the crew's aversion to the transporter when Reed and Travis discussed it in the previous episode. But I rather liked Archer's rather blatant statement of distrust of the transporter in this episode, claiming that it would bring back the user "inside out." A nice irony that Trip would be later forced to use the transporter to rescue Archer. I loved the look on Archer's face after having been transported. The symbolic meaning in Archer's dreams is finally clarified. In part one they didn't seem to serve much of a purpose. Now Archer is recalling his father's advice and applying it to try and quell his natural distrust of Vulcans and to command with no fear. I loved the scene when Henry Archer said "don't be afraid of the wind," showing a picture of T'Pol. The only thing I didn't like about this episode, besides the technical problem listed in the problems section and the things I complained about in part one was the highly inappropriate decontamination chamber scene. What can I say? That was just totally unnecessary. Overall though, I thought the pilot episode was quite good, much better than I thought it would be.
The following are comments submitted by my readers.
* The Suliban superstructure was cool.
* The "freaky room" was cool.
* The "inappropriate decontamination" scene was outrageous... I'm not sure it was really inappropriate, but it was definitely gratuitous... I got the sense it was another quick and dirty way for the writers to try and distinguish this series from the rest of Trek, and to make it a bit more cinematic and less TV-like... Completely agree that it was gratuitous, but doesn't really detract either...
- - -
The various tensions between T'Pol and Archer (and Trip) are cool. Turns out this is going to be a lynchpin of the next few episodes, if not the entire series...
One thing that bugged me was the Klingon's relative amicability towards Archer and Trip... I mean, as far as he was concerned he was being transferred from one set of captors (who restrained, drugged and interrogated him) to a previous set of captors (who first shot him in the chest, then restrained him)... Archer+Trip turned their back on him a number of times and being a proper Klingon, with no real reason to trust them, it was weird how docile and accommodating he was.
Maybe because of the "temporal war" the course of events has been altered, thus averting disaster on first contact with the Klingons.
The decontamination scene did feel weird. Still, there are worse things to see in the world than a close-up of Jolene Blalock...
All in all, it was a promising episode.
Is it just me that had a hard time separating trip and reed?
Glad to see others were squicked out by the decontamination scene. There were little shots in there that were definitely just PG porn. Blatant pandering. I do enjoy it when sex or sexiness is handled tastefully in Trek, but this ain't it. To me it feels so inappropriate because they're sexualizing a scene that isn't--and shouldn't be--sexualized at all. Going for arousal in an unsexy context. If it were an actual sex or foreplay scene, it would have hit way differently.