“Fight or Flight”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 1, Episode 3
Production episode 003
Original air date: October 3, 2001
Date: May 6, 2151
Captain’s star log. Enterprise has been sailing about in the unknown for two weeks now and all they’ve found is some animal life. They brought one on board: a slug, which isn’t doing well. We open on Sato staring at the slug in sickbay, where Phlox is trying to save the creature—whom Tucker has named “Sluggo.”
Archer is frustrated by the lack of intelligent life they’ve found. T’Pol points out that only one in 43,000 star systems in the galaxy have intelligent life. (Archer is also frustrated by a squeaky noise under the deckplates in his quarters.) Sato is frustrated by her quarters being on the opposite side of the ship as on her training cruise, and she can’t sleep because the stars are going the wrong way. Reed is frustrated by their rushed maiden voyage meaning that the torpedo targeting scanners are still not fully calibrated.
Archer has Mayweather stop the ship so Reed can shoot at asteroids—which the torpedoes miss by a country mile. They continue onward, encountering an Axanar vessel (they’ll find out that’s their name later) that seems to be drifting, and isn’t responding to hails, though there are bio-signs.
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Against T’Pol’s advice, Archer takes a team over to the ship that includes Sato (to talk to the aliens) and Reed (to protect them in case the aliens are hostile). However, once they board the ship, they discover why the aliens didn’t respond to hails (and also that neither a translator nor protection are necessary): they’re all dead. Moreover, the corpses have been hooked up to something that is draining fluids from their bodies.
They continue onward, but just leaving them behind doesn’t sit well with Archer, and he eventually decides to turn around and go back and try to find out what happened to the Axanar—again, against T’Pol’s advice.
For her part, Sato is upset that she screamed like a child when she stumbled across the corpses on the alien vessel. She tells both Phlox and Tucker that she wants to return to Earth to go back to her academic career, as she isn’t cut out for space exploration.
Enterprise returns to the Axanar ship, and Phlox performs a post-mortem on one of the corpses, while Sato struggles to decipher the language and send out a distress call. Phlox determines that the tubes are sucking triglobulin out of the Axanar, which can have a variety of uses.
Another ship approaches, which isn’t responding to hails, and the technology of which matches that of the pumps. The alien ship fires on Enterprise, which takes significant damage while hanging around waiting for the pod carrying the away team to dock. Archer tries to fight back, but the torpedo targeting still kinda sucks, and they’re caught in the second ship’s tractor beam. (They call it a stabilizing beam.)
Then another Axanar ship shows up. Sato tries to communicate with them, but it’s slow going, and at first the Axanar think that Enterprise is just as hostile. Using the translator is problematic, so Archer convinces her to speak directly to the Axansr captain as best she can in their own language.
She manages it, and the Axanar fires on the other ship, destroying it. The Axanar are grateful to Archer and his crew for stopping the exploitation of their people’s corpses, and a happy first contact is made.
Sato decides to stay on board, and she and Phlox leave Sluggo on a world it can possibly maybe survive on.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Enterprise’s targeting scanners for their torpedoes don’t work right. This proves problematic in a firefight…
The gazelle speech. Archer doesn’t like the idea of just leaving a ship full of corpses behind, especially ones being drained of fluid, without investigating further.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol repeatedly throws cold water on Archer’s notions, whether his complaints that they haven’t found any intelligent life or his desire to investigate the Axanar ship.
Florida Man. Florida Man Whines About Not Going on First First Contact Mission, Is Rewarded by Going on Second One.
Optimism, Captain! When Sato refers to Sluggo as a “she,” Phlox gently points out that they haven’t determined the creature’s gender yet.
Good boy, Porthos! Apparently Porthos loves cheese, but it’s very bad for him. Archer gives in to his overwhelming cuteness and feeds him cheese anyhow…
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… Vulcan starships don’t go to places that pique their curiosity, they prefer to travel through space in an orderly manner. They also believe that if a ship doesn’t answer hails, they should just move on and not investigate further.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. At one point, Phlox is eating lunch with Tucker, and the doctor starts pointing out various observations he’s made while people-watching, including his belief that Crewmen Bennett and Hayden intend to mate—Phlox would very much like to observe the proceedings. Wah-HEY!
More on this later… The term “Axanar” was heard only on the original series in “Court Martial,” referencing one of Kirk’s citations, and “Whom Gods Destroy” as the site of a battle that Garth of Izar led as a Starfleet captain. Here we establish that they’re a people (presumably Kirk’s peace mission and Garth’s battle took place on or near their homeworld).
I’ve got faith…
“We’ve been out here for two weeks now, and the only first contact we’ve made is with a dying worm.”
–Tucker bemoaning the state of the ship’s mission so far.
Welcome aboard. The only guest in the episode is Jeff Ricketts, who plays the Axanar captain. He’ll be back in “The Andorian Incident” as Keval.
Trivial matters: The Axanar will be seen again in “Dead Stop.” That same episode will also see Archer’s cabin’s squeak get fixed, finally.
It’s been a long road… “I didn’t realize you spoke slug.” This is a perfectly serviceable episode, mostly, but that’s really all it can manage, and it’s frustrating in its total lack of imagination, whether in world-building or in plot.
First of all, there’s a reason why editors tell writers not to start your story with your characters being bored because if your characters are bored, so too will be your audience. I remember watching this in 2001 and thinking I should watch something else where I was engaged by what was happening instead of watching people be bored which is, well, boring.
And then we had a real opportunity for a truly alien species. I was hoping that Archer’s assumptions about what was going on would be challenged, that the corpses weren’t being exploited or abused, but that this was actually a legitimate death ritual that the Axanar do with their dead.
But that would require writers who were genuinely interested in writing about alien cultures. Instead, everything is exactly what Archer thinks. T’Pol, who just last week was the voice of reason and whose talents were able to salvage the mission, is instead a pure killjoy this week. She constantly tells Archer not to do the thing, he does the thing, and he turns out to be right. It’s just so lazy.
Speaking of lazy, we have Sato’s plotline, which has a completely foregone conclusion by virtue of Linda Park’s place in the opening credits. I do like how Park plays it: one of her talents as an actor is showing her emotions via body language, whether her tense apprehension while asking Archer for new quarters, her slump-shouldered depression after the first away mission, her sad frustration at Sluggo’s declining health and at her inability to communicate with the Axanar—and, most notably, her very obviously feigned confidence-boosting posture when talking directly to the Axanar.
Speaking of Sluggo, what a horrible treatment of the poor creature. First they yank the poor little thing from its natural environment, stumble around trying to figure out how to feed and house Sluggo, and then drop it into a world to which it isn’t native, probably has no food sources, and in which it’s as likely as not going to starve to death or get eaten by local fauna.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido wishes everybody a happy and wonderful Thanksgiving! He is certainly grateful to everyone who reads these rewatches and all his other work on the site…
Or, worse, they’ve just contaminated an entire planet’s biosphere by introducing a new alien species. Stop back in five years and it’s the Planet of the Slugs. Why the hell didn’t their science officer and Voice Of Reason™ have anything to say about that?
It always annoyed me that there doesn’t seem to be an actual order in which the Enterprise is checking things out. As far as I can tell, Starfleet’s orders were “just go poking around, Jon, and see if anything strikes your interest.” I mean, maybe they gave them some kind of list we never see, but it sure seems like they are just winging it, and the only person who seems to find that troubling is Reed (who spends a lot of the first couple seasons being the only human with any common sense or sense of priorities).
Also…. Two weeks and these people are stir-crazy? The standards for going into space must have really, really lowered between now and the Trek future. Astronauts now are specifically picked (and then further trained) to not be the kind of people who get cabin fever or dangerously bored- for the very good reason that space if big and it takes forever to get anywhere and going out for a walk to clear your head isn’t an option. That’s aside from the fact that apparently studying alien worlds and (non sentient) alien life is apparently super boring to our crew and not, you know, a fascinating opportunity for scientific study. If you only got into the space-travel business for the chance to have a conversation with aliens, I imagine you are going to spend a lot of time being disappointed.
So this for me was when it all felt stale (a whole episode in). Not even the soaring, lyrical theme tune (sorry, couldn’t resist) nor the awesomeness that is Phlox could save it. I actually liked the Axanar storyline, and kinda hoped that humanity’s good work would be repaid in a later plotline. But no, it’s a paint-by-numbers plot (it actually felt like a Voyager script) with some routine business (Lieutenant Reed Royal Navy, playing with weapons, Ensign Sato feeling unbalanced) and Archer being irritated and grumpy (he seems operatically grumpy to both Reed and Sato). Meh, with a side order of ‘yep fine’.
EDIT – I also wished that it was Archer or Reed who panicked at the sight of the mutilated Axanar. It seemed a bit 1950s for the female to be the one to scream.
How convenient this is since I recently started a watch of Enterprise- it’s airing schedule didn’t really line up in my college and immediate post-college life so I only caught a few episodes. Like most Trek shows the first season is rough- see the Naked Now or Move Along Home. This is no exception for many of the reasons already stated.
As a quick note though, Sato’s inexperience/suitability was a recurring theme with this, her claustrophobia and a few others so it’s not completely dropped.
Otherwise I agree it just felt lazy. T’Pol spends much of the first season as the voice of opposition only so she could be proven wrong for example. Also the writers felt it necessary to constantly do “the first time ______”. This episode was another paint by numbers filler
@1 – Recently saw a video at work about preventing the spread of invasive species. What they do with Sluggo is exactly wrong. They cannot take care of it. They cannot put it back where they found it, but they drop it off in a place convenient to them because they feel sorry for it. It sounds emotionally satisfying, but it is terrible policy. Again, they do not seem to have developed any protocols for what to living specimens taken from the worlds they visit.
@2- Also.considering this is the first Earth ship to he cable to travel fast enough to get to other systems in a reasonable amount of time. Surely some of the crew, including Archer, had served on long haul pre-Warp 5 Starfleet or private vessels other than Mayweather?
Yeah, not sure why Star Trek keeps going back to the bored-to-be-in-space well from time to time. From all the way back in “The Cage” to more recent examples with Star Trek Beyond and Star Trek Picard, it’s not fun to see people tired of being space adventurers or saying it’s boring to be in space. Uh… space is one of the main reasons I’m watching this damn thing.
I don’t mind this one. One thing I appreciate about season 1, though I didn’t quite realize it until I rewatched it for researching my ENT novels, is that it was trying to be different from previous shows — instead of the usual action stuff, it went more for a slice-of-life, character-driven, workplace-drama tone (something that TOS also did in its first season to an extent). Sometimes I felt it was trying to be M*A*S*H, and though it couldn’t hold a candle to that show, I appreciate the effort to go for a more subtle, understated kind of storytelling.
I also liked the focus on Hoshi and her role as a translator. This is the kind of story that makes a prequel worth doing, showing how things had to be done before you had magic instant translation and people actually had to work at building understanding. They couldn’t keep it up in the long run, since it slowed down the drama, but here the drama was about whether translation could be achieved, so it worked.
It was also an interesting touch that the crew faced a number of threats in season 1, notably here and in “Silent Enemy,” that remained mysterious and unexplained. It makes sense that explorers just starting to probe into the vast galaxy would occasionally encounter mysteries they were unable to solve.
I do have a bit of an issue with the idea that two weeks between discoveries was intolerably long. This early on, interstellar journeys should routinely have taken weeks. They should’ve gone out expecting that kind of interval between ports of call.
I wouldn’t mind the I’m bored to be in space thing, but it seemed a little early to do it in this very second episode of the series, and also it would have been nice to use that opportunity for a slice of life about what it’s actually like living on board Enterprise, instead it was just a bunch of mopiness.
And it’s coming back to me way too quickly why I had so much trouble with this series, especially the first time I tried to watch it. Archer is just an insufferable whiny little bitch. I mean, I could see Picard having the same internal struggle with himself, do we stay, do we leave, what do we do? But in his hands I could have seen him convening his officers and having an actual methodical discussion about pros and cons and then making a decision. Here, Archer solicits opinions over dinner, then gets all high-and-mighty when he second-guesses himself later.
Agree on complimenting Park’s performance as Sato here, she genuinely sold her angst and fear and insecurities about her place on this ship. I was initially annoyed with the scream too, although they addressed it very soon after that where Sato herself points out how she was the only one to lose it. Maybe a ham-handed way to set up some development for the character later on, but I thought it was okay in context
More evidence for people who complain about Star Trek going too liberal minded these days: in 2001, we’ve got Phlox saying if we don’t know someone’s gender, we shouldn’t make assumptions about it. Take that, “puppy” fans…not you, Porthos. You’re a good boy.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one that saw the opening minutes of this episode and almost changed the channel. Although I’m sure it contributed to my not watching Trek as “religiously” as I had with DS9 and VOY a few years prior, though this and I think the next episode (and a few others from this season) come off as Star Trek’s version of “Colonial Williamsburg” where while it’s our future, it’s still the long-ago past of the people we’ve been watching for the past 14 years (TNG, DS9, VOY). It seems like we know what they’re trying to do but just looks like they were putting in artificial obstacles to their situations (we can’t use the transporters, we can’t use universal translators (though that’s spotty too), our weapons aren’t strong enough to deal with the threat) instead of it coming across as new.
@5:
Which makes absolutely zero sense. The entire purpose of their mission is to explore strange new worlds; you’d think that if they don’t have xenobiologists on board (which also doesn’t make much sense that they didn’t), the crew would at least be tasked with collecting biological samples to bring back to Earth for the scientists to study.
Hell, NASA had protocols (not great ones, admittedly) for ensuring that the Apollo astronauts didn’t bring back any alien microbes from the Moon, and we’re pretty damn sure the Moon is sterile and always has been.
So they collect alien fauna, with Trelane-knows-what other unknown-to-Earth-science microbes hitching a ride, and have it sitting in a cage that looks like it’s ventilated to the open air, in an atmosphere that is nothing like its own, in the middle of the ship’s only medical facility.
And then they drop it on another planet apparently without even thinking of the possible consequences of introducing an alien species to the biosphere.
Does nobody think ahead in the 22nd century?
Found this a solid episode and on first viewing I did see the show offering something different in episodes like this, much like @7 said. It was a nice change of pace to see the crew not able to instantly communicate or work out the alien ship. It would have benefitted the series though if we had seen more failure and lessons learnt on the voyage as Keith mentioned. Was a bit safe for Archer to be right.
@2 I certainly agree with you and thought so at the time of airing. Starfleet surely must have observed systems, planets and anomalies through previous probe launches etc. they would be itching to send Enterprise to investigate further. I said on the last episode thread I’d have thought it make more sense for Earth to want to explore closer to its own doorstep given how limited such exploration must have been to this point.
It bothered me in the episode what happens when the Axanar ship when it responds to the distress call. Surely seeing Enterprise with another ship locked on its roof would give an idea of the aggressor, even if the translator was causing confusion to the Axanar Captain?
Also thought it odd no mention was made of the weapons used in the pilot (which we never saw again). I later assumed these were low yield plasma cannons, the same mentioned as being on freighters for clearing asteroids so perhaps wer not much use, but given the imminent threat I’d have thought they would have been thought about. Unless maybe they have very narrow forward firing arc?
I’d like to agree with Mr Bennett that this is quite a good slice-of-life episode (Also, that never discovering the precise nature of those assailants is a nice way to add to their menace and to the sense of a galaxy far wider & even more wild than that known to Kirk or Picard).
I would also like to point out that it makes a good deal of sense that NX-01’s crew would find it a little difficult to come down from the high of their aggressively Dramatic first mission to the everyday realities of deep space exploration.
On a less serious note, I would absolutely love to see a transcript of that conversation in Axanari – I’ll bet the Axanari captain’s report would make interesting reading – as one imagines at least one or two entertaining errors lending a fairly tense scene a bit of dark comedy.
Also, you do have to wonder if that courting couple would be down for some ‘Scientific Observation’ from the CMO …
Now I find myself wondering – courtesy of Porthos’ little dance with Captain Archer – which came first; The domesticated dog or the ‘puppy eyes’ technique.
Yeah, the lack of any kind of protocols for, well, anything is a constant frustration here. I mean, this sort of lack of prep makes sense in, say, Stargate SG-1, when they, in essence, had new technology — and a major threat in the Goa’uld — dumped on them pretty much at once, but it makes no sense that all these years after the Phoenix flight they haven’t developed any protocols whatsoever for exploration…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@14/ED: As it happens, that actually has been answered — domestication came first. A 2019 study determined that the changes in facial musculature that produce “puppy dog eyes” have evolved in the wake of domestication, because dogs that could give us that look triggered our nurturing instincts more and made us take better care of them, leading to more reproductive success.
@15/krad: Yeah, this is something I have mixed feelings about. I appreciate the idea of showing us a less experienced Starfleet figuring things out as it went, but the show went too far in making them utterly clueless. Still, they were often a lot more reckless in TOS than they really should’ve been (e.g. beaming right down into unknown environments without sending probes first), so that kind of necessitated lowering the standards even more in ENT.
I did have a couple of quibbles with this episode.
1) There’s more to space exploration than meeting new civilizations. The NX-01 is Earth’s first true Deep Space exploration vessel. Don’t forget that the vast majority of nearby stars are unremarkable (and even by pre NX-01 standards would have been visited), but the Enterprise could reasonably reach stars that mankind hadn’t visited and as such could have been used to validate any number of theories on stellar evolution and system formation.
2) I agree that there should have been established protocols for obtaining samples of Flora and Fauna but long term, sample return would fall within mission parameters.
3) The targeting scanners seem to have worked acceptably in Broken Bow. How did they get so badly out of alignment in a couple of weeks.
My biggest issue though is that the mission to explore seems to be to travel effectively blindly and hope the ship stumbles across something interesting. I would have preferred the mission to be guided by mankind’s first up close exploration of known stars/planets/nebulae etc with the ability to update the parameters in the event of an aha moment.
I decided to attempt actually watching episode instead of just reading the article this time. Even being struck at home, stuck, in bed, I couldn’t make it out of that first scene. My primary memory of the original run of the first half of the first season was an incredible sense of boredom and predictability and I’ve got to agree with everyone else that opening with the crew sitting around bored was just not good. I love slice of life, but it’s still gotta be compelling slice of life. This is also the moment I realized I love coming here because KRAD’s synopsis tend to be far more entertaining than whatever he is reviewing. Kudos.
@16. ChristopherLBennett: Thank You for pointing to this article! I still wonder if, in this case, the conclusions therein can barely see the wood for all the trees – because whole these changes via selective pressure would have undoubtedly made Fido’s eternal mooch much more potent, SOMETHING about the proto-dog population must have persuaded our hard-pressed ancestors to part with hard earned foodstuffs in the first place.
Blame the romantic and the imp of mischief in me – it amuses & charms me to imagine that dogs have been pulling the Oliver Twist routine to part gullible bipeds from their spare food since before they were dogs.
@15. krad: By the way, I wanted to add that one does not disagree with your points regarding a certain alarming tendency to muddle through, never mind the Vulcans, on the part of the Enterprise crew – one can only suppose that (if they gave this point of characterisation specific thought at all) the writers were concerned with emphasising the learning curve of Starfleet Earth in its early days and the divergent approaches of Humanity & Vulcans in space (Unfortunately at the cost of a certain plausibility).
@1. elcino: Going by their previous form, T’Pol probably tried to make them see sense, but was resoundingly ignored (or decided to save her energy for more important battles).
@19/ED: “SOMETHING about the proto-dog population must have persuaded our hard-pressed ancestors to part with hard earned foodstuffs in the first place.”
Well, yeah — the fact that hunting in tandem helped both humans and wolves get more food than they would have separately, so naturally they shared it.
And the notion that our ancestors were perpetually “hard-pressed” and starving is a myth. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle was actually pretty cushy most of the time — and what our sexist culture tends to overlook is that about 2/3 of the calories were provided by the gathering done mainly by women, a consistent and reliable food source under normal circumstances, with the hunting done mainly by men being a secondary, more intermittent source of sustenance. There was usually enough to sustain a community of a few dozen people fairly comfortably — and sharing with others was the norm, not the exception. Humans’ and hominins’ primary survival strategy has always been cooperation and the sharing of resources. Both humans and wolves had social, cooperative survival strategies, so it wasn’t that hard for them to fold each other in to their existing behavior patterns.
The only thing I remember about this episode was Enterprise contaminating a planet’s ecosystem with that slug. One slug maybe wouldn’t impact an ecosystem very much – I don’t know how slugs reproduce – or maybe it would be like Australia and rabbits, or Colombia and hippos. Interesting, because Enterprise will again impact a planet’s ecosystem in the very next episode when Porthos urinates on the planet’s surface.
Quite right CLB! Cooperation is what boosted hominids to the top of the food chain. One of the reasons we and wolves got on is that they are also a social animal and willing to accept funny looking two-legs as part of the pack.
@22/roxana: I wonder, do dogs really see us as having fewer legs, or just constantly showing off how good we are at balancing on the hind pair?
“Let’s hope the next time we make first contact it isn’t with a room full of corpses.”
I don’t know why but I seem to be having trouble with this episode’s name. I think “Fight or Flee” was the closest I managed without needing to look it up.
Hoshi’s claustrophobia bleeds over into the viewer a bit here. There’s only really one speaking character apart from the regulars and he doesn’t appear until right near the end. Until then, we’re basically watching characters who are the best of an inexperienced bunch bumble about. Enterprise continues to feel extremely vulnerable. Archer is plagued by squeaks and Sato by stars moving the wrong way, so when they actually come across a hostile alien ship, they’re completely outclassed. Their only hope of survival is by begging a bunch of strangers to save them and the fact that we never see the aliens or learn anything about them just makes them seem even more threatening. Even though the crew come out unscathed, they seem out of their depth somewhat here.
Archer is still learning on the job what it means to be a Starfleet captain. Enterprise has been launched with an idealised idea of making peaceful contact with other species. When they instead come across a crime scene, what exactly is the next step? There’s no “Federation space” to give them a sense of authority yet, and they didn’t come out here to be the space police. T’Pol’s assertion that it’s none of their business and they should just move on is so logical that Archer initially bows to it. While it’s T’Pol that Archer ends up taking most of his frustration out on, Tucker doesn’t seem any more keen to turn around and put themselves in danger. Ultimately, it’s not Starfleet regulations, or the counsel of his senior officers, but Archer’s conscience that means he can’t just leave behind a group of murder victims without making some effort to find out what happened to them and alert their people.
Not that Archer isn’t still a flawed character, especially where Vulcans are concerned. He and T’Pol get a great scene at the start with her Vulcan “Do I give a damn?” response to his claim of squeaky noises, but it’s downhill for much of the episode as they disagree on what to do at nearly every turn. He’s notably sharper with her than he is with the rest of the crew, culminating in him basically blaming her for them turning tail and running. But once again, when they’re in a crisis, they’re firmly on the same side, working together to get Sato to talk to the Axanar.
It’s a nice touch to have Archer refuse to indulge Tucker and take him along on a mission that doesn’t need him: A shame the episode contrives a way to get him off the ship anyway. The parallel between Sato and her slug friend is a bit heavy-handed but she finds her place on the ship in the end: It’s a significant turning point when she forgets to take instruction from Archer in her conversation with the Axanar captain and just gets on with it.
Phlox’s first time on the bridge: I hear John Billingsley hated filming there because he had no station and was left standing up all the time, a tradition that begins here. Not that Tucker fares much better on that score.
The end credits music seemed more muted to start with than I was expecting? See if that changes or if I’m just remembering it wrong.
I rewatched this episode up until Reed complains about the targeting scanners so not very far in at all. I’m content to rely on my memories of my initial viewing of this episode and read this rewatch entry. As of others here have alluded to, the characters’ sense of boredom carries over to the viewer as I myself didn’t feel too excited to continue on watching. I did like T’Pol’s remark though reminding Archer (and the viewers) how vast space is and how intelligent life is relatively few and far in-between. I did like the creepiness of the discovery of the dead alien crew being drained of fluid. But I also was annoyed by and felt it was so regressive to have one of the two main female characters act so afraid of the dangers of space. It was just rather stereotypical and a big step down from the progress made from the likes of prior strong female characters like Kira and B’Elanna.
Admittedly, rewatching Enterprise from the beginning seems like slow, boring torture to me so I’ve already skipped ahead to the end of season two to get into the Xindi arc and where the show finally feels more confident and has a sense of direction.
It seems I’m the minority, but I liked the idea that they had major expectations for all-the-type adventures and got deflated when nothing really exciting happened for a while. Maybe it’s unrealistic that this happened so quick, but when I was watching the episode I didn’t catch that only two weeks are gone and thought maybe a month or more has passed.
1 in 43,000 planets. I can’t imagine the Vulcans have a large enough sample to calculate that, and it doesn’t feel consistent with the density of spacefaring civilizations we see in Trek. Maybe it’s a difference between exploring systematically and changing course to explore the interesting.
Of course, in First Contact, Vulcans detected a warp signature, and came to investigate. And they certainly didn’t regard it as none of their business, so there’s some more inconsistency here.
If time and distance were treated correctly, the boredom would be entirely expected. It’s 10 days to Alpha Centauri at maximum warp, after all.
Enterprise D would often explore because they found something interesting, but there also seemed to be a decision to make regarding their current mission when they did.
Voyager had the plot advantage of scavenging for supplies and shortcuts to justify the detours, even if the supplies didn’t always make sense.
1 in 43,000 planets. I can’t imagine the Vulcans have a large enough sample to calculate that, and it doesn’t feel consistent with the density of spacefaring civilizations we see in Trek. Maybe it’s a difference between exploring systematically and changing course to explore the interesting.
Of course, in First Contact, Vulcans detected a warp signature, and came to investigate. And they certainly didn’t regard it as none of their business, so there’s some more inconsistency here.
If time and distance were treated correctly, the boredom would be entirely expected. It’s 10 days to Alpha Centauri at maximum warp, after all.
Enterprise D would often explore because they found something interesting, but there also seemed to be a decision to make regarding their current mission when they did.
Voyager had the plot advantage of scavenging for supplies and shortcuts to justify the detours, even if the supplies didn’t always make sense.
@28/lerris: “1 in 43,000 planets. I can’t imagine the Vulcans have a large enough sample to calculate that, and it doesn’t feel consistent with the density of spacefaring civilizations we see in Trek.”
The thing about space is that you don’t have to go places in order to see them, because with a good enough telescope you can see anything anywhere. We’re already closing in on the ability to detect biosignatures or technosignatures on extrasolar planets based on what their spectral readings tell us about their atmospheric chemistry, and eventually we’ll even be able to image exoplanets well enough to see surface water or vegetation, nightside city lights, etc.
So it certainly would be possible to work out a reasonable estimate for the number of inhabited planets in the galaxy without actually having to go to them. The question is whether T’Pol’s stated estimate is plausible. It’s now understood that most star systems have planets; let’s conservatively assume that T’Pol was speaking only of terrestrial planets, and that there are an average of maybe five of those per star system. So 1 in 43,000 planets would be one in every 8600 systems. From what I can find, though, there are only 1000-1500 star systems within 50 light years, which means that by T’Pol’s estimate, there wouldn’t be any other inhabited planets within 50 light years of Earth, which obviously doesn’t work. Maybe she is including giant planets and maybe dwarf planets. The problem is that just saying “planets” is way too vague to figure out exactly what she meant.
I still don’t understand how the stars would be going the other way if Hoshi’s on the other side (which seems to mean port or starboard). They’d be going the same way, just on her other side, if she’s aligned the same way. And if she’s not, couldn’t she just align herself the opposite way?
@30/Raksi: Hoshi said that on her training cruises, she had portside quarters, which means that when facing the window, she would’ve seen the stars moving right to left. That’s what she got accustomed to, so now seeing them move left to right out the window feels like going backwards and is disorienting. She couldn’t “align herself the opposite way,” since the window’s only on one side of the cabin.
It’s not that implausible. It’s like how I can never get to sleep on my first night in a hotel or motel. For many people, any change from normal sleeping conditions triggers an instinctive alertness to potential threats and makes it harder to get to sleep. Since Hoshi is uneasy about being in space to begin with, that would make her discomfort threshold very low, so even a slight change from what she managed to get accustomed to would trigger that threat reaction.
I don’t have much of a problem with this one, honestly. Second episodes are every bit as hard to do as the pilot episode, since you have to reiterate the show’s mission statement from the pilot (and establish the formula, this time on 44 minutes rather than the preceding two hour block) while still telling a fresh story. Since UPN had vetoed the original plan of setting the whole first season on Earth, Brannon Braga had to scramble and fill the void with 26 individual episodes in heaven knows how little time, while still trying to differentiate itself from past Trek shows in some shape and form. The choice was to put character over plot – something that Braga was definitely not used to, given the way he tended to generate story ideas.
Fight or Flight is a serviceable second episode. Not particularly great or inspiring, but it gets the job done. And I do appreciate the increased focus on a secondary character right from the start. They could have done an Archer/T’Pol/Trip story out of the gate, but this was a smart choice. Hoshi Sato was a woefully underutilized character over the show’s four season run. It’s simple enough in terms of plot – a ship full of dead bodies is Braga’s comfort zone -, and having a climax dependent on Hoshi’s translation abilities is worth it (imagine if they’d ever done an Uhura-centric TOS story like this). Allan Kroeker pulls off some nice shots and gets a good performance out of Linda Park.
Overall, it was good enough for me. In terms of second episodes, I’d still rank it above the likes of The Naked Now, and even possibly DS9’s Past Prologue (or A Man Alone, which should have been the actual second episode on that show – airdate shenaningans notwithstanding).
@29 I think you may be a little optimistic about our eventual ability to image exoplanets, and that you are describing imaging that seems beyond what the Federation has exhibited, let alone pre-Federation Vulcan.
Even with such imaging, we would have been undetectable to extrasolar civilizations 300 years ago, but have qualified as intelligent life for much longer.
I agree on the 50 light year sphere and plausibility of the number.
(now let’s see if I can figure out why my comments are double-posting
At the risk of repeating the same sentiment on every episode it had a decent premise with some potential but was not developed enough. Making a story about people who are bored is a big risk, similar to writers trying to write about writers block.
The episode might have looked better in hindsight if the plot points had ever been revisited. The deliberate introduction of a non-native slug species, with no mention of the risks seemed insane to me at the time and still does. (By that time The Simpsons had highlighted the issue of invasive species at least twice already in Bart vs. Australia (1995) and again in Bart the Mother (1998) and I expected at least some scientific awareness from Star Trek.) It is disappointing that Phlox did not even acknowledge the risk and instead waved it off with “close enough”.
Yeah my first thought on Sluggo is invasive species, though I wonder why they took him without knowing how to feed him. That really makes no sense. Wouldn’t they have also brought sampling of the local flora or fungus that they found him in? It’s really very odd. I appreciated Sato in this and many episodes. She’s the absolute best in her field which is why she’s needed, but she’s not naturally adventurous, in fact in some ways she’s quite the introvert; an astronomer instead of an astronaut, so being a Starfleet officer is her living outside of her comfort zone. Doing that is not easy, so she has to reevaluate and re-choose to keep going. Watching her confidence build as the series goes on is a joy.
And then there’s Mayweather. Isn’t this one of those episodes where everyone should be asking Travis how not to go stir crazy? That’s technically his core role in the show, to show all these deep space rookies how not to go nuts?
@33/lerris: T’Pol was talking about life, not civilization. Inhabited planets can be identified by biosignatures such as molecular oxygen and methane in their atmospheres, the spectral signature of chlorophyll in their reflection spectra, etc. Scientists today are already working on such detection methods. It’s been less than 30 years since the first exoplanet was discovered, and now we’ve found thousands. So there’s no telling how much more our detection abilities will improve within the next 30 years, let alone the next 130.
If the question is whether it’s plausible to be able to estimate the number of inhabited worlds in the galaxy, then surely the plausibility of a work of fiction is assessed in comparison to how things work in reality, not just to other bits of the fiction, since different assertions in the same fictional franchise can be more or less plausible than one another. If anything, Star Trek tends to be implausibly conservative in its assumptions about what science could determine across interstellar distances. T’Pol’s ability to estimate the abundance of inhabited planets in the galaxy is actually one of the more plausible concepts within the franchise, even if the specific number she cites is too low.
@32 It’s an interesting point having listened to Brannon Braga interviews detailing the troubles he had with the experience of the team of writers during S1 which I believe were mostly let go by S2. I wonder if the idea was to bring on board writers that could write to that original idea of being Earth based and then the struggle became writing more ‘out in space’ episodes.
Regarding the debate T’Pol’s estimate I think the show shot itself in the foot here by having Qo’nos only 4 days away in the pilot. Surely the Vulcan star charts that Enterprise possesses will have other planets etc. to peak their interest within a 2 week travel time (in a similar fashion that we will see with P’Jem)
@32: “Fight or Flight” may be subjectively better than TNG’s “Naked Now” quality-wise but I believe the latter is much more fun to watch as it’s wonderfully bad and funny. It was never boring.
@37: Probably. The Jacquemettons are the prime example of this. Having written both Breaking the Ice and Dear Doctor, they excelled in character-centric stories – and we’d see the fruits of their work later on Mad Men. And then they ended up writing a pretty substandard Ferengi action episode later in the season, completely out of their comfort zone, which was probably the reason they didn’t last past the first season. Their talents would be wasted on standard Trek action-adventure fare.
@23. ChristopherLBennett: For my money, while dogs are unlikely to think of us as show-offs (if there’s one thing dogs are very, very good at it’s taking their people for granted – a little like well loved small children in that respect) cats are dead-certain to have taken one look at we bipeds and thought “Pfft, like that’s clever! Birds do that and we eat birds.”
Well now I also have the amusing image of dogs looking at us with pity for being able to walk like birds, but completely unable to fly!
@20. ChristopherLBennett & @22. princessroxana: Your argument most definitely holds water, though one would like to point out that at least one working theory for the domestication of canids is that the ancestral dog was a scavenger long before it was a hunting companion – scrounging around the camps of humankind until some bright spark got the idea of putting those (oddly loveable) hairy moochers to work!
Personal experience of Man’s Best Friend and their indefatigable appetite for munching & mooching leads me to favour this hypothesis (hence my suspicion that the “Be your best friend!” approach predates the addition of proper Puppy Eyes to the arsenal).
In all fairness, given that there’s at least some scientific evidence for multiple domestication events, there’s at least the possibility that both these scenarios – the ‘Hunting Buddy’ and the ‘Great Ingratiatory’ – having some truth to them.
@40/ED: I’m convinced that cats domesticated humans and guided us to develop civilization so that we would invent can openers and windowsills.
Indeed, cats are like the Cylons. They have a plan.
@@@@@ 36 – “If the question is whether it’s plausible to be able to estimate the number of inhabited worlds in the galaxy, then surely the plausibility of a work of fiction is assessed in comparison to how things work in reality”
But Trek isn’t reality. It has aliens seeding worlds with DNA, preservers, Genesis Devices (If the Federation can discover it surely someone els did millions of years ago), space born organisms made of crystal that scout planets clean, Doomsdays Machines and the list goes on. And wee saw all the above and more in just 100 years show time. How much have the odds changed over billions of years?
And remember, this is the show that thinks dark matter nebulas mean that you can’t see through them.
@36
T’Pol (verbatim): “I’m sure you’re aware that only one out of 43,000 planets supports intelligent life.”
I think your memory is missing the word “intelligent” in this statement, which is where our disagreement seems to be rooted. I can agree with your reasoning beyond that detail.
@44/lerris: Ah, okay. Well, there are plenty of ways to determine that without visiting the planets in question. As I said, the ability to detect technosignatures such as city lights or atmospheric pollution could be only a decade or two away. And once a certain number of planets had been surveyed, as the Vulcans would have done by then, you could use statistics to calculate the probabilities overall. The power of statistical methods is that you can indeed extrapolate to the whole from a fairly small part.
So it doesn’t change my conclusion. While the specific number cited is way too low, there is nothing implausible about the idea of formulating such an estimate.
Not much to chew on with this one. It’s a serviceable second episode, but you can really see the cogs turning – you know Hoshi will overcome her doubts, you know Reed will sort out the targeting sensors in time, you know aliens will arrive and target Enterprise, you know the Anaxar will need to be convinced that Enterprise isn’t the aggressor (despite it being patently obvious given the circumstances)…
The thing that bothers me the most is how everyone on the bridge is so casual when the ship is trapped and they’re about to be boarded by a hostile force with advanced technology. Week two, they’re facing death and yet the only person visibly under stress is Hoshi, who is only worried about syntax. Sure.
The premise is at least a little different for Trek.
Nice performance from Park but an oddly overwrought performance from Bakula.
Theme tune reaction: mild thrill as the soft-cheese rock drifts through the stale-air opening meditation on boredom and regret.
@41/ChristopherLBennett: Considering cats’ habit of standing on keyboards when you’re trying to use a computer, how much they love to sit on papers, the way they’ll jump up to stick a butt in your face when you’re trying to read, the way they’ll ignore you until you start doing something interesting, and what generally adorable distractions they are (not to mention the way they took over so much of our digital communications), I have my own theory about cats: they’re alien bioweapons seeded here æons ago to keep us from becoming sufficiently technologically advanced to be a threat to the extraterrestrials. (Being highly civilized, the aliens see no reason to eliminate what they can so easily neutralize.)
But for cats, we’d have FTL, the cure for cancer, benevolent AI, all that A Better And Brighter Future jazz. They haven’t guided us to civilization, they’ve put dampers on our achieving it, alas.
Why do you think they’re always hanging out in used bookstores? They’re concerned we might actually start to correlate our previously accumulated knowledge more efficiently.
(Our Elvis is curled against my leg grooming himself as I write this in bed on my tablet. I can only hope he isn’t going to report to his masters that I’m on to their plan.)
@47/eric: Pfft. Cats have no masters.
@35/Mr D: Interestingly, there seems to have been a deleted scene of Mayweather trying to teach Archer one of the word games they used to pass the time (I think immediately following on from the targeting simulation). I wouldn’t like to nominate anything to get cut to make room for it, but I guess it shows the struggle of trying to include these character moments.
@48. ChristopherLBennett: You left out the other half of the quote “Cats have no masters … only worshippers and humble servants”. (-;
@47. eric: You know, these two theories actually compliment, rather than flatly contradict each other – our Feline supervisors wanted us to develop civilisation to a degree that leaves them more comfortable, but not to the point where we might actually challenge their supremacy!
@41. ChristopherLBennet: I can see no holes in your theory, but can only suspect that – like Victor Frankenstein, Felis catus sometimes looks upon their great achievement and think “Well, it was a calculated risk but the maths could use a little work” (I’m specifically thinking of ‘Cat screws up’ Internet videos and the sort of human being who dresses up their cats the way children play with dolls).
You know, I guess I hoped that a prequel to TOS would not have to look like TOS, but really dive into that TOS feel of space being vast and mysterious and beautiful.
The NX-01 Enterprise crew should have been geeking out at being in deep space with a state-of-the-art Warp 5 engine driving them. Tucker, like a good engineer, should be crawling through every manifold inside out.
Enterprise should have been orbiting a random-ass planet or nebula in the opening because hey, we’ve never been out this far, this is all new to us! Let’s look into every nook and cranny we get to! I mean, say what you will about Voyager, but at least they got that right.
Archer should be fascinated by every detail of Random-ass Planet or Nebula, while T’Pol is like, yeah been there, done that; you humans are easily impressed.
We don’t even need to spend the whole episode charting Random-ass Planet or Nebula, just show we’re out in deep space doing the thing, while we explore the most important aspect of the show: the characters.
Instead we get…this. Two weeks on and everybody’s bored. Yawn!
The only people who act in any reasonable way are Reed and Phlox. I like that Reed is basically like, yeah space is big and beautiful, but there are things in space that want to kill you; We should, y’know, probably be prepared for that. And Phlox is like, these humans are weird, and I fucking love it! See those two crewmembers? Yeah, they’re fucking, and totally acting like they’re not!
For me, the only part that makes this watchable, even more than the ever-delightful Dr. Phlox, is Linda Park’s performance. I mean, we know Hoshi isn’t going to leave the ship, but Park gives a range of emotions that really drew me into Hoshi’s story.
And for sure, as krad points out, a missed oppurtunity for a story about jumping to conclusions, and respecting other cultures. But nope, we need murder and whiz-bang explosions! At least Hoshi got to save the day by talking.
Kudos to Linda Park, but overall, Warp Factor Blah.
@51 I really wanted to see that, too! It would have been nice to see a scene where Archer laid out the 20 planets Starfleet wanted them to investigate, and have everyone argue for their pet project to be the first one they go to. Heck, have them all geebling over the slug they found (it is, after all, alien life, and apparently they are the first ones to find it!), it would have been cute to have them all exclaiming over it and trying to find things to make it comfortable and happy on the Enterprise. I like the idea of them getting interrupted by the distress signal, but there is no reason to have them be bored, of all things, up until that point. Most people who are watching SF *love* the idea of being in space- so if it doesn’t really affect the plot either way, why not err on the side of them being super excited to be out here?
Actually the targeting scanner worked during the battle. Once the torpedo bounced from either the armor or a close-in deflector field, once if was intercepted by the point defense. If anything, it showed us how the alien attacker outclassed the Enterprise …
As to Sluggo, I don’t see anything wrong with taking it, once they were convinced-beyond-reasonable-doubt that it wasn’t the larval stage of a sentient species. They did have enough faith in their entry scans to decide who got a back rub in the pilot, after all. The mistake was not to dispose of the lab animal properly.
This script had some okay ideas but it needed a workover.
Drop the crew being bored, have them be excited about the alien slug, trying to come up with names for it and such. The torpedo scene is a little too slow, the scene on the dead ship is fine.
Linda Park is good but I don’t feel like her conversations set things up well. Could have had a talk with Reed where he says she was a civilian two weeks ago and he doesn’t expect her to keep her cool which doesn’t really soothe her. Then a talk with Phlox about adapting to different environments. And then finally she goes to Archer who tells her to trust him that he’s picked the best person for the job.
When Archer decides to go back, instead of being whiny and seemingly blaming T’Pol he should just say that this is a human ship and sometimes they’re going to do things that aren’t perfectly logical.
The return, hostile confrontation and translation scene is competent enough. Afterwards Archer says told ya so to Hoshi. Then instead of dropping the slug on a random planet, the crew which has grown attached to slug proposes to backtrack to return it to it’s planet, T’Pol says that is highly illogical and Archer just smiles, says she might need to get used to that and orders the ship back, end with Hoshi smiling and putting it back on the planet.
I liked the realism of ship’s systems not working as they should, and a lack of clear operating procedures. That made the show feel very real. The lack of functioning torpedoes comes right out of the early days of World War II. And Phlox is beginning to stand out as one of the best characters in the show.
@9 Maybe I am weird but as someone who mostly (it’s confusing) is a guy and identifies as a guy, I often wrongly get assumed to be a girl when I talk to people on the phone or through a drive through speaker. Sometimes I correct the person, but just as often I don’t even bother to correct them.
I guess what I am saying is I am quite used to people not only assuming my gender, but assuming it wrong.
@51 I don’t even respect my own Culture, why should I respect others?
edit: There was supposed to be a smiley face emoji here? What happened to it
Side note: Forget going back for everyone being illogical, it’s outright reckless. Everything they have seen on the ship suggests that the Aliens (I forget the name of the species) VASTLY outclass them, to go back for people who ARE DEAD. If it was just Archer, I would say that it’s his decision to make. But it’s NOT just him, Archer basically puts his ENTIRE CREW in danger over a bunch of corpses
I really liked this one. Or maybe I just disliked the pilot episode so much that it looks a lot better by comparison. The only part I didn’t enjoy was them stranding that poor slug on an alien world. It would have been better to let the doctor’s bat eat it.
Do we know why the bad guys killed everyone on that derelict ship, trussed them up to drain their fluids, and then just left? Why wouldn’t they stick around until they got what they wanted? Or, if they had somewhere to be, why didn’t they take their victims in tow? We know they had a tractor beam.
The question’s rhetorical, but I bring it up as another of the many questions raised, but not answered by this episode
@60/terracinque: I liked it that the crew didn’t always figure out the explanations behind things in these early episodes. It helped convey the sense that it’s a big, mysterious universe that they’re only starting to explore. Although it might’ve been nice to have eventual followup on these things.
I completely agree that this was a missed opportunity to deal with real differences in cultures and challenge assumptions. And it would have so vastly improved the series to explore the strength in difference. For example, the writers could have had Archer poke around and interfere with the death traditions of an unknown species over T’Pol’s objections. Then, have it work out well in the end when, after some initial tension, the species is friendly anyway, forgives the unintentional error and provides some useful info about where they’re headed. Archer and T’Pol could have a conversation about the risks and rewards of diving headfirst into the unknown, and the benefits and drawbacks of their different approaches. Or even keep the same story line except 3 crew are killed during the attack. Have T’Pol point out to Archer that those three are dead because he decided to turn back for some corpses. Although he defends his actions, points out the successful first contact and argues that humans choose to risk death in exploration, be it on Polynesian rafts or arctic expeditions, also show him struggling with the impacts of his choices. There are so many ways to write this that are better than what we got.
Also, the total disregard for the ecological impacts of dropping a slug on a different planet, and the boredom of officers who have been in space for 2 weeks and have already visited a whole planet with life that no human has ever seen before, all make me think that they really should have included at least some human scientists on the “exploratory mission.”
Wow. And what I appreciated was the boredom. Because life on a starship has to be a lot tedium and waiting, testing out targeting computers, eating, watching slugs. IDK, then again one of my favorite films is Jean Dielman, which is mostly three hours of a woman repeating the same rituals every day.
What I continue to appreciate about this show is the low-fi jankiness of early Federation space travel. It’s the incredibly manual docking procedure with the swing down ladder, the physical loading of torpedos, the clunky computers, a sliding window covering over the decontamination area. And, hey, actual EV suits because space is dangerous and we don’t have fancy dermal regenerators or instant innoculations for the radiation of the week.
I agree that the character development is so by-the-book it could be a high school play. It would have been incredibly painful without Park. Bakula continues to unimpress with his fluffy eyebrows and overgrown boyscout routine.