“Vanishing Point”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by David Straiton
Season 2, Episode 10
Production episode 036
Original air date: November 27, 2002
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Tucker and Sato are checking out ruins on a planet, but a diamagnetic storm is moving in faster than expected, so they have to risk taking the transporter. Tucker beams up first at Sato’s insistence, as she doesn’t want to beam up until she knows Tucker made it through safely.
Sato feels out of sorts after her first time through the transporter, and Archer gives her the rest of the day off. She’s the subject of some good-natured teasing in the mess hall, with Reed, Tucker, and Mayweather telling her the story of Cyrus Ramsey, who was lost in an early transporter test and who is now the subject of dozens of ghost stories. Sato has never heard of Ramsey, and is sorry to have heard of him now.
Phlox examines her and assures her that she’s fine, even though her birthmark appears to have migrated during transport. Archer tells Sato that they’re going to retrieve the shuttlepod in the morning. Sato declines the offer to join that landing party.
The next morning, Sato is awakened by T’Pol, who informs her that she’s overslept by three hours. Tucker and Mayweather were taken hostage by aliens on the planet when they went to get the other pod. Sato is confused, as the planet was uninhabited. Archer says it’s fine that she was late, but they need her now to translate the aliens’ language. When she struggles with it, Archer relieves her. Later, she finds out that Baird figured it out, using a very simple technique that Sato herself should have been able to manage—and which, in Sato’s professional opinion, Baird should never have been able to manage.
While showering, Sato sees herself go transparent in the mirror, and then water goes right through her during the shower. People seem to be ignoring her or not noticing her, with T’Pol ignoring repeated requests to sit with her, but T’Pol herself looking up and inviting Sato to join her, as if only just noticing she was there. T’Pol calmly informs her that the hostage situation has been resolved and that Sato has been temporarily relieved of duty, with Baird taking her shifts.
Sato also has trouble operating the turbolift controls, and at one point she thinks she hears Tucker’s and Reed’s voices. (That will probably be important later…)
Sato goes to the gym and works out with Tucker. The latter insists that he feels perfectly fine after the transport. He leaves her alone to work out, but then her hands pass right through the equipment. In the mirror, her reflection vanishes completely.
Later, T’Pol and Tucker enter the gym, but they can’t see Sato. She is considered missing, and nobody on board can see or hear her. Phlox reports to Archer and T’Pol (and, unbeknownst to him, to a sad Sato) that her cellular membranes were deteriorating. It was so minute when he first examined her after transport that he missed it, but that’s probably what happened to her.
Archer has a very awkward conversation with Sato’s father, as he struggles to explain what happened. As she walks despondently through the ship, Sato sees two aliens planting a bomb on the ship. But she can’t get anyone to see or hear her. She finds she can manipulate a couple of lights in Archer’s quarters, but her attempt to communicate with him via Morse Code fails.
She manages to turn off the aliens’ bombs, but the aliens just turn it back on again. She hears Tucker’s and Reed’s voices again, and then suddenly she finds herself on the transporter platform again.
It was all a hallucination while she was stuck in the matter stream for eight seconds. Reed had trouble reintegrating her at first, and she had that entire scenario play out in her head until she rematerialized. She mentions that she’s grateful she didn’t turn out like Cyrus Ramsey, and everyone looks at her all confused, having no idea who that is.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently a diamagnetic storm is way way way worse than an ordinary storm. So stay out of those…
The gazelle speech. The imaginary version of Archer has real trouble making a condolence call to Sato’s Dad.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. The imaginary version of T’Pol is incredibly mean.
Florida Man. Florida Man Regrets Beaming Up First.
Optimism, Captain! The imaginary version of Phlox is pretty much the same as the real one: affable and full of fun stories and generally nifty.
More on this later… Sato’s transporter-phobia will later be seen in other characters (with way less justification), including Leonard McCoy, Katherine Pulaski, and Reginald Barclay. Sato’s complaints about having her molecules scrambled are similar in nature, if not in tone, to those of McCoy’s in particular, while her having hallucinations while in the matter stream is similar to what happens to Barclay in TNG’s “Realm of Fear.”
I’ve got faith… “Starfleet said it’s safe. That’s good enough for me!”
Tucker being all glass-half-full and trusting military standards…
Welcome aboard. Keone Young plays Sato’s old man. Young previous appeared on DS9’s “If Wishes were Horses” as an alien posing as baseball player Buck Bokai. The two aliens are played by Gary Riotto and Ric Sarabia, while Baird is played by Morgan H. Margolis. Margolis previously played a Vaskan on Voyager’s “Living Witness.”
Trivial matters: While the Cyrus Ramsey story turns out to have all been in Sato’s head, something similar will be established to have happened to Quinn Erickson in “Daedelus.”
It’s been a long road… “New forms of transport take a while to get used to.” I kept waiting for something interesting to happen in this episode, but by the time it did, it turned out to be an even bigger letdown.
So we spend an inordinate amount of time with Sato being incredibly sulky. Linda Park is a very expressive actor, but watching her be whiny and moany for an hour is her least compelling mode, and it’s all we get. (I found myself longing for batshit Sato from last episode, bellowing for carrots.)
Buy the Book
Nona the Ninth
Then we get the alien threat, and I’m thinking finally, we’re getting something interesting here, the ship’s in danger, they probably are accidentally responsible for Sato’s condition, and she’ll save the day and all that—but no, it all turned out to be a lengthy hallucination. Which means that nothing actually happened in this episode after the teaser.
In Archer’s case this is a blessing, because holy crap, that was the worst condolence call in the history of condolence calls. Prior to finding out it was all imaginary, I was thinking that it’s a very good thing nobody’s died for real, because when someone does, the families of same are not gonna be happy with how they find out…
Oddly, the thing that annoyed me most was the name Cyrus Ramsey. Hoshi Sato is from Japan. She was teaching in Argentina when we first met her. Yet her subconscious comes up with an aggressively white-guy name for this person who had a transporter accident. Mostly because this script was by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, the co-creators and by far the most prolific writers on this show, and if Enterprise has shown us nothing else, it’s that their world is mostly populated by white guys.
That, I admit, is a personal bugaboo, but I mainly mention it because the rest of the episode was so incredibly uninteresting and then not even something that really happened in the fictional setting, that I find myself nitpicking the nomenclature.
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido is writing a Resident Evil comic book miniseries that serves as a prequel to the animated Netflix series Infinite Darkness. Entitled The Beginning, the cover for the first issue was recently revealed on Keith’s blog. That inaugural issue should go on sale soon.
While I was re-watching this, my reaction was exactly the opposite to yours. A character story about Sato slowly going insane, and then they had to introduce a bunch of aliens because they couldn’t leave well enough alone. The story was not perfect, but I took it as a play on Hoshi’s well-established anxieties — about wearing space suits, about going into the field. Not a memorable story, and I didn’t remember the resolution from first watching years ago, but even with that, better than a 2.
Watching it now for the first time on UK broadcast channel Sky Mix.
Not a great episode, but I would give it 4
The worst thing is probably the incidental music was too intrusive.
“It was all a dream” should never be the ending to your story. Never.
I distinctly remember at the time that after this episode aired, people over at the Trek BBS were joking that the title referred to the ratings and fan interest having reached the vanishing point.
“I was sure I was going to be the next Cyrus Ramsey.”
This is one of those episodes where the ending negates much of what went before. Not completely, since we still get a look at Hoshi’s subconscious fears, but there’s no point trying to apply any logic to it. It seems a slight backwards step to make Sato afraid of new stuff, and panicking at not being able to translate alien languages, but we’re dealing with her subconscious here, so it might just mean she’s got it pretty well buried. At least the regulars get decent material as versions of themselves who think Sato’s dead, and Archer gives her a fairly decent pep-talk in reality.
Tucker and Sato use the transporter for the first time. Tucker notes Archer has used it (in ‘Broken Bow’) and Reed has used it twice (‘The Andorian Incident’ and ‘Detained’). Since it’s mostly in Hoshi’s head, we should ignore much of the information given here but replacement communication officer Crewman Baird is presumably real, as is the fact Hoshi’s parents are both alive. (And yes, she imagines Archer to be really bad at breaking the news of her death to her family.) Mayweather only appears in Hoshi’s hallucination.
I remember being happy that they were highlighting Hoshi for the episode, and then becoming progressively more distressed by the fact that she was being featured in such a boring and ultimately pointless episode.
I was amused that relabeled PowerBlocks and the human gyroscope are apparently the pinnacle of fitness equipment in the 22nd century.
According to Broken Bow, Hoshi was teaching linguistics in Brazil not Argentina.
This episode is a big “meh” and a colossal waste of time. And while I know Linda Park can act, I just could not relate to how understated she was playing Hoshi for most of this episode, especially after being completely “phased” unless she was told to play it that way. If people could no longer see me and I was “phased” then I would be completely freaking out. For one thing, how am I going to eat? I’m going to slowly die of starvation.
We’re definitely in the doldrums of season two now.
Easily one of the worst episodes of the series, if not the franchise. Nothing about it worked for me. Maybe it’s because I figured out it was a hallucination pretty early on, so I knew the whole thing was pointless. Also, I thought it served Hoshi poorly; by this point she’s grown a lot and become more confident, so it was a lousy idea to revert her to her early first season “Oh, I’m so scared of everything to the point that I have no business being on a starship” characterization. Just a totally useless episode.
In general, I’m not a fan of episodes whose events seem real but turn out to be dreams or hallucinations. In my experience, dreams are far too non-linear and stream-of-consciousness for a rational, awake observer to mistake them for reality. So it’s a very artificial, unrealistic story device.
Good point, Keith, about the writers’ total failure, as usual, to portray Hoshi in a way that reflected her being a native of Japan in even the slightest way. Japan has its own rich lore and iconography about ghosts, spirits, hauntings, and the like. Imagine if the antagonist had turned out to be the yuurei of Cyrus Ramsey attempting to discharge his urami at being wrongfully killed by the transporter, with Hoshi needing to convince it to let go of the emotional conflict that kept it bound to this plane, which in turn could’ve helped her work through her own phobia.
Not sure I agree about “Cyrus Ramsey” being an aggressively white name. While “Ramsey” is a name of Anglo-Saxon origin, “Cyrus” comes from Persian by way of Greek. If anything, the name sounds to me like a play on the names of the ancient kings Cyrus and Rameses, which suggests a Biblical allusion. Although that doesn’t explain why Hoshi would hallucinate such a name, or why the writers would choose it.
#2
Unless that story is being written by Benny Russell.
Ramsay Street is a soap opera setting in Australia; they’re neighbours.
It is a dead end, though.
The episode… I don’t like it-was-a-dream episodes with possibly an exception for Data in “Star Trek” and maaaybe the dreaming aliens on Voyager, and the other aliens in dream episodes tend to be not especially interesting. Perhaps that’s where they let designers try out new ideas, but the story would work with Klingons.
The first two seasons are full of aggressively unambitious storytelling and this one is the probably the least ambitious of the lot, since it’s literally All A Dream. That said, I remember that I was invested in the creeping insanity/ ghost stories in space plot before it all turned out to be in Hoshi’s head.
I can’t disagree with any point made here.
It’s telling that I had a low opinion of Voyager when it originally aired, and yet due to KRAD’s timing, I’m overlapping my rewatches and enjoying Voyager a lot more.
@8 You took the word right out of my mouth. Meh, indeed.
Yes, this one is pretty bad. Regressive characterization, boring plot, and the twist that none of it actually happened. The only things I actually remembered about it before reading the recap were Hoshi’s being mopey, Buck Bokai being her dad, and that it was all a dream, which annoyed me. You should only employ that twist if something interesting is also going on in the waking world.
I know there are more problematic episodes of Enterprise, but this is the one I skip on rewatches because nothings actually happens.
Hallucination stories (or comas) are easily the worst episodes in the genre and should be banned. Not sure why writers keep doing them. Maybe we need to pass a law?
@17/T: “Hallucination stories (or comas) are easily the worst episodes in the genre”
Counterargument: “The Inner Light.” Also “Far Beyond the Stars.”
Any category of story can be done well or badly. If quality resulted from category alone, it would be easy to make every story good.
Yeah, this one is not very good. Maybe the next one will be bet– Oh no.
T: as a writer, I find the notion of banning a kind of story to be revolting. And, as I’ve often said, ideas and concepts are irrelevant to quality. It’s the execution of the idea that matters.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This isn’t showing up on the series page, by the way.
@9 I would pay good money for that angry transporter yuurei story, if you ever feel like writing it.
I guess maybe this episode gives some insight into how Hoshi sees her crewmates, but mostly an exercise in frustration. I would rather have seen Hoshi and Trip stuck on the planet trying to ride out the storm, except they already did that before.
@21. cap-mjb: Where this episode is concerned, that might be more of a feature than a bug.
@krad: I have slightly kinder feelings toward the main body of this episode than you do, but that ending unquestionably leaves all hopes of entertainment writhing in an unbearable agony of disappointment. In all honesty this particular development might well have been salvaged had it come at some earlier in the plot of an episode that actually dealt with Ensign Sato’s efforts to handle her rather traumatic experience in the transport buffer and the relapse into her earlier fears it induced (This might work especially well if her visions of out-of-synch aliens planting bombs are taken entirely seriously by the crew, but eventually proven to be false; learning that her friends not only respect her trauma but continue to trust in her recovery would likely come as a boost to her healing process).
Also, given the various transport-related mishaps depicted in STAR TREK (at least one of them horribly lethal, others merely tragic and a few outright terrifying – wasn’t the discovery of the Mirror Universe part of a transporter malfunction?) it’s more than a little unfair to poo-pooh Doc McCoy’s ferocious distrust of the device, not least since (if memory serves) ENTERPRISE itself establishes that the first human to build a transporter device lost his son to the gizmo (I cannot remember if this was a permanent or ‘merely’ a years-long loss).
I certainly wouldn’t be prepared to use a transporter except in an emergency situation and I’m not ashamed to say so.
@23/ED: “not least since (if memory serves) ENTERPRISE itself establishes that the first human to build a transporter device lost his son to the gizmo”
In prototype, sure. Dozens of experimental heavier-than-air craft failed miserably before the Wright Siblings (their sister was an invaluable part of the team despite being effaced from history) got theirs to work. But that doesn’t mean today’s aircraft aren’t safe. They didn’t clear transporters for human use until they fixed the early problems and could be sure they were reliable.
Keep in mind that the transporter mishaps we see in Trek are almost always the result of exceptional, external circumstances, like the ship being under attack or the transporter being exposed to some weird substance or energy effect. And even then, they’re rarely fatal. The deadly mishap in ST:TMP was a big deal precisely because it was so rare. It happened because Kirk rushed the launch of the ship and forced them to skimp on the safety checks.
You’d think an episode that mixes up Realm of Fear and The Next Phase would be a sure hit, especially considering that Realm of Fear is a superb character study of transporter phobia, and one that came from Brannon Braga himself (based on his fear of flying). And it happened to be a good ghost story too. Plus, using a character as endearing as Hoshi as the protagonist should have sealed the deal. Vanishing Point should have been a top tier episode.
And yet, somehow, they messed this one up. Part of this is can be attributed to the ending. That it was all an illusion is enough of a story cheat that sours the whole deal. But they’re also asking us to buy the notion that Hoshi somehow imagined the equivalent of a full day’s shift while she was in the middle of the beaming process. That’s a complete break from reality. Trek was never into doing hyper-subjective character digressions that broke from their own reality, unless it serviced a mental asylum story, such as TNG’s Frame of Mind, or a telepathy-induced prison nightmare, like DS9’s Hard Time. Even Barclay’s transporter nightmares weren’t 40 minute stories.
I didn’t peg that this was a hallucination as quickly as I should have, but for me the thing that clinched it that something was wrong was that for the first time, I actually thought Tucker was a decent character. I’ve been unbelievably frustrated with him and this was the first time I thought “Well, maybe he’s OK after all.” Nope.
I guess the one interesting thing you could get out of this episode is an analysis of what Hoshi’s versions of the crew members tell us about her relationships with them, but that’s abotu it.
@24. ChristopherLBennett: I agree that the transporter only rarely malfunctions, but I still maintain that those rare malfunctions not only tend to be quite spectacular, they also remind us that the transporter – by it’s very nature – poses it’s users some truly frightening questions about the nature of existence (Well, perhaps only the one, but it’s a BIG one: “Is the me who enters the transporter the me who pops out at the other end?”).
Quite frankly I find it all too easy to believe that this question eats away at a certain percentage of the population to the point where their willingness to use the transporter as a default is more or less nil.
Put another way – flying has been a dream of humankind since the first generation of our ancestors looked at a bird on the wing, then thought “Wish I could do that” but I’m not sure than anyone in Human history has dreamed of being taken to pieces right down to the molecular level (though I suspect there might well have been a few nightmares with that particular subject).
@27/ED: “I agree that the transporter only rarely malfunctions, but I still maintain that those rare malfunctions not only tend to be quite spectacular”
Except that that’s the selection bias of fiction. Stories are about crises and problems. The times that something works as intended are not interesting enough to generate stories. So stories are always going to focus on the cases where things go wrong, which in an ongoing series can convey the impression that they frequently go wrong. You can say the same about any trope in Trek. How often do warp cores breach or nearly breach despite the dozens of safeguards? How often do deflector shields fail? How often do innocent diplomatic missions go shockingly awry? How often do romantic relationships fall into crisis or end in breakup? If you go by the frequency of problems and failures in fiction, you could conclude that anything and everything is too dangerous to risk.
“(Well, perhaps only the one, but it’s a BIG one: “Is the me who enters the transporter the me who pops out at the other end?”)”
My answer to that question is yes, as spelled out here: https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/on-quantum-teleportation-and-continuity-of-self/
I tend to think that the concept of a “Transporter Malfunction” and hallucinations might have played better if Tucker was the one who got stuck mid transport. Imagine if the hallucination was that the transport took hours (or days), and Tucker spent the episode tearing the Transporter apart searching for the problem while a Shuttlepod on a subsequent mission got stranded on a planet. You can still show the crew acting somewhat out of character (Archer being bossy, T’pol being mean in a Vulcan Supremacist way, Hoshi getting agitated fielding increasingly desperate messages from the stranded crew etc). Even the reveal that it was a hallucination and that the transport only took about a minute could still lead to Tucker deciding to tear the Transporter apart to make it “safe” for the crew to use.
@25
Well, technically, Phlox said that it probably occurred in the last couple of seconds as her matter stream was coalescing.
But more directly to your point, the timing is the most believable part of the story. Haven’t you ever had a dream that seemed like it went on for hours? A REM cycle is not nearly that long, and it is certainly possible to have a complex dream or imagination appear (or, really, come together) along with a perception of time that is vastly different from the actual time taken. In the real world, we don’t construct dreams out of nothing; we assemble them out of bits of things we have already experienced and imagined. Looking back over them and turning them into a coherent narrative reinforces our feeling that the dream was subjectively lengthy, but if a researcher were to mark when we started dreaming and wake us up immediately after the dream ended, we would usually find that we have been dreaming for much less time than we perceived.
@31/sheepdot: It’s a common belief that you can experience a long dream in a short amount of objective time, but science doesn’t bear it out. One study of lucid dreamers suggested that it took the same length of time to dream an event as it appeared to take within the dream. Another study suggested that dream time passes slower than real time, that because of the body’s sluggish responses in sleep, it can take roughly twice as long to perform a dream action as it seems to the dreamer.
“In the real world, we don’t construct dreams out of nothing; we assemble them out of bits of things we have already experienced and imagined. Looking back over them and turning them into a coherent narrative reinforces our feeling that the dream was subjectively lengthy…”
That may be true, but it doesn’t apply to this kind of story, because we, the fully awake viewers, are able to watch the narrative unfold step by step and recognize that it actually is a coherent narrative in a way a dream would not be. Which, as I said, is why I dislike stories that make us think something is real and then reveal it was just a dream. Dreams just don’t work that way.
@32/ChristopherLBennett: I can only say that I have experienced dreams that felt, to me, as if they took days. The science on this isn’t conclusive, at any rate; it is common for people to report the experience of subjectively very long dream time. Some of that is undoubtedly due to the same compression of time scales we see in a TV show or movie, and some may be due to true differences in how time is perceived.
I tend to agree with your second paragraph. Dreams very rarely track well with how the real world works in retrospect. I wasn’t arguing that this type of story was good.
@33/sheepdot: Even if that’s true, I doubt it would go to the extreme of a whole day experienced within two seconds.
@34/ChristopherLBennett: If we’re being charitable, we only need to account for the 45 minutes or so of runtime, assuming that Hoshi experienced/remembered the episode as we did, including implicit/abridged periods that give the illusion of time elapsing.
All the same, you are correct that it is a stretch. Unless, of course, the “dream” is really a reconfiguration of her “neural pathways” (as they like to say) due to some sort of reassembly issue when her matter stream was coalescing (in other words, there was no “dream” at all, just a “memory” of a dream that she recognizes upon reassembly). In which case, Hoshi was right that the transporter is not necessarily reassembling people exactly the way they were when they entered it.
@28: You think so? I spend a lot more time wishing I could just teleport to where I need to be than wanting to fly there!
@35/sheepdot: “Unless, of course, the “dream” is really a reconfiguration of her “neural pathways” (as they like to say) due to some sort of reassembly issue when her matter stream was coalescing (in other words, there was no “dream” at all, just a “memory” of a dream that she recognizes upon reassembly).”
Which makes it even less credible to me that it would conveniently organize into a narratively coherent 40 minutes.
Hey — what if it wasn’t actually a dream? What if she actually crossed streams with a Hoshi from a parallel timeline where these events really happened, like in “Mirror, Mirror,” and gained some of her memories in the process? But the science wasn’t advanced enough for the crew to recognize that, so they thought it was just a dream.
Given a transporter mishap can split you into two people, spontaneously divided neatly amongst your psychological impulses, experiencing a day’s worth of hallucinations in a couple of seconds is pretty small potatoes.
@38/foamy: The difference is that “The Enemy Within” is good enough to make you willing to suspend disbelief.
@CLB: Was “Tuvix”?
@40/foamy: “Was ‘Tuvix’?”
Absolutely. I’m surprised you have to ask. However one feels about the outcome (and it was supposed to be controversial), it was a powerful and compelling story, one of VGR’s very best. It was the best kind of science fiction, the kind that explores moral and philosophical questions in a way that would be impossible to do in a conventional story, because the situation couldn’t exist without the speculative element. It was dramatically compelling with a creatively challenging and difficult moral dilemma, and it featured an excellent guest performance.
“Vanishing Point,” by contrast, is utterly pointless and empty. It raises no challenging ethical or philosophical questions and has no compelling or difficult character conflicts, because most of it didn’t even happen. Its attempt at exploring Hoshi’s character fails because it resets her character to where she was more than a year ago. There’s no there there.
I guess I’m just an old fogie who has been a Trekkie since 1966. I look forward to watching this episode when it comes around on H&I. It’s not the usual bad guy aliens attacking the Enterprise for no reason followed by a shoot out either ship to ship or person to person and Hoshi is the primary character. There was just enough of the mysterious, not-real, aliens to make it creepy enough for me. Even better – no pontificating by Archer or chewing the scenery by Bakula. Even though he’s the captain, he’s my least favorite main character/actor.
The first time I saw this episode, the ending surprised me. In this case, I didn’t mind “it was all a dream” ending because it wasn’t. It was the effect on Hoshi’s mind in part due to her fears and a minor glitch with the transporter.
With a few exceptions, I’ll take an episode of “Enterprise” over an episode of TNG, any day, especially if features another instantaneous romance that might be “forever,” but lasts barely the length of the episode for a crewmember of the ENT-D, or another malfunctioning holodeck!
I’m of mixed feelings about this episode. The first time I saw it, I loved it, in spite of the ‘it was all a dream’ trope. It was at the very least, atmospheric to me and I’m a stickler for atmospheric stories in Star Trek. I thought the sudden introduction of the aliens being on the ship and planting bombs was out of left field, but it’s off-kilterness was something I liked. The whole Cyrus Ramsey story was amusing as something made up by Hoshi’s mind but being used by the mental projections of her friends as good-natured ribbing. It was as if she was poking fun at herself in her subconscious. The second time I watched this episode, however, I didn’t know what to make of it. Reading Krad’s review just now, I guess that kind of makes me realize why I wasn’t as impressed with it the second time.
@CLB/37: That is my head-canon for this episode now. That brilliant retcon puts something interesting in an otherwise completely pointless episode.
What a disservice to both Hoshi Sato and Linda Park. Eduardo is right: putting Hoshi front and center should have made this at least a good episode. But no, Hoshi had to be mopey and sad the whole episode. Hoshi should have also been terrified at the implications of completely dematerializing. For reasons passing understanding, Linda Park wasn’t allowed to play into that existential terror, which we know she could have done effectively, and the whole thing is just boring.
This should have been a great character study of Hoshi Sato, but was sadly the exact opposite. It reverts Sato to season one mode of being afraid of absolutely everything.
What a waste.
Pedestrian and dull. Once we hear the distant voices it is obvious what’s being shown isn’t real.I feel bad for Linda Park that they gave her this one.
I didn’t think this episode was as much of a stinker as others have done, but it would have been better if they had found the bombs were really there, and Hoshi had become aware of them during the transporter malfunction because of [insert psychobabble/technobabble here].
@CLB/9 I’ve seen many comments in these re-watches about how aliens are seen as monocultures with one or two cultural traits – Vulcans are logical, Klingons are warriors etc. Perhaps this is because this is how the writers see humans as well. All humans are 20th/21st century Americans.
I actually really enjoyed the direction and music in the beginning. Everything was nice and disquieting. I suspected some kind of “it was only a dream” ending, which is what we got. Since this is Enterprise‘s version of that TNG episode with Roe and Geordi, I figured it wouldn’t end with her being able to successfully communicate.
I didn’t hate the episode, and at least with it being a dream we didn’t have to deal with the fact that out-of-phase characters don’t fall through deck plating conundrum. Yet it did lack something…