Star Trek: Enterprise Second Season
Original air dates: September 2002 – May 2003
Executive Producers: Rick Berman, Brannon Braga
Captain’s log. Archer manages to rescue himself from the future, with help from T’Pol, and presumably fix the dystopian future he and Daniels were trapped in. Aside from finding a time-displaced ship, that’s the last we hear of the Temporal Cold War until the season’s end, when Future Guy and the Suliban (the name of my next band) provide necessary exposition to Archer and the gang about the attack on Earth.
Between those two are a series of adventures. They have their first encounters with Romulans and Tholians, they get trapped by a repair station that’s too good to be true, they have difficult new encounters with Klingons and Kreetassans, and they deal with issues involving Earth Cargo Ships and leftover Borg.
Past encounters with Vulcans are revisited, including T’Pol being telepathically raped, which has dire consequences both biologically and sociologically; a mission from T’Pol’s past coming back to haunt her; and the ongoing Andorian-Vulcan conflict, which Archer winds up thrust into the middle of. Archer also finds himself imprisoned on no fewer than three occasions: once by mistake while making first contact with the Enolians, once by the Klingons who accuse him of consorting with rebels against the empire, and once by a Tellarite bounty hunter who wants to turn him into the Klingons after he escaped the latter’s imprisonment.
We get a couple of flashbacks, including to T’Pol’s ancestor who lived on Earth for a time in the twentieth century, to everyone’s surprise, and Archer and Tucker’s first meeting during the early days of the Warp Five Project.
Plus, they make several first contacts besides the aforementioned Romulans, Tholians, and Enolians: the Retellians and Kriosians, the Takret, the Arkonians, the Vissians, the wisps, and the people on the planet where Reed left a communicator behind that the writers couldn’t be bothered to name.
At the end of the season, Earth is attacked by a mysterious probe, and the finale closes with Enterprise entering the Delphic Expanse in search of those responsible, thus setting the next season up…
Highest-rated episode: “Judgment,” the first Enterprise episode to be ranked at 10.
Lowest-rated episode: “A Night in Sickbay,” the first Enterprise episode to be ranked at 0.
Most comments (as of this writing): “Carbon Creek,” with 64. Apparently talking about Pennsylvania in 1957 is more compelling than talking about deep space in 2153…
Fewest comments (as of this writing): A tie between “Canamar” and “The Catwalk,” both with only 21.
Favorite Can’t we just reverse the polarity? From “Future Tense”: When examining a strange pod that they can’t get any readings on until they open it, Archer, T’Pol, and Reed are remarkably cavalier and unsafe with doing so, as are Tucker and Reed later: they don’t wear any kind of protective gear, they open the hatch and hope that there’s no poisons or contagions inside (seriously, when we got to Archer opening the hatch and shoving his head in to smell it, I was flashing to the scene in Galaxy Quest where Guy cries out, “Is there air? You don’t know!”), and then they fondle all the stuff inside.
Favorite The gazelle speech: From “Shockwave, Part II”: This is the episode from which this section title comes from. Archer talks about how gazelles are born and immediately run with the herd flawlessly, but humans aren’t like that, and they need to stumble. It’s, um—not the best metaphor…
Favorite I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations: From “Singularity”: T’Pol’s usual role as the ship’s only grownup is taken to its absurdist extreme in this episode, as she’s the only one unaffected by the singularity.
Favorite Florida Man: From “Precious Cargo”: Florida Man Kidnapped With Alien Princess!
Favorite Optimism, Captain! From “Horizon”: Phlox has sufficient medical ethics that he won’t make up an illness to help T’Pol get out of Movie Night. He also has insufficient human social skills to realize that you shouldn’t talk during the movie…
Favorite Ambassador Pointy: From “Shockwave, Part II”: Soval stands by his insistence that Enterprise’s mission should be recalled, his primary evidence being the number of armed conflicts they’ve gotten into in general and their actions leading to the destruction of the monastery on P’Jem and freeing of 89 Suliban in particular. When T’Pol reminds him of the illegal listening post on P’Jem, he storms out of the meeting.
Favorite Good boy, Porthos! From “A Night in Sickbay”: Poor Porthos gets rubbed in decon gel, gets sick from an alien pathogen, gets a weird transplant, and has to put up with his human being a douchenozzle. Oh, and be replaced by the world’s most unconvincing puppy double for the surgery scene.
Favorite The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… From “The Seventh”: Vulcan helped Agaron take down criminal elements that were dominating the planet with a very large number of deep-cover agents, nineteen of whom went native, which doesn’t speak particularly well of how they train their agents…
Favorite Qapla’! From “Judgment”: We learn in this episode that the warrior caste has the greatest status in the empire—which remains true for the next two centuries—but that it wasn’t always like that, and that Klingons used to value other professions more than they do now, but these days it’s all warriors this and soldiers that. These kids today, with their music and their hair…
Favorite Blue meanies: From “Cease Fire”: There is a faction of Andorians—represented by Tarah—that wants all-out war with Vulcan. Luckily, Shran is one of the cooler heads that prevails.
Favorite No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: From “Precious Cargo”: When Tucker first sees Kaitaama in stasis, he drools pretty openly over how hawt she is. His attraction lessens when she introduces herself by hitting him over the head. But they wind up knocking boots after they crash land, because of course they do.
Favorite More on this later… From “Vanishing Point”: 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.”
Favorite Welcome aboard: We’ve got a mess of recurring characters: Vaughn Armstrong as Forrest (and also as a Kreetassan in “A Night in Sickbay”), Jeffrey Combs as Shran, Jim Fitzpatrck as Williams, John Fleck as Silik, Gary Graham as Soval, James Horan as “Future Guy,” Matthew Kaminsky as Cunningham, Daniel Riordan as Duras, Joseph Will as Rostov, and Matt Winston as Daniels.
Some Trek veterans show up for return engagements, including J. Paul Boehmer (“Carbon Creek”), Scott Burkholder (“The Catwalk”), Michael Canavan (“First Flight”), Dennis Cockrum (“The Communicator”), Brian Cousins (“The Catwalk”), Michael Crawic (“Carbon Creek”), Leland Crooke (“Precious Cargo”), the great Bruce Davison (“The Seventh”), Robertson Dean (“Marauders”), Michael Ensign (“Stigma”), Nicole Forester (“Horizon”), Danny Goldring (“The Catwalk”), Brad Greenquist (“Dawn”), Francis Guinan (“The Communicator”), Jeffrey Hayenga (“Stigma”), Bari Hochwald (“Marauders”), Laura Interval (“Cogenitor”), the late great Andreas Katsulas (“Cogenitor”), Tim Kelleher (“The Communicator”), Scott Klace (“Precious Cargo”), Jordan Lund (“Bounty”), Aaron Lustig (“The Catwalk”), Morgan H. Margolis (“Vanishing Point”), Larry Nydrom (“Marauders”), Robert O’Reilly (“Bounty”), the great Suzie Plakson (“Cease Fire”), F.J. Rio (“Cogenitor”), Mark Rolston (“Canamar”), David Selburg (“Carbon Creek”), Christopher Shea (“Cease Fire”), Bruce Wright (“The Expanse”), and Keone Young (“Vanishing Point”).
Some other nifty guests include both Ann Cusack and Hank Harris as 1957 humans in “Carbon Creek,” Gregg Henry as an alien stuck with Tucker in “Dawn,” Melinda Page Hamilton as one of Phlox’s wives in “Stigma,” Sean Whelan as a really annoying fellow prisoner in “Canamar,” Joan Pringle and Corey Mendell Parker as Mayweather’s Mom and brother in “Horizon,” Mark Chaet, Laura Putney, and D.C. Douglas as three ornery Denobulan geologists in “The Breach,” Bonita Friedericy, John Short, and Chris Wynne as three human scientists in “Regeneration,” Keith Carradine as a fellow Starfleet captain and Brigid Brannagh as a bartender in “First Flight,” Ed O’Ross as a Tellarite in “Bounty,” and Josh Cruze as a Starfleet captain in “The Expanse.”
But the all-time winner for the season is the trifecta of awesome voices that play Klingons in “Judgment”: John Vickery as Orak, Granville Van Dusen as the magistrate, and especially the great J.G. Hertzler as Kolos.
Favorite I’ve got faith… From “The Catwalk”:
“You knew we’d be stuck in here for over a week. You might have given a little thought to making it tolerable.”
“I only had four hours, Malcolm—you’re lucky we’ve got a toilet.”
–Reed pissing and moaning and Tucker refusing delivery of same.
Favorite Trivial matter: It’s gotta be the one for “Judgment,” especially given the number of Easter eggs David A. Goodman put in his script, though the one for “Horizon” deserves honorable mention for all its callbacks and for my nerdity on the subject of Frankenstein.
It’s been a long road… “Weight of the world, Trip.” Where the first season was mediocre but at least showed some promise, the second season did an impressive job of being even more mediocre and fulfilling almost none of that promise.
The two big recurring elements of season one were the Vulcan-Andorian conflict and the Temporal Cold War. The former was only really seen once, in the excellent “Cease Fire.” The latter was only poked at occasionally, and managed to be even more nonsensical than it was in the inaugural season, which is no mean feat. Other than that, it was a bunch of standalone sci-fi episodes that were only distinguishable from TNG and Voyager in that the technology of Archer’s crew was slightly lesser than it was for Picard’s or Janeway’s.
Some of those stories worked nicely, mind you, but even many of those had a weird feeling of inconsequentiality. For example, “Minefield” was a good bit of suspense, but the fact that it was the first contact with the Romulans felt almost muted, while “Regeneration” was a strong action story, but the need to keep information about the Borg minimal kneecapped the episode in many of the same ways as “Acquisition” (though “Regeneration” was actually a good episode). Others were decent concepts that were just horrendously executed (e.g., “Marauders,” “Dead Stop,” “The Communicator,” “Stigma,” “Vanishing Point,” “The Crossing”). And some were just awful from the ground up and from the roof on down the other side, like “Precious Cargo” and “A Night in Sickbay.”
Having said that, the season also had some high points, including one of the franchise’s best Klingon episodes in “Judgment” and a fun flashback in “Carbon Creek” (though it, too, has that air of inconsequentiality that hovers over the entire season).
The show was also hemorrhaging viewers: by mid-second-season, Enterprise was averaging half the viewers it had had in the early first season. In an effort to kickstart the series, a new direction was conceived, which commenced in the finale, “The Expanse,” as they decided to do 9/11 in the future, ending the season on a sour note, albeit a hopeful one for a more coherent show. We’ll see how that worked out over the course of the next six months or so…
Warp factor rating for the season: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido is also doing his semi-annual revival of “4-Color to 35-Millimeter: The Great Superhero Movie Rewatch.” He covered Samaritan last week, and will be covering Black Adam this week.
