Enterprise review: "Fight or Flight".
(Episode 3)

Fight or Flight? What Fight? What Flight? Where? When? Did my local UPN affiliate forget to air an Act or something?

The Enterprise didn't fight anybody. They merely fired a few shots that strayed off course. It was the aliens that fired the kill shots. It was more like "Watch the aliens fight". And even then the aliens only fired a shot or two themselves.

The Enterprise didn't fly anywhere either. If the situation was too dangerous for them and they had to make a life-and-death decision to stay or go, then the title could actually fit. But the only flying Enterprise did was because T'Pol broken-recordly suggested they take off (as always), while Archer un-characteristically said "Yeah, okay, let's go".

I suppose the title could represent Hoshi Sato because of her temporary desires to go home, but she neither flew nor fought anyone either. I suppose if the Producers were smart enough to place a character onboard the series for the sole purpose of having that person leave a half-season into the show to raise the threat level for the viewers the title would have been perfect, but the Producers aren't that smart.

Alternate titles:

"Lite or Trite"
"Slug or Snooze"
"Map or Nap"
"Drain or Plain"
"Dumb or Dumber"
"Boring or Boring"

Dr. Phlox was brought onboard because he knew how to handle the biology of the Klingon. But the Klingon's gone now. It makes sense to keep Phlox for the other alien encounters yet to come, but it makes more sense to have a real Doctor onboard also to handle the human crew when they get injured. With at least four Doctors working to save Klaang in "Broken Bow", wouldn't it have made sense to have more than one on the ship full time?

If the Producers don't see the potential between two Doctors conflicting with eachother, then they shouldn't be in charge of anything that is considered a "franchise". It's fine and dandy to have the crew have a difficult time with Neelix's medical antics, but having a real human Doctor also having a problem with Phlox's antics as well only further increases the label of "exotic" that the Producers promised but failed to fulfill.

It's a brand new show, with a brand new ship, and now you're up to the first single regular episode after the pilot movie premiere. So what do you do to get viewers familiar with the new settings? You go the entire Teaser and Act One without showing the exterior of the ship not once.

Yes, the Producers were that stupid. New ship. New show. Only the second broadcast. And we had to wait until the episode was 1/4th over before we got to see the ship that the show was set on actually cruising through space.

And to think I now actually miss the old days when Star Trek episodes would open with an establishing shot of the ship at warp.

Berman and Braga claimed that they needed to dig into Trek's past in order to be able to tell fresh, new and different stories that they insisted they couldn't tell in the Picard-Janeway time frame. Yet it appears that many episodes of this new series will involve Away Team trips in which spacesuits are necessary. This is obviously a part of their attempt at showing the earlier years of space travel by having spacesuits needed when in Picard's time they didn't.

It also shows that Berman and Braga have no intelligence as well as brains. Picard's Enterprise never used spacesuits. Sisko's gang never used spacesuits. And Janeway's buddies only used spacesuits when they were able to re-use the suits left over from the theatrical film "First Contact". If aliens in the past (Archer's time) have non-breathable atmospheres on their ships, then why do they all have breathable oxygen atmospheres now (Picard's time)? There was never anything stopping NexTrek, DS9 or Voyager from needing spacesuits for their alien contacts. If the Producers wanted it so much, what was stopping them from sticking Riker in one?

This is just one more example that B&B didn't need to rewrite Trek's history or produce an entire prequal series in order to do stories like this, as there was nothing stopping them from sticking Geordi La Forge in a spacesuit.

Where did Hoshi Sato get her slug from? You mean here we are with the first episode after the premiere movie and already they were coming across planets off screen that we never saw?

Wouldn't it have had a bigger impact if instead of seeing them on the rocky desert planet dropping off the slug, the episode instead opened with the rocky planet where all they find is the slug, their first contact in space?

So we sit through Reed trying to test his torpedoes for twenty minutes, but in the heat of battle he manages to align the mis-aligned targeting systems on his own without any testing just by pushing some buttons on his computer just in time for battle?

What ever happened to the theme of pioneering this new technology in this new time period? I guess Reed is done pioneering the torpedoes now because he got them to work already.

Enterprise fires a few shots, including a dead-on target, but nothing happens. The aliens fire a single shot and the bad aliens' ship explodes in a fireball.

Right.

The big bad ship attacks the aliens, strings them up, pumps out their blood, then attacks the Enterprise. Other aliens arrive to search for their ship, they see the big bad ship attacking the Enterprise. Yet not only does the searching aliens decide to threaten to attack the Enterprise also that is already being attacked, but the big bad ship leaves the searching aliens alone completely even though they already strung up their sister ship's crew. Did the big bad ship not expect a retaliation from the aliens they already attacked?

I'm sure it made sense to the writers of this episode, who of course were series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga.

Hoshi Sato, whose entire career is based on communications with aliens and speaking their new languages, is afraid to attempt to communicate with the aliens and speak their language, instead trying to pass it off to the universal translator whose failure to work properly got Sato a position on the ship to begin with?

Hoshi Sato misinterprets the aliens' language and relays the alien's questions as to why the humans were on the alien ship "two years ago". This surprises Archer for a moment until Sato corrects the translation with "He probably means two days ago". This all came about because of the ship's badly working translator.

But imagine if there was a mystery that was just laid in place with this scene. Imagine if there really were humans onboard these alien's ships two years ago. Who were they? What did they do? Since the aliens also wanted answers, where did these humans go? Why wasn't the Earth governments aware that humans were forcefully boarding unencountered alien ships? The potential was great, and would have made a complicated situation for Archer more complicated while opening threads to be carried into future episodes.

Imagine if there was a mystery involving a group of humans who were two years out ahead of Archer, whether it was part of the "temporal cold war" or not. I could imagine it. Why couldn't Braga? He wrote the line. Why couldn't he see it after he typed the line. When Hoshi Sato translated "two years ago" my interest peaked up greatly. Then they wrote it off as a malfunctioning translator.

Fill in your own "Section 31" or "temporal cold war" backstory here.

Archer tells Sato "Half the crew would give their eyeteeth [upper canine teeth] to be going over there."

One of the reasons why Berman & Braga insisted that they needed to do a prequal series is because they couldn't write the characters normal because they were stuck in the 24th century way of talking.

Brannon Braga said:

"I needed something new, something fresh. As a writer, I don't think that I could have written one more line of dialogue for Voyager. I really had just about had it with the 24th Century. One thing I'm finding here after having written ['Broken Bow'] plus 4 other episodes is that I do feel that I'm writing a different television show. Actually, Rick Berman and I were heavily influenced by [successful dramas like 'The West Wing' and 'The Sopranos'] We watch television too. Week after week we would watch shows like The Sopranos and we'd say 'Wouldn't it be great if we could just write people without having to worry about that somewhat stylised, neutral way of talking?' We were really pining to write characters like that. This concept allows us to really start writing more naturalistic characters."

So we get to see Archer crawling on his floor looking for a squeak he insists he keeps hearing. Do you think he'll ever find it? Do you think it will ever be brought up again? No!

In the early episodes of Voyager, as well as Deep Space 9 and NexTrek, they would often place the characters in pointless scenes like this just to stall time and to fill in space. Archer crawling on the floor looking for his squeak is just like something we would have saw first-season Torres doing in Engineering or first-season Janeway doing in her Ready Room. I remember a pointless scene of first-season Riker watching holographic women play the harp.

Perhaps if they replaced Sato's Slug with an alien hampster that got loose, not only would we have had the fun of watching Sato and Dr. Neelix continously trying to find the scurrying hampster before Captain Archer learns an alien rodent is loose on his ship, but Archer could have found that the squeak was from the hampster living under his floorboards. Watching his dog Porthos sensing something under the floor and barking wildly at an unseen creature moving around under the floor would have been great.

Instead we get a slug that we neither care about nor see the crew first discover it, and a squeak that is never solved and never will be.

"Captain's Starlog. After we saved the aliens, we made peaceful contact with them off screen. They then invited us over for dinner, we exchanged information, they gave us medals, helped fix my floor's squeak, and made me an official Ambassador to their people, off screen. They gave us new ideas, a dictionary so Sato can talk to them in the future, and even saved the life of Phlox's slug, all off screen of course. It was our true first contact out here in space, a momentous occasion, and I'm sure the Admirals at home will be thrilled with the new information we transmit back to them - off screen. Archer out."