Enterprise review: "Dead Stop".
(Episode 30)

Phlox injected Regulan Bloodworms into Reed, and actually lost one. What?!?!

Regulan Bloodworms are dangerous. All fans know it. But yet suddenly B&B insist "oh, no, they're really cute and we use them all the time". And for "medicinal" purposes no less. Why the hell would writer David Gerrold establish Regulan Bloodworms into Star Trek history in the 1960's unless there was an implied threat and history behind them? And it was just all thrown away by people who most likely have never met David Gerrold, because they wanted to write some joke or turn them into some medical leech?

You know, when Phlox was plastered in "Two Days and Two Nights", it was funny when Phlox suggested using Regulan Bloodworms because the viewers knew they were a threat. Now they just ruined that joke as well.

The more the writers f*ck the fans, the lower their ratings go. And they still don't get it. This "cute" throw-away line just cost them a few more viewers.

Most people don't know this, but the higher the warp speed, the faster the ship travels per speed point. Example, Warp 2 is MORE than twice as fast as Warp 1. So if you traveled a month at warp 1, at warp 2 it would take less than half of that, as you're now traveling at MORE than twice the speed from warp 1. The higher the warp speed, the more speed you pick up with each warp. So when Archer and Tucker suggest at Warp 2 it would take them 10 years to get home, that's actually somewhat plausible.

IF it made sense.

In order to be ten years out at Warp 2, this would probably mean the Enterprise would have to be traveling for its entire one year in space in a single direction, non-stop, 24-hours a day, at Warp 4 or 5 constant, without stopping EVER!

But yet Enterprise has been wandering around aimlessly in circles for one year, constantly zigzagging, backtracking, taking unscheduled detours, traveling at standard speed, etc. They even turned the ship around and started back towards Earth TWICE already, both in "Silent Enemy" and in "Shockwave, Part 1". It took them three episodes just to get to Risa because they kept stopping and going off into different directions. Plus then there's all those off-screen stops we've heard about, like the one mentioned in this episode where a crewmember caught the flu on yet another off-screen planet just a month before. And just 4 days before they stopped by the Romulan planet.

Taking into account the entire first season and all its stops and detours, I'd say at Warp 2 Enterprise would only be 3 or 4 years out at most - IF after every stop they had made they still resumed the same general direction away from Earth every episode. But realistically they're probably still only a year out at Warp 2 non-stop, which would compensate for the constant stops and detours at warp 4. And remember, if they traveled in the same direction for a year, it would still take them the same amount of time to travel back to reach Jupiter Station anyway.

It's only been 4 days since Reed had a rotating steel bar puncture all the way through his leg, pushing the spacesuit material into it, exposing it to the vacuum of space for 10 seconds as well as the spacesuit sealant for hours, contaminating the inside of the leg with all the material the mine had accumulated over the many, many years Reed had stated it was drifting in space, plus any potential radiation that rickety mine had been building up, and even exposed to human pee.

And he can return to duty in one week? Maybe two?

The first crewmember ever to die (excluding Daniels), and the writers expect us to believe it's a main character? This is why the cast needs to be expanded well beyond "seven guys", and also why they needed to have a main character whose entire purpose was to die a year and a half into the series just to throw off viewers and raise the threat level.

Besides, if Mayweather was really dead, we would have heard about it on the internet four months ago. These Paramount guys can't quite keep a secret you know.

Suddenly, out of the blue, out of nowhere, we hear about these great and hilarious things Mayweather did - all off screen of course. There was an episode of Voyager where they thought Janeway was dead, and Harry Kim talked about a touching moment between him and the Captain, when they were eating pie or something. It sounded like a nice moment. Too bad we never saw it.

So here we go again. All the endless boring episodes in the past, and we once again find that all the good stuff is being TOLD to us. Maybe if we actually SAW Mayweather doing this little stunt about the Gelatin, or saw him do ANYTHING for that matter, it would have had value.

Mayweather's dead body lies in the sickbay. Then the real Mayweather is found and brought to sickbay. Common sense says scenes where Mayweather confronts his dead body in sickbay, looking it over, freaked out by it, and not sure what to do with it, etc, would have made great psychological scenes. Do you bury it? Do you have a funeral? Can you salvage any organs? What they have is a complete functional human body that was basically born dead. These ethical questions alone had never been touched on Star Trek before. And the writers miss this? This was common sense!

That's probably why the writers missed it. Because it was common sense.

T'Pol takes injections to hide the natural smell of human bodies. But yet suddenly she's in a dark, damp and smelly room with a dozen inanimate bodies lying there for years, some probably dead, and she doesn't smell a single thing?

Even Archer should have smelled it. And he's stupid.

Tucker said it would be great to have a matter replicator so they can replicate parts, because all they have is a protein resequencer.

Uhm, that protein resequencer had in the past already been replicating bowls, glasses, silverware, etc. It ALREADY replicates matter!!! Yeah, we've seen crew grab a fork or cup and walk over to it, but not every time.

For that matter, why not just ask the Replicator to replicate a Replicator? He didn't even try.

The Repair Station indicates the scratch the Maneuvar Pod put there in "Broken Bow". While Trip's "I was just about to get on that" was kinda funny, the Enterprise MUST have sustained far more damage than that over the year. There must be hundreds to thousands of "scratches" all over the ship. And Tucker spots that specific one?

The Repair Station was only one week away (at a measly warp 2) from a planet the Romulans had taken and guarded with cloaked mines for many years, and not only did the Romulans not care about the Repair Station, but the repair station didn't necessarily seem to be receiving damaged ships courtesy of the Romulans either, as evident that Enterprise never located any debris in the mine field from any other ships, and no Romulans or "Vulcans" were located in that repair facility. "IF" those bodies came from other Romulan-damaged ships, then that means all those ships had engaged the Romulans - and survived to tell about it.

So either a repair station is right next to the border of a hostile enemy and nobody noticed, or the repair station is taking advantage of being next door to a hostile border and every single survivor who escapes the Romulans either manages to still not ever see them, or the ones that did voluntarily decided not to say a single word to anyone ever.

And once again the black guy stands in the background. Sure enough, once Mayweather did get some screen time, he was unconscious in it. And it wasn't even him. It was his dead clone.

Ten seconds putting his shirt on, and three minutes lying on a bed pretending to be dead. Just one more example of the establishment keeping the brother down.