Enterprise review: "A Night in Sickbay".
(Episode 31)

In "Minefield", Reed was going to tinkle in his spacesuit. Earlier we learned that Producer Brannon Braga thought some first season episodes were "poopy". In this episode, the dog tinkles on some trees, then Archer threatens to tinkle on the trees. And now after finding out Archer offended the aliens again, Tucker asks Archer if he ate some cabbage before he left, implying he farted in front of them.

Yeap. This is the mind set of the Enterprise Producers. Pee-pee, poopy and fart jokes. Watch the Ratings Fall!!!!!

They head down to get some rare and hard-to-find plasma injectors. So they DON'T take the Engineer? Or ANY Engineer. But they take T'Pol and a dog?

They were JUST at a repair station that repaired the whole ship! Even if you count the damage they sustained trying to escape the station, that doesn't explain the worn out plasma injectors.

Archer is absolutely baffled about how he offended the aliens. But yet when T'Pol finds out and explains it to him, Archer goes maniacal and doesn't care, making threats to pee on the trees himself. The writers suck.

I just wanted to point out how this would have looked and sounded if Voyager was written this way.

But then the Kazons did want some water.

Let's Rock and Roll!

Potty humor was what made The Next Generation such a great show.

Gene would have been proud of the quality writing that still sustains Star Trek to this very day with "Enterprise".

Captains threatening to piss on you or your stuff is a Star Trek tradition, dating back to the unaired pilot.

Wasn't it?

This episode went out of its way to point out the time on the bottom of the screen, even though nothing really vital or time sensitive was taking place at all.

Then when Archer is in Sickbay and falls asleep, a fade-to-black showed that a passage of time (several hours) took place before Archer re-awoke, but the time stamp on the screen was suddenly now missing. Make up your mind. Is it important or not?

Interestingly, Archer had NO hints, clues, fantasies or illusions concerning T'Pol or even sex with anybody until AFTER Phlox repeatedly brought it up.

While the writers, who (Surprise!) also happened to be series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, want us to believe that Phlox can double as a psychiatrist and knows the crew better than they do, instead they're giving us the illusion that it's actually Phlox who's forcing these thoughts on Archer due to his constant harrassment of the subject.

Instead of wasting scene after scene on sweaty people rubbing decon gel on eachother (that's not sexy, that's stupid), it would have been better to have a montage scene of Archer entering Phlox's hospital and taking up residence, copying scene-by-scene the opening of "The Odd Couple" while the Odd Couple music plays in the background.

It would have been funny if when Archer layed down on the Bio-Scan bed to take a nap, he hit the wrong button and the bed slid him into the wall socket. Instead he layed down on some other bed.

While we're on the subject of comedy, it was funnier in the preview when Archer mispoke on the bridge and we saw the crew reaction.

Interestingly, while the scene in the preview was edited to look like it was on the bridge, the actual scene itself played out in the sickbay, while the reaction shots of the crew on the bridge were taken from other episodes, including the shot of Reed who in this episode was ONLY seen in the dream sequence. Besides lying with yet another misleading preview, the joke was then played out one step too far when Archer started babbling about T'Pol's lips.

Some of the best scenes on "Star Trek" were between Kirk and Yeoman Rand. With the possible exception of when Kirk's transporter duplicate attacked her, many of the only 13 episodes she appeared in included great scenes comprised of just glances, difficulty in finding the right words to say and holding eachother during a crisis.

And even though B&B insist that they want to recapture the magic of the old series, instead of this and the drama and conflict that comes with it they decide to focus on the equivelant of Kirk and Spock and force some type of sexual tension there, even though they already had established Tucker and T'Pol in Decon before, as well as Reed having fantasies about T'Pol and commenting on her nice bum (which isn't so nice). With Archer convincing Hoshi to stay onboard when she wanted to leave, and Archer being her guide to how to fulfil her job, it could have been realistic to have Archer and Hoshi together - if written right (meaning NOT written by B&B). It was after all Hoshi who had to work with the Captain and the aliens the most, while T'Pol wasn't even necessary to the story at all.

Instead what we have is the hottest woman on the ship (Hoshi) alone and forgotten, while every man onboard is slobbering all over T'Pol, an ugly whore with a boy haircut who looks like someone punched her in the mouth and starved her for two weeks.

The transition to Archer's dream just came out of nowhere. Then when the dream shows Archer at his dead dog's funeral, it leads to sex. Huh?

It's getting more and more difficult to sit through an episode of this show without falling asleep. They're dumbing it down further and ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Oh yeah. I forgot. I'm not in this episode.

Again.

The dog didn't move!!!

For thirty minutes!!!

You killed him!!!!!

It appears they used more than one fake dog for this episode. But they looked real enough that I can't understand why Paramount doesn't officially license them as stuffed animals or replicas or something. When Clinton was in the White House, they made stuffed "Socks the Cat" animals that sat on your couch. When "Family Affair" was on, every girl bought a Mrs. Beasley doll. "Enterprise" sucks, but even I'll take a stuffed Porthos.

"We deserve another raise."

I hate these Bastards.