Enterprise review: "Singularity".
(Episode 35)

The idea behind a Teaser where the only conscious character gives a Captain's Report about how the ship is headed into a blackhole and everyone is going to die sounds good, but yet they still managed to screw this up. It just looked like actors laying on the floor (even TNG did that badly) while T'Pol reads a cue card. As we see too often whenever Enterprise gets close to getting it right, the idea was sound but the execution was bad.

I know Vulcans are suppose to be emotionless (unless a writer needs otherwise for whatever his current story to work), but I can see even Professor Stephen Hawking's robot voice would have faired better. And if no one is piloting the runaway ship, do I have to ask why it was still flying straight? Even auto-pilot would have a hard time with a black hole. If the ship is in danger, why was T'Pol just standing there like a tard? Go vent the tachnobabble exhaust or something.

I can imagine FOX's "Firefly" doing this tons better, which has already proven itself far superior to Enterprise within just a half-dozen episodes, while B&B's decade and decade-and-a-half Trek experience still proves above and beyond that they and the crew working with them are still hacks.

This of course comes the same week we learn "The Communicator" achieved a record-low audience and tied with their record-lowest rating.

After I watched the Teaser and saw the story was already "joined-in-progress", and knowing full well Rick Berman and Brannon Braga can't push the dramatic structure of story-telling beyond recycling past scripts, it wasn't too hard to see that this episode was going to be "framed", a term writers use for a story that opens "after the fact". Meaning, it opens after everything had already happened, which is suppose to raise questions to get the viewers interested (What caused the crew to become unconscious? Why wasn't T'Pol affected? How did they get so dangerously near a black hole?), then the story is filled in via flashback as T'Pol tells us what happened through her Log Report.

Other "framed" Trek episodes include Deep Space 9's "Whispers", in which O'Brien tells us through a Log Report about a conspiracy he uncovered on DS9 (shown in flashback), Deep Space 9's "In the Pale Moonlight", in which Sisko tells us via Log Entry how he tricked the Romulans into engaging the Dominion (shown in flashback), Voyager's "Thirty Days", in which Tom Paris tells us through a letter to his dad how he disobeyed an order and got temporarily demoted (shown in flashback), Voyager's "Macrosm", in which Janeway returns to Voyager and we see in flashback how the ship was over-run by viral lifeforms, and I believe TNG's "Suspicions" was framed, in which Beverly Crusher tells us of an event in which she risks her career to clear the name of a murdered Ferengi scientist (shown in flashback).

Framed stories are meant to be rare and special. Some of the above stories work ("In the Pale Moonlight"), and some don't ("Macrosm", written by Braga), but this dud of an episode of Enterprise wasn't worth producing, let alone wasting one of your few chances to properly "frame" a deserving episode. It's interesting that the worst framed Trek episodes were a Braga-written Trek episode and a Braga-produced Trek episode. But then these people are graduates from the Clown College.

As much as a prequel is suppose to include the crew pioneering much of what we know on Trek today, even by Archer's time Starfleet (emphasis on "FLEET") should have already had much of what Reed was trying to come up with already worked out prior to even Enterprise's launch. Even Aircraft Carriers and Submarines have Tactical Alerts and such, so the idea that such a major thing is lacking and needs to be invented by Reed is just plain stupid.

Then of course there's the problem that it contradicts TOS, which alone is probably why B&B did it. They don't like the original series, and they want to make it look bad so people will forget it.

Almost a season and a half now, and suddenly out of the blue out of nowhere, Archer decides his chair has been uncomfortable all this time.

It's interesting that the writers chose to make his chair uncomfortable to explain away Bakula's hammy acting in the past episodes where he is always wandering around the bridge being melodramatic instead of sitting still (as Archer himself says "Haven't you noticed I don't sit down much?"). Do you think the fixed chair will stop him from wandering around the bridge in all future episodes when he's giving a Braga-written speech?

But this still doesn't answer the question, why was Bakula so good on "Quantum Leap", and so bad on this show.

And yet once again T'Pol says she has heightened hearing, which still contradicts Tuvok's statement in Voyager's "Innocence" that his pointy ears don't make him hear better. Yeah, maybe the pointy ears have nothing to do with Vulcans hearing better naturally, but it's still bugging me and still comes to mind every time she picks up on little children crying out for Superman.

While the premise was suppose to be about characters performing mundane tasks repeatedly, Tucker's constant intentional drilling to drive T'Pol away instead of asking her to leave for a few minutes while they finish was an outright act of meanness and was out of place, for the character as well as the story's premise.

Archer said it would have been easier to write a whole book than to write a single page preface on his father.

And perhaps someone would care to explain why someone was writing an unauthorized book on Archer's father without Archer's involvement, yet get approval from Archer enough to get him to proofread it and write a preface? Does this make sense to anyone who doesn't work for the show? Why WAS Archer NOT writing the book? Writing it at the same time he was exploring space would have helped him put his father's work in context, and the options for great scenes, flashbacks and Teasers to lead into many episodes' stories were unlimited. Well, they were unlimited to REAL writers.

Archer was trying to record the preface (by speaking into the computer), yet Porthos kept barking. T'Pol was suppose to proofread it later.

Wouldn't it be funny if when T'Pol read the preface, it went "My father Henry Archer arf arf shut up Porthos helped build the first warp-five starship engine."

Hey, at least I'm trying. B&B promised a whole new level of comedy and it isn't here.

So, this episode is trying to tell us that deep down inside Phlox is a murderous nut waiting to crack?

It was only a few episodes back that Mayweather wound up in sickbay. Then a few episodes before that he wound up in sickbay. Then there's that episode where he was wounded and wound up in sickbay. Are we seeing a new trend here? Can't come up with good stuff for the black guy, so have him get iunjured? Yeah, that's character development.

A High Point?

I need to point out the Special Effects at the end was good. Also, Reed's Tactical program kicking on at the right time was good.

But Special Effects don't carry a show. And watching all the endless tedious scenes like Hoshi whining about her cooking and crap was annoying and makes this show overall unwatchable. Just watch the last six minutes. Actually, just watch the last five minutes prior to the last minute, then turn the channel.