Enterprise review: "Canamar".
(Episode 43)

Gold Star Bonus?

You ready for this? It sucked less than usual. But that still doesn't mean it was good.

There's always the same old stupid stuff they still insist on doing, like why didn't the Police take the Shuttlepod when they arrested Archer and Trip. Then there's the fact that T'Pol still sits in the Captain's Chair funny.

But there's lots of little reasons why this episode didn't suck as much as usual. The prison guards cared for eachother when one helped the wounded one off the prison ship. Mayweather and Hoshi shared a glance while T'Pol was babbling away to the viewscreen. The Executive in charge of the planet actually accompanied the Enterprise in search of the prison ship. Everyone hated the alien who wouldn't stop talking. Little things like this all add up, good or bad. Although half or more of these could possibly be completely attributed to the Director, and may not have even been in the script. One powerful bonus, Bakula didn't act hammy in this one.

It's also important to point out that this episode was NOT written by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. And this episode is beginning to add to a pattern. I'm not saying all the ones written by other people don't suck, but the episodes that don't suck do NOT have B&B's name on them as writers too much.

What's interesting is this comes the same week TV Guide does an article about Enterprise's failure. The UPN Network President actually tried to claim that it takes years for some shows to be successful, implying this show would pick up as it goes on (even though the pattern is it gets worse as it goes on, because as these shows go on, B&B get more control). I'm going to point this out to you UPN Bananas reading this: UPN is almost ten years old. Star Trek is 30 years old. Modern Star Trek has been running non-stop for 16 years. Berman has been working on Star Trek non-stop for 15 years. Braga's been there more than a decade. Enterprise is already two years down. And with my guess of it being canceled after about five years, it's almost half over already. You think it'll pick up in a few years? Not only are you stupid, but you should be looking at why it sucks this much to even begin with.

This is the difference between the best show on TV and the worst show on TV.

When "CSI" does a scene where they find blood drops on the dashboard of a car, it plays out for four minutes and it's absolutely fascinating to watch the CSI Team work to uncover the evidence, and also often educational as they discreetly and non-blatantly explain or reveal to the viewers what they're doing and why they're doing it.

When "Enterprise" does a scene where Phlox finds Archer's blood drops on the dashboard of the Shuttlepod, he flipped some buttons on the console on the bridge and told everyone what he had found in under five seconds, and it's STILL boring to watch. He wasn't even in the shuttlepod! He found the blood drops offscreen! He used made-up technobabble crap to figure it out!

Both the "Police" and Archer said they found Archer and Tucker smuggling "contraband". So what was it they were carrying? If nothing was found, would they have still arrested them? Common sense says it would have been mentioned if Archer and Tucker was arrested because "nothing was found". So what was found that caused them to get arrested? Everybody seemed to agree that they were hauling "something". So what's going on here? This was a clear opportunity to add another little gem of a scene. But yet it was completely forgotten?

And why didn't the space police take the Shuttlepod? They actually thought it was best to just let empty vehicles drift aimlessly in orbit of a planet?

"Yeah."

Not only didn't we learn what Archer and Tucker were caught with, if anything, but we never learned what's so special about what everyone else was suppose to be smuggling that they have an entire capturing process of boarding ships and arresting people for.

Canamar was the name of the prison that the ship was being sent to. One problem. We never saw it. Once the prison ship was hijacked, they actually went off into a whole other direction completely. Once again the title just doesn't make a damn bit of sense. It made more sense to name the title after the name of the prison ship they were all stuck on, since the majority of the action took place there.

Why was this episode named after a planet nobody went to and we never saw?