Enterprise review: "Judgment".
(Episode 45)

And how exactly did the Klingons get ahold of Captain Archer to begin with?

Or this really cool hand object that allows the wearer to walk through walls.

I can tell you where you can pick up some debris from Suliban and Tholian vessels.

Or how about a quick peak into this book about Romulans I pocketed from a devastated future library.

Want some Mallurian mining equipment?

I know the location of a comet that has a precious mineral so rare, even the Vulcans don't have much of it.

Or if you give me a few weeks, I hear the Borg are coming. Want a Nano-probe? You let me go and it's yours!

Hello? Suliban Cell Ship? It cloaks! Hello?

As if fantasy and dream episodes in the past weren't bad enough, here we get Another 5 minutes of fantasy again when the Klingon mis-remembers his encounter with the Enterprise. As soon as Archer said Enterprise was a battle cruiser, I started remembering all those "dream" versions of Voyager. Archer's words is exactly what Janeway has said in those stupid fantasy versions of them.

I also knew I was wasting more time because not only have we seen this stuff on television several dozen times before, I also knew Enterprise wasn't going to take it any further than recycling and retreading.

And the most elite Chief of Security on the most powerful Starfleet vessel in human history not only manages to lose Archer to the Klingons unexplainably, but how does he rescue him?

He walks in.

Says hi.

And they walk out.

And Rick Berman and Brannon Braga honestly didn't understand why their ratings were so low.

This was the perfect opportunity for a multi-episode story-arc.

1- You got Enterprise coming to the rescue of this drifitng ship trying to escape the tyranny of the Klingons, only to have Enterprise duke it out in a battle. From a production stand-point, you already had to do the computer models and aliens, and you already had to do the battle scenes. So it would have been cheaper to expand on this story than to do yet another self-contained alien-of-the-week episode in its place. The rest was character development.

2- Fill in whatever story you want to put here, but it ends with the Klingons unexpectedly capturing Archer for trial. "Farscape" had the great ability to end regular standard episodes with unexpected twists. It's a shame that with 15 years of Trek under his belt, Berman and Braga can't.

3- The Trial. You already did it. Just move the last 8 minutes at the prison into the next hour. And by re-using the battle scenes from the first episode, it actually CUTS THE BUDGET (because they're used twice instead of once).

4- Escape from the prison. Kirk and McCoy carried the prison scenes for fifteen minutes solid. Archer was in it for just 5 before Reed freely wanders in through the front door. Here you've got the most toughest prison ever, and we don't even get to see an escape? B&B claim they're showing how things end up the way they are by Kirk's time. Showing the reason why the prison increased their security (because of Archer's antics) was a clear opportunity. No surprise that B&B missed it. Remember, they went out of their way to include this specific prison from "Trek 6". They're not filling in the blanks in history that a prequel is suppose to. They're either rewriting already established history or simply name-dropping, as they did here.

B&B whine about "casual viewers" missing episodes. How did Archer get into prison? What did he do to warrant a trial? If you can't sum this up for new viewers, then you suck as Writers and Producers. Clear opportunities to keep "casual viewers" from getting "lost" included when T'Pol updated Admiral Forest (which didn't happen here, even though it should have), or when T'Pol asks for assistance from the Vulcan High Command (which you claimed happened off screen, what a wasted opportunity!), or via the flashbacks from the trial (which you showed anyway!). There's no reason why a multi-episode continuing story could not have been done here in a way that even casual viewers could have easily followed.