|
|
|
Enterprise review: "Impulse".
(Episode 57)
Reviewed by Richard Whettestone.
THE PREMISE: Newby intern Editors that suck discover the fast forward button on the Paramount editing machines. This, combined with someone teaching them about "jumpcuts" (WHY???), makes this episode all goofy to watch while Archer and gang get chased by zombie Vulcans who want to eat your brains.
"Impulse"
Teleplay by Jonathan Fernandez
Story by Jonathan Fernandez and Terry Matalas
|
|
Captain, her impulse is down to 12 beats a minute. Wait, you're right. I meant to say her ''Pulse'' is down to 12 beats a minute. You caught me Captain, I'm not really a Doctor. I knew I couldn't keep this charade up for ever.
''Impulse''? What the hell kind of title is that? Nobody was traveling at impulse. The Enterprise wasn't going anywhere. The Vulcan ship was drifting dead. What the hell did ''Impulse'' have to do with anything? Why not call the episode ''Warp 3''? The outcome would have been the same: A title that didn't make any sense.
|
|
|
 Gold Star Bonus!
Stop me if you've heard this before. Hey those rocks are kinda cool. But come on. Special Effects can't carry a show. This is why Star Trek only wins technical Emmys for lighting and crap, and not any creative Emmys for like, say... writing!
I'd rather watch the rocks hit eachother for an hour. It would have made a really cool screensaver for my computer. Somebody work on that and send me one.
|
|
|
|
You mean T'Pol starts out crazy, then in flashback we can watch her become crazy? All right!!!
And once again we're back to the recycled formula of "framing" a story, meaning it opens "after the fact" or "joined in progress" to show the middle or end of the story to tease the viewers into wanting to know how certain events had happened, then it flashbacks to the beginning of the story and tells it.
I had already discussed "framing" in my review of the Enterprise episode "Singularity", which was also framed. It's bad enough that a good show like ''The West Wing'' is relying too much on framing their stories in their teasers, only to open Act One with the words "24 hours earlier", just as this episode did. Let's hope this isn't going to be common on Enterprise either. But with two framed stories only 22 episodes apart, that's not a good sign. Also, framing episodes should be saved for something really special. In both of these cases, it wasn't necessary, and the fact that it was implemented was clearly to falsely jack up the suspense because the episodes couldn't hold its own.
|
|
|
And the ironic thing is the first Vulcan ship was sent in to search for the Robinson family onboard the Jupiter 2.
And as further evidence that there are no pre-planned stories but rather made-up episodes-of-the-weeks under the false claim of a ''story-arc'', here we learn that the Vulcan ship where all those Vulcans went all emotional that we heard about in "The Expanse" was actually in search of an earlier Vulcan ship that disappeared. Gee, why didn't Soval mention that one back when he was trying to convince Archer not to go? It would have added to the threats of the Expanse.
For that matter, why didn't T'Pol mention to Archer that she herself served on the first Vulcan ship that went into the Expanse never to return?
|
|
|
Well I give up! All these anomallies make mopping the floors Impossible!
And once again we get a bunch of scenes of anomallies rippeling up the walls and floors, yet still no crew manage to get hurt.
|
|
|
It's a good thing we used our captured Suliban Cell ship to rescue T'Pol more quickly.
Oh, sorry. Wait. Never happened. Shuttlepod One and Shuttlepod Two is suddenly all they've got now.
Now right off the bat, a lot of whiny Paramount plants who spread propaganda among the fans will try to claim "Well, hey, you don't know if they still have that thing. For all you know they may have left it back on Earth." Okay. Let's explore both options:
If Enterprise left the Suliban Cell ship back at Earth, then the fact that they didn't show it further proves that the writers suck. They had already skipped so much valued material without a second thought, such as that mass-funeral we heard about but never saw. The scenes of Archer, Admiral Forrest, T'Pol and Soval discussing studying the Suliban ship and even reverse engineering it would have been great to see.
If the Enterprise kept the Suliban Cell ship, it further shows how little thought the writers are putting into this show. Don't the Producers even have a picture of the Enterprise hanging on a wall with little pictures of everything it has onboard? Such as two Shuttlepods, Photon Torpedoes, Daniels' locked room and the Suliban Cell ship? How can they do endless scenes of characters discussing the ship's manifest, cargo, rooms, weapons and crew if they themselves aren't even keeping track?
And let's remember that this episode shows once again a Shuttlepod suddenly equipped to fire weapons - something they weren't able to do before.
|
|
|
Space Herpe? Damn you, Ice Pirates!
Let's talk about the editing. My god it sucked.
First let's cover the fast-forwarding. Here's a tip for the Enterprise editors: Get your finger off the fast-forward button. By the way, you're also fired. Watching this episode REMINDED ME ALL THE WAY THROUGH of the Robert Urich classic film ''The Ice Pirates''. God that was a great movie. Anyway, at the end of the film, time got speeded up at the same time they were attacked and boarded. They had to fight off the enemy in fast-forward as time got speeded up. By the time the battle was over, Robert Urich had a two-foot long white beard. It was funny. Go watch it. Keep an eye out for the Space Herpe, too. And with the ships damaged, the lights kept flashing and strobing on and off during the battles. So when Archer and gang ended up in speeded up battles with flickering lights, I couldn't get that old movie out of my mind.
Now let's talk about the jumpcuts. A ''Jump-cut'' is when stupid editors who are incapable of seeing what the rest of the human race sees decides to cut big-ass chunks of frames out of a film during a battle, usually a fistfight or something, to make it look like the action goes faster. Now cutting out a frame here and a frame there might not be noticable. But cutting out what seemed like 41 consecutive frames in a row looks like crap. How Hollywood Editors are incapable of seeing this is beyond me.
A frame here and a frame there would have worked. Jumpcuts and fast-forwarding was rediculous. Especially when it was WAYYYY over used.
|
|
