Enterprise review: "Terra Nova".
(Episode 6)

If you've been building for several years a starship to break Warp Four, wouldn't you have come up with a prioritized list of places you want that Starship to go? Wouldn't the first place you would want it to go would be all the colonies? And within that list wouldn't you have wanted it to go to the one colony that not only hasn't been heard from in nearly a hundred years, but has such a great legendary mystery surrounding it?

After they delivered the Klingon in "Broken Bow", the mysterious and legendary Terra Nova colony would be the first place you would go. Instead the Enterprise has been randomly cruising through space, with the investigation of Terra Nova an afterthought.

A prioritized list of places to go created in advance of the starship's launch not only would have supplied Enterprise with guaranteed missions, mysteries and stories to keep them busy, but the prioritized list actually made sense.

That's probably why Berman and Braga didn't think of it. Because it made sense.

They sent a probe to confirm that the planet was able to support life to colonize, but they weren't able to send a probe at any time within the last 70 years to even take a look at what happened to the lost colony? What, the technology we used on Mars today gets lost sometime in the next hundred years?

These colonists wouldn't have traveled blindly for 9 years to a planet unless they knew they could have landed on it and lived. Which means they knew other continents were also there. Yet they complained about the idea of a second wave of colonists. What, a planet with multiple continents too big for 400 people? They couldn't have set up base on one of the other continents?

So, these people were mentally and emotionally stable to make a 9 year journey to colonize a new planet, but suddenly cracked and thought that not only humans were attacking the planet (why attack a planet you want to colonize?) but also thought they might be in league with the Vulcans to destroy the colony (if the Vulcans were involved, you wouldn't have a 9 year journey, plus you would have access to other worlds)?

Well, I'm sure it made sense to this episode's writers, who also happened to be series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga.

Ignoring the idea that the original colonists were obviously mentally unbalanced and believed they were under attack by humans, and also ignoring that there was plenty of room for many more colonists, weren't they smart enough to realize that it was a meteor that hit them? Their communications still worked (just couldn't transmit outside the contaminated atmosphere). What happened to the rest of the ship? Weren't they ever planning to visit the other continents? Even Neil Armstrong took a Luner Rover with him to the moon. It's still sitting there. But these guys? No scanners? No vehicles? No protective suits?

As Archer points out, the colonists used the ship's bulkhead itself to construct their houses. But all I saw was a few little rickety old shacks. This ship was big enough to carry not only 200 colonists and food for a 9 year trip, but a bicycle as well. You think there would be more of it.

A 9 year journey and 200 people to feed, they MUST have brought animals with them. Yet there wasn't one mention of them. Archer asked why there wasn't any bodies of the colonists. Wouldn't it have heightened the mystery if they found the bodies of 70 year-old dead cows? Was the colonists always planning to eat the rodents in the caves?

And if there wasn't any bodies of the colonists, then that means the dead colonists were buried. Why didn't Archer find the graves?

They have the building blocks for a ship big enough to carry 200 people for a 9 year journey, but they didn't have enough to construct a few token transports that could have taken them from one location to the next on the planet itself to take them away from the danger area? Not even a boat? Even Gilligan had a boat. It had a hole in it but that's not the point.

And if all the adults are killed and all you have left are the young kids, how are they smart enough to understand that something invisible (radiation) that they can't see is outside and will kill you over a long time? If the kids believed this, they would have believed the invisible killer was the boogieman. Another great plot twist lost on the minds of B&B.

They all carry machine guns, but never ran out of bullets after 70 years?

If you're getting shot at, and your Lieutenant was just shot down, are you going to turn your head and start off without him? Because that's exactly what Archer did, providing Reed with just enough time to get caught.

And if you do really believe people from Earth attacked your planet, do you refer to your own kind as "humans"? The kids grew up thinking the evil "humans" were other people because their parents kept talking about how evil the "humans" were for attacking Terra Nova. Don't they have a more specific name, like... Starfleet... Government... NASA... Politicians... San Fransisco?

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor or we bombed Hiroshima, did either side refer to the other as "those humans"? It was a clever gimmick to create a story, but it doesn't hold up in the real world.

Gee, it was really lucky that Archer happened to find Terra Nova when he did, because Phlox said a few more years and they all would have died.

And it's also really lucky that they found the one person who was among the original colonists.

And it's really, really lucky that this same person just happened to have lung cancer so they could take her back to Enterprise to make the connection.

It's a good thing Archer was able to download those pictures of the colonists to get the aliens to question why "humans" were living in their houses before the attack. Because if he didn't do that, then the aliens might have learned this on their own when they found family pictures and photo albums of these evil "humans" lying around their colony.

How come the fans can read the scripts leaked on the internet weeks prior to broadcast yet the animators can't read them at all? If the Novans can't live on the surface for another decade because of the lethal radiation, what Foundation Imaging idiot put the birds flying over the Terra Nova colony?

And even though Enterprise could scan the caves, they couldn't detect the one Mayweather lands the ShuttlePod on.

So, the alien asks for Archer's Phase Pistol to burn out a tunnel off screen. Then Archer asks for the Phase Pistol back to burn the tree in an attempt to build a trust. Beside the fact that he took the Phase Pistol for no reason (Archer could have done the digging), I think the fact that Archer let the alien have his Phase Pistol alone is trust enough.

So, the guy was drowning in the rising water with a dead tree pinning him down. And besides the fact that Archer didn't think to vaporize the rising water to buy them time, he manages to phaser a dead tree in half without catching it on fire.

Do we even want to ask how a dead tree so heavy they couldn't move it got underground in a side cavern?

All throughout the episode they kept saying the colony was lost 70 years earlier. As we know from "Star Trek: The Next Generation", a generation in the Star Trek universe is 78 years.

Then Archer turns around and says the colonists have been living in the caves for two generations.

Then T'Pol says they have been living on this planet for three generations.

Did anybody actually read this script twice?