This is the first episode of Enterpise that has piqued my interest, and aside from the odd (Firefly like) intro, it's now starting to feel like Star Trek.
Things would have been much simpler, and the episode would have been much shorter if they'd just beamed everyone back on-board instead of sending the inoculations down... but this is a warp 4 era (hahaha), so they're clearly not there yet.
Perfect example of how fear and ignorance sows division.
Skip
Themes: Vulcan-human friction, recklesness of crew
Three weeks into deep space. Again with Vulcan caution vs human eagerness. T'Pol wants to send probes on strange new empty planet and everyone else is anxious to get down to it. Shuttles grows wings when they're going to the planet, pretty cool. Of course everyone just burst out of the shuttle without masks. They get to camp and tell ghost stories around fire before being hit by a storm and hiding inside caverns. They start seeing other people in the caves and T'Pol secretly talking to them. Poor Novakovich is the first victim of a teleport, getting children-of-a-forest complexion in the process, but it turns out mysterious people are all result of a halucionogen from flowers. Turns out T'Pol was right with the probes idea. Novakovich first casualty. Way to enter history books.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2019-04-12T22:07:28Z
[7.0/10] I often come to Star Trek for the joy of problem solving. In all incarnations, much of the fun of the “strange new worlds and new civilizations” is each new crew facing an array of their own, strange rubik's cubes to figure out how to solve. Using the combination of their wits, their insight, and their technology to leap over whatever the universe is throwing at them is a venerable and above all else, fun mode for the franchise.
And “Strange New World” is part-horror story and part-problem solving. While I like the latter much more than the former, it’s at least something both familiar but novel enough in execution to spice up Enterprise a bit in the early going here. The first half of the episode is about uncovering the mystery of what exactly the threat on this heretofore unknown M-class planet is, and the second half is about how to address it. The show goes a little overboard on the whole haunted mystery and potential sabotage angle at first, but once it becomes a question of how to save everyone from the identified risk, the show becomes much more clever and even humane.
In some ways, the episode feels like a mishmash of different Original Series installments. You have the Vulcan vs. Human jousting while stranded on an alien world of “The Galileo Seven.” You have the ghost story motif of “Catspaw”, and you have the cave-based panic of “The Devil in the Dark” (which gets a subtle nod from Captain Archer). Moreso than other sequel series, Enterprise seems to be borrowing from its 1960s predecessor, and if that’s the tack, the mixing things together is a sound approach to keep it fresh rather than repetitive.
The problem, though, is one I often encountered when watching The Original Series -- namely that I’m apt to side with the Vulcan stick in the mud rather than the ornery human questioning their detached and/or utilitarian judgment. Enterprise recreates the same dynamic that Dr. McCoy and Spock often had with Trip and T’Pol, right down to the southern drawl and recriminations of heartlessness.
I don’t know how to feel about it. To be fair to Enterprise, I think the show wants to bring the audience over the Trip and the rest of the redshirts’ point of view of T’Pol in the first half just so it can flip the script in the second half. You literally see the other crewmen’s hallucinations so that it seems like T’Pol is lying. But it’s also playing on the bias the humans have against the Vulcans, even as T’Pol is explaining why everyone must be mistaken and that their suspicions are motivated by preexisting frustrations between the species.
That’s a bit of a cheat in the first place, but it also makes it hard for the show to win you over to Trip and company’s side when you’re pretty skeptical of their motivations in the first place. Enterprise wants you to buy into the “Vulcans have held things back and may not be able to be trusted” thing, but for longtime viewers (at least Spock-appreciating ones like me), it’s hard to buy into that long enough for the episode to pull off its twist.
It also doesn't help that this episode is full of pretty hammy acting. Trip’s mental breakdown is downright Shatner-esque in its over the top lunacy mode. The rest of the crewmembers aren’t necessarily super convincing in their panic and paranoia either, though Jolene Blalock does a pretty damn solid job of conveying slipping Vulcan stoicism in a difficult situation.
What I do like about the episode is its effort to create that scary mood, and Archer’s solution to the problem. The former is pretty hit or miss. But Mayweather’s ghost story is a lively one, and while frequently overblown, the show’s effort to go full horror movie with unknown creatures moving around in the shadows of the cave is a commendable one. Spookiness is a rarer look for Star Trek, but it works in this context, particularly in one of the first, unexamined worlds that Starfleet encounters.
Archer’s solution to the problem is even better though. Once he realizes, via Dr. Phlox, that there’s a toxin in the local flora that’s creating the hallucination, and the weather prevents them from shuttling down or beaming anyone up, he starts trying to talk Trip out of his psychosis long enough to let T’Pol apply an antidote.
What I like best about this problem-solving is that it has stages. At first, Archer tries to get Trip to realizes that he’s not at his mental best, to just talk some sense into him, with a touching story from their shared history to try to drive it home. It’s a little too much (and frankly, part of what turned me off to the solution used in the last episode), but it doesn't work! Instead, Archer goes to Plan B, which requires leaning into Trip’s paranoid delusions, but coming up with a plausible enough story to convince him to stand down long enough to let T’Pol do her work. The cover story, the use of Vulcan by Hoshi, and the chance to stun him long enough to make it all come together is a smart and tense solution to the problem, in the best Trek tradition.
Granted, the path to get there is a mixed bag at best. But it ultimately plays like an Aesop’s fable in that same Original Series-esque way. On the one hand, you have Trip getting an object lesson in not letting his preconceived notions about Vulcans get in the way of assessing a situation. And on the other, you have an event that lays the groundwork for General Order 1 and the Prime Directive, or at the very least some protocols to help ensure that the Federation doesn't go waltzing into a patch of hallucinogenic poison ivy.
At the end of the day, that’s a big part of what I ask for from episodic Star Trek. What is the problem? How did they solve it? How did it impact the characters? And what did we and they learn? “Strange New World” isn’t the boldest or best rendition of that form, but it’s a solid version of it, and after a shaky intro to the series, I’m glad for it.