Sure, ok, make the first non-corporeal species Enterprise encounters evil, because two legs good, no legs bad, right. The xenophobic undertone of this episode is hilariously ironic when you consider the whole point of Star Trek is to examine and embrace other cultures and ways of life.
Also, I've come to the conclusion that the theme of Enterprise is "Star Trek, yes, but make it sexy."
Ugggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh why did they just end it? Any of the preceding three Star Trek series would have taken a few minutes at the end for the captain to turn the ethics around and around trying to come to terms with that decision. But no, Enterprise just makes a big boom, kills the alien ship, saves everyone—roll credits.
We learn nothing about the aliens. They're literally just an enemy of the week. Maybe it's because I'm rewatching Deep Space Nine in parallel with this, but I'm really not happy with the episodic style. I know DS9 still gets a lot of flak from the Trek fandom at large for being "different" and for daring to tell longer-term stories, but doing that makes for more interesting television. It makes for deeper stories, for in-depth character development, for a richer universe, if everything that happens in this week's show affects what comes later. (Since I'm also rewatching Voyager, I'm made painfully aware that most Trek is actually allergic to consequences.)
For all his declarations that sacrificing a third of the crew to save the remaining two thirds would be "unacceptable", Archer really doesn't seem to have much of a head for ethics. He'll save his own crew at any cost, and to hell with any consequences that might ensue for anyone else. Anyone who stands in his way is an enemy. I'm really not sure I like this kind of Starfleet captain.
Not that my rating of the episode reflects on Archer. I gave this a 5/10 solely because of the flat writing and the wasted potential.
I'm just really disappointed in how lame that ending was. It wasn't worthy of a Star Trek show. (Well, maybe it would have worked in Star Trek TOS. I could see Kirk pulling one of these, maybe. Maybe.)
This was annoying for so many reasons lol the entire thing is that the crew has become possessed and instead of responding with urgency they question why they were acting weird??
This hostility Archer shows seems stupid even on our standard in 2020, let alone after 2150!
Enterprise loses all propulsion but the shuttle pod has propulsion? WTF?
And what is wrong with this crew always being quiet and never letting anyone know things are about to go sideways. Trip just looks at the alien and doesn't say a word to anyone else in engineering? B.S. At least Rostov has the sense to say something and be useful with identify a problem.
Yet again we see how dense Archer is. Yet he always has a magical ability to sense a problem when nobody should be able to. He is written so poorly.
Why oh why doesn't Archer make a shipwide announcement at the beginning of the encounter so the crew knows what is going on? Maybe they could then actually be helpful with tracking these aliens?
Travis is really slow in this too, not that he is ever quick. Why wouldn't he immediately notify someone that Trip is acting weird? Seems like that is the sort of thing that everyone would be doing to ensure no aliens slip through.
So the aliens can wander space between ships, but being exposed to space would kill them? I assume T'Pol meant after some time it would kill them.
Also, if the aliens don't have a host body in their existing ship, why do they need host bodies in which ever ship they move to? Can't they just catch a ride on another ship without a host body?
I thought the previous episode was badly written. This is far worse.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2019-07-08T22:46:57Z
[5.6/10] For me, the greatest sin of a television show is wasted potential. Some episodes are liable to be great. Some episodes are liable to be terrible. A good many more will vary between “fine” and “pretty good.” As I’ve exhaustively detailed on this website, there’s a ton of reasons for that, some of which are understandable and some of which are maddening. But the most frustrating thing when taking in a story of any stripe, is feeling like somebody had a great idea, or great premise, or sniffed greatness, but then left some of the best possibilities on the table.
“The Crossing” leaves more than the best possibilities on the table. It leaves most of the possibilities on the table. The prospect of non-corporeal beings, touring the human body as a vessel of choice through meatspace, is a thrilling one. As “Return to Tomorrow” from The Original Series showed us, the notion of what beings without bodies do once returned to them can be an illuminating experience for the characters and the audience alike.
But Enterprise dispenses with all of that for a rote pod people story. Instead of any philosophical exploration of what it means to encounter a new form of life or the costs of their form of existence versus ours, “The Crossing” does a cheap spin on a horror tale, with Stepford Smilers and “who’ll be brainwashed next?” questions that don’t amount to much beyond some bargain basement scares.
That wouldn’t be so bad if the show’s would be ghost story were any good. As much as I enjoy Star Trek’s more philosophical side, there’s nothing wrong with just telling a simple, creepy tale in the confines of a spaceship. The problem is that the invasion of the “wisps” is pretty dull, and doesn't make much sense.
Most good stories that involve the supernatural (or the “may as well be supernatural”) have rules for how things have to operate. These rules take the nigh-magical and not only ground it in something the audience can relate to, but make the characters earn their success (or failure) in dealing with it. Here, the rules are all so opaque and nonsensical that it’s hard to invest in any of the problems or solutions.
Are you unsure whether or not a fellow crewman is inhabited by a wisp? Well that’s no problem, because Dr. Phlox just invented a wisp detector! Are you running from a being that can go through walls (which, in fairness, are the episode’s best sequences)? Don’t worry about it! These things that the sensors can’t even really detect are repelled by the alloy in the catwalk for some reason! Is a third of your crew infested with these beings who might have evil intentions? That’s fine! We can just gas them out of the ship without any ill effects to the human beings they’re inhabiting! What about that massive alien ship that you can’t outrun and which is so technologically advanced that it takes over all of your systems? Just blow it up!
I’m used to easy Treknobabble solutions to what ought to be thorny problems, and I’m not a nitpicker, but “The Crossing” takes the cake. It stacks arbitrary implausibility on top of arbitrary implausibility until you wonder if the writers even began to think this whole situation through. I’ll concede that there’s something clever about T’Pol using her psychic abilities and disciplined mind to discern the wisps’ plan after one tries to take her over. But for the most part, the episode introduces a series a big, difficult problem and then comes up with all sorts of convenient answers that don’t pass the smell test.
Some of this would be more tolerable if the episode didn’t feel like it was stretching to fit the required runtime. My compliment for the last episode was that it knew how to evolve its central problem to create new challenges for our heroes to overcome. “The Crossing” does nearly the opposite, giving us the gist of the problem early on and then letting us watch Archer and company tread water for most the episode before figuring out how to solve it. In the meantime, we get a bunch of lifeless scenes of Archer yelling generic missives at his wisp-possessed crewmen and, bafflingly, multiple silly fight scenes starring Dr. Phlox: action star.
The episode also tosses in some weird sexual harassment material with the wisp who possesses Malcolm which is, dare I say, problematic. Either it’s meant to be a source of menace, in which case it feels cheap and especially galling for the show to try to pull that crap using T’Pol as the victim again. Or it’s meant as comedy, which may be even worse. There’s something interesting about a non-corporeal being experiencing sexual curiosity and desire, without understanding human mores, but Enterprise doesn't have the skill to explore that fraught material with any grace or nuance, and the whole thing comes off as uncomfortable for other reasons than what the show seems to be going for.
That’s the cinch to all of “The Crossing.” There’s grand metaphysical questions at play about what it’s like for a being without a body to suddenly find itself able to talk and eat and feel again, and for a human to suddenly experience the world through a different lens. There’s grand ethical questions about whether it’s right for a wisp to do this, and how much leeway to give a species that’s long removed from issues of bodily autonomy. And there’s compelling moral dilemmas about a group of dying lifeforms seeking salvation and how we measure their lives against ours.
But Enterprise just blows them up, literally and figuratively. Gone are the engrossing questions of different forms of life, and in comes a procedural horror story that’s rife with boring interludes and quick fixes. When the series had the chance to tell us a story about the famed “new life and new civilizations” from the once-famous, now-jettisoned intro, it gave us a mostly-fine but uninspired possession story that barely bothered to graze any of the imaginative qualities and curiosity that made Star Trek great.
I can handle bad Star Trek episodes. Hell, I love some of them. What I truly don’t like are episodes like this, that feel like they waste something great to settle for something less.