2x10 Vanishing Point

[6.5/10] Well, at least instead of just riffing or recreating a given episode from Star Trek’s past, Enterprise is officially riffing on multiple episodes from Star Trek’s past. I know I’m being a little sarcastic there, but it’s a legitimate improvement. You have a little of Barclay’s transporter fears, a little of Geordi phasing out of reality, and even a little bit of Leela’s inside-the-mind adventure in the Trek-inspired show Futurama. And while tons of shows have borrowed from this idea, the whole “it was in your head the whole time” reveal is pulled from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

But hey, mashing all of those things up at least makes “Vanishing Point” a serviceable episode. There’s a certain Twilight Zone vibe, or at least a Goosebumps vibe to the whole outing. As much as the episode limped along at times, it did a good job of making you feel Hoshi’s sense of isolation and panic at disapparating. There’s a creepy atmosphere to the whole thing, that lets the audience get inside Hoshi’s paranoia and feel what she’s feeling.

The only problem is that the ending was predictable. Even if you haven’t watched lots of Star Trek’s prior episodes that play in similar spaces, there was an off-kilter, daydream vibe that suggested these events were not real. It didn’t help that Hoshi hearing voices trying to tell her to snap out of it are familiar to anyone who’s watched shows where characters were having crazy experiences inside a coma dream. (See: The Sopranos, House, the aforementioned Futurama, and dozens, if not hundreds of other shows.)

That takes some of the impact away from this one. “Vanishing Point” desperately wants to convey the sense that something is wrong and that one of Hoshi’s worst fears has come true. But even apart from the de jure status quo reversion for episodic television, when you can guess that it’s all a dream, the lack of real consequences makes the panic sequences more academic and less arresting than they might otherwise be as the episode wears on.

At least the episode uses these adventures to give Hoshi the spotlight a little. It definitely feels like her character has been neglected relative to some others, so balancing the stories a bit is an encouraging development. It doesn't help that this transporter fear is only introduced in this episode, but still, her dealing with a fear of being lost or disassembled without being able to be put back together is a good premise for a crazy coma dream and some attendant character development.

And hey, unlike Barclay, Hoshi has some decent reasons to be afraid of the transporter! Setting aside the philosophical implications of deconstructing and reconstructing molecules (which are, fair warning, kind of staggering and disturbing once you think about them), there’s the fact that this is a very new technology in Enterprise’s era. Only a couple members of the crew have ever gone through it, so a certain degree of wariness and trepidation are natural when putting your entire being through a “matter stream” like that.

The episode manifests that fear reasonably well. The whole phase ghost routine is a bit of a cliché, at least for Star Trek, but it still leads to some sad, tense moments when Hoshi is trying to make contact with her friends and coworkers who believe that she’s dead. More than that, I like how the episode builds to the “disappearance,” with little things like Phlox not hearing her in sickbay, or Trip, Reed, Mayweather, and T’Pol each not immediately acknowledging her in the mess hall. It’s subtle stuff that’s easily explained with logic, but is off and unsettling enough to suggest that something is wrong.

“Vanishing Point” also gives Hoshi’s other phobias a fair hearing as well. While the away mission fear has pretty much been lost (or, more fairly, conquered) at this point, the concern that she’ll be unable to properly do her job as a translator, and be replaced has a natural bad dream feel to it. By the same token, her concerns of being turned into a pile of goo, or having her parents be told that she’s dead, or that aliens are secretly trying to blow up the ship feel like the mishmash of anxieties that would clump together and feed off one another in a weird, liminal mental state like hers. And inventing the legend of Ramsey is a nice touch on that front as well.

The big problem holding the episode back is the acting. Linda Park is fine, if unspectacular, with a little more of the spotlight. But it feels like much of the rest of the cast isn’t up to snuff here. There’s multiple scenes here where Archer, Trip, and even Hoshi’s dad (played by the great Keone Young, who’s the third future Deadwood alum to pop up this season) are trying to communicate distress and grief at Hoshi’s loss, but come off like they’re doing a bad soap opera riff. Bakula’s line delivery on the “residue” line is particularly egregious.

The best defense I could make for it is that maybe they’re going a little hammy or otherworldly in their delivery on purpose, to represent the sort of off-kilter nature of Hoshi’s dream world. Either way, when the reactions to Hoshi’s “death” feel fake and unconving, it weakens the impact of her alleged disappearance.

Still, while the episode runs out of gas by the end, and seems to give Hoshi’s actual transition and development the short shrift, the fact that she chooses to step onto the transporter pad in order to “save” Enterprise is a good beat. Although the “it was all a dream” reveal felt inevitable, and the last scene is a little cheesy, Archer’s pronouncement that the experience allowed her to get past her fear at least puts a nice button on the journey that Hoshi went through here.

I’d be lying if I said “Vanishing Point” had a great deal of momentum, or if it offered anything particularly new for a Star Trek show. But it at least created a good spooky atmosphere for much of its runtime, and used the opportunity to develop Hoshi a little. It’s not a vital or especially original episode by any stretch, but not a bad one either.