Enterprise S1E3 - Strange New World

A storm traps an away team on an alien world, while spores cause them to experience psychosis – Wikipedia.

First Thoughts:

Earth – with a twist! Porthos gets to be the first dog to pee on an alien planet.

Nice touch to explain the origin of Class-M planet.

I like that the Enterprise crew is still basically bumbling around. They’re still green.

I was initially a little put off by how Archer continues to publicly blow off his second in command when she gives reasonable advice…like we should totally take a little bit of time to check out this alien planet we just found before we start walking around on it. However, I realized that it’ll work if it turns into Archer maturing and learning to trust T’Pol’s experience. She’s done this a lot. The whole point of having her along is to benefit from it.

Holy crap, do we get to play around with the sexual tension between T’Pol and Trip during this episode or what? I seriously thought they might just start making out in the middle of that cave. On a related note, was it just me, or was T’Pol kinda sexy talking all Vulcan-y?

The initial hallucination scenes were pretty cool. I was momentarily freaked out when Travis was seeing crew members walking around in the woods, and Cutler’s hallucination about T’Pol was great.

Banged up, but a little bit wiser, the crew of the Enterprise limps off to the next adventure.

Nitpicks:

Archer really brought along a water-polo ball to space?

At no time did the away team ever seem in actual danger from the weather. It was pretty windy. That’s about it. Speaking of which…the orbiting ship with sensors had no idea that a massive storm was about to hit the landing zone in a few hours?

It was completely obvious they were going to hallucinate somehow from the moment Novakovich smelled the flower…and there was no way they were going to off a major character in the third episode…so not too much dramatic tension here.

So tricorders can take spectral analysis of rocks and stuff, but can’t warn you when you’re about to walk into a massive chasm?

The aborted shuttle landing was super lame. Archer told them to go to a nearby clearing, but it was obviously still too close to the cliff face. Why didn’t they just go back to the initial landing zone? It was “less than a kilometer” away. Travis had already gone there and back without incident when they were at the cave.

Need to rethink their supplies for next time. Apparently they ran out of food and water in like 6 hours. When Travis went back to camp to get the food…he only picked up one small silver bag. He even made a big show of diving to catch it in the wind, so it wasn’t that heavy. Super dehydrated I guess. They were really worried about lack of water after only a few hours? Even if that wasn’t weird, they just spent the whole afternoon skipping stones across a creek just few minutes from the campground…I’m sure they would have pulled through.

The failed transporter scene with Novakovich was totally AWESOME and they blew it. He was a red shirt, he could have had a rockin’ death as half-tree half-man, but no! He just had some stupid flesh-wounds…and then dies pathetically of drug overdose on a slab in sickbay. Sure they learned about the neurotoxin along the way, but they could have found that out from a postmortem when he died as tree man.

AND…once they set up that he survived the transport essentially unharmed, there was no compelling reason NOT to beam up the rest of the away team. So what if they get some cuts and bruises? Sure it’s dangerous and all, but Archer’s first and second officers were seconds away from killing each other in a drug induced rage. That sounds like a textbook emergency situation to me.

Very minor nitpick…but those cases for the phasers are REALLY bulky. That huge case for just four pistols? LOTS of foam padding…better safe then sorry I guess.