Enterprise S1E9 - Fortunate Son

The cargo ship Fortunate was attacked by Nausicaans and the Enterprise lends a helping hand only to find the crew of the Fortunate has secret plans – Wikipedia

The good:

Directed by LeVar Burton.

The design of the freighter was good. It made sense to have a central section with modular cargo pods. Also, it looked cool.

Good establishment of mood when the Enterprise crew encountered the Fortunate crew. I really thought it was some kind of mutiny at first, and that the X.O. was edgy about them helping Captain Keene recover.

Great development episode for Ensign Mayweather. I liked the exposition on the blue-color “Boomer” culture. It isn’t just fancy pants ships like Enterprise flitting about out there.

The bad:

The cold open low-gravity football shot. In the moment it was really cool, but it didn’t hold up at all. At no other time do we see the low-gravity effect. Even in the same scene, Ryan and Keene appear to be in normal gravity conditions. I suppose it’s possible that the artificial gravity is off in the middle of the cargo bay for some reason, but very unlikely. Gravity is normal in every other cargo bay (we see at least two others during the episode).

They go out of the way to point out that the freighters are basically sitting ducks. Does that actually make sense? I understand that this is early exploration and ships are expensive, so providing an armed escort is probably prohibitively expensive. But is there an actual reason why they can’t just give the freighters halfway decent weapons? Even so, if their little beam cannon is basically crap, how did they take out the first Nausican anyway?

More punch-you-in-the-face style torture. Sorry, probably gonna call it out every time. I totally understand appropriate for TV and kids, but you could always set it up by a cut-away. Don’t show it at all, just let us fill in the blanks. Hereafter referred to as PYITFST.

I always cringe a little bit when Star Trek captains preach about human exceptionalism (e.g. nobility, bravery, perseverance, etc.). I get it. That was totally Roddenberry’s angle from the start, but I’ve never seen it come off anything but pompous when they actually talk about it.