1x25 Two Days and Two Nights

[5.6/10] I like the general approach that Enterprise takes with its penultimate episode, Doing an episode with a bunch of smaller, lighter, and more intimate little stories than another standard crisis of the week is a monotony-breaker, and gives the audience the chance to see its heroes in a different light. The tack reminds me of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s “Tales of Ba Sing Se” installment, one of that show’s finest hours.

But “Two Day and Two Nights” falls far far short of that standard in a well-intentioned but ultimately failing outing. The episode tracks four separate stories as our heroes finally get the chance to make their visit to Risa: Archer flirting with his attractive neighbor at the resort, Trip and Malcolm trying to get laid and getting mugged instead, Hoshi aiming to learn the local language and ending up with an island crush, and Dr. Phlox trying to hibernate but being awoken for a medical emergency.

The first story is the meatiest bit in the episode, but it takes a long time to get there. Most of Archer’s story just involves awkward, stilted flirting between the captain and the fashionable woman in a neighboring villa, who brought her dog on vacation too. This is the third time that Enterprise has attempted to show Archer having romantic chemistry with a random stranger, and it’s the third time that effort has fallen completely flat. For the twist at the end of Archer’s story to feel meaningful and significant, you have to buy into Archer and Keyla’s romance, and this show just does not have the chops to pull the “attraction by fiat” schtick off.

The same goes for Reed and Trip’s efforts to play the characters from “Night at the Roxbury.” The show makes a couple of dispiriting attempts at comedy here, and the humor is sitcom-level at best. Even if you’re willing to forgive a few “what gender is that alien” gags that feel transphobic in 2019, the whole “couple of bachelors trying to get some” setup comes off as hacky from the jump. It doesn't help that, for a show made in 2002 and set in the 2150s, the clothing, atmosphere, and attitude of this whole thing feels like something out of the 1980s. (I was thinking of The Love Boat, personally.)

There’s at least the mildest of amusing twists when the ladies who are fawning over Malcolm and Trip’s every word turn out to be shape-shifters who mean to rob them. But even there, the whole “they don’t have any valuables, let’s sell their clothes instead” comes off like a proto-Hangover bit of a dumb comic premise. And the bit goes nowhere after that either, with some lame “look they’re wandering around in their underwear” gags that sputter and collapse as soon as they’re unleashed.

Broad comedy seems to be the order of the day in “Two Days and Two Nights”, as its firmly present in Dr. Phlox’s story as well. The setup is that Dr. Phlox is planning to hibernate during the crew’s shore leave, but a Mayweather injury on Risa forces acting-captain T’Pol and Crewman Cutler to wake him up early. With that bit of somnum interruptus, Phlox is basically high as a kite, but still trying to do some doctoring, which leads to no end of shenanigans.

Honestly, this is probably the best storyline of the four which, given its meager successes, is telling as to the quality of the episode. John Billingsley continues to make a lot out of a little, clowning around, Frasier-style, with T’Pol in particular making an excellent straight man to his buffoonery. It’s big, outsized comedy, but it’s glancing enough to work in this context given the small stakes, and its fun to see Billingsley showing some zany comic range. Plus, it has some just a hint of that wider perspective that can elevate Enterprise when an exasperated Mayweather asks T’Pol if she’s ever had to go to an alien hospital, and she responds, “Yes, in San Francisco.”

Sadly, such small bits of depth are thoroughly absent from Hoshi’s story, where her linguistic efforts end up connecting her with a hunky alien with whom she trades both conjugations and kisses. There’s nothing wrong with this storyline exactly. It offers an amiable enough meetcute and their little island romance is rushed but serviceable. There’s just nothing to it.

There’s the hint of a twist in the fact that rowdy Reed and Trip aimed to find hook-ups on vacation and ended up embarrassed, while Hoshi aimed to do something constructive and instead found romance. But Hoshi’s briefly-sketched, by-the-numbers romcom routine never rises above “fine but kind of pointless.” We don’t really learn anything about her from it; I doubt there’ll be any lasting effects, and it seems to only provide an excuse for a corny title drop.

Still, “fine” is better than where Archer’s story ends up, as it’s revealed that Keyla is Tandaran and this whole deal is an elaborate honeypot scheme. I’ll give the Tandaran’s credit -- trying to set up Archer up with an age-appropriate partner who also has a little dog, in an effort to pump him for information, is a pretty good plan. But all it leads to is soap opera-esque dramatics between him and Keyla, and a cheesy, sub-James Bond bit of espionage and subterfuge. The notion of the Tandarans trying to scam Archer out of more info about the Suliban is a good one, but the execution is dismal.

That pretty much goes for “Two Days and Two Nights” as a whole. It’s a solid concept for a format-bending episode, particularly one meant to take the edge off before the fireworks of the season finale. But the actual stories told are so shallow and uninteresting and downright boring that the whole outing feels like a giant waste of time. Taking a break from the usual rhythm in a series can be great, letting writers and actors flex different muscles than usual. The catch, though, is that gear-changing presentation has to be, well, you know, actually good in order for it to work.