Hoshi is "the only one" who can fit into the crawlspace? It's massive! Almost the size of a Jefferies tube on the later series. Please. If they want to say stuff like that on screen, they gotta build smaller sets.
And, shortly after that line: The men in Starfleet wear full-body underwear beneath their uniforms, but Hoshi doesn't even have a sports bra on under her shirt? It's definitely not because the writers wanted to do a gag where she ends up topless after the aforementioned trek through the crawlspace. Nope, not at all. Logic - 0, Hollywood titillation - 1
[7.6/10] It’s funny, after the complaints about season 2 of Star Trek Discovery, to go watch an episode of Star Trek from almost two decades earlier that makes its character the special-est and most important person in the universe. Whether it’s long lost siblings or over-important protagonists, it feels like every sin the current Trek series gets raked over the coals for is one that the franchise has committed (often more than once) in the past.
Suffice it to say, as someone bearish on the character of Jonathan Archer, I can’t say I love the fact that pulling him out of the year 2150 means that there’s no Federation, that the adventures of Kirk and Picard and Sisko and Janeway never happen, that the entire world as we know it goes to hell by the 3100s all because of this one big old “meh” of a guy. But god help me, it adds stakes to why it’s so important that he and Daniels find a way to get the captain of the Enterprise back to his own time.
The better action, though, is on Enterprise itself. After the underwhelming stand off and cliffhanger that ended part one of “Shockwave,” T’Pol realizes that the ship is wildly outnumbered, and allows the Suliban to board to see that she’s telling the truth about the absence of Captain Archer. It leads to a nice echo of the events of the first part, with every remaining member of the team working together to trick the Suliban, regain control of the ship, and buy enough time and misdirection to ensure that Archer can make the jump back to the twenty-second century.
Those efforts are the highlight of the episode. Hoshi’s crawl through the vents to gain and distribute weapons is shot and edited in a way to convey her claustrophobia visually without having to belabor it in dialogue. (Though her losing her shirt in the process was utterly gratuitous, another sin that presages a similarly unnecessary bit of titillation in Star Trek Into Darkness.) T’Pol feigning being out of sorts mentally after her interrogation session as a distraction to let Trip and Reed take out the guards is a great little sequence. And Reed avoiding his Suliban pursuers by hiding in a random duct is a fun little one-shot bit. Hell, we even get a firefight that ends with a Vulcan neck pinch here!
While too much of it could be exhausting, just seeing our heroes confront a difficult problem, come up with a smart but tricky solution, and then having it bear out because of their friendly, but uber-competent execution, continues to be enjoyable. The writer play most of the plan close to the vest, if only to align the audience’s surprise with the Suliban’s, but it’s neat to see our heroes at the height of their powers, being behind the eight ball with their enemy attackers, but still finding a way to strike back. The fake engine overload feint is a nice excuse to scare the Suliban off the ship, and it works well as the culmination of all that deception and planning from the good guys.
Were that the same could be said for Archer and Daniels. I’ll admit, there’s something neat about the two men wandering around the wasteland of a post-apocalyptic library, trying to figure out where things went wrong in the timeline. (What’s less neat is Daniel’s sparkly future suit, but it’s not the first silly Star Trek outfit, and it won’t be the last.) The episode hits the same notes about “I can’t tell you too much about the future,” while winking at the audience, for my tastes, but it at least puts what’s at stake in all of this into focus.
The best part of Archer and Daniels’s little escapade in the future is their efforts to create a device that will let them communicate with the past. If there’s a watchword for “Shockwave”, it’s “resourcefulness” -- the sense that the good guys are with fewer tools and fewer options than they’re used to having, but make the best of the situation and are still able to win the day. Turning Archer into a bland action hero who delivers punches and painful lines like “you’re an ugly bastard” in an equally unconvincing fashion is a lame move, but having Daniels try to reach the Enterprise crew in the past using the equivalent of his high school science project is much more fun.
Naturally, the good guys win, with Archer holding Silik hostage and getting him to call off his ships. Again, having Archer’s contribution to saving the day be equal to, if not greater, than the combined efforts of the rest of the crew, rankles me, but I suppose these are the concessions you have to make. Protagonists do major things, even when you don’t like them. The misdirect with Daniels’s technology is predictable, but still a solid excuse to send the captain back to the past.
It’s the part that follows that really annoys me. Enterprise tries to put a period on its first year of adventures, with the bad guy Vulcan ambassador declaring that, Suliban or no Suliban, the armed conflicts and scrapes Enterprise has gotten into in the past year indicate that humanity is not ready for deep space travel yet. The response to that is clunky, trite bit of speechifying about humanity slowly learning to walk that would make Jeff Winger blush. Scott Bakula, and Berman & Braga, are just not up to making the faux-inspiring and philosophical take on humans’ journey through the stars work.
But T’Pol and Jolene Blalock are. Her character’s arc has been far more interesting this season, and T’Pol’s rejoinder to the Vulcan Ambassador about her people’s own troubled past, about their own hypocrisy, their own role in the things that he’s chastising Archer for, is an excellent capstone on her personal journey over the past year. While it takes an eye roll-worthy scene between her and Archer to confirm the good news, it’s enough to convince Starfleet that the “Warp 5 Project” should continue.
And so Enterprise continues, having completed its little two-part finale in a fairly satisfying, is still occasionally pestersome fashion. While all show’s change and evolve over time, it feels like it’s easy to discern the show’s strengths and weaknesses at this point. It plays with a strong premise and interesting ideas about the friction-filled politics of Earth’s entry into the interstellar community, it has a strong ensemble who do particularly well when used together, and it has a particularly good anchor in T’Pol, where the combination of performer and character is compelling.
On the other hand, the writing and dialogue are both hit or miss at best, some of the other performances can be hammy or exaggerated, and too much weight is put on Archer and Scott Bakula, who are made out to be the linchpin of the ship and the show respectively, but who are, too often, both’s biggest liability.
The cure for the problem is a bit dubious. All of the actors, especially Jolene Blalock, are more comfortable in their roles.
Weak conclusion to Shockwave... No real explanation for how the timeline was restored
Review by LNeroBlockedParent2022-01-23T04:30:25Z
Essential episode, but actually fun to rewatch. Every scene with Archer and Peewee Future-boy can be skipped save for the last one where Daniels gets Archer to hammer out some copper to make the trans-temporal almighty Oz projector. I did, and didn't miss a thing!
Of course, the time travel stuff makes no sense, and pretty much any science fiction "meat" is just peevishly hadwaved, which is par for the course with Berman/Braga episodes. Archer is an idiot, and his tough guy words and actions to Silik are eye-roll inducing and just make you hate him even more, while wishing Silik had had a chance to vaporize him. John Fleck is wasted on Braga's dialog and being Archer's punching bag. Aside from that, it's fun and genuinely engaging to watch our plucky crewmembers scheme out of their captivity and boarding.
And, it might surprise some Star Trek geeks, but it's perfectly reasonable for Hoshi to have only had a t-shirt on in her quarters. Plenty of women toss the bra as soon as they get home if they're forced to wear one, and many don't need one. There are complaints as if half of this dumb series' appeal isn't TA&BC (bear chests). It was basically preview bait, but it only added appeal to the episode. If anything, seeing T'pol splayed out after being questioned by the Floam FSB was potentially exploitive, but I can't really take the episode seriously enough to be conflicted about it. Jolene got some legitimately good acting in, though it's consistently disappointing to see Ambassador Soval portray Vulkans as seething divas who raise their voices in barely controlled, pearl-clutching rage whenever they get triggered by those pesky upstart humans. You'd think he was a slighted 18th century noble the way he swished out of the room when T'pol spoke up for the Enterprise and its crew.