Enterprise:The Pilot “Broken Bow”
“Theorizing that one could jump-start a flagging film career by returning to television, actor Scott Bakula stepped onto the set of the new series Enterprise and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped on UPN, facing a sci-fi fanbase that was not his own, and driven by the scriptwriters to change Star Trek history, for better or worse. His only guide on this journey is the audience, observers from his own time who appear in the form of ratings. And so, Mr. Bakula finds himself leaping from episode to episode, striving to put right what Berman and Braga put wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be back into feature films.”
The episode starts with a shot of Gil Gerard as Buck Rogers, frozen in his space shuttle on the way to the 25th century. No, wait, my mistake. It’s just a model being painted by our hero as a boy, with his father. As they work, they discuss the sociopolitical ramifications of Earth’s relationship with the Vulcans and speculate on the impediments they may have placed in humanity’s way, and the consequences and reasons for them. As a father and son are wont to do on a lazy Saturday. Meanwhile, young Mr. Archer selects a particularly unpleasant ochre pigment to paint the warp nacelles, and we learn that Daddy Archer has plans to build a starship which he can’t (forgive me) seem to get off the ground.
Thirty years later, in a cornfield outside Smallville, Kansas, an alien spacecraft has crashed to Earth, containing a baby with powers and abilit–no, wrong again. My bad. It’s actually Broken Bow, Oklahoma, and the Klingon now running through the corn away from the crash is fully grown. As two other aliens chase the Klingon, firing their (phasers? phase pistols? disruptors?) zap guns at him, Farmer Ted emerges from his prefab house (some things never change) and sees the smoke from the crash and the flash of weapons fire. Faced with mysterious goings-on on his property, Farmer Ted does what folks like him have been doing for hundreds of years: he goes back inside and gets his gun.
Meanwhile, the Klingon finds a grain silo-looking building and rushes into it, followed by two lumpy green guys in purple outfits. Discovering that the Klingon was so uncooperative as to lock the door behind him, one of the Lumpy Bad Guys gets down on the ground, becomes all squishy, oozes under the door, and unlocks it from the inside for the benefit of his less malleable companion. As they enter the ground level, the Klingon leaps out of a hatch higher up, runs far enough away that the entire special effect will be in the shot, and shoots the silo. Now, I don’t know whether the building was full of grain dust, or they found Farmer Ted’s secret ’shine stash, or Klingon hand weapons have a special “Blow Up Agricultural Structure” setting, but the silo blowed up real good, killing the Lumpy Squishy Green Bad Guys in Ugly Purple Jumpsuits. Just as the debris finishes raining down, Farmer Ted runs onto the scene, sees the only other living thing around, and shoots it.
Opening credits. A lovely set of images I’ll be watching muted from now on. I notice Jolene Blalock’s credit coincides with film of a Saturn V booster thrusting upward on powerful engines. You don’t gotta be Fellini to figure that one out.
Returning from the break, we see a small shuttle ferrying Admiral Kirk to the newly-refurbished NCC 1701 for his inspection–damn it! Ferrying Captain Archer on an inspection of the outer hull of the NX-01 Enterprise, piloted by Sulu–Gah! Chief Engineer Charles “Trip” Tucker, whom I’ve been told bears a striking resemblance to Tommy Lee Jones. Archer gets a call from Admiral FORREST to come down to Starfleet MEDICAL at once.
On Earth, a gaggle of human admirals and Vulcan ambassadors enter an observation room looking in on where doctors are working on the wounded Klingon. There’s a lot of protuberance-waving between the two groups over who should be in charge of the situation. The humans claim jurisdiction since he crashed on our planet. The Vulcans claim that if we tried to deal with it on our own, we’d only screw it up and start a war. They have a point, but Our Hero arrives on the scene and convinces the admirals to throw off the chains of Vulcan oppression and let him taxi the Klingon, who we learn is named Klang, to Kronos in his shiny new starship. The emotionless Vulcans do a fair approximation of being peeved when they realize they aren’t going to get their way, and logically conclude the time is right to storm out of the room. Archer calls over the doctor who’s been working on Klang, and after the scene ends, invites him to do his doctoring on the Enterprise.
Back up in spacedock, armory officer Lt. Malcolm Reed and helmsman Ensign Travis Mayweather are watching the single transporter pad in operation, bringing up materials and supplies. Even though this pad has been “improved for bio-transport,” meaning it can transport living people and keep them that way, everyone is about as enthusiastic about trying it as Doctor McCoy was in the original Star Trek series. The package for which these two were waiting materializes, and Lt. Reed is lack of shocked to discover they sent the wrong techno-do-jobbers. As they head down to Engineering to complain, we learn that Lt. Reed does a mean southern accent and Mayweather grew up someplace off Earth where the gravity was adjustable.
Next, we head off to Klingon language summer camp to meet communications officer Hoshi Sato. Um, that is, a very serious and progressive alien language educational seminar in Brazil. It seems Hoshi has a uniquely keen ear for languages. Hoshi is reluctant to leave her campers, um, students until Archer bribes her with the opportunity to learn a new alien language before anyone else. We also learn that Star Fleet had to make some concessions to the Vulcans in return for the language sample. What kind of concessions? Hmm, I wonder.
Back once more to the ship, where Archer and Trip are walking so we can see lots of different locations. They’re discussing how Star Fleet accepted having a Vulcan on board as science officer in return for star charts showing where Kronos is. Trip sees the Vulcan as a spy, while Archer tells him to consider her a “chaperone.” They both want her off the ship as soon as the mission is over. They enter the captain’s ready room/quarters, I’m not sure which, where we meet Porthos, Archer’s beagle. I can only hope there isn’t an episode ahead of us where Porthos saves the ship by anything but accident. I mean literally having an accident and peeing on the enemy. Cute doggie, though. T’Pol slinks into the room and officially reports for duty. There’s more introductions and plenty of good natured ribbing. It turns out T’Pol doesn’t want to be there either. Still, Porthos likes her. Likes her leg, anyway.
It’s the launching ceremony for the Enterprise. Some admiral gives a speech, and all the humans applaud while the Vulcans in the room trade meaningful looks, disgusted by the admiral’s weak swimming metaphor. From the speech, we learn that Captain Archer’s dad worked directly with the exalted Zephram Cochrane himself on warp technology, and that the Enterprise is the first ship to use the engine the elder Archer and Cochrane designed. This is presumably the ship mentioned in the first scene, which would mean the Vulcans kept it out of production for thirty years. No wonder humans don’t like them very much. Sadly, it also means no one has made any technological advances in warp engine design in three decades. As the crew boards the Enterprise and prepares to leave, we get a voiceover of Cochrane reading a dedication speech which closely follows the “Space: the final frontier” speech from the original series. Bored by the speech, Archer flashes back to the first scene, where it is somewhat later in the day and he’s installing the antigrav generator in his model rocket. Estes has come a long way since 2001. Archer snaps out of it in time to give Mr. Mayweather the Go command. Maybe I watched Galaxy Quest too many times, but I was just waiting for the ship to scrape against the side of the spacedock on the way out. It didn’t, though. Mayweather lays in a course for Kronos, which T’Pol criticizes (way to inspire confidence in the crew when heading out in a largely untested vehicle, babe), and off they go.
Elsewhere, a Lumpy Green Guy enters a chamber to speak with the hologram of Emperor Palpat– that is, the shadowy faceless image of the man giving the Lumpies their orders. Lumpy reports that two of his sub-lumpies were killed and asks if their deaths can be prevented. Shadowy Guy says no, but it’s still obvious that whoever this is has some ability to fiddle with time. It seems the rumors of a time travel overarc are true.
Well, so far so good. What am I, about half way through? Oh man, that’s just the first commercial? What have I gotten myself into?
Back to the show. Archer is in sick bay, helping Dr. Neelix, oops, Phlox unpack and inquiring about the odds of the Klingon being able to leave the ship under his own power when they reach Kronos. Phlox, despite being pulled off a cushy 9 to 5 job on Earth as part of the Vulcan-instituted medical exchange program, is excited about having the chance to study human biology under field conditions, as it were. Phlox tells Archer there’s a chance the Klingon will wake, and a chance he won’t, so stay optimistic. Then he smiles this CGI-enhanced Joker smile, giving me a first class case of the heebie jeebies. I can only hope they won’t have the budget to do that every week.
Trip crawls through a Jeffries tube and discovers Mayweather sitting upside down on the ceiling of a room with no obvious function. Mayweather explains that this location is the “sweet spot,” a place where the artificial gravity goes all wonky. He tells Trip to grab both sides of the hatch and push off, which Trip misunderstands as an invitation. He launches himself up into the room, bonking his head on the ceiling/floor. Somehow, the starship’s chief engineer was totally unaware that such gravity inversions occurred, or that they could be used as cheap excuses for wire work. What follows is a classic “We’re not gay. No, really,” conversation, starting with the tip-off line, “Have you ever slept in zero gee?” “Do you like gladiator movies?”
T’Pol and Archer are in the captain’s mess, making small talk while waiting for Trip to arrive. I’m starting to think Bakula is a diversion to keep us from realizing we’re watching The Trip Show. Vulcans aren’t a touristy bunch, all their recreational needs being satisfied within the confines of the Vulcan compound in Sausalito. I have mental images of Vulcans playing volleyball and tennis, trying to body surf in the wave pool, and discoing until the break of dawn. Anyway, Trip arrives, and the steward brings T’Pol her vegetarian plate, and huge steaks for the other two. It looks like real, honest to God meat, too. None of that syntho-protien crap they eat in the 24th century. T’Pol disapproves, and uses it as a springboard to launch yet another offensive against the barbarity of humanity, while she cuts a hard breadstick in half with knife and fork because Vulcans are too civilized to come in contact with their food. I figure they keep it suspended inside their digestive tract with their mental powers until their highly trained stomach acid artillery can bombard it into its component molecules.
One ship flyby later, everyone is on the bridge as they push the ship to the upper end of its speed limit. Hoshi gets increasingly nervous as the speed increases, thinking she feels tremors in the ship. T’Pol suggests that maybe Hoshi would like to have a good lie down, to which Hoshi responds, in Vulcan, expressing a sentiment that I never would have guessed the Vulcan language had words for. Dr. Phlem calls the bridge to tell the captain that the Klingon has awoken.
Down in sick bay, Klang is ranting in Klingonese, and Hoshi is nervously trying to get a handle on what he’s saying, using both a language translator and her own ability. The Klingon’s aggressiveness has her spooked. Once the doctor confirms that Klang is out of his mind, Hoshi regains some self-assurance. She must feel better about not making sense of what he’s saying once she knows he’s not making sense in the first place. Suddenly, everything breaks.
We are shown a group of Lumpy Green Guys skulking down a hallway with the lights out. Up on the bridge, Reed thinks he saw something on the sensors just as the power went out, but he can’t be sure. Down in sickbay, they’ve broken out the MagLites. Klang is ranting again. Across the room, one of the light beams illuminates the quickly fading form of a Lumpy in a stairwell. They look more closely, then search the entire room, eventually finding Spider-Lumpy crawling across the ceiling. Someone shoots first without asking questions. As they’re killing that Lumpy, they completely miss seeing a second one leap off the ceiling onto the exam table with the Klingon. Soon, the lights come back up and they discover that Klang’s gone missing.
On a side note, it’s been a bad day for Hoshi. The ship’s all creaky, T’Pol was snide at her, a Klingon yelled at her, she saw a spooky half-invisible alien, then saw it fall dead right in front of her. I just know she’s thinking, “I could be back in Brazil, sucking down fruity drinks and conga-ing with muscular tanned beach bums. It’s Carnival. But no, I had to learn Klingon. Stupid, stupid!”
On the bridge some time later, T’Pol and Archer discuss whether or not to continue the mission now that the Klingon is gone. Specifically, Archer wants to go find him and get him back, while T’Pol wants to write the whole delivery mission off simply because they no longer have anything to deliver or any way to find him. Archer isn’t convinced, and calls T’Pol into a side room for a private chat. In what must be Archer’s ready room, backed by some delightful art of previous ships named Enterprise, Archer vents about how the Vulcans have spent the last hundred years pretending to help humanity while actually holding us back, and how he won’t have it on his ship. He orders her to go out and help try to find Klang instead of just standing there saying it can’t be done.
Returning to sickbay, we get a name for the Lumpy Green Guys: Suliban. Phlox is dissecting the dead one using actual medical tools and cutting open the body to look inside. Keen. He finds all kinds of genetic and anatomical changes, from extra lung capacity to chameleonic skin and clothes, which he points out to Archer with the glee of a man who knows he’s grossing someone out. Phlox declares the dead Suliban the recipient of advanced genetic engineering.
Down in engineering, T’Pol is trying to convince Trip that the Enterprise’s sensors are woefully inadequate to the task of tracking the plasma trail warp signature thingy of the stealth ship that took Klang away. Trip takes this personally, and we are treated to yet another “Humans good, Vulcans bad” speech. I think we get it, guys. Archer shows up, closely followed by Hoshi, who has translated most of what the Klingon said before he was taken. Using a crowbar and pliers, Archer gets T’Pol to give up some backstory on the Suliban (”Mostly harmless”) and to reveal that Rigel Ten was Klang’s last stop before hitting Earth, so to speak. They set course and head off.
Somewhere, the Suliban have Klang strapped down and drugged up, and are interrogating him. They learn that he was sent to Rigel Ten to meet a Suliban woman named Sarin. The interrogators think she gave him something, but he doesn’t know what they are talking about. The head interrogator leaves, no doubt to do something nefarious.
The Enterprise arrives at Rigel Ten, and a landing party is being briefed. Pretty much every cast member we’ve met so far is in the party. Which means pretty much the head of every department and all the senior officers. If you wondered where that idea originated, here it is. Their goal is to find the person Klang was sent to meet, and find out what was so dang important. They land on the roof of a trading complex and descend into the city to begin their search. At this point, the broadcast screwed up, so there is a break in the narrative.
When the picture comes back, T’Pol is warning her away team buddy, Trip, not to get involved in some local affair.
Mayweather and Reed, meanwhile, have made their way to a club with multicolored dancing girls with two and a half foot tongues and how did they convince the censors that body paint was an article of clothing? There was something about finding a guy who saw Klang, or a guy showing them where he saw Klang, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Well, I was, but not to that. Moving on….
In Down Below, the lurkers gather along the corridors
