Vox Sola, Prod#ST:ENT 122

Synopsis: A strange, symbiotic alien creature boards the Enterprise capturing a few of the crew members, including Archer and Trip, and cocoons them in its web feeding off their bodies to survive. With the captured crewmembers' lives in jeopardy, Hoshi, under T'Pol's command, faces her biggest challenge by trying to find a way to communicate with the lifeform in order to return it to its home planet.


MJC Review: 

The Drama -

Congratulations Berman and Braga. You have successfully made the first (and hopefully only) Star Trek episode in MJC's review history to receive a 1 (god awful) rating. Your reward is an upside down cool peace sign. It was like I was trying to force myself to watch the entire episode. What were the producers/writers thinking?? Or rather, we're they even thinking for that matter? I must admit that there have been some big time flops in Star Trek episode history, but this one takes the grand prize. Even with some of Voyager's wishy-washy episodes, one could at least make half-way sense of what was going on. And to think that I wasted a whole hour of my valuable time watching this episode, when I could have been enjoying a good ball game (and not water polo) at Hooters. So why am I wasting my valuable time writing this review? Well, it's so bad, that "stuff" just comes out so easily (and fast) to criticize it. I'll make sure to at least run a spell checker. As far as the grammar, at least certain 4-letter words will be filtered out. So what's bad about this one? Everything! The story was bad, the premise was bad, the plots were bad, the writing was bad, and it was just too hot and humid that evening to watch a bad episode like this one. Having a "bizarre space creature" of the week to deal with was kind of lame as well. However, I must admit that despite how bad the story was, Bakula did give it his all. Kudos goes to Bakula for not degrading his acting abilities despite a bad story. A couple of scenes are (surprisingly) worth mentioning. The scene with Mayweather alone on the bridge was interesting. I thought he handled the situation with the Kreetassens well. It looks like Mayweather has good communication skills when no one else is on the bridge. I'm surprised that he didn't sit in the captain's chair real quick while no one was around. The T'Pol/Hoshi interaction was interesting as well. It looks like T'Pol actually thinks highly of Hoshi, considering she's a smelly human. Who knows? It could be the foundation for a future friendship. I'm not sure what to make of this space alien creature thing. It's an individual when separate from the rest, but one when joined with the whole. Reminds me too much of the great-link from DS9. Any more original ideas? Oh well, I just may be the "Vox Sola" for badly criticizing this one too much. However, Enterprise must be held to a higher standard of writing, producing, and good solid science fiction creativity than any other Trek or sci-fi series.


Tid Bits -

So do all alien ships dock so perfectly with Enterprise's docking port? I can see how the Kreetassen visitors would mistake humans eating food for sex. Quite often humans will give their food the "tongue". It was interesting that the movie and Archer's sports game were being watched on a square screen. I guess wide viewing screens don't survive into the 22st century. Yet, Enterprise (22 century era) is shown (21st century era) in letter box format. Go figure.


What it all means - 

"I feel your pain."


1 cool peace sign 
MJC 200205.03