Fight or Flight
01/11/2000 . Source: Gary M. Torborg  

The second episode of Star Trek Enterprise makes it's way onto the small screen and Gary M. Torborg pops a beer and gives us the inside track on the new Trek.

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"Broken Bow" gave us a good introduction to the characters and settings of Enterprise. "Fight or Flight" does a very good job of developing those characters and settings. Where "Broken Bow" showed us the origin of the Starfleet motto "to boldly go where no man has gone before," "Fight of Flight" actually lived that motto.

There were many things that clicked nicely to make this a very enjoyable hour.

It may not stay on top, and it isn't going to rank as one of the Star Trek franchise's best ever, but it easily eclipses the series premiere to capture, for now, this season's top spot.

The story concept of "Fight or Flight" will seem pedestrian to some, but it's actually about the first time we got 1) a realistic look at what space exploration is all about, and 2) an episode in which the Enterprise crew is actually "exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations...".

The ship is depicted as going for quite a while without really encountering anything. Boredom is setting in. Sato's complaint about her quarters being on the wrong side of the ship is something that can only happen during a protracted lull in the action.

It gives the episode a realistic atmosphere and brings out the characters' personalities. Well done.

Stopping to shoot some target practice at a cluster of asteroids is another good but unexpected touch. Frankly, you would never have seen anything like this in the original series or The Next Generation.

Everything was already firmly established with regards to ships weapons. Here, they are obviously in their infancy and haven't really been tested yet. Watching miss after miss may be uncomfortable to some, but it's realistic. Think about present-day space flight.

There are no on-board weapons. And once we get to the point of interstellar travel and meet other alien races, I actually have my doubts as to whether there's going to be any weapons on the first Earth ships or what kind of weapon they will be.

It turns out that the shortcomings of the weapon system was a setup for the episode's "A" plot, that of the discovery of the derelict ship. Once again, excellent Story Execution took a rather pedestrian concept and turned it into another kudo for the episode.

If this were the original series, they would have beamed aboard the ship, found the lights and powered up the ship, discovered a perfectly breathable atmosphere, then found one or more of that ship's crew still alive (but just barely) whereupon the near-dead crewmember would have been beamed aboard the Enterprise, revived, healed, and spoke perfect English to tell the captain who did this to their ship and how to combat them.

Instead of all this, the Enterprise crew took a shuttle craft over, donned space suits, performed a crude docking of the shuttlecraft to the derelict ship, struggled with getting a hatch open to get inside, discovered a dark, cold, ship with an unbreathable atmosphere and no (or at least not enough) power to light things up or warm things up.

What they also found, of course, were the bodies of the crew, dead and being drained of bodily fluids by an unknown aggressor. In what is sure to draw the largest amount of criticism for this episode, Sato goes into a now-famous fit of screaming.

Though the screams themselves were a little exaggerated, her fright at the horror before her was not only perfectly understandable but refreshing as well.

The last time we saw someone show a realistic amount of pure fright at seeing something like this was way back in the original series episode "The Deadly Years" where Chekov discovers the body of an aged scientist who was supposedly only in his 30s.

In that episode, Chekov's brief panic was forgiven and dismissed by a crew that knew what it meant to be "scared half to death."

What happened after this discovery is a little puzzling, and constitutes this episode's clearly weakest point (though it really isn't that bad). T'Pol convinces Archer to return to the Enterprise and leave the area out of what appears to be a concern for the crew's safety.

Again, Vulcan over-protectiveness rears its ugly head. What isn't all good about these scenes are two points: 1) Archer actually listens to T'Pol initially, and the Enterprise leaves the area to find other adventures, and 2) T'Pol's request that they abandon the derelict ship seems to almost show an emotional reaction.

It's almost as if what was found on the ship was as frightening to T'Pol as it was to Sato. Of course, that is illogical, but so is T'Pol's request to leave the area. Despite the horror, there really wasn't any reason to at least stay and investigate further.

Archer's initial acceptance of T'Pol's reasoning appears to have been based on mainly the fact that their weapon systems were not yet operating properly. This seems a reasonable explanation, except that they had no idea where the enemy was or when (or if) they were going to return soon.

Quite frankly, they wasted valuable time that could have been used to complete the investigation without having a run-in with the aliens because Archer listened to T'Pol.

That said, Archer's acceptance of T'Pol's request to leave ended up setting up this episode's high point: the scene where Archer, Tucker, and T'Pol mull over the recent events and Archer has his change of heart.

The dialog here was snappy and well-thought-out. Archer uses just the right combination of emotional appear and logical reasoning to show what his change of heart meant, and then ordered the Enterprise to return to the derelict ship and resume the investigation.

Next, of course, we get the inevitable return of the alien aggressors, returning for (apparently) the tri-globulen being extracted from the derelict crew's bodies.

Now, the Enterprise crew has to get off that ship quickly and deal with these other aliens. Thanks to the *lack* of transporter technology, the return trip doesn't go as quickly as they'd like, and they find themselves trapped and under attack.

Just when things look worst, a companion ship to the derelict shows up. Suspecting that the Enterprise was the original aggressor, our heroes are faced with a two-fold attack. Then, the most unlikely hero of all emerges as the ship's savior: Hoshi Sato!

Some will criticize Sato's all-to-quick mastery of the alien's language as unrealistic, but let's not forget that this is why she was brought on board. We have to allow a *little* stretching of our imaginations, and it is a lot more realistic that a language expert gets the rudimentary parts of a language than the techno-babble explanations we're used to getting of how the Universal Translator works.

It took some doing, but Sato finally convinces the dead crew's allies that the Enterprise is "on their side" and disables the enemy aliens long enough for the Enterprise to escape. Just for good measure, our "allies" destroy the enemy ship in a scene that made me wince a bit to put it bluntly.

But though this episode was not perfect, as stated above, the bad parts were more than made up for with the good scenes. I look forward to more of this more-realistic depiction of first contacts, space dangers, and new experiences.

The Enterprise writers could afford to tone down T'Pol's over-protectiveness (if that's what it really is...) and not be quite so quick to have characters develop new traits like self-confidence.

The scenes revolving around the slug didn't really do anything for me, nor did they do the episode any harm. They were kind of just "there." I see the writer's point, though: using a parallel in nature, this episode is meant to be as much a character study for Sato (gaining some real self-confidence and overcome her phobias) as it is an adventure story.

I have no problem with the character development; it just happened a bit too fast.

Gary's Ranked Reviews
written by Gary M. Torborg
Copyright ©2001 All Rights Reserved