Fight or Flight: Enterprise Retrospective

I mentioned before that this is my favorite Star Trek series. This is the first post-pilot episode, in which the crew encounter a new alien race and almost get turned into Spanish Fly. It focuses on Hoshi, of all people, who is both the youngest crew member and the least comfortable crew member in space. She gets claustrophobic in the EVA suits. Not a good disadvantage to have on a spaceship.

So, the Enterprise is just cruising along exploring the area on their Vulcan star-charts, when they run into a dead-in-space ship that shows markings of having been attacked. T'Pol tells them to just fly away, but humans being humans and afflicted with incurable curiosity, Archer takes Hoshi and Malcom and hops over to the derelict ship. There they find the crew butchered and being processed by a machine that's flushing out their bodily fluids.

Again T'Pol urges them to leave, and Archer reluctantly does so. But he has a change of heart, thinking about how he would have reacted had the crew been humans. So the Enterprise turns around and heads back. They use the ship's systems to send an automatic distress call, but are interrupted by a large alien ship that they quickly realize was doing the body-flushing. They're out for useful chemical compounds such as aphrodisiacs, and humans have similar compounds in their bodies. This does not bode well.

Sure enough, the hapless Enterprise is badly outgunned by the aliens, but before they get assimilated--sorry, processed--another alien ship arrives, related to the derelict ship. Despite communications issues, Hoshi is able to convince the alien captain that the other ship is the problem, and after some judicious blasting (and a gratuitous torpedo shot from the Enterprise), the bad ship is blown to bits, and Hoshi has made a new friend.

These aliens are the Axanar, and while we never see a live Axanar again, they do appear once in a later episode of Enterprise, and Axanar (the world) is mentioned twice in TOS as both James Kirk and Garth of Izar were awarded medals related to events on or around that world.

So, how does this episode rank? Well, Tanner liked it, although there were some uncomfortable moments with the jump-scare and the gross flushing machine. Obviously, he doesn't have a basis to compare the episode to anything else, since he's only seen Broken Bow before this. For me, I like it because it shows both the vulnerability of the ship and crew and their resilience and determination to do the right thing. Unlike Kirk or Picard, Archer doesn't have a rulebook to tell him what to do in these situations; he's got to make it up as he goes on. Here, his conscience, not the rulebook, determines the fate of not only his own ship, but the murdered Axanar crew members as well, who get the dignity of being brought home for burial instead of becoming alien sex drugs.

I'm going to rank this episode a 6 out of 10; it has good moments, but it's obvious that the show is still trying to find its footing, and it's also obvious that Starfleet needs to learn to make sure ships are fully stocked, armed and prepared before going out into space, a lesson they'll forget a century and a half later as well in Star Trek: Generations. The show does get bonus points for not having a universal translator to solve all their communications problems, although Hoshi's gift for languages borders on the telepathic. She literally carried on a complex conversation with a brand-new alien species only hours after first encountering their language, convincing an alien captain to change his mind and side with the Enterprise against a greater threat. Clearly, the universal translator was invented because not every ship could have a Hoshi Sato on board.

If exciting space action is your idea of fun, but you're looking for something other than Star Trek, consider taking a look at my own science-fiction adventure book, Bard Conley's Adventures Across the Solar System. You'll be supporting Indie publishing, and you might even enjoy it.