Synopsis:

Archer and the crew must intervene when a human freight vessel goes to battle with alien pirates.

The Enterprise crew is dispatched by Starfleet Command to assist Fortunate, a human freight vessel that has been attacked by Nausicaan pirates. On arriving, they are surprised to find that Fortunate's crew is resistant to Archer's efforts to help them and determined to seek revenge against their attackers, no matter what the repercussions.

C.A. Voigts' "A View From The Shuttlecraft" Enterprise Episode Review:

A solid episode - I like sticking to one story and giving Travis more
depth of character. The story seems a nice combo of original and next
generation Trek. LeVar Burton has done good job on the two episodes he
has directed so far - this and Terra Nova. Typical Trek music but done
well for the episode. It is less percussive than in some of the previous
episodes. The shoot-out scene sounded almost reminiscent of “Jaws.”

Archer showing more of the character we saw in Broken Bow - I would like
to see Archer and Commander Riker in a poker game together. Archer is
becoming a gratifying amalgamation of Kirk and Picard. By the way, it
was very considerate of the Fortunate to jettison the shuttle pod for
Enterprise to pick up. Sound development of the character of Matthew
Ryan (the character was listed as Ryan Cross on the Star Trek web site
-did someone goof?). The beast within Ryan gradually comes to the fore
and the background for his need for revenge was worked in nicely in the
lunchroom conversation with Travis. Unlike what we are use to, when
there was nowhere to run, Ryan and his crew may have had only moments to
live, and Enterprise comes to the rescue, Ryan is less than
enthusiastic.

Was it in everyone's contract that they all get to eat in at least half
of the episodes?

New information - yes, Enterprise does use subspace to communicate with
Earth. I was wondering about that. The mysterious Enterprise chef is
the best in Starfleet - I am looking forward to seeing this character
some day.

Good lines - Doctor, while in the cargo hold of the Fortunate: “Under
the circumstances, I defer to your experience.”

Episode Rating:
What does this rating mean?

C. A. Voigts 
cavoigts@starfleetlibrary.com
--
Copyright 2001, C. A. Voigts. All rights reserved, but feel free to
ask... This article is explicitly prohibited from being used in any
off-net compilation without due attribution and *express written consent
of the author*.

Laurie's No-Nonsense Review

I guess it's getting better, kind of. The Enterprise was sent to aid a cargo ship that had sent out a distress call, and wasn't responding to hails. They found that the freighter Captain was wounded & unconscious, and the first officer had taken over. He said they'd been attacked by Nausicaans (the big scary tough-guy aliens famous for stabbing a young Captain Picard through the heart), but didn't mention that they were holding one of them prisoner, so he could beat him into giving up the shield frequency codes for the rest of the Nausicaan ships. When the Enterprise crew found out, they got into a fight, and Ryan (the first officer) ended up trapping Dr. Phlox, Reed, Archer, T'Pol, and Mayweather in a cargo bay with a hole in it. The Enterprise rescued them, and followed the cargo ship until they found it surrounded by Nausicaan ships. Archer negotiated the release of the prisoner and extracted a promise from the Nausicaans that they'd stop attacking freighters. In the middle of all of it, we got a bit of Ensign Mayweather's history, or at least a series of descriptions of life aboard a freighter.

I admit it all still looks very cool. It's great that the show is letterboxed, it always looks crisp and clean and believable. The slow-flying football at the beginning was fun, and so was the scary moment when they ejected the cargo bay all those Enterprise crew members were on, after they punctured the hull. But I'm still frustrated, I still feel like they're not telling very exciting stories. And the show, it's fun but it's just not smart. The other shows weren't always smart, but they tried to be, and I feel like they're giving up some smartness in an effort to snag a wider audience, which they're getting, apparently. It just ends up being a bit bland. There was a sickly sweet scene where Mayweather goes to Archer because he's conflicted about their pursuit of Ryan's cargo ship, he thinks Ryan is just defending himself. Archer gives him this speech about how human beings have a responsibility not to seek revenge, and that even people who don't come from earth are still "humans". Mayweather, having grown up on a ship instead of on Earth, says, "I guess I should know that better than anyone." I would have felt better about the racism lecture if Mayweather wasn't the only black member of the crew. In fact, the whole season so far is filled with white guys. Can't the extras, at least, be different? What's wrong with putting some women and some people with dark skin in some shots? Is that so wrong?

I'm nitpicking. I can't help it. I want it to be better than it is. Fortunately, next week's preview looks excellent! Time travel, scary aliens, questions of trust, lots of running around. . .it looks fun. (And even bad Star Trek is usually better than other TV.)

Land of Laurie
http://www.twogirlsandatv.com/lauriereviewscifi.htm#enterprise

Timothy Lynch's Enterprise Episode Review

WARNING:  It ain't me ... it ain't me ... oh, wait, it *is* me -- and
these are spoilers for ENT's "Fortunate Son."
 
In brief:  Very solid character work -- a keeper.
 
======
"Fortunate Son"
Enterprise Season 1, Episode 9
Written by James Duff
Directed by LeVar Burton
Brief summary:  Mayweather is conflicted when the Enterprise finds
itself caught in a private war involving space "boomers."
======

Okay, it's clearly time for those individuals making the ENT previews
to get with the program, as this is the second week in a row that
they've been seriously, and unpleasantly, misleading.  With
"Civilization" last week, it looked as though the focus was "Archer
romances the alien babe of the week," when in fact that was a fairly
peripheral part of the show.  This time, "Fortunate Son" looked from
advance publicity as though it was going to be one of those "cast
member with divided heritage has to decide where his loyalties lie"
episodes -- Odo had more than one, Kira had a few, Worf had about
six million (including what I'd call the very first one of its type,
TNG's "Heart of Glory").  Instead, we got an episode where
Mayweather's conflicts were a lot more internal, and a lot more subtle.

"Fortunate Son" begins somewhat atypically, on two counts.  First,
the entire teaser has nothing whatsoever to do with the Enterprise
itself -- we've seen that before, in "The Andorian Incident," but it's still
rare.  Second, this is the first time we've seen Archer actually receive
*orders* on where to go rather than just going where the mood takes
him:  Admiral Forest calls and orders the Enterprise to assist the
freighter Fortunate, which has sent out a distress call.  (And yes, I
realize Archer referred to "Terra Nova" as a mission, but it's a little
different here.)  As Mayweather was born on an ore freighter (the
Horizon), Archer hopes his input will be valuable.  (His expertise in
the day-to-day experience becomes clear early on, when he points out
that the established number of crewmembers won't include newborns;
as he puts it, "at Warp 1.8, you've got a lot of time on your hands
between ports.  That's how my parents wound up with me.")

Eventually, the Enterprise finds the Fortunate and boards her after
there's no response to hails.  Once there, they (and we) find that the
captain's been wounded, that first officer Matthew Ryan is acting
captain, and that the Fortunate's crew is not in the habit of accepting
help from outsiders.  Phlox more or less insists that he at least offer
medical assistance, and when it turns out the captain's injuries will
require two or three days to treat, Ryan reluctantly accepts
engineering assistance as well.  Why "reluctantly?"  Because, as we
quickly discover, he's got a Nausicaan prisoner on board whom he's
torturing for information that will help him put an end to their pirating
activities.

At this point, the show basically tries to cover ground on two fronts.
On one front, there's the question of whether Ryan's choice of waging
a one-man war on the Nausicaans is justified.  A quieter issue that
gets raised several times, however, is that these freighter crews' entire
way of life is going to change once the spaceways get crowded with
starships, and how easy or hard that's going to be to accept.  That's an
issue we've never gotten to see among humans before (on Trek,
anyway -- it's got lots of historical parallels), and I like it a *lot*.  The
immediate threat here was ended, but this is the sort of long-term
issue that can simmer in more than a few situations -- I'd like to see
more of it.

I'm of two minds about how quickly we discovered that Ryan's hiding
something, though.  On the one hand, the meat of the episode isn't
about Ryan so much as it is about Mayweather, and by getting that
plot point revealed early we got to cut to the chase.  On the other
hand, it's Mayweather's own experience as a boomer that really
informs his reactions, and it's not as easy for us to understand that
experience if the only freighter we get to see is commanded by Well-
Intentioned Nutcase #47B.

That said, the episode does a good job gradually ramping up
Mayweather's misgivings.  Initially, he and Ryan are on fairly good
terms:  Mayweather gives Ryan a tour of some of the Enterprise's
highlights, including the transporter (which Ryan has never seen), the
warp 5 engine, and the well-stocked dining room.  Mayweather is
proud of everything he's surrounded by, and generally with good
reason -- I particularly like his curiosity about the transporter.  Ryan,
however, is more concerned with why Mayweather chose to leave the
Horizon in the first place -- if everyone goes off to join Starfleet, he
fears, no one will be left on the freighter runs and his way of life will
die off.  Mayweather disagrees, but Ryan plays the guilt card
extremely well:  he makes Mayweather wonder if his family really
supported his choice, or just said what Mayweather wanted to hear.

As much as I dismissed Ryan earlier, though, he and Travis are easily
the strongest characters of the show.  Ryan's gone over the edge, to be
sure, but he's generally convincing about it -- and a lot of his
arguments are at worst short-sighted.  He's seen his ship damaged
and his captain nearly killed by Nausicaan raiders, and is so
convinced that "progress" is passing him by that he's obsessed with
solving problems on his own without outside help.  Is he seeing the
likely consequences of his acts?  No -- but in a lot of ways, neither
does Mayweather initially.  Is he thinking rationally?  No -- but given
everything he's been through, that's not surprising.

Even when he's found out and tries to rid himself of Archer and
company, Ryan tries to be humane.  He leads them into a trap that
leads to a firefight, yes -- but that firefight looked much more like a
delaying tactic to me than a deliberate attempt to kill anyone.  Given
how much control Ryan had over the situation once the Enterprise
team was sealed in, if he'd wanted them dead they'd *be* dead.
Instead, he simply cuts that part of his ship loose, with enough of a
leak that the Enterprise can't chase him but not so much of one as to
be instantly lethal.

One of the few false notes the episode struck came when Mayweather
goes to talk to Archer.  The core of the scene was absolutely fine, and
a huge improvement over what we'd been led to expect from the
trailer:  rather than challenging Archer openly, Mayweather goes to
him privately and respectfully expresses some misgivings.  My real
concern, I suppose, is that Archer's response and Mayweather's
acceptance suggests that Archer is 100% in the right, with no gray
areas to doubt at all.  I'm not buying that.  Mayweather's argument to
Ryan later, that in going after the Nausicaans, Ryan is putting other
freighters at greater risk rather than lesser, is a marvelous answer --
Archer's claim that all humans have codes of behavior regardless of
origins or lifestyle comes off as entirely too glib in comparison.
Given how young Mayweather is, I can see him accepting the
argument at first -- but later on, I think Mayweather should've
challenged it a bit, and I definitely think Keene (the Fortunate's
captain) should have said a little something about how heavy-handed
Archer's approach was.  I don't object to Archer's ethics or his overall
actions -- I just think he was too heavy-handed, and that the
justification was too self-serving to stand unchallenged.

The remainder of the episode was a little predictable, and in some
ways reminiscent of DS9's "Valiant."  Ryan gets crucial information
from his Nausicaan prisoner, shouts down his assistant's objections,
and tries to wage his own personal war on the Nausicaans, walking
into an ambush and nearly getting his crew killed in the process.  By
this time, Ryan's unfortunately become a little less three-dimensional
than he was earlier, which had me feeling a little detached during
much of this battle.  Mayweather's argument to and with Ryan was
superb, however.

Both on the writing and the directing end, the episode's as significant
for what it *doesn't* show and tell as what it does.  For example,
Ryan makes reference to another freighter, the Northstar -- clearly
something disastrous happened there which claimed a lot of lives, but
we don't really know what.  Given that Ryan and Mayweather both
know extremely well what happened, though, there's no reason
anyone should be giving us the exposition ... so we don't get it.  I
appreciate that.  I also appreciate the fact that no one ever comes out
and directly says that Ryan's entire hostage-taking resulted in nothing
more than false information -- the results make that plain, but
everyone's too busy to really say much about it.  Lastly, we don't find
out exactly why Mayweather left the Horizon -- and in this case, I
suspect it's because Mayweather himself can't quite put his reasons
into words.  I'm expecting we'll find out more about this eventually (I
assume we'll actually meet his parents at some point, for instance), but
for now that ambiguity felt right.

On the other hand, one thing the episode *does* show and really
needed was the tag scene at the end between Archer and Captain
Keene.  Without that scene, I think we'd be left with the sense that
Ryan is a typical boomer, and that Mayweather's the aberration -- with
it, it's clear that most boomers are independent, but also reasonable
people.  There's a real difference between these early explorers and
the Enterprise crew, who do their exploring in relative comfort and
can head home relatively easily if needed.  This scene pointed that out
without harping on it, which I also think is a plus.

Acting-wise, a lot of this show rested on Anthony Montgomery
(Mayweather), and fortunately he was up to the task.  A couple of his
early lines, like "besides, the Horizon didn't have transporters to play
with" and the whole bit about "mystery meals," felt forced the way he
delivered them -- but his two really key scenes were the conversation
with Archer and the final arguments to Ryan, and I think he nailed
them both handily.  Mayweather sounded passionate, but still
somewhat young and green ... which is exactly how he should have
sounded, I think.  Kudos.

Lawrence Monoson (Ryan) also did a fairly good job -- certainly a
much better one than when we saw him years ago on DS9's "The
Storyteller."  When Ryan tried to be menacing or openly passionate,
such as some of his interrogation sequences, things felt a bit off to me
-- but most of the time Ryan was just someone who's been through
hell and tends to bottle a lot up.  That worked.

Other thoughts:

-- In terms of "fun with words," it's interesting to see how the preview
managed to mischaracterize the episode so completely.  Mayweather's
concern that "maybe this isn't any of our business" is quoted without
the "maybe," and that one omission gives the entire line a very
different flavor.  Similarly, Archer's "are there any other orders of
mine you'd like to question?" comes off very differently when you
can see the smile Archer has while saying it.

-- In terms of "fun with numbers," however, I've got to question
something.  We're told that the Fortunate has a crew complement of
23, and the "24 bio-signs" T'Pol detects is supposed to be an obvious
hint about the presence of the Nausicaan.  We know there are kids on
board, though, and I'm having difficulty believing they're considered
*crew*.  It's certainly easy enough to rationalize (mainly that T'Pol
made a poor choice of words), but seems a bit odd.

-- Several of the visuals this time around are absolutely gorgeous:  I
quite liked the initial shot of the shuttlepod swooping around to dock
on the Fortunate, for instance.  (On the other hand, the low-G game of
catch felt very contrived visually, though the idea of it was great.)

-- Porthos fans, take heart:  he's back, albeit briefly.

-- So, the Nausicaans have been around for a while, it seems.  We
must have a good effect on them, though:  later on they give up piracy
and just stab future Starfleet captains during bar brawls.  :-)

-- The Archer/Forest scene seemed to click pretty well -- it's obvious
that Archer doesn't want to go back, but he's restrained about it.  The
reference to "subspace amplifiers" to keep communications open was
also nice.

-- I like the fact that the distress call was an honest mistake.  (And
yes, there's only Ryan's word for that, but the explanation makes a lot
of sense.)

That pretty much does it, I think.  "Fortunate Son" has a few false
notes, but mostly dealt with a clash of operating philosophies and did
it honestly -- on a character level, I can't ask for too much more than
that.

So, wrapping up:

Writing:  The plot's a little predictable towards the end and Archer's
justifications are questionable, but the general core of the
show was marvelous.
Directing:  Lots of good visuals, and Burton generally kept things
restrained without being too quiet.
Acting:   A few minor false notes, mostly early -- but fine overall.

OVERALL:  8.5; well worth keeping.

NEXT WEEK:
 
Remember that "temporal cold war" thing?  Looks like it's heating
up...

[And my review next week will undoubtedly be late, as I'm going out of
town; sorry for any inconvenience!]

Tim Lynch (Castilleja School, Science Department)
tlynch@alumni.caltech.edu<*>
"Don't kid yourself thinking you're doing this for some greater good.
This is about revenge, nothing else."
-- Mayweather
--
Copyright 2001, Timothy W. Lynch.  All rights reserved, but feel free to ask...
This article is explicitly prohibited from being used in any off-net
compilation without due attribution and *express written consent of the
author*.  Walnut Creek and other CD-ROM distributors, take note.

Related Links:

Where to Watch - Local channels and airtimes.
VHS, Laserdisc and DVD availability.

Cast:

Scott Bakula as Captain Jonathan Archer
Connor Trinneer as Chief Engineer Charles Tucker III
Jolene Blalock as Sub-commander T'Pol
Dominic Keating as Lt. Malcolm Reed
Anthony Montgomery as Ensign Travis Mayweather
Linda Park as Ensign Hoshi Sato
John Billingsley as Dr. Phlox

Guest Cast:

Lawrence Monoson as Ryan Cross
Kieran Mulroney as Shaw
Vaughn Armstrong as Admiral Forrest
Danny Goldring as Nausicaan Captain
Charles Lucia as Captain Keene
D. Elliot Woods as Boy
Elyssa D. Vito as Girl

Creative staff: