What a difference a year makes. A year ago, Archer and Trip were surveying the Enterprise and Archer was complaining about a scratch on the paint. This year, the damage is a little more extensive. But, it's nice to have a logical reason for the Enterprise to be fixed so quickly so the ship can keep going and a good reason that Malcolm is able to return to duty so soon.

Regulan (sp?) blood worms and Tellurites are introduced, as are replicators (molecular synthesizers). The squeak in Archer's ready room and Porthos both make another appearance - nice to see Porthos again. Background music was a nice blend of soothing and menacing in the proper proportions. Again, attention to detail. Watching the ship repairs in the background was great. All the different species found in the primary data core was wonderful. The final scene of rebuilding is a great touch. And, somehow, I don't think Captain Archer is going to complain too much about the scratches this time.

Captain Archer does a nice job of being stuck between a rock and a hard place and not liking it one bit. I did have to laugh at the idea of a Starfleet vessel maintaining itself - it reminded me that, with the advent of computers, we were told we would now be a paperless society - hasn't happened yet. And, finally, we have the doctor telling the captain, "He's dead." It had to happen sometime - I'm just glad it didn't really happen. We really need a story featuring Travis - he has been been sorely neglected. And the dressing down of Malcolm and Tripp really brought back memories of a similar scene in "The Trouble with Tribbles" although this one was not as funny nor was it meant to be. How the crew death with death was fascinating to watch - a glimpse of what may come in the future.

And once again, food made an appearance.

Great lines. "It's unethical to harm a patient. I can inflict as much pain as I like." "Your inquiry was not recognized (sounds like the androids in "I, Mudd")." "They need to work a little on their hospitality." "I thought I told you to have that repainted. - I was getting around to it." "Where's your spirit of adventure? I left it in the Romulan mine field." "You look pretty good for a dead guy."

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

Timothy Lynch's Enterprise Episode Review

[Sorry this is so late, all.  Other obligations intruded.  The
"Sickbay" review should be along around the end of the week.  -- TWL]

WARNING:  The Enterprise may have come to a "Dead Stop," but
the spoilers have not.
 
In brief:  Despite a few cliches, another successful outing.
 
======
"Dead Stop"
Enterprise Season 2, Episode 4
Written by Mike Sussman & Phyllis Strong
Directed by Roxann Dawson
Brief summary:  The Enterprise, in desperate need of repair, comes
aboard an automated space station that works miracles for a terrible
price.
======

"Dead Stop," its title notwithstanding, got off to one hell of a
beginning.  There were a few goofy bits late in the episode that one
can certainly criticize (and I will), but the episode did so many things
right that I'm finding myself quite fond of it.

For starters, the sheer existence of the show, or at least the
acknowledgement that such a show was needed, pleased me no end.
You may remember that although I liked "Minefield" quite a bit, I
worried that the extensive damage the ship took there might simply
disappear without a trace by the beginning of the following episode, a
la the many times "Voyager" pulled such a stunt (and most especially
"Deadlock," at least among the episodes I watched).  Now, people
may well disagree with the way Enterprise was repaired here, but I
don't think anyone can dispute that at least *requiring* the repair job
is a serious plus -- and in my case, it certainly made me more willing
to buy into the rest of the story.

(It also helped that the extent of the damage wasn't minimized.  As
Trip points out, in the ship's current state it's highly vulnerable, and
the best they can do is about warp 2 -- which means that any
Earthbound help is a decade away.)

That "rest of the story" quickly solves the search for repairs per se,
when a Tellarite freighter steers Archer and company towards a repair
station -- an automated station which, it turns out, can solve all their
problems in about a day and a half, whereas Trip's engineers would
take at least three months even with all the supplies.  Archer has a few
misgivings about this "gift" -- even with the station's request for
compensation, it's still too good to be true -- but Trip feels they've got
little choice.  So, with a few handy repair visuals (which actually
looked pretty spiffy), everything looks like it's going smoothly.

Meanwhile, I was pleased to see that not only was Enterprise's
damage in "Minefield" acknowledged, but so was Reed's.  When we
first see him, he's still got another week or two before he can return to
duty, and the distinct impression I got is that his leg would never
completely heal.  Phlox's techniques have merit, but they're not
magical cures and they're not lightning-fast.  I approve.  (I also liked
his response to Reed's griping about the pain:  "It's unethical to harm
a patient; I can inflict as much pain as I like.")  It was obviously set
up to make a nice contrast with the station's facilities healing Reed
fully in the space of a few minutes, but I'm still pleased.  (It does need
to be consistent, though -- if Phlox can bring back the dead inside ten
minutes at some point in the future, it won't be pretty.)

Naturally, however, these being 22nd-century humans, the crew can't
accept this repair without screwing *something* up.  In this case,
Trip really wants to get a good look at the computer running the
whole business, which seems entirely in keeping with his character.
He then talks Reed into helping him with a little reconnaissance --
Reed objects a bit, both because the station might not appreciate the
snooping and because his own sense of adventure was "left ... in a
Romulan mine field," but in the end he comes along and helps.

What follows is one of the better character scenes of the show.  Trip
and Reed trip automated sensors and are beamed back to Enterprise,
at which point Archer tears into them pretty firmly.  I appreciated this
for several reasons.  First, it *was* an awfully stupid stunt of theirs,
and it'd be easy enough for the station to demand the pair of them in
payment or something.  Second, it was nice to see Archer for *once*
laying into someone for a good reason, given the number of times
he's done so somewhat irrationally and then apologized later.  Third,
we actually get a sense that Archer heard what Reed said to him last
week, when Archer notes that "you've made it clear that you think
discipline aboard Enterprise has gotten a little too lax -- I'm beginning
to agree with you."  Granted, having Archer throw Reed's own
opinions back in his face could be interpreted as a little bit petty, but
it's also a devastatingly effective technique for him to use -- Reed's
pretty stoic, but you can almost see him shrink back a bit.

Unfortunately, the pair's punishment is cut short when Archer's called
to the launch bay, and it's here that we get a decent bit of misdirection.
While Reed and Trip were crawling around maintenance shafts, we
see Travis get a call, ostensibly from Archer, ordering him down to
that launch bay, which is under repair and supposed to be off limits.
We see him examining a seriously damaged panel ... and the next
thing we know, Archer's called to the bay and Phlox is examining
Travis's burnt corpse.

The misdirection isn't that Travis isn't really dead -- that much is
obvious to anyone.  The misdirection is that I took his "killing" (be it
an actual killing that's reversible, an abduction, or what have you) to
be the penalty imposed for Trip and Reed's snooping.  While going
that route could have been somewhat interesting, primarily due to the
guilt it'd give the pair of them, I was surprised when it turned out that
the station was going to take someone all along.  Not a bad feint,
really.

(Of course, I suppose that it's not actually *proven* the station was
going to take someone regardless.  Maybe it only takes from
transgressors.)

Of course, the crew doesn't know any of this to start out, so we get to
see everyone deal with the first on-board death of the series.  I was
impressed at the combination of emotion and professionalism at work
here -- no one tossed it off as "ho hum, another death" the way I
sometimes felt Kirk did, but no one fell to pieces so badly that it kept
them from investigating, either.  Reed comes off particularly well, but
everyone's reactions seemed pretty realistic here.

(Incidentally, I'm not sure it's out of place for Kirk to be a little bit
more accepting of death as commonplace than Archer.  Space travel's
a lot more common by Kirk's time, and there have also been some
significant conflicts in the recent past.  Kirk is very much a soldier;
Archer isn't.)

One significant criticism I'd make here, though, is that I think making
Travis the "target" of the station was a mistake.  Given how much I've
mentioned that Travis is underused, that may seem a bit contradictory,
but in this case using him significantly detracted from the flow of the
story.  Had it been some nameless crewman drawn to the launch bay,
we as viewers wouldn't have been able to dismiss the death as either
faked or reversible, and things would have seemed more menacing.
It's not as though we found much out about Travis as a result of these
events, so in this case I'd have put someone in whose continued
survival wasn't assured.  (Fans of Anthony Montgomery can at least
console themselves with a good chest shot of him, though.  :-)

As I've said, it was no real surprise that the corpse wasn't really Travis,
but I was pretty pleased with the way we found out about it.  For
starters, it looked as though something Phlox would have noticed in
the postmortem *eventually*, but not something that was immediately
obvious to anyone -- and more importantly, it fit really well from both
dramatic and plausibility standpoints.  It's also something that
wouldn't have come up were it not for an action Phlox took a month
earlier, which is a nice twist.  One wonders if Phlox will suggest
routinely injecting people with said vaccine just in case they need to
check for exact duplicates again ... or better yet, if Reed will.

(Of course, our bodies are all so full of microorganisms anyway that
one assumes Phlox would have noticed some sort of glitch later on
even without the flu shot ... perhaps when the postmortem got to the
gut flora or something.  But I digress.)

Once the fake is noticed, the show descends into a few cliches -- not
enough to keep the episode from being a winner overall, but certainly
enough to detract a bit.  Reed manages to get Archer and T'Pol past
the same sensors that tripped him up earlier, the pair get to the
computer core ... and find piles of bodies hooked into the machine,
which is using their brains to enhance its own processing ability.

That's pretty much vintage horror-movie cliche from where I sit:  I'm
hard pressed to come up with any really obvious examples (other than
noting some fairly general similarities to the Borg), but I was hoping
for something a little more interesting than "Archer rips a few tubes
off Travis and pulls him to safety."  Similarly, while having Trip stall
by playing the role of dissatisfied customer worked well enough from
a plot standpoint, it seemed a little too obviously 2002 to me.

Even if those disappointed a bit, however, the general ending of "we
have to get free and here's our best shot" held together reasonably
well.  Things were for the most part paced very well, for instance:  I
especially liked that within fifteen seconds of Travis being free, we're
already seeing Archer returning to the Enterprise, handing Travis off
to Phlox, and heading for the bridge.  (Phlox's very concise, "Comm's
down" as Archer comes aboard helped with this -- no wasted words
or wasted shots.)  The action didn't hold a lot of surprises, but it
solved the problem at hand -- and here, as earlier, the visuals did a
nice job of supporting everything.  No real complaints.

I was a bit surprised that the only thing the station did when thwarted
was refuse to let the Enterprise leave.  I was half expecting to see it
start methodically undoing all the repairs it had done, so that by the
time our heroes got free there'd be a few days' worth of repairs yet to
do.  That might have been nice, actually -- as it is, we did get the
"cure" more or less for free.

And the closing shot, of the station repairing itself?  I'm sure that
opinions are split here, but personally I more or less liked it.  I've no
objection to the station remaining a mystery that's left unsolved -- in
fact, I'd prefer it remain such -- and there was so much magic-tech
going on here as it was that one more bit felt like a good thematic
addition.  (Besides, as long-time fans of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis,
both Lisa and I had a lyric from "The Lamia" in our heads as that
played out:  "The lights are dimmed, and once again the stage is set
for you...")

Other thoughts:

-- If anyone out there is saying "hmm, wonder if this station really
*is* connected to the Borg somehow" ... shush.  Don't give anyone
ideas.  (Seriously, I don't see any need to connect Archer to *every*
race that comes into the Trek universe later, and would strongly
disagree with such a move in this case.)

-- Does anyone else wonder if the static-shrouded part of the Tellarite
message had some sort of warning about the station, or at least a
further explanation?  ("By the way, leave your helmsman at the door -
- we've heard he's expendable.")

-- When the Enterprise is flying around early on looking as if
someone had taken a bite out of the saucer, I can't have been the only
fan of "The Tick" hoping to see a "CHA" surreptitiously placed
somewhere.

-- If the previous atmosphere was liquid helium, where are the helium-
breathers among that room full of bodies?

-- Was I the only one expecting to see Dave Bowman appear when
we first boarded the station?  The Kubrick estate should definitely
take a look at this...

-- I think we may be seeing John Shiban's influence at work here a bit
-- not only was the threat very "X-Files"-ish in many ways, but we got
to see Phlox start a postmortem.  All we need are flashlights and we're
all set.  :-)  (Actually, I thought the postmortem sounded awfully good
so far as it went.)

-- Even after everything he's been through, one of Travis's first
concerns is all the other bodies he was stored with.  That fits with his
"we have to all work together" boomer mentality -- I'd like to see
more of it.

All in all, then, "Dead Stop" worked surprisingly well given some of
its ultimate conclusions.  Apart from the outcome of repairing the
ship, it's not going to be one of the more significant episodes of the
season -- but in terms of the journey the episode took, I'm happy.

So, let's sum up:

Writing:  Great in terms of the characters and solving past problems,
a little cheesy in terms of the actual threat.
Direction:  Roxann Dawson (who also voiced the station computer)
did a nice job in terms of pacing and some unusual shots; the
computer's-eye-view of Archer was a case in point.
Acting:  Not a lot of truly standout work, but good stuff.

OVERALL:  Parts of the last act and a half knock it down to about an
8, but still well worth the time.

NEXT WEEK:
 
Archer faces a long night, and Tim's new-found optimism faces its
greatest challenge.

Tim Lynch (Castilleja School, Science Department)
tlynch@alumni.caltech.edu <*>
"We're explorers.  Where's your spirit of adventure?"
"I left it in a Romulan mine field."
-- Trip and Reed
--
Copyright 2002, 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:

Creative staff: