An ok episode - an interesting twist on the "it was just a dream" idea and better than "The Next Phase."

The introduction was a little longer than the previous episodes but well done. The progression of Hoshi's dream was interesting - slow but, for a dream, fairly logical. In fact, had it been more logical, I would have been more upset. Not too many of my dreams are logical. I especially liked the voices of Malcolm and Trip being interjected. Some may complain that, since her hand could pass through a wall, why didn't her feet? Well, since it WAS a dream, Hoshi regulated that, not the laws of physics. In fact, Trip's allusion to the laws of physics not working was quite apt.

And I wonder where she came up with the name Cyrus Ramsey? Since this was all a product of her mind, conscious and unconscious, it must have been in there somewhere - and we Wisconsinite thank her for having our state develop transporter technology!!

The aliens planting a bomb part seemed contrived - had to put the ship in some sort of danger, right? I didn't really believe her emotional seesaw throughout the episode. I was able to easily distance myself and didn't really become "involved" in the episode as I have with others. Music was ok but, again, did not really powerful. And, I do hope that little mistake in the scene between the captain and Hoshi was not the start of lowering quality.

Great lines: "As far as I'm concerned, I never saw you come in." "You men are all alike."

Laurie's No-Nonsense Review

Finally, a good story! I thought tonight's show was pretty good, even if it was reminiscent of a few Trek episodes gone by.

Hoshi & Trip were down on a lifeless planet, taking pictures of ruins that had survived for thousands of years. With two magnetic storms approaching, Captain Archer ordered them to beam out instead of taking the shuttle. They argued briefly about who would go first, because they each wanted the OTHER one to do it. Nice bravery! Go Starfleet!

Trip went first, then Hoshi...only Hoshi started noticing some strange feelings afterwards. She was sure that a birthmark on her nose had moved a quarter of a centimeter, and nobody seemed to notice her the first time she spoke. Once this stuff started happening, I thought maybe she'd been beamed back out of phase or something, because the scenes, especially the first one, had this slightly dreamlike quality to them. Nobody else seemed to be behaving quite like themselves. They also kept talking about her "traumatic experience" on the planet, which seemed odd because all it really involved was watching some scary storms from a distance and beaming up.

She showed up late for her next shift on the bridge to find them in the middle of a crisis. Trip & Mayweather had beamed down to the planet and were being held hostage, even though their sensors had detected no life forms on the surface. The aliens spoke to them and Hoshi was unable to translate, so Archer sent her back to her cabin! It was all very strange. She ended up in the mess hall, where T'Pol told her that an Ensign had translated, and Mayweather & Trip were safe. From there she tried to ease some tension in the gym, where Trip was spinning around in some giant gyroscope-y kind of thing. It looked fun, although I can't imagine what muscles it was working for him. It was there, however, where Hoshi finally disappeared, after seeing her image fade in and out of the mirror for the last day or so.

Turned out the crew couldn't see or hear her, and assumed she was dead. They decided that her molecules had come apart after an unsuccessful transport, and went searching for her cellular residue. I think the highlight of that was Dr. Phlox, crawling around in the ship's innards, saying, "Captain Archer will want Hoshi's parents to have this," as he scooped up some sticky green goo with a popsicle stick.

At that point, it reminded me less of the Trek episode where Dr. Crusher notices everyone disappearing but nobody else does, and more like that one where LaForge & Ro can see each other but nobody else can, and they find out that Romulans are planning on destroying the Enterprise. Hoshi saw aliens planting bombs on one of the decks, and even though she kept sneaking up and deactivating them, they'd get them working again. She tried using Morse code to get Captain Archer to notice her, but that didn't work, and she went after the aliens herself. They got the bombs up and running and jumped onto their own little transport platform, and she went after them without a second though -- and ended up in the Enterprise's transporter room. Turns out she'd been stuck in the pattern buffer for 8 minutes. It was all a dream. Poof!

Okay, so the end was a little easy, but I think Hoshi's just great and the story was well done. Good time had by all. Good night.

In brief: Not bad for a while ... but I can't recommend the last fifteen minutes at all.

====== 
"Vanishing Point" 
Enterprise Season 2, Episode 10 
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga 
Directed by David Straiton 
Brief summary: After using the transporter for the first time, Hoshi fears that she hasn't been put together quite properly.
 ======

"Vanishing Point" is probably an episode that appeals more to new viewers than to veteran Trek-watchers. Relatively new viewers will think that it makes a lot of sense for Hoshi to be concerned about new technology, and that it's worth making the point that this is still new and relatively untried technology ... and they'll be right. Long-time viewers will say this is a rehashing of plots and situations from at least half a dozen modern-Trek stories in the past, and that there's not a lot new here ... and they'll be right as well.

Ironically enough, after all the "transporter accident" episodes Trek has had over the years, _Enterprise_ is the series that's most entitled to have one: the transporter is extremely new, only having been cleared for humans in the last few years, and everyone from Archer to Reed has been nervous about using it. It seems only fair that somewhere, at sometime, something should go wrong -- and dramatically, using poor Hoshi seems a decent enough notion.

On the other hand, it's precisely *because* there have been so many transporter episodes in the past that _Enterprise_ needs to do something different to separate this one from the pack. Considering that we've already seen characters who make it a point never to use the transporter (Bones, of course, and Pulaski as well), and that we've already seen the transporter do everything from splitting people in two (TOS' "The Enemy Within" and TNG's "Second Chances") to turning adults into children (TNG's "Rascals"), it's a little hard to see what's left. Hoshi's worries are natural, but if the story itself follows paths all too well trodden there's not much to invite viewers back.

The odds did not appear encouraging at the start, as we needed a dose of both character idiocy and technical illogic just to get the party started. It's all well and good that a sudden storm could ground Trip and Hoshi on the surface, but it strains credibility when (1) the interference makes a shuttle impossible but the transporter okay, and (2) Archer and T'Pol apparently didn't bother looking at the weather situation beyond the immediate vicinity. T'Pol's the science officer, after all -- is there some reason she's not doing her job?

That said, Hoshi's initial worries were both justified given the situation and well stated. I was particularly fond of her asking, "What if some of the pieces get put in the wrong place? You know, I bet a lot of them look *real* similar." Hardly meaty stuff for long-term viewers, but a nice piece of stage-setting for those with no idea what's to come.

Hoshi's worries that she wasn't reassembled properly work well enough, and it makes sense that she might view a lot of otherwise ordinary events through the prism of that worry: she feels as if she has to work harder just to be noticed, for one thing, and she fears that a birthmark may no longer be in its proper place. All well and good - - they could be real effects, or they could be psychological.

My suspicions about what might actually be happening were raised early on, when every single scene we saw included Hoshi and tended to focus on her point of view. Yes, when a character's the focus of an episode he or she tends to appear a lot, but every scene? That's unusual, and often suggests that what's shown is a subjective reality. Sometimes this can be done extremely well, as in Stephen Donaldson's _Chronicles of Thomas Covenant_ series (or, if you want televised SF, try TNG's "Remember Me" or "The Inner Light"), but it usually works best when readers/viewers are brought into the secret well in advance. (It also works well if they're utterly fooled until the time is right, a la DS9's "Whispers," but that's even harder to pull off.) Feeling as though you've stumbled on the secret early on is rather like watching a magician trip up mid-trick: it tends to break the spell.

"Vanishing Point" gets as far as it does because, for the most part, the past Trek stories it's reliving are good ones. This may not be an exhaustive list, but it's worth noting where a bunch of the parallels are. So...

-- Hoshi's fears sound a lot like Barclay's transporter phobia in TNG's "Realm of Fear" (written, probably not coincidentally, by Brannon Braga).

-- The "voices in the turbolift" that are actually her comrades talking to or about her: TNG's "Remember Me."

-- Hoshi being intangible and invisible, yet trying to get others' attention and having to save the ship from other creatures no one else sees: TNG's "The Next Phase." (They didn't fall through the floor in *that* episode either.)

-- The ending: akin to TNG's "Frame of Mind" or VOY's "Projections," both written by Braga.

If you wanted to go for more tenuous connections, there's no shortage of other ones you could make ... but these strike me as ones where "Vanishing Point" was similar enough to actively remind me of its predecessors. Most of those are decent (some better than others, like "Remember Me" and "Frame of Mind"), so the episode gets by for a while. Things get stranger and stranger, from the "cellular residue" of Hoshi's which can't possibly be hers to the mysterious aliens only Hoshi can see, but any qualms about "wait, is this making sense" are temporarily set aside as the tension builds.

There is, of course, the near-obligatory skin quotient as per usual, summed up by Hoshi's shower scene and by the convenience that she changes into skimpy workout attire just before she goes intangible and can no longer change clothes, but Linda Park is a lot better at not calling attention to it than some of her colleagues (of either gender).

Episodes like these, however, tend to live or die by their endings. "Frame of Mind" and "Remember Me" worked as well as they did because pretty much everything that happened made sense once you looked at it from the right vantage point. What's happening to Beverly Crusher in "Remember Me" seems utterly mysterious and inexplicable, but once we see some of the perspective of Geordi, Wes, and the Traveler, everything falls into place and has a beautiful internal logic to it. "Frame of Mind" (or "Parallels," another TNG standout of Braga's) succeeds in much the same way: Riker's jumping from perspective to perspective is explained pretty well in light of what his captors were putting him through.

"Vanishing Point," unfortunately, goes for one of the oldest endings in the book: "it was all a dream," or more accurately a hallucination Hoshi had during the 8.2 seconds it took her to materialize. One could lobby the same accusations about "The Inner Light," for example, but that episode had a reason for Picard to experience what he did and a profound effect on him afterwards.

The "it was all a dream" ending can work, but not when it's used as an excuse to toss in any damn strange thing you want because "in dreams, anything can happen." Dreams and visions have worked exceptionally well on occasion in Treks past -- Data's dreaming in "Birthright" and "Phantasms", not to mention many of the better Orb or Prophet visions in DS9 -- but all of those had underlying ideas behind them and events which eventually made sense in the proper light. "Vanishing Point," on the other hand, had events occur randomly because they could. Braga's done much better than this with dream imagery in the past, and I was deeply disappointed to see that "Vanishing Point," in the end, basically had no point.

Even the "real" moments in the teaser are rendered more or less meaningless. What did happen to this civilization? What do the various inscriptions mean? Apparently, we're not meant to care, since the only time the planet's mentioned again is during the dream sequences involving their nonexistent hostile inhabitants.

It's a shame, because some of the moments within the show were quite good from a character point of view. Trip's "damn it, why didn't you listen to me?" lament about Hoshi's apparent transporter accident is one of the better treatments the character's had lately (mostly because this time he's at least taken seriously), and John Billingsley once again does wonders with Phlox's gentle wit. (Reassuring Hoshi about her privacy with "as far as I'm concerned, I never even saw you come in here" was just beautiful.) The moments are there -- they just don't linger when it turns out that all of the episode can drift away in the breeze.

Other thoughts and observations:

-- Trip's reaction to Hoshi's apparent death stands out as especially good compared to the terrible, *terrible* "Archer informs Hoshi's dad" scene. I felt rather embarrassed for both Keone Young and Scott Bakula in that scene.

-- I'm not sure what to make of the "Cyrus Ramsey" bit. If Hoshi's going to invent a fictitious historical event to justify her own worries, that doesn't speak well of her. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if there were accidents similar to those that allegedly befell Ramsey. (Free plug: David Brin's TNG graphic novel _Forgiveness_ deals with some of the early days of transporters, and does a nice job of it.)

-- The ending, where Archer notes that Hoshi really did face her fears, whether due to a real threat or an illusory one, is something that could be used for the character later ... but given that she basically dismisses the point, it doesn't seem likely. Sigh.

That's pretty much it, I think. Like so many episodes this season, "Vanishing Point" had a lot of potential -- but like almost as many, it's giving the impression of a series that's just going through the motions. "Vanishing Point" is reliving so many past Trek glories that it's almost cannibalistic, but it's not bothering to integrate them in any way that viewers are going to find particularly new and unusual -- and what *is* new is an ending that renders the episode somewhat pointless.

I remain convinced that _Enterprise_ can succeed at far above the level of basic subsistence. I remain worried that no one's going to bother making it do so.

Wrapping up:

Writing: Good atmosphere and mystery with some minor "idiot plot" moments, but shot all to hell by the ending. Direction: Nicely eerie on occasion, but mostly pedestrian. Acting: Linda Park held up her end of things as much as she could. Trinneer and Billingsley had the occasional wonderful moment.

OVERALL: 5.5. Watchable, but be prepared to get annoyed.

NEXT WEEK: A rerun of "Carbon Creek." I'll be making other plans that week...

Tim Lynch 
(Castilleja School, Science Department) tlynch@alumni.caltech.edu <*> 

"You're in perfect health. You're neither transparent nor porous." 

"You won't put this in my medical record, will you?" 

"As far as I'm concerned, I didn't even see you come in here." 

"Not funny, Doctor." -- Phlox and Hoshi 

-- 
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:

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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:

Keone Young as Hoshi's Father
Gary Riotto as Alien #1
Morgan Margolis as Crewman Baird
Ric Sarabia as Alien #2
Carly Thomas as Crewman Rhodes

Creative staff: