Trip and Reed are on Shuttlepod One in an asteroid field, to test the shuttle's weapons systems, when a sudden incident puts out their sensor array and communications. Heading back to rendezvous with Enterprise early, they discover no ship... but on one of the larger asteroids, they find debris, clearly from the Enterprise.
Concluding that the ship was destroyed, they pilot the shuttle toward Echo One, so that their short-range distress signal will eventually be picked up by Starfleet and so that the destruction of the Enterprise will be reported back home. But it is not a lifesaving plan. Echo One is weeks away at impulse power; the shuttle has no warp; and they only have enough oxygen to last them a few, short days.
CHARACTERS
Trip: This episode portrays Trip as a determined optimist, to the point of being in denial about the pure desperation of the situation facing them. He actually runs through many of the stages of a terminal patient. He denies that they will die, insisting that the time remaining to them is plenty of time for a ship to encounter them and rescue them. He becomes irrationally angry at Reed for accepting the situation. He bargains with Reed to try to get Reed to stop being fatalistic. He even reaches a sort of depression/acceptance stage, when he attempts to send himself out of the airlock to give Reed more time. We don't really discover much new about Trip (though a cut scene, in the Deleted Scenes menu, fills in more background on Trip's friendship with Archer), but the episode does provide Connor Trinneer the opportunity to sink his teeth into some meaty material, which he does with relish.
Reed: We get far more character information about Reed in this episode. Silent Enemy showed us that Reed wasn't somebody easy to get to know, even by members of his own family. This episode expands on that, as Reed reveals that he has never really gotten close to anyone, because he has never felt very comfortable with other people, and that the crew of the Enterprise are as close as he's ever come to others. We also learn that Reed is a bit of a ladies' man, with several broken relationships in his past, including one girlfriend he and Trip unwittingly had shared.
THOUGHTS
Gah! After Deep Space 9 rehashes the old (long-debunked) chestnut about humans only using 10% of their brains, now this episode pulls up the whole "hair and nails continue to grow when you're dead" myth. At this point, I'm wondering whether the writers of 1990's/2000's Trek were intentionally yanking their audiences' chains.
Both a budget saver and a strong character piece, this episode is practically a two-hander between Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating. Given that few (if any) viewers truly believe that Trip and Reed are going to be killed off within the 44 minutes of the show, the real interest is in watching their interactions. This proves to be very entertaining, as we see them bicker with each other, get drunk with each other, and - when a slim chance at survival finally does present itself - pool their abilities to exploit that chance. The characters are likable, the actors are good, and the script is quite competent. As a result, the episode works nicely.
It does feel odd that writers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga came up with an episode that is more than 90% a 2-hander, and then didn't quite have the courage to just stay with the two characters throughout. Berman and Braga either don't trust their writing or their audience - I'm not sure which - and provide a cutaway to the Enterprise immediately after the credits, presumably to assure viewers that the entire regular cast was not blown up off-camera midway through the series' first season. I am sure the approximately 5 minutes spent with Archer and T'Pol debating microsingularities could have been filled quite adequately with Trip and Reed's interaction. And for my money, it would have been more interesting to have waited until the tag to find out what happened (and would only have required a couple of extra lines of dialogue in the final scene).
Still, strong character work and good performances count for a lot. Also, save for the irritant of the pointless cutaways, the script actually is fairly good. One of the issues I have with some of the wholesale Berman/Braga bashing in Trek fandom is that the pair plainly aren't the talentless hacks they're often made out to be. It reminds me a bit of the mindless bashing of producer John Nathan Turner that plagues Doctor Who's fandom. Sure, Bergman and Braga made their share of mistakes, and they had probably grown a little complacent by the time this series came around. But anti-Christs who merit death threats? No. Before they stayed too long, they probably did the franchise a fair bit of good. Quite frankly, I find that the first season of Enterprise is stacking up quite favorably against the first season Next Generation episodes I've re-watched and reviewed thus far.
In any case, this episode works. It's not superb, but it gives two of the show's more promising actors some good material and manages to entertain. It's just a shame that, after tackling an episode with a 2-hander concept, Berman & Braga didn't quite have the courage to stick to their guns with the idea. An unspectacular but solid:
Rating: 7/10.
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