Star Trek: Enterprise

After the crew of Enterprise decide to ignore the advice of their only competent crewmember, they find themselves on a very routine away mission on a very unremarkable planet, exhibiting behaviour that would embarass the most racist of your racist uncles. Turns out that at the end of the day, it hasn’t been such a long road getting from there to here.

This week, Enterprise Chief Engineer Charles Tucker III is pregnant, and Nathan and Joe expect to be embarrassed and offended by the result. Instead, they are delighted to find themselves merely bored. (In fact, Nathan thinks the first half of the episode is rather sweet and charming, but he’s an incurable romantic where lizard people are concerned.)

This week, Enterprise is beset once again by the Temporal Cold War, in the form of two guys who won’t stop talking about the Temporal Cold War, a conflict so subtle and urgent that no one can explain what it is or why anyone should care about it. And in a breathtaking B-plot, a bunch of be-latexed men drop by for a religious ceremony audacious in both its meaninglessness and its orthogonality to everything else in the episode.

This week in Star Trek: Slow-Witted White Men, no one turns into a salamander, gets trapped in a board game or has sex with a ghost. In fact, no one does much of anything at all — at least not anything that anyone will remember 23 years later.

A change of pace for Star Trek this week, as the writers of Enterprise decide to explore the rightly-neglected relationship between Captain Archer and his completely featureless Armory Officer, Malcolm Reed. As so often happens, people get strapped to a bomb, Romulans utter muscular threats, and the most interesting members of the crew are completely sidelined.