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.)
Our mission this week — to boldly rehabilitate an unjustly maligned episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. After more than a season of being aggrieved and obnoxious, Jonathan Archer is suddenly confronted by the need to apologise to people, sometimes with his shirt off. Meanwhile, Porthos is a very good boy, even when he’s just a fluffy puppet.
In this Very Special Episode, we learn a Valuable Lesson about discrimination and bigotry without a single mention of the minority group being discriminated against. In the meantime — by the most amazing coincidence — Trip has an awkward moment when confronted by some nice people who don’t share his sexual ethic. It’s all a bit of a slog, to be honest.
The crew of Enterprise encounter the Vissians, a genial and technologically advanced species who enslave three percent of their population and force them to have sex with married couples who wish to conceive their horrible latex-faced children. Surprisingly, we’re generally fine with this. Apart from Trip, who is a good person.
This week, we learn a valuable lesson about Johnny Foreigner: he’s just not to be trusted. (God knows how we’re going to get a Federation together.) Still, we manage to enjoy ourselves for a bit.
First broadcast on Friday, 6 May 2005
and Friday, 13 May 2005
Enterprise is reaching the end of the long road that brought them from there to here, and before we say a final goodbye, we’ve just got enough time to foil a charmless racist demagogue who wants to destroy our future — a future based on co-operation, openmindedness and mutual respect. It’s just like the present day, really, only the good guys win. Oh, and Trip gets to punch a racist in the face.
