Star Trek: Enterprise

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.

Another astonishingly dull and unambitious week aboard Enterprise, as Hoshi Sato is accidentally transported into a high-concept plot that we’ve seen done better half a dozen times in the last fifteen years. Things liven up slightly ten minutes from the end, when we are treated to the dumbest line of dialogue in the history of the franchise.

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, untrustworthy foreigners attack and terrorise Enterprise for literally no reason other than the arbitrary tenets of their weird and incorrect religion. There’s a lesson to be learned here, but only if you don’t think too hard about it.