I’ve got mixed feelings about last night’s episode of Enterprise, “Breaking the Ice”. It was definitely one of the strongest episodes yet in getting into the characters, but there were some definite bits that rubbed me the wrong way.
To start with the good bits…well, the shining moment of the show for me was probably the transmission to the schoolchildren. It lended a very nice, almost “homey” feel to the show, helping remind us that these are the first humans out in space like this, and there’s an entire planet back home curious about what they’re experiencing. The way each of the characters handled themselves was fun to watch too — Archer seemed to be a bit nervous, but was still enjoying himself; Trip had to cope with a bit of stage fright (and embarrassment at being handed a ‘poop question’); and Sato gave the best presentation of the bunch –not all that surprising, though, as when we first saw her in “Broken Bow” she was teaching a class.
T’Pol and Trip seem to be forming an interesting dynamic (the obvious parallel being the McCoy/Spock duo to Archer’s Kirk, but we’ll see how it plays out over the coming weeks), and T’Pol’s dilemma here certainly added to it. It seemed clear to me that they’d end up talking about her problem (if nothing else, it was the logical choice — he already knew, so why involve anyone else?), but they both played it off very well. Jolene Blalock is impressing me more and more, too — while I’m not always sure if I like what the show is doing with T’Pol, Blalock is doing a wonderful job of under-emoting to perfection. It’s known that Vulcans are not emotionless, they merely suppress their emotions for the greater good, and she’s doing a wonderful job of very subtly conveying her mood while still maintaining the stoic Vulcan exterior.
I did have a couple quibbles with the show, though. First off — just how much gravity does an 86km diameter snowball have? Apparently, it’s pretty Earth-normal, so that psyllium they were mining must be some pretty amazingly dense stuff. Considering Andre Bormanis, one of the staff writers, said in an online chat that “We went out of our way to get the science right in this week’s episode]3, and it really helped the story,” I was a bit surprised at that extremely-obvious gaffe.
I’m also a bit concerned that once the content of T’Pol’s message was found, the matter of her receiving (and, presumably, having the opportunity to send) secret encrypted messages was dropped so suddenly. Whether or not this particular message was of a personal nature, the fact remains that after telling Archer that she would have no unauthorized contact with other Vulcans, she was surreptitiously doing just that. I don’t think that the matter should have been just swept under the rug quite as quickly as it was.
Aside from those matters, though, it was a pretty decent episode. It’s becoming more and more obvious each week that this shows focus is going to be on the trio of Archer, Trip, and T’Pol, and I just hope that they can continue to explore their characters as well as they did this time. Enterprise is still a bit of a question mark, but it has definite promise.