Enterprise Review: “Carpenter Street”

B&B are back! About the only thing that makes this episode pallatable is by watching it and then watching “The Hulk.”

Carpenter Street

Cast & Crew

Director: LeVar Burton
Written By: Manny Coto

Starring
Scott Bakula as Captain
Jonathan Archer
Connor Trinneer as Chief
Engineer Charles “Trip” Tucker III
Jolene Blalock as Sub-commander
T’Pol
Dominic Keating as Lt.
Malcolm Reed
Anthony Montgomery
as Ensign Travis Mayweather
Linda Park as Ensign Hoshi
Sato
John Billingsley
as Dr. Phlox

Guest Cast
Matt Winston as Daniels
Leland Orser as Loomis
Michael Childers as Strode
Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Xindi-Reptilian #1
Erin Cummings as Prostitute #1
Donna DuPlantier as Prostitute #2
Billy Mayo as Officer #1
Dan Warner as Officer #2

Episode Information

Originally Aired: November 26, 2003
Season: Three
Episode: Eleven
Production: 063

What Happened

Ex-crewman Daniels, a temporal agent from the future, appears on Enterprise and sends Archer and T’Pol back in time to 2004 Earth, to learn why three Xindi-Reptilians have been detected in the timeline where they’re not supposed to be. Using 22nd-century technology, Archer and T’Pol scour Detroit, Michigan, and locate an abandoned factory where the Xindi are developing a biological weapon with the help of a local medical worker. [Video Preview]

Review

“Make the bad writers stop, Mommy!”

Time travel’s overused in Trek, but it has been done well. Both seriously (TOS’s “City on the Edge of Forever”) and humorously (Star Trek IV and DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations”). This one lacks both humor and drama, merely content to drop T’Pol and Archer into the past to collect some aliens and tangle with a morally-deficient medical technician.

High Point

So few to choose from. Ordering fast food. I can’t imagine what people of the future will say when the study what we used to eat.

Low Point

So many to choose from. Off the top: Selecting a car to steal. Did anyone doubt they’d end up swiping the nice shiney truck?

The Scores

Originality: Bio-Terrorism, Time Travel, and Abducted Humans. Was there anything original here? 1 out of 6.

Effects: Other than phasers, were there any effects? 2 out of 6.

Story: Out out-of-synch is this week’s episode? We’ve changed weapons-of-mass-destruction, detoured to Earth of the past, and then end it without a real resolution. 2 out of 6.

Acting: Loomis makes for a suitably slimy henchman, but everything else is coated in B&B dialog. 4 out of 6.

Emotional Response: There are some laughs, but they’re forced. 3 out of 6.

Production: Behold! Detroit of the future! Ya know, next month. 2 out of 6

Overall: It’s no wonder they buried this episode the day before Thanksgiving. I think Paramount hoped no one would see it. 2 out of 6.

Total: 17 out of 42

Episode Media

From StarTrek.com

Next Time on Enterprise (December 3, 2003)

Anomaly (Originally aired Sept. 17, 2003)

The mission to find the Xindi takes a treacherous turn when Enterprise is crippled by inexplicable, destructive spatial anomalies that distort the laws of physics. With systems down, Osaarian pirates board the ship and and raid it of valuable supplies. The crew captures one of the marauders, and Archer’s sense of morality is tested when he interrogates the prisoner. [Video Preview]

Enterprise goes on vacation for the next month and a half. New episodes won’t air until January 14th with “Chosen Realm

Additional Notes and Comments

If you’re interested in what’s in TheAngryMob’s review queue, check out my What’s Coming page.

TheAngrymob

10 replies on “Enterprise Review: “Carpenter Street””

  1. New Physics derived from studying the link between ships named “Enterprise” and the 20th/21st Centuries

    After seeing a part of last week’s, which was well-reviewed here and by my wife, I decided to see this week’s– even though I knew it was going to be a B&B. Was there any reason for this episode to exist? Was there even a good reason to set it in the past?

    About the only thing useful was learning that the future apparently doesn’t know these events have happened, because the changes to the timeline haven’t “rippled” that far forward yet. Never mind that this contradicts every other time-travel episode of Trek— it at least suggests that there may be a reason why we never hear about the Xindi in the future.

  2. The only way…
    …this ep could have redeemed itself was if they had gotten Mulder and Scully to do a guest shot and bust into the lab just as everybody else took off and abandoned it.

    • Re: The only way…

      …this ep could have redeemed itself was if they had gotten Mulder and Scully to do a guest shot and bust into the lab just as everybody else took off and abandoned it.

      Or Lenny and Squiggy!

  3. B&B are retarded.
    There is no clearer way to say it. And I don’t mean to offend the actual mentally handicapped who usually try much harder than B&B.

    B&B obviously have never actually WATCHED any other Star Trek or read any science fiction or for that matter even THOUGHT ABOUT TIME TRAVEL. See if you could travel in time it would be different than travelling to say, New Jersey. If you change something in the past it changes history, which would change the present. That’s what makes stories about time travel more interesting than stories about travelling to another city. Get it, B&B?
    There are all kinds of twists on this, such as there could exist different “time-lines”. But in that case Daniels would hardly care what happens in a timeline that won’t affect his own, would he?

    As I watched, I noted several of the glaringly stupid contradictions before I got bored of keeping count. Here are some of them:

    1) Why didn’t Daniels have enough time to arrange permission to handle this within his organization? Even T’Pol sarcastically noted ‘he should have all the time in the world’. Of course he could take years to go through the red-tape and then go back to the exact moment he needed.
    2) Archer explains that the Xindi have been on Earth 2004 “for months” and they’d better hurry up. Huh? By what measure have they been there “for months”? You could pick the moment they got there and say they have been there “for minutes”. Or you could pick a time after they have been there “for years”.
    3) Archer tells Trip to cover for him while they are gone. Duh? They are travelling in time. They can spend years on old Earth and return to a moment after they left. At least Trip was befuddled by their return, so perhaps B&B weren’t too stupid to realize this, but they made Archer, T’Pol, and Trip all that stupid.
    4) If the Xindi could travel back in time to Earth 2004 and develop a devastating biological weapon, WHY OH WHY would they bring it back to the present (future?) to deploy it from thousands/millions of light-years away against a technologically equal adversary instead of just deploying it right then and there against Earth 2004 and stopping those pesky humans once and for all? Why would Archer and T’Pol jump to the conclusion that they would choose this stupid behavior? Only when Archer has destroyed the Xindi method of returning to their home time does he worry that now, with no other choice, they might deploy it right away.
    5) T’Pol says the warehouse has a simple electronic lock that they could open. Why go to all the trouble of following the slimebag home, arranging an elaborate ruse to get Archer inside, allowing the Xindi to stick needles in him risking discovery (“my scanner showed that human wasn’t actually unconscious so I injected him with the toxin”), just to start shooting at them anyway. Couldn’t they have just used their scanner to find the Xindi and snuck in and started shooting anyway?
    6) Once Archer is in, why not knock the slimebag unconscious and avoid trouble with him? It’s not like he is any use to them. Was T’Pol so enamored of his witty banter and smelly habits?
    7) If the Xindi could travel into Earth’s past, it’s all over anyway. Why develop a biological weapon? Why not just drop a nuke on ancient Greece? That ought to set back human civilization for long enough. Just drop nukes all over the place, at all sorts of different times. Really dirty ones.
    *sigh* I could keep going but I won’t. It’s sad that I get more intelligent writing on “Invader Zim”.

    • Re: B&B are retarded.
      Oh, by the way, B&B will redeem themselves just a tiny bit if this whole big Xindi storyline ends with the Xindi being right: humans are bastards that exterminate their race and they were right to have been worried all along.

    • Re: B&B are retarded.
      I wanted to rant about this episode but I’ll just say, “Yeah, what you said.”
      I’m one of the many people that sort of tuned Enterprise out in season two
      and came back in with the Xindi story arc..suckered in with some good eps
      like Sim and The Shipment only to be flattened by this awful lemon.
      Worst Star Trek episode ever..I’m going to go watch my DVD of Spock’s
      Brain to wash the taste out of my mouth.

    • Re: B&B are retarded.
      I’m going to start a new ritual to be performed after a remarkably poorly written Enterprise (redundant?). Everyone pipe in with their favorite example of a GOOD story written with a similar theme. Perhaps if B&B every read this site they could do a little reading and figure out the difference between “inspired” and “sucked”.

      So my choice for clever time-travel story: ‘To Say Nothing Of The Dog’ by Connie Willis. Quirky unusual take on time-travel, thoroughly enjoyable throughout, and it really comes together nicely at the end, while suggesting the grander mechanisms of the universe…

  4. I try to be generous…
    and I try to be nice to B&B and give them a break.

    BUT. This episode had no redeeming qualities and was a pure waste of time filler.

  5. Thank God Enterprise is off for 1 1/2 months
    All I can say is: I’ve had enough fricken time travel! Please make it stop!
    Please! Whine…….

  6. Let’s have a rest…
    I hate to offend you good people, but some of you complain far too much about everything that happens in this programme. I knew I was in for yet another inconsequential time travel ep with plot holes big enough to pilot the Enterprise through, but I also knew that worrying about it would not change the nature of the episode: so I switched my brain off, sat back and enjoyed a halfway decent episode of Trek.
    While the disaster duo are allowed to run rampant with Trek’s timeline we are NEVER going to get what we want. If B&B were going to start listening to the fans of Trek then they would have done it back in 1995 when Voyager started taking flak.
    I like to think I enjoy Star Trek IN SPITE what what B&B, those hated, moronic half-wits, do to it. I love the show, I love the cast, I love everything Star Trek stands for. There’s no-one who can take that away from me, there’s no-one who can stop me enjoying Enterprise…no matter how retarded or recycled B&B’s drunken, unbelievably stupid ideas sometimes are.

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