Enterprise Review – “Dead Stop”

It is so hard to find someone that does good repair work without getting ripped off…

Enterprise LogoDead
Stop

 

Cast & Crew

Director: Roxann Dawson
Written By: Mike Sussman & Phyllis Strong

Starring
Scott Bakula as Captain
Jonathan Archer
Connor Trinneer as Chief
Engineer Charles 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

Airdate Information

Originally Aired: Oct. 9, 2002
Season: Two
Episode: Four
Production: 031

MinefieldWhat
Happened

The Enterprise, still severely damaged from the Romulan mine, issues
a general distress call. A weak signal from a Tellarite ship sends the crew
to an unmanned space station. In exchange for a few hundred liters of warp plasma,
the station can repair the ship in a day and a half (Trip and company would
take over three months, and that’s assuming they had all the parts).

While under repairs, the Enterprise crew are treated to samples of the
stations technology, replicators. But all is not as it seems. Mayweather is
apparently killed while in a restricted area. Upon investigation, Phlox realizes
it’s a fake, a body replicated to look just like the ship’s helmsman. Archer
and T’Pol break into central core of the station, only to discover its horrifying
secret, sentient lifeforms all connected to a main computer to boost its computing
power. Archer frees Mayweather and they blast the station to bits escaping.

Review

What’s most irritating about Star Trek is their propensity for "killing"
off main characters. Do we really fall for this? In the writers defense, Trek
hardly has a monopoly on this concept, but they are the biggest purveyors.

That bit aside, the episode was OK. Nothing too much one way or the other.
Much of it was spent with characters either gawking at all the gee-whiz tech
or Archer brooding about nervously. You know, just once I want a paranoid character
to be let down. Just once.

The extensive use of replicators here may have been a bit much since I don’t
think they ever appeared in TOS. Then again, we hardly ever saw the crew doing
anything of a day-to-day nature in that series either.

High Point

The station repairing itself after Enterprise rips it a new one. Echoes
of "Christine." A close second was Phlox/Hoshi during the autopsy.

Low Point

Yeah they’re all vegetables, but I’d think Starfleet wouldn’t approve of detonating
300 liters of warp plasma inside a station full of innocent bystanders. The
final explanation doesn’t do much, in my mind, to absolve the crew.

The Scores

Originality: The finale seem a bit too borgish. 3

Effects: Cool stuff with the station. 5

Story: A nice twist on something that could have been a lame deus ex machina
excuse for repairing the ship. 4

Acting: Noting really special, nothing really bad. One stand up piece was Phlox’s
dialogue with Hoshi. 4

Emotional Response: I never thought for a moment that Mayweather was really
dead, so where’s the emotion there? 2

Production: The station wasn’t that cool, but there was a definite shift in
look and feel from the "public" sections to the "private."
Good use of sets to create mood. 5

Overall: A nice way to move the story forward, especially nice that they kept
the story flowing from one story to the next. 4

Total: 27 out of 42

Episode Media

From StarTrek.com

Completely Useless Trivia

The Tellarites (the ones who sent the message, not who built the site) are
one of the five founding members of the Federation. Except the for the Alpha
Centauians (who are basically human), we’ve now covered all the original members.

Next Time on Enterprise (Oct. 16, 2002)

Next Time on EnterpriseA
Night in Sick Bay

Archer spends a fretful night in sickbay with Dr. Phlox after Porthos, Archer’s
pet beagle, picks up a deadly virus on an alien planet. Meanwhile, crew members
believe Archer’s increased stress level is due to Porthos’ illness, but Dr.
Phlox suspects it has to do with Archer’s repressed sexual tension and urges
Archer to discuss it with T’Pol.

FYI: I’m out of town next week, so I’m intrusting our already overworked
Fiziko with the review.

TheAngryMob

21 replies on “Enterprise Review – “Dead Stop””

  1. Top 10 people allowed to die in Star Trek
    10. Any robot
    9. Any clone
    8. Senior bridge officer from alternate universe.
    7. Anyone brain-dead that you do not know and is not your race
    6. Any borg
    5. Valiant officer introduced for first time at the start of an episode
    4. Any bad guy with full-face helment.
    3. Tribbles
    2. Senior bridge officer from future who’s timeline is eliminated by actions they came back in time to cause.

    And the number one person allowed to die in Star Trek:

    Redshirts!

  2. An Unhaunted House…

    This was a haunted house ep without one iota of horror. The car breaks down, gotta go up the hill to that creepy looking place to use the phone, the guy that opens the door is inbred with rotten teeth – no, wait a minute, they skipped that part, and it showed. How can you feel tension in a haunted house when there is no real evil, just a lot of gee-whiz gizmos and ripoff of the only cool scene (and really the whole plot) from the old movie Coma? The place was just one dumb computer doing what it was programmed to do, and losing the crewmember was done without any element of horror whatsoever. Phlox had to do a bit from CSI just to figure out there had even been a kidnapping! And to say everybody was braindead so it’s OK to blow stuff up only further drains any pathos or horror from the situation. Killing already dead bystanders and a computer who was never alive is just an exercise for fireworks.

    There was a good story in here somewhere- I’m just still trying to figure out what it was.

  3. Irritating

    What’s most irritating about Star Trek is their propensity for “killing” off main characters.

    No, what’s irritating is that they never have the balls to leave them dead. Hell, Kirk could make a comeback any day now.

  4. Star Trek explosions have mysterious results…
    Were we supposed to forget that the reason they couldn’t do much to escape was that the repair station had locked them out of the computer and “scrambled the access codes”. As soon as the station explodes, everything comes back online. Um, okay. I was also troubled by the way they ditched and then blew up the “alien” coma victims in the data core.

    My number one dissapointment… They talked to the tellarites, but we didn’t get to see their piggy faces.

  5. Three complaints
    I only have three major complaints about this otherwise decent episode. One – Not even trying to save those other captives. Two – Those litres are pretty bloody small. (That’s almost 53 gallons for those who are more familiar with the Imperial system.) Three – They finally have an episode where Mayweather has a major role, and he’s lying on a table the whole time! The Smallville people finally made Pete useful. I think it’s time for the Enterprise people to do the same for Mayweather.

    • Re: Three complaints

      I only have three major complaints about this otherwise decent episode. One – Not even trying to save those other captives. Two – Those litres are pretty bloody small. (That’s almost 53 gallons for those who are more familiar with the Imperial system.) Three – They finally have an episode where Mayweather has a major role, and he’s lying on a table the whole time! The Smallville people finally made Pete useful. I think it’s time for the Enterprise people to do the same for Mayweather.

      Those liters were probably presurized, thus fitting into a smaller container.

      • Re: Three complaints

        Those liters were probably presurized, thus fitting into a smaller container.

        Folks, it was WARP plasma. Most of it (172.43 liters according to my quantum calculations) existed in subspace.

      • Re: Three complaints

        Those liters were probably presurized, thus fitting into a smaller container.

        Hold on there sparky. If you can pressurize stuff and make it fit in a smaller container how come two leater bottles of coke are so dang big?

        Or is this a Star Trek feature and not something we can do in a real world?

  6. *sigh*
    I didn’t really like this episode.

    First of all, has any crewmember actually died yet? And did anyone have any doubt WHATsoever that Mayweather will be back by the end?

    Like everyone else I think the Killing All The Other Brain-Dead people was just bad. But I also think it was wrong to destroy the station. Suppose someone’s ship gets blasted REALLY bad, and they don’t MIND giving up a guy to save it? What if other races don’t have a problem with that? Enterprise has probably destroyed the last chance for survival for god-knows how many people!

    I know who built the station though – the design makes it all too clear – the station was built by Apple!

  7. Odd… I LIKED It
    More comments later ’cause it’s really late (been up late coding) but with a few reservations I actually liked this episode!.

    Enjoyed Trip’s "complaining" to the service computer – enjoyed the fact that the captain was finally thinking paranoid for once….stuff blew up amd there were smashing robots (my 2 pre-qualifications for enjoyable anime BTW).

    Couldn’t tell you on how many Star Treks it was that I’ve seen the crew end up on the big bad alien ship to negotiate or whatever and I always asked, "Well if they got on the damn ship why didn’t they just carry over and/or transport an ounce of ani-matter to help in ‘negotiations’ ". Well finally somebody did! Good Hehehe…..

    More comments later….even TechnoGirls need their beauty sleep.

  8. Ohhh…One more thing…
    Wouldn’t it be a cool plot twist if the alien ship rebuilds itself into a warship because it’s pissed at Archer and uses and expands it’s Human Interface technology to become the first Borg ship. So in effect, by blowing it up Archer ends up creating the Borg collective?? !

    Thought that would be a neat twist….or maybe it’s just 3 am and anything sounds neat about now….
    Night….

    • Re: Ohhh…One more thing…

      Wouldn’t it be a cool plot twist if the alien ship rebuilds itself into a warship because it’s pissed at Archer and uses and expands it’s Human Interface technology to become the first Borg ship. So in effect, by blowing it up Archer ends up creating the Borg collective?? !

      Maybe it’s the fact that it’s 6:00am and that I didn’t get much sleep last night, either, but that DOES sound cool – AND very twisted. You are a very twisted person – keep it up!

      • Re: Ohhh…One more thing…

        Wouldn’t it be a cool plot twist if the alien ship rebuilds itself into a warship because it’s pissed at Archer and uses and expands it’s Human Interface technology to become the first Borg ship. So in effect, by blowing it up Archer ends up creating the Borg collective?? !

        Maybe it’s the fact that it’s 6:00am and that I didn’t get much sleep last night, either, but that DOES sound cool – AND very twisted. You are a very twisted person – keep it up!

        That would be cool, but wasn’t it hinted at that maybe Kirk/Spock helped create the Borg in ST:TMP?

        • Re: Ohhh…One more thing…

          Holy cow, they’re having ENOUGH problems maintaining canon continuity without introducing the Borg at this point!!! It’s been well established, I think, that the Borg started in a far-away (Delta?) quadrant where Q took Enterprise-D for OUR (the viewer’s) introduction to the Borg, that 7of9’s parents made first human contact with the Borg in a far-away quadrant (in the ST timeline), and the Borg were invading Federation space the first time in Best of Both Worlds (where I really regret Shelley didn’t join the D crew permanently – guess I have a thing for smart gals with ability who stand up to guys…)

          That said, there’s no reason what happened to produce the Borg happened only once in the galaxy’s history, and how it may have happened here again independent from the true Borg – so give em a new name, let Archer fight em, and we all know they’re gonna be contained / obliterated before TOS…

          • Then again…
            Huh. After thinking about this some more, maybe this WAS a Borg probe – unmanned – er, unBorged – sent to a distant place like flypaper to collect samples of specefaring races and their technology to take back to the distant Collective…hoo boy, I hope not, it would be just another example where the writers have no new ideas so it’s the wink-wink tribute to yet another race (Ferengi, Romulan) that we can only hint at at this time in the ST timeline…

          • Re: Ohhh…One more thing…

            It’s been well established, I think, that the Borg started in a far-away (Delta?) quadrant where Q took Enterprise-D for OUR (the viewer’s) introduction to the Borg, that 7of9’s parents made first human contact with the Borg in a far-away quadrant [/quote>

            Yeah…thought about that as I went to sleep. If I were writing a screenplay I have it as a season cliffhanger with the ship coming back to kick some earthman ass in the season closer….but it’s been damaged so it doesn’t exactly know where earth is anymore…so it starts capturing and disassembling/integrating nearby vessels and crew to try to find out. Fortunately hardly anybody else does either. Earth and Vulcan get wind of the threat and team up to destroy the vessel. Big fight scene at the end. Alien vessel transports crew off the vulcan ship and interrogates/integrates them into it’s operation. Some of the crew "come back" as cyborgs to fight against the Vulcan or maybe even the Enterprise crew.

            In the season opener I’d have it all conclude with disables the alien station again being disabled and flungs off to some far away portion of the galaxy ….maybe the Enterprise and Vulcan crew lure the station into coming near a wormhole or blackhole. So the station gets flung to the other side of the galaxy ….and I’ll have one of the vulcans it captured and integrated be a woman who is found out at the end of the story to be called B’org. HEhehehehehe….. :)

          • Re: Ohhh…One more thing…
            The Borg are actually in the first season of ST:TNG acording to one
            of the producers Rick Berman I think. During the first season there
            was an episode where the Enterprise comes across 3
            cryogenecally frozen humans from the late 20th century, while
            investigating a number of Federation colonies that have been
            destroyed along the border of the Neutral Zone. They suspect that
            it was the Romulans, but at the end they find out the Romulans
            had the same problem, and it was a mystery enemy. According to
            Berman at the start of the show the big bad enemy in TNG was
            going to be….. The Ferangi !!!!!!! They turned out to be very lame,
            and they decided when the show was ending its first year, that they
            better come up with a truely good villian or the show would be
            over.

            • Re: Ohhh…One more thing…

              at the start of the show the big bad enemy in TNG was
              going to be….. The Ferangi !!!!!!!

              I seem to recall in the Farpoint pilot the Feringi were actually discussed as being untrustworthy Hanibal Lectors before turning into sensitive-eared sex clowns. ST just can’t bear to have a dark edge – even the Borg were humanized as the series went on – big mistake, they were a GREAT “villian” that has been reduced to mush over the years.

    • Re: Ohhh…One more thing…

      Wouldn’t it be a cool plot twist if the alien ship rebuilds itself into a warship because it’s pissed at Archer and uses and expands it’s Human Interface technology to become the first Borg ship. So in effect, by blowing it up Archer ends up creating the Borg collective??

      I recall that in a Voyager episode, there is a race, the Vadwar(sp) that were in stasis for a few hundred years. Anyway, 7of9 pushes the button, they wake up, eventually Voyager has to fight them after helping rearm them. One of them, after hearing that 7of9 was borg, mentioned that in the golden age of his race the borg were already estabilished and masters of a few systems. One would have to compare how long the Vadwar were asleep to the time between ST:E and ST:TNG.

  9. interesting… yet it sucked
    great way to “fix” the ship but… gimme a break. I never once thought mayweather was dead, I never thought that the fix would go smoothly, I KNEW something would happen.

    A show being too predictable is really just lame. This is Sci-fi. they have unlimited ways to make it unpredictable and fun. Like for instance, lets just say, the ship gets fixed and they leave and crash on a planet where a whole OTHER plot takes place… eh?

    or how about the station “fixes” the ship and then bumps up the price and enterprise cannot pay, so the ship “un-fixes” enterprise and they leave still crippled… eh?

    Or even the same thing happens, but they cannot save mayweather’s life, so they turn his body into a brain-in-jar navigator/pilot ensign. I mean… heck, throw him in a mason jar with some oregano, canola oil, and maybe some OJ. Geez, as long as he can still fly the ship who cares right?

    BAH…

  10. Emotional Giveaway
    I hate to keep pounding on this ep, seems everyone sees something wrong with it. I happened to catch the writers giving stuff away with their urgency to show an emotional response to Mayweathers’ death. When Hoshi broke down mid-way through the show I figured that was too soon to have a response for him if he were really dead. When Trek writers (and others) kill of a main character for real (Yar being the only one I can think of) they save the morning for the end of the show. I think the Hoshi bit was unnecessary to the plot even though it developed her character a little bit. But why not do it with a real death instead of a fake one.

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