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Star Trek Ent - Season 1 - Episode 03

Star Trek Ent - 1x03 - Fight or Flight

Originally Aired: 2001-10-3

Synopsis:
The crew comes across an abandoned ship of dead aliens. [DVD]

My Rating - 6

Fan Rating Average - 5.41

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Rating: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
# Votes: 23 1 2 11 3 6 20 15 13 15 10

Problems
None

Factoids
- According to T'Pol, one out of every 43,000 planets supports intelligent life.

Remarkable Scenes
- Archer: "Come on, Travis. We've got to find Mr. Reed something to blow up!"
- Phlox sharing his observations of humanity with Trip.
- Hoshi freaking out about the alien corpses.
- Archer second guessing himself and deciding to turn back and go back to that ship to investigate.
- The alien ship thoroughly kicking Enterprise's ass.
- Hoshi defeating the language barrier.

My Review
This episode outlines Earth's first contact with the Axanar, a species we've heard of before in TOS (mentioned in TOS: Court Martial and in TOS: Whom Gods Destroy). I'm glad the writers didn't repeat the mistake here that they made with the Suliban and the Denobulans. Granted, nobody knows who was in that alien ship that almost tore Enterprise a new rear end, but I don't think that it's very important. Personally I think this episode belongs to Reed and especially to Hoshi. Reed was concerned that Enterprise would do poorly in a fight due to its primitive and improperly configured weaponry, and he was right. Hoshi was concerned that she'd have no grace under pressure, and she was right too... for a while anyway. It's kind of annoying that she doubted her ability right up to the point when Enterprise was about to be destroyed before finally showing some courage. But it was easily realistic and it was nice to watch her character evolve from a scared little girl to a confident young women in the course of a single episode. As a more general analysis, this episode does well to further elucidate the fact that Earth is hardly prepared for exploration. This mission would have hardly been worth a full hour on any other Star Trek show, so the writers are taking full advantage of Enterprise's weaknesses, for they are a strength in terms of writing for a prequel.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Dstyle on 2015-08-12 at 5:56pm:
    Despite creating world peace, ending poverty, and eradicating hunger, humanity had yet to learn the catastrophic dangers of introducing non-native species into a new environment. Sorry, random planet: you're about to be overrun with slugs!
  • From Zorak on 2016-09-17 at 12:08pm:
    That part with the slug actually bothered me quite a bit, and not just because it made me roll my eyes at how symbolic it was supposed to be. It's Hoshi's (and Phlox!?) complete naivete in thinking that slug would be just fine marooned on an alien world. They completely doomed that slug and acted like they were it's saviors. What rubbish.
  • From Hugo on 2016-11-24 at 8:49am:
    Totally agree about the slug!

    I thought it was quite refreshing to see aliens that breath a different kind of atmosphere and have a different environment - and the language/communication problems was also good to see.

    The final 5 minutes felt quite standard Trek - with that standoff etc, and a quick resolution...

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