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Star Trek Ent - Season 1 - Episode 12

Star Trek Ent - 1x12 - Silent Enemy

Originally Aired: 2002-1-16

Synopsis:
An ill-prepared Enterprise is under attack by mysterious aliens with unknown motivations. [DVD]

My Rating - 7

Fan Rating Average - 5.11

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# Votes: 31 0 1 1 5 8 11 23 9 12 9

Problems
- Reed says that the phase cannons have a power output of 500 gigajoules. But that is a unit of energy, not power. Additionally, this number seems way too high when compared to TNG.

Factoids
None

Remarkable Scenes
- Archer contacting Reed's parents.
- The alien ship attacking Enterprise.
- Archer: "Did your people run into as many hostile aliens when they first went into deep space?" T'Pol: "It was a different time." Archer: "How so?" T'Pol: "There were fewer warp capable species." Archer: "This ship just isn't equipped to handle some of the threats we're coming up against."
- Reed and Trip vowing to get the phase cannons online before Enterprise returns to Earth.
- Hoshi trying to figure out what Reed's favorite food is.
- Hoshi asking Reed what his favorite food is, only to have him accidentally take the question as an invitation to romance.
- Archer: "This time we won't be leaving before we're ready." Trip: "Are your ears a little pointier than usual?"
- Reed's test firing.
- Hoshi consulting the doctor about Reed's favorite food.
- Enterprise battling the alien ship, defeating it.
- The celebration at the end.

My Review
Preliminary remark, it's annoying that we're shown a hostile alien of the week that we've never seen before and will probably never see again. However, we aren't told their names. Maybe they were one of the many hostile aliens mentioned in previous Trek series but never shown. Regardless, it would have been a better idea to show the Klingons, Romulans, or even the Suliban, not introduce something new. With so many hostile aliens lurking about, it's a wonder that Earth wasn't wiped out years ago. Maybe the Vulcans protected it. Anyway, the basic idea of the episode is fascinating. I'm glad Reed's concerns in Ent: Broken Bow and in Ent: Fight or Flight about the ship being fairly defenseless are finally being addressed. In many ways, this was entirely Reed's episode. He got to blow some stuff up and he got to eat his favorite food! But I think the episode has a much more profound effect on Archer. At the beginning, he was very excited to make another first contact but as this soon leads to yet another conflict, Archer starts having his first real doubts about his mission and wonders if the Vulcans were right. It's interesting and quite consistent that the only person he could talk about this was Trip. Finally, I thought this musical score in this episode was way above average. If only this episode had featured a familiar alien to give us some valuable backstory, it would have been worth eight points.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Dstyle on 2015-09-09 at 3:07pm:
    According to T'Pol, there were fewer warp capable species when Vulcans first went into deep space. Really? That seems odd to me. Okay, I know from TNG: The Chase that all humanoid life in the galaxy was seeded from a single humanoid species, but I also know from various other TNG episodes that Jean Luc Picard is interested in the archaeology of ancient civilizations, many of which were warp capable. There could be an understandable ebb and flow in the number of warp capable species over time, but I would assume the number would be relatively constant as some older civilizations collapsed while other younger civilizations developed the technology. T'Pol's statement makes it seem like they were one of the earliest civilizations to have warp capabilities, when we know from Picard that that is not true.

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