Episode Title: Broken Bow Parts 1 & 2
Director: James Conway
Writer(s): Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Wikipedia Synopsis: First contact with Klingons; the Enterprise (NX-01) is launched. Archer finds himself in the middle of a Temporal Cold War.
Guest Stars of Note: James Cromwell, "Tiny" Lister
Impressions: It's not that they decided to go with a pop song as their opening theme, it's that they decided to go with a song from Patch Adams that irritates me, did Star Trek not carry enough cultural clout in 2001 to swing an original shitty pop song for the opening credit sequence?
The Klingon Klaang is taken down by a space redneck with the future equivalent of a squirrel hunting rifle, it's a sad showing for a representative of a military caste based culture.
Why must Archer's father also have been a part of the team to work on the first warp engine? Why can't he dislike Vulcans solely because they have impeded humanity's progress? Isn't that motivation enough?
Also, on a production design level you know that you are designing a prequel show to what may be the most Sixties-era looking show in the history of everything. I understand that the crazy day-glo, bubble design from the original series isn't going to cut it with a modern audience but the Enterprise of this show has to believably become the Enterprise of the original series and the designs are so fundamentally different it's sort of shocking. There are roughly 100 years between Enterprise and the Original Series so I'll just assume a race of crazy space aesthetes joined Starfleet during that time and just punched everything up.
Trip is just awful. As the chief engineer of a space vessel he is unaware that there is a little pocket of reversed gravity IN EVERY SPACE VESSEL EVER. How do you not know that when your job is to maintain the ship. That's like the doctor not knowing where the medicine stores are kept.
T'Pol is also just awful.
Speaking of T'Pol let's discuss the gender politics of this episode for a second shall we. They have two female characters in the pool of this show, both are supposed to be the big brains of the ship, T'Pol the Vulcan science officer/executive officer and Hoshi Sato the communications officer with some sort of savant gift of language. Let's discuss how they are used in the show. T'Pol has to smear her as naked as they could get her body with space oil to decontaminate herself and Hoshi spends the entire episode afraid of every noise on the ship like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Yay, space suffrage!
The lizard tongue butterfly devouring space strippers/prostitutes also bother me. I'm not a prude and I will concede that Trip also gets oiled down in the decontamination scene but by and large the women are objectified hard and long in this episode and it becomes sort of embarrassing. The issues with how women are treated so shabbily is a theme I fear I will be returning to again and again so I'll save it for a later episode.
Dr. Phlox, aside from the horrific CGI smile, is the greatest character on the show. I will brook no discussion otherwise.
Why must the Archer and Trip be the two crew members to enter the unknown alien vessel and rescue the possibly violent seven foot alien space marine? Aren't there any like ensigns that they could spare so THE CAPTAIN OF THE SHIP and THE CHIEF ENGINEER MAYBE DON"T HAVE TO PUT THEIR FUCKING LIVES ON THE LINE? I forgive Kirk when he does this kind of shit because Kirk is a sociopath but Archer isn't so that just makes him stupid I guess.
Score: 2 out of like 7 or so.
EDIT: Temporal Cold War? Really? That's the best you had?
