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Re: ENT S2: The Expanse

Season 2 finishes strong, after a string of rather pedestrian episodes with only one or two bright spots amongst them. One of my previous comments was that Enterprise was starting to feel like a continuation of Voyager and that - like its predecessor series - it had buried its engaging premise in favour of telling simple, "safe" sci-fi adventure stories from week to week. Seems like this was the feeling amongst the Paramount and UPN execs back in 2003 as well.

Speaking as someone watching through this series for the first time, I do hope this Xindi arc helps galvanise Enterprise a bit. I can practically see the producers' logic now: "A seasons-long war arc worked great over on DS9, fans loved it!". And of course there's the 9/11 parallel: I'd imagine that this had been in the back of the producers' minds for the last two seasons. To put it into context, Enterprise made its debut only two weeks after the attacks in New York.

As an episode, though - this one is a bit too heavy on the table-setting and throws a ton of exposition at us too, having the Suliban and Future Guy set up to hand out plot-relevant information and then bookending it with the Klingons, still pissed off that Archer's escaped them (twice!). It ends up feeling very disjointed, but it just about gets by on the strength of its characterisation, particularly Trip. I thought the scenes between him and Malcolm were very strong, especially when Malcolm tries to console his clearly grief-stricken friend and Trip's having none of it. Sounds like the kind of thing that a ship's counselor would be useful for....