[ENT] Season 1, Episode 3 (Netflix: S1 E2): Fight or Flight

Rating: 3

This makes for an appropriate second episode. Enterprise does a great job of keeping the viewer aware of the ongoing conditions of the mission. They establish that the ship isn’t war ready, is likely to be outmatched, and that the ship has been flying for two or so weeks and the crew is antsy to find something interesting.
A lot of the plot centers around Hoshi being afraid, and finding her confidence. Some may find it annoying to watch such a squeamish character, but I think they do a decent enough job with it. Well, aside from the really forced slug metaphor they do a decent enough job. It’s also noteworthy that once Hoshi conquers her fears, they’re more or less conquered… the writers don’t make it a lasting part of her character.
Like many episodes of Trek, the last third falls kind of flat, but not so much to drive “Fight or Flight” to a 2.

Read more about it at Memory Alpha

Trek.fm gave it an 8/10

Notes:

One of the ways the writers could have shown the NX-01 to be more primitive would be manual targeting for weapons. It would have given one of the characters a cool skill that the audience can easily understand.

They start with the cheese/porthos gag

Hoshi is afraid of everything!

The slow build up to boarding the mysterious ship, the discovery of creepy dead bodies, the limited weapon strength of the Enterprise, and the prospect that the alien aggressors returning creates decent suspense. Hoshi has plenty of things to be afraid of, they didn’t need to add weird things like not being able to sleep because of the stars. It just makes her seem crazy.

Sometimes Phlox only talks through a small hole on the right side of his mouth

In the end Hoshi saves the day, which is predictable. But compare it to Voyager’s second episode, “Parallax”, which has a similar arc for Torres, and this looks pretty good.

Stay tuned, we’ll be discussing this episode more next week in our “Second Episode Conundrum” article.

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