| Review : |
At first, I thought this episode would suffer from the usual problems of a 'middle' episode, but it actually turned out to be better than the first. Soong is clearly starting to lose control of the Augments, especially Malik, who seems to be madder than his 'father'. Persis is more believable. She obviously has her own agenda, but has latched onto Malik to pursue it, although she clearly has more doubts about going against Soong. Smike was a little under-used, and perhaps they should have given him an extra scene or two, which would have helped to explain his change of loyalty and explained Earth's attitude to the Augments. The scenes on CS-12 worked well, with the torture scene highlighting Malik's complete disregard for Human life as much as anything else. Archer's approach and attack was fairly simplistic, and was almost inevitably going to fail. Anyway, lots of tension, a decent story and fairly well acted. One thing I really can't understand is Archer going to fix the containment breach instead of sending someone else (Reed maybe). Archer's just been beaten up by someone five times stronger then him, yet he goes himself. Strange choice. Also, that Denobulan medical ship must be a lot smaller than it looks. |
| Review : |
This is one of the best episodes of Enterprise and one of my favourite Trek episodes overall. I'd say this stands up well against DS9's darker episodes. The only thing preventing it from getting 5 stars was Malik's somewhat annoying nature. I know he is meant to be young and immature, as all the Augments seem to be, but he is leading them straight down the U-bend. It would also have been nice to see the Klingon High Command threatening Earth and maybe a joint human-Klingon mission. Once again Brent Spiner is superb and Bakula's portrayal of Archer, which improved from the beginning of season 3, is light-years ahead of the strange, stiff, overly formal way he "acted" in the first two seasons. I still wonder where the rest of Starfleet is - surely, given the NX-01's impressive record, the Alpha Quadrant would be swarming with NX class ships by now. |
