Star Trek Enterprise (Season 3B)

Season 3a – Season 3c

This section of the season picks up the quality a bit, mixing the overarching story with a mix of god—and not so good—stand-alones:

Episode 59: “The Shipment” 

This is a solid action story with some good, thought provoking ideas. It is always good to remember that not all of “the enemy” are evil creatures out to get you. Some on the other side are people just like you, wanting to live life as best they can and get along. Assuming you aren’t just an evil creature out to extinguish all of “the other.”

Episode 60: “Twilight” 

I’ve probably stated this before, because I am pretty passionate about it, but if you ever find yourself telling a story where the protagonist has to do something that will cause the story to have never occurred… stop. Why tell it? Time travel often falls into this trap. Undoing mistakes is fine (if done right) but if you get to the end and everything that just happened didn’t—if no one remembers it—why bother?

Episode 61: “North Star” 

When the Twilight Zone does stories like this—stand-alone, genre-bending, “What If?” stories—it works. When Trek does it, they have to find a way to tie it into the overarching timeline. In this case it works really pretty well. And, it provides for some fun speculation. What if the slaves had risen to power in America? Would racism have still reigned the way it does? Human nature answers, “probably.”

Episode 62: “Similitude” 

The supposedly hard-hitting quandaries proposed by this episode are undercut by the preposterous unbelievability of the scenario.

Episode 63: “Carpenter Street” 

As time travel stories go, this one is fun and unproblematic. They succeed by not dwelling too much on the mechanics and not impacting the timeline at all. It is just an exercise in fun adventure.

Episode 64: “Chosen Realm” 

As the writers were clearly trying to reflect on the cultural climate of their day—post 9-11, they finally got to dealing with religious extremist terrorism. And, this episode was done quite well. It is a balanced, clever hypothetical, that confronts the messed-up nature of such fanatics. And, it is interesting that the made up a distinct alien species from the Xindi to be the terrorists. This is the best episode of the season so far.