Star Trek: Enterprise Episode 1 & 2 "Broken Bow" (2001) TV Episode Review

Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Today I'm going to be talking about the pilot episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, "Broken Bow". There will be spoilers. Let's get into it.

 While I have a fondness for Enterprise because it's the Star Trek series that aired when I was in high school, it's not my favourite Star Trek show. In fact, as I mentioned in the 20th anniversary post I did on the show two years ago, Enterprise was the Star Trek show that wasn't an absolute must watch for me every week. Because it aired twice a week here in Canada, once on CityTV and once on Space Channel, I frequently pre-empted it in favour of That '70s Show and the last few seasons of Friends. I also preferred reruns of DS9 and Voyager, plus my VHS tapes of TNG episodes over Enterprise. It's also the Star Trek series that I've revisited the least over the years, having only seen it once through, and very few episodes more than once since they originally aired. 

"Broken Bow" feels rushed as an introductory episode despite its 87 minute runtime. It does a decent enough job at introducing the new crew and the new Enterprise, it didn't do anything to further the characters beyond Captain Archer and possibly T'Pol. Which is fine, but, since TNG started in 1987, Star Trek had been marketed as a series with an ensemble cast, where you didn't really have a singular main character. But the early 2000s action shows were more about the singular protagonist and the singular antagonist or foil character, and less about the larger ensemble casts that populated TV shows in the '90s. Despite its name, Smallville was very much Clark's show, Andromeda was very much Kevin Sorbo's show, therefore it was Dylan's show, and The O.C. was very much Ryan's show despite the more ensemble nature of each show.. Sure, all those shows had supporting characters surrounding the main protagonist of each show, but most of the time that's all they were and very rarely were they handled in a way in terms of the writing that conveyed to the audience that they're ensemble shows.

One of my favourite parts of this episode is near the beginning when the Vulcans, led by Ambassador Soval (played by Gary Graham), try to convince Starfleet Command to postpone the launch of Enterprise until the situation with Klaang has been resolved, and after some insistence from Archer, Admiral Forrest (played by Vaughn Armstrong) shuts Soval down and says, "We've been waiting nearly a century, Ambassador. This seems as good a time as any to get started", with a look on his face that is almost pleasure in finally telling the Vulcan Ambassador where he can shove his dismissal of Humanity as a whole. In the last twenty-two years Vulcans have been portrayed as having the biggest superiority complex in the entire galaxy, and it's really weird, since, yes, we kind of had that with Spock in TOS and the Vulcan Baseball team in the DS9 episode, "Take Me Out to the Holosuite", but, it's still weird to see the entire species have that complex. 

Another thing I liked was the way Archer and T'Pol's working relationship developed over the course of the episode. It does feel a bit rushed compared to Sisko and Kira's working relationship on DS9, but that developed over the course of the first few seasons of the show, whereas here, they needed Archer and T'Pol to be different from Sisko and Kira. Mostly so the show wouldn't feel like a retread of what was already done on DS9 and on TOS 35 years earlier (from the time Enterprise premiered). 

Jonathan Archer, played by Scott Bakula, is an interesting character, and he is one of my favourite ones in all of Star Trek. I've never seen Quantum Leap, so I had no idea who Bakula was until I watched this episode for the first time, back in 2001, but I liked him instantly. Archer, and the rest of the Enterprise crew, minus Phlox and T'Pol, all feel like the most Human of all of the Human characters we've had on Star Trek up to that point, with the exception of the DS9 characters. Archer, Trip, Malcolm, Travis, and Hoshi have fears, prejudices, dreams, goals, and desires that make them all feel more identifiable to the audience than the perfect Humans we'd been getting in the 24th Century shows. They also feel more like 21st Century people. 

The 2000s was an interesting time for Star Trek. By the time Enterprise premiered on September 26th, 2001, mainstream audiences had moved on from Star Trek. The movies weren't doing nearly as well at the box office as the TOS movies had been doing in the '80s and early '90s, merchandise wasn't as available in retail stores as it had been only ten years earlier, and people just weren't watching the shows anymore. And they really hadn't been since TNG ended in 1994, as shown by the ratings of both DS9 and Voyager, which had continued to decline throughout their respective runs. "Broken Bow" garnered 12.54 million views the night it premiered, but every week after that the ratings dropped until by the end of the season, the ratings were down between 4 and 5 million views per episode. You can't even blame streaming for that, because streaming didn't even exist yet in the early to mid-2000s when Enterprise was on the air.

I remember watching "Broken Bow" the night it premiered. It was on CityTV, and it was the first Star Trek premiere episode that I watched by myself. My parents and siblings watched it, but I watched it on the TV in my bedroom, which I'd just gotten four months earlier. However, the opening of the episode confused me at first because it opened on a model spaceship with a kid and his dad working on it. I honestly thought I had the wrong channel until they started talking about warp speed and Vulcans, and a Klingon showed up in the very next scene. And, what threw me off even more is the opening credits not only just said Enterprise, and not Star Trek: Enterprise (they changed that for the beginning of the third season), but the theme music was "Where My Heart Will Take Me" by Russell Watson, which I knew as "Faith of the Heart" by Rod Stewart, which came out in 1998, not an orchestral piece like Star Trek had always had. I understood what UPN was trying to do with this, because, like I said, Star Trek was no longer popular as it had been ten years earlier, and the most popular shows of the time had or would have pop songs as their opening themes. Sitcoms had always had iconic theme songs (Full House, Cheers, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Friends all come to mind), but previous Star Trek shows, and shows like Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman all had orchestral opening themes. 

The big thing I really don't like about the episode is how Hoshi, played by Linda Park, was portrayed while they were on Rigel X. She's a trained Starfleet officer, so why was she being treated like a hinderance by Archer and the crew? And why wasn't she carrying a weapon? I get that in this time period Starfleet had only been around for a short period of time, but I also know that by this point in time, women were treated way more equally than they were being treated when this episode originally aired. I suspect it has something to do with Rick Berman being one of the writers of this episode, with Brannon Braga being the other. From what the cast of Enterprise has said in the last few years, these guys didn't treat anyone very well on set, especially the women. Which was corroborated by the casts of both DS9 and Voyager, who all had similar stories. Not so much from Braga, but Berman was who these casts pointed out in recent years. 

Overall, this is an okay episode. I think I liked it alot better when it originally aired than I did watching it now. Enterprise got pretty good as the show went on, but, again, it's not my favourite Star Trek show, and I often skipped it in favour of That '70s Show and Friends. Especially in later seasons. It's not a bad show by any means, it just got too compromised by studio and network interference, and behind the scenes issues so that by the time Manny Coto took over as showrunner in what ended up being the show's final season, the damage had been done. As I've said many times, even if UPN hadn't canceled Enterprise when it did, The CW, which was created by the merger of UPN and The WB, would've canceled it during or after the fifth season simply because they weren't interested in doing Sci-Fi shows, and because the audience for Star Trek just wasn't there anymore. I do like the cast though, and I respect them for working under difficult circumstances.

Alright my friends, that's it for me for today and for this week. I'll be back next week for more posts and reviews. So until then have a great rest of the weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.