Fight or Flight

Fight or Flight has the Enterprise crew slightly bored with the vastness of space. There is very little out there in terms of new lifeforms.

Apart from a sick slug that Hoshi Sato is trying to nurse back to health.

There is a near mishap with a torpedo test that Reed is trying to calibrate.

Danger arises when they find a damaged vessel with the murdered alien bodies hanging upside down. Their fluid being drained.

T'Pol urges Archer to flee. Only he returns to bury the bodies and let the alien homeworld know what has happened. Only for the attackers to return.

It is a kind of episode that makes Archer out to be reckless as he tries to abide by an ethical code. While T'Pol is more logical about the safety of the crew.

The Enterprise may not be a technological match for the attackers or the aliens if it was to encounter them.

It turns out that Hoshi's linguistic abilities are put to the test.

As a character development episode it did not work. Hoshi was the second top graduate in her class and does not look cut out to be in space. Why did they not get the person who graduated first.

I could not buy how she suddenly could communicate with the aliens.

If I was a member of the Enterprise crew. I would not had been happy that my captain endangered my life unnecessarily.

This is not a particularly great episode because it mostly focuses on Hoshi--and she is a particularly weak and hard to like character. Having her being a bit uncertain would have worked but having her being THAT indecisive and filled with neuroses was NOT a good thing at all. At every turn, she's annoying the audience with her stupid fears. One minute she's afraid she'll be space sick, another she's upset her cabin faces the wrong direction, another she's worried about going into a confined space and another she's worried about her linguistic skills during a first contact. I felt like yelling 'man up' or something like it during so much of the show. On a planet with billions of people, couldn't they have come up with someone more qualified, less stupid and more capable than this mess of a woman?! Plus, I am sure a lot of women cringed to see such a weak female leading character and she's nothing like any of the much more capable and less annoying guys!

The purpose of the episode is to show Hoshi evolving very quickly (and a bit TOO quickly) to become more confident on the ship. While an interesting episode in most ways, she isn't. Perhaps she'll get better--I'll have to revisit this in future episodes.

The story is decent and back to the basics of Star Trek. The series is still at the point of getting to know the characters, so that will probably be the primary focus early in season one. Unfortunately, it is already clear that the representation of women in this series is taking some huge steps back from Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager.

After seeing some very strong female characters in the previous two Star Trek series (Captain Janeway, 7 of 9, Torres, Jadzia Dax, Kira, etc.), Enterprise appears ready to go back to the weak female characters (with the possible exception of Uhura) in the original series. Yes, Enterprise does take place prior to the events of the original series, but it is still set in the future and one would hope that female characters would be depicted in a much more positive light.

With all the males being characterized as brave and curious adventure seekers, T'Pol has been limited to being a killjoy. Hoshi is whining and complaining about everything, even the location of her room, is on a space mission in spite of being claustrophobic, and is unsure about her own profession. She is given some confidence but only after the encouragement of male characters. Her screaming upon boarding the alien ship was more appropriate for a teen slasher film then for a Star Trek series.

For its time, the original series had some fairly positive and strong women. The Next Generation took that a step further and Deep Space Nine and Voyager did an excellent job of it. Hopefully, as Enterprise evolves, it will get back on that trend.

I would see it in her garage whenever I would come visit. The same purse that Hoshi used to bring the alien slug to a new planet... I just have a couple of minor complaints about this episode and then we will get back to that Slug-Purse.

I understand Hoshi's reluctance to continue with the mission, that was not unrealistic.

I don't understand her reluctance to do her JOB. That was totally unrealistic.

Of course, this show represented some of the first people to ever travel the galaxy and visit "Brave New Worlds"- and of course these people didn't act like the crew of the Enterprize D. But still-

But Hoshi was an OFFICER, with a rank. Rather than a "rank" amateur... her reluctance to act when under pressure was not only out of character, it was not believable.

Even if she were as frustrated as she portrayed, she would have not hesitated to do her job- it's what military do. She was on the ship for one major reason, and even if she had intended to quit, she still would have done her job to the best of her ability.

Especially under the circumstances and the threat of being connected to some kind of alien device and turned into snacks.

Even the Maquis on Voyager did their jobs without question when ordered to by their captain.

The other thing going on here, finding an alien derelict in space and seeing that the crew had been subjected to a nightmare scenario, that was almost like "Alien", the creep factor was about 90%.

These two aspects of the third Enterprize episode appears to have torn the episode in half making it weird and creepy on one hand and ridiculous on the other.

The show and the Hoshi character did get better as it went along, showing that Hoshi was talented not just with spoken languages but with mathematical languages as well, when she became infected in one future episode and the ship was under observation by Organians Who were reluctant to help with the ship out of a worthwhile conundrum.

She was even kidnapped by the Xindi reptilians aliens in the last episode of season three, and her talents were made to work for them.

So we know even in this episode that she was capable of communicating with another species even with limited knowledge of those spoken language. She was of course the woman who created the universal translator.

But in this episode she acts like a scared little girl which she definitely was not. Scared, maybe.

Getting back to that clear square purse that she used to bring the slug to a new planet, I was amazed that I recognized that, my friend had one exactly like that. This was an object that could have been purchased at any $.99 only store and that's probably where it was found. Because we know that guys like Dan Curry, who created a lot of objects used in Star Trek even back as far as some of the feature films of the 80s, was known to obtain some of the best props from what we would consider mundane sources. For example the prop for Jupiter station used in a couple of voyager episode, was actually created from three generic trashcan lids. And the side of the Borg cube that was used to show how the ships regenerate was constructed from an even more generic source. Don't get me started on the "hatch" of the Dyson sphere scene in next generation season six episode "relics" where were you last saw Scotty who had crashed onto the Dyson sphere.

It pleases me to no end that we continue to see the Star Trek franchise ability to create beautiful props out of basically garbage still alive in the final show of that particular franchise, that franchise which began with the motion picture in 1979 and ended with Star Trek nemesis in 2002-3.

Very few of those original people are left to work on the new Star Trek franchise of CBS. It's like Paramount owned a support crew to make great movies and with the end of the Star Trek franchise of the 80s and 90s, those people all had to find new jobs after some of them, 20 years of constant work.

This episode has a whole lot of filler, a lot of it focused on Hoshi's self-doubt and utter lack of self-confidence. Boy, can she whine! I'm okay with a little bit of it but it felt like half this episode is listening to her ramble on about how she doesn't belong out here. This, mixed with the heavy-handed slug metaphor used to represent Hoshi's situation makes for an all too forgettable episode.

Captain Archer seems to act very similar to Captain Kirk thus far: Emotional, inquisitive, and has a bit of a temper. The rest of the crew seems solid, although we don't know much about Reed thus far and I'm interested to know a little more about his backstory. Dr. Phlox is my favorite character through the first few episodes: witty, optimistic, with a child-like curiosity.

Hopefully this is the last episode centered around Hoshi's insecurities. I'm not sure if I can handle much more of that.