“Breaking the Ice”
Written by Maria Jacquemetton & André Jacquemetton
Directed by Terry Windell
Season 1, Episode 8
Production episode 009
Original air date: November 7, 2001
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Tucker is showing off the drawings made by his nephew’s fourth-grade class to T’Pol and Phlox when Enterprise drops to impulse. They’ve found a gigunda comet, bigger than any humans or Vulcans have seen. Archer, who is thrilled at the opportunity, has Mayweather match course with the comet.
Later, T’Pol and Tucker again encounter each other in the mess hall, T’Pol explaining that she isn’t big on caffeine, Tucker waxing rhapsodic on the subject of pecan pie.
T’Pol discovers that there’s eisillium in the comet. It’s a rare mineral that Vulcans haven’t had much of a chance to study. The deposits are too deep to transport, so Archer orders Reed and Mayweather to take a pod to the comet. They’ll use explosive to blow a big hole and then collect the eisillium.
A Vulcan ship, the Ti’Mur, under the command of Captain Vanik, arrives, wishing to observe Enterprise. Archer doesn’t object publicly, but privately to T’Pol is pissed at feeling like he has a Vulcan chaperone.
The pod lands on the comet, and Reed and Mayweather start scanning and setting up explosive charges. They also construct a snowman…
Sato records a video for back home on the bridge: Some schoolkids in Ireland have sent questions to the crew, and they answer some of the more popular ones. Archer explains what they eat, and discusses fraternization rules. Sato explains the universal translator, Tucker explains what they do with their waste, and Phlox talks about how germs can survive in space.
Tucker reports to Archer that an encrypted transmission has secretly been sent onto Enterprise, directed at T’Pol’s quarters from the Ti’Mur. Archer is not happy—T’Pol had promised she would not contact the Vulcans without talking to him first—and orders Tucker to have Sato decrypt it. She does so—it’s in Vulcan, which she doesn’t feel comfortable translating and reading. Tucker, however, is concerned, and so runs it through the translation matrix—and then becomes crestfallen. He reports to Archer that it’s a personal letter, and Tucker feels like absolute crap for having read it. If they’d just sent it through proper channels and marked it “personal,” everything would’ve been fine, but they went and encrypted it and sent it secretly, making it seem way more suspicious than it actually was. He doesn’t divulge the letter’s contents to Archer, and then he goes to apologize to T’Pol.
To say T’Pol is not thrilled is the understatement of the millennium. (“I have more letters in my quarters—would you like to read them as well?”) Tucker is abject in his apologies, and T’Pol reiterates that he should keep its contents to himself, please.
Archer invites Vanik to dine with him on Enterprise, with Chef preparing some Vulcan dishes—none of which Vanik tries because he ate before he came over. The dinner is magnificent exercise in awkwardness, until Archer finally gets fed up with his polite attempts at conversation being swatted aside, and out-and-out asks why Vanik is spying on them. Vanik tartly replies that if he was spying on them, they’d never have known the Ti’Mur was there.
While Reed and Mayweather explore the new crater they created, T’Pol informs them that the explosion changed the comet’s rotation, and their landing zone will be in direct sunlight much sooner. The sun will fry them both if they’re exposed on the surface. They work more quickly, though Mayweather hurts his leg.
T’Pol goes to Phlox with a tension headache. He suggests she talk to someone about whatever is stressing her out, and she finds herself forced to talk to Tucker, as the alternative is to let someone else know what’s in her letter.
We learn that T’Pol’s wedding was postponed so she could continue her assignment on Enterprise. Her fiancé’s family wasn’t all that thrilled about that, and now they’re demanding she return to Vulcan for the wedding and then stay on Vulcan for at least the first year of the marriage (her prospective husband is an architect, a skill that would be of no use on a starship, so he can’t come to live with her, while T’Pol can easily transfer to a post on Vulcan). Tucker’s not all that impressed with the entire thing, likening arranged marriages to slavery. T’Pol vociferously defends Vulcan tradition, leading Tucker to wonder why she even asked for his advice. He also points out that humans have a choice in how they live their lives.
As Mayweather and Reed are boarding the pod, the ice under the shuttle collapses. The pod is stuck, and can’t get out under its own power. Enterprise tries their grappling hooks, but only one of the two hits the pod. Vanik offers the Ti’Mur’s tractor beam. Archer objects on principle, but T’Pol points out that (a) Vanik made the offer expecting Archer to be a stubborn ass and refuse, and (b) he’s human, he has a choice to not save two of his crew’s lives over a point of pride.
Archer asks for help and the pod is yanked out. Vanik snottily tells Tucker that the tractor beam specs are classified and then the Ti’Mura buggers off, though not before T’Pol sends a letter over there, to pass on to her fiancé’s family. Then she goes to her quarters and has some pecan pie…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The comet they find is the biggest comet any human or Vulcan has seen. Mayweather wants to name it “Archer’s Comet.”
The gazelle speech. Archer is incredibly, and adorably, nervous about talking to the kids, but is great once the camera is rolling. He’s also back to being completely shitty toward Vulcans.
Buy the Book
Until the Last of Me
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol is torn between her duty to Enterprise and her duty to family tradition. She also eats non-Vulcan food for the first time. (Well, okay, the camera shows that she has a piece of pecan pie in her quarters. We don’t actually see her eat it…)
Florida Man. Florida Man Lectures Schoolchildren About Poop; Then Illegally Opens Someone Else’s Mail.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox goes on at great length on the subject of germs in space, to the point where Archer has to cut him off before he starts babbling about a colony of spores he found once.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… Vulcans are apparently not all that interested in comets, since it’s just a bunch of ice.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. T’Pol was affianced at the age of seven, just like Spock was, and she’s been procrastinating on re-setting the wedding date that was postponed by her posting to Enterprise. Meantime, the seeds of the T’Pol-Tucker romance are sown here, with him visiting her quarters and her deciding to try his beloved pecan pie.
More on this later… The Enterprise crew is introduced to the concept of the tractor beam, something that is commonplace from the twenty-third century onward. Vulcan ships are equipped with them and they are way more useful than the grapplers Enterprise has.
I’ve got faith…
“C’mon, it was an honest mistake.”
“I can’t let it go. I’ve got to tell her.”
“How’s that going to help?”
“It’s the right thing to do. At least I’ll be able to look her in the eye without feeling guilty.”
“You’re a good man. You might want to take a phase pistol with you.”
“I might need one…”
–Archer and Tucker discussing Tucker’s reading of T’Pol’s personal mail.
Welcome aboard. The only guest in this one is William Utay as Vanik.
Trivial matters: This is the first of three scripts by the husband-and-wife team of Maria & André Jacquemetton, who were story editors on this first season. The pair would go on to work on Mad Men throughout its run, getting three Emmy nominations for episodes they penned.
We get our first look at a Surak-class starship, and the general “ring” design of the Ti’Mur will serve as the template for all Vulcan High Command ships seen since on Enterprise, and also on Lower Decks.
That Vulcan marriages are arranged by parents for their children was established in the original series’ “Amok Time.”
The Denobulan home system is established as Denobula Triaxa.
It’s been a long road… “Just help me make him go away.” There are few writing devices more tired than artificial suspense. While there’s been a sea change in television in the years since this episode aired two decades ago—with Game of Thrones probably being the most talked-about example—at the time “Breaking the Ice” aired, the notion that a character played by an actor in the opening credits would depart in a mid-season episode was laughable. It was not believable that we’d lose McCoy when he was diagnosed with a fatal diseases in the original series’ “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,” or that we’d lose Riker when he was offered a command in TNG’s “The Icarus Factor.”
So it’s really hard to be invested in T’Pol’s agonizing over whether or not she’s going to stay on Enterprise because there’s been nothing in the show’s short life to date that indicates that they’re going to do anything radical.
That’s just one of the problems with this episode that should be a lot more enjoyable than it actually is. There are some great individual set pieces here, from Reed and Mayweather building a snowman while comet-walking to the crew answering letters from little kids to Tucker’s epic rant about how crappy he feels about reading T’Pol’s personal stuff to Tucker’s singing the praises of a good pecan pie to T’Pol’s whupping Archer upside the head regarding asking Vanik for help.
The letters-from-kids scene is a particular favorite, even though it has nothing to do with the rest of the episode, because it’s a lovely little touch, the sort of goofy thing that a ship like Enterprise would be doing. It provides some nice characterization, too: reminding us that Sato is a teacher also, as she’s very friendly and professorial in her reply, where Phlox shows off his tendency to babble, and Tucker gets to be all outraged over getting the poop question (and you just know that at least half the kids asked that…).
Not all the set pieces work, though, particularly the interactions with the Ti’Mur. After Archer actually being friendly toward the Vulcans at the outset of “The Andorian Incident” (it was Tucker who was being a racist ass in that episode), the captain is back to being a paranoid snot, and this time he’s outmatched by Vanik, who is overwhelmingly snotty to the point of parody. Seriously, the whole dinner scene is just a mess, and trying really hard to show that Vulcans are garbage people to make Archer look justified (like having him eat before coming over for dinner, which is a pretty classic dick move). For that matter, Vanik continues to be dismissive of the comet even after Enterprise discovered the eisillium, which should pique Vanik’s interest, given its rarity.
One of the biggest problems watching this episode in sequence is that the events of “The Andorian Incident” should be coloring everyone’s reactions, especially those of Archer and T’Pol. Archer’s snottiness toward Vanik and the Ti’Mur should be straight-up outrage after the events on P’Jem, and the revelation that Vulcan High Command was using an ancient monastery as a cover for a treaty-violating sensor array is a very good reason for T’Pol to be questioning Vulcan traditions. But those events aren’t mentioned, and it makes it feel like this episode and “The Andorian Incident” didn’t happen in the same space-time continuum. It robs Archer and T’Pol of texture for their actions, reducing the former to just more racism toward Vulcans (which, to be fair, is completely reciprocated by the arrogant Vanik) and the latter to a tiresomely foregone conclusion.
Ultimately, the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. Just a blown opportunity.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido feels real loose like a long-necked goose.
I’m a bit irritated that they didn’t even try to depict the gravity on a comet. It could have allowed great accidents, a completely unstable piece of slush. Well, that’s hollywood science for you …
Also strange how the Vulcans ever made contact with anyone out there. They do their very best to avoid interacting with other species. But on the other hand, the first season of TNG had cringe-worthy episodes, too. It took them some time to hit their stride.
It doesn’t make much sense to me how pleased the humans are with themselves that the Vulcans didn’t have this comet in their database. Our solar system’s Oort cloud is thought to have about a trillion comets, and there’s no reason to think it’s atypical in that regard. Why the hell would the Vulcans include them all in a database?
“If they’d just sent it through proper channels and marked it “personal,” everything would’ve been fine, but they went and encrypted it and sent it secretly, making it seem way more suspicious than it actually was.”
Unless, of course, sending it this way was an attempt, on Vanik’s part, to test whether Enterprise had the capability to intercept and decrypt a covert communication, while maintaining the moral high ground in the event that it was so intercepted and decoded.
Another example of the first season’s tendency to focus on slice-of-life character stories rather than high-stakes action. Some nice moments, nothing remarkable.
It should be noted that the Vulcan ringship design debuting here was inspired by a Matt Jefferies concept illustration that was reportedly intended for an unmade Gene Roddenberry project called Starship, and that was eventually included on Star Trek: The Motion Picture‘s recreation-room display of earlier vessels called Enterprise (which did not include NX-01, of course). That same illustration will later appear in ENT: “First Flight” as a painting on the wall of a bar where Starfleet personnel hang out. In my Trek novels, drawing on earlier fan concepts, I’ve explained the ringship Enterprise as an early prototype based on Vulcan ring drives before the decision was made to go with the twin-nacelle approach instead. Which is the inverse of the real-world cause and effect, where the Vulcan design was inspired by the Jefferies design.
@1/o.m.: “I’m a bit irritated that they didn’t even try to depict the gravity on a comet. It could have allowed great accidents, a completely unstable piece of slush. Well, that’s hollywood science for you …”
More like Hollywood budget, probably. Wirework is expensive.
The Surak class, first of the Vulcan ringships, one of Enterprise’s greatest contributions to the canon. A lot of my friends on Star Trek Online lament that we haven’t gotten any later additions to the line later on as the Surak and D’kyr classes are absolutely beautiful, and really distinguish their ships.
I love the slice of life stuff too, answering questions for kids seems like first rate Starfleet stuff, Starfleet at its most NASA.
As a Tr’pol shipper I wonder if Trip being honest about what he did gave her the respect for him that would later develop into their relationship. It wasn’t planned like that I imagine, but they certainly took the ball and ran with it.
That’s the biggest dropped ball of Season 1. Archer has indisputable proof that the Vulcans negotiate interstellar treaties in bad faith. That’s huge. It’s a massive piece of leverage and serves as a truly excellent argument for why Humans end up starting the Federation.
The really frustrating thing is that TNG & DS9 had already displayed competence at how the politics of the Klingons and Romulans impacts characters & stories, lessons it seems were forgotten until the 4th season of this show
I tend to agree that the ‘Slice of Life’ bits in this episode were the best bits of the episode – you just know that Class Message has been played and replayed so many times for Federation schoolchildren – and in all honesty that bit with the Snow Elf was Perfection (One would love to have seen the Vulcan reaction to same; mental image of Deadly Serious silence on the bridge of that High Command ship, with various hints of distaste, mild perplexity & calculation – and the inevitable raised eyebrow hinting that at least one of the High Command crew would be cackling, if they if they weren’t a Vulcan).
I’m also very fond of Doctor Phlox’s gentle “Oh the humanity” amusement at the notion a mere two people in one room can find themselves crowded (I’m fond of the idea that a Denobulan’s personal space is Lilliputian by contrast with our own); It’s also interesting – and a little gruesome – to meet the sort of Vulcan officer who helped leave Captain Archer with that chip on his shoulder (I’m only sorry we don’t get an insight into how that Vulcan subordinates feel about his calculated rudeness – I suspect that some would find it distastefully adolescent, that the very worst simply couldn’t imagine treating Humans any other way and that many would be somewhat indifferent (Humans can be oversensitive, after all).
All in all I really liked this episode, especially the fact that the crew of NX-01 are embarrassed and ashamed to have violated their crewmate’s privacy (and I especially like Ensign Sato’s refusal to read the thing, even after translating it).
Also, that Vulcan ship IS a beauty, it must be said – do we ever get a look inside one?
@3. cuttlefishbenjamin: I think your idea that the Vulcan Captain deliberately resorted to devious means is the Best explanation for this otherwise peculiar process (Sending a message about a Vulcan’s private life in code is of a piece with their reluctance to discuss that sort of thing, but sending it in secret feels almost like a provocation of T’Pol to boot – “Your crew cannot be trusted” as it were).
@6. Chieroscuro: In all fairness we don’t know whether it was the Vulcan Government itself or a division of same that set up that listening post on P’Jem – we also don’t know whether it was set up with or without the blessing & knowledge of the High Command, so I would suggest that it’s dangerous to infer that the Vulcan Government as a whole was negotiating in Bad Faith when it put together that treaty with Andoria.
I really like this episode, even if it would probably work better if it switched positions with “The Andorian Incident”. Archer’s realization that he’s letting his prejudices get in the way of his mission would even motivate his desire to get to know Vulcans better.
Slice-of-life stuff is one of my favorite parts of science fiction—I find exploring how daily life would be affected by faster-than-light starships and alien species fascinating. To give a non-Trek example, I enjoyed the Dead Space games in large part because you get to explore spacecraft that show signs of being lived-in and part of a society, with concert posters, vending machines, storefronts, and zero-gravity basketball courts.
To return to the episode, I also appreciate that it really makes the most of Enterprise‘s premise that these are humanity’s first steps into space, and they aren’t as well-equipped to handle the dangers as they will become. I feel like the show is at its best when it remembers that.
@8 From Episode 15 ‘Shadows of P’Jem’, Ambassador Soval seems to have been in the know as he’s pissed at the humans for ruining a perfectly good covert outpost, and cancels joint maneuvers with the humans to punish them. The Vulcan sensibility seems to be that they expect the Andorians not to keep to a treaty, thus they don’t feel obligated to adhere to anything they negotiate. To them, Andorian treaty violations are expceted and proof that Andorians simply cannot be trusted, and Vulcan violations are sensible precautions against inevitable Andorian violence.
The first show I saw that killed off an opening credits character was Buffy. It killed off more than one, and not all of them survived being killed
What I always remember from this episode is the striking visuals of the Enterprise, Ti’Mur and the comet on first viewing, think it was the first time I really saw the step up in some of the VFX for this show.
Otherwise not all that remarkable but some good moments as have been said, like the school recording scene. I originally thought the reference to Vulcan ships regularly feeling nearby was a follow on to the ‘incident at P’Jem’ given the show gIves soft continuity references in other early episodes (Klaang being mentioned in Unexpected, the comet here being mentioned by Forrest in Fortunate Son, etc..)
ED: Not sure if we see the inside of a Vulcan ship on Enterprise or not, but we do see the inside of a 24th-century one on the Lower Decks episode “wej Duj.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Don’t we see the interior of the Vulcan ship where the crew went bonkers in the Expanse?
@15/Charles Rosenberg: Hey, good call! We also briefly see the interior of a Vulcan ship in “Stigma”.
@5/Mr. D: “The Surak class, first of the Vulcan ringships”
Suurok-class, actually.
@11/wiredog: There were various older shows that killed off or otherwise wrote out main cast members, but usually just when an actor left or was fired from a show, rather than arising from the storyline. And it was usually at the start or end of a season. In the ’70s, McMillan & Wife lost its lead actress to a contract dispute in its final season, so she was killed off between seasons and the show became just McMillan. One midseason example was the 1988 Mission: Impossible revival, whose original female lead was a very weak actress and thus was killed off and replaced less than halfway through the first season. She was replaced by Jane Badler, whose previous series, V: The Series, had killed off or written out a number of its cast members midseason due to budget cuts.
@5. Mr. D That’s always been my reaction to the school conference, as well. A lovely bridge back to all those “Links from Orbit” into the classroom NASA has done, especially from the ISS.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some concept art (possibly from NASA) of a hypothetical FTL starship that used the ring configuration, too.
@@@@@11/wiredog – Buffy did a particularly nasty trick where they added Tara to the opening credits just to make you think that she was safe and killed her in the same episode. But, with the exception of Anya in the series finale, I can’t really think of any other characters in the credits who were killed off permanently over the course of the series.
@19/Vulpes: Yes, the Harold White update to the Miguel Alcubierre warp drive theory involves a ring of exotic matter creating the warp bubble.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/329631-scientists-havent-created-a-warp-bubble-but-theyre-a-bit-closer-to-testing-one
An effects artist I follow on Youtube released a short video recently of a TOS movie era Starfleet ship with the ring design. Looks pretty cool. Check it out.
“Vanik expects you to refuse his offer. He sees humans as arrogant, prideful. Why not prove him wrong?”
This is another one that feels like it’s two or three ideas mashed together. They do eventually link up but it can make for a very disjointed viewing experience.
And yes, the juxtaposition with the previous episode is a bit unfortunate: It would have been less noticeable in the days when mostly-episodic television was the norm, but now that we’re used to serialised storytelling, you’d expect some callback to events at P’Jem with Enterprise encountering a Vulcan ship. Archer should have bigger worries about the Vulcans that simply that they might be looking over his shoulder, and the Vulcan authorities should have bigger concerns about T’Pol than her wedding arrangements. Instead, this could have been dropped in ten episodes down the track without changing anything.
It’s nice that the crew are still less than seasoned professionals. Setting foot on a comet for the first time, Reed and Mayweather make a snowman, because of course they do. Archer still hasn’t learnt how to find a balance. In the pilot, he was determined to solve the problem without the help of Vulcan High Command and it was mostly portrayed as laudable. Here, he tries to do the same but has to learn there are more important things than proving a point. And it’s T’Pol who gives him the nudge: T’Pol, the crewmember that’s still viewed as the outsider by herself and everyone else, but is showing signs of going native. She wouldn’t have called Tucker to her quarters if a part of her didn’t want him to talk her out of ignoring her people’s traditions. But surely there’s a better symbol of Earth culture than pecan pie?
The kiddies’ questions scene is a hoot. Tucker is smirking at the toilet question up until the point Archer tells him to answer it, after which the tables are well and truly turned. By the end, they both look as though they’d rather have gone ten rounds with the Suliban. Archer notes there’s no rules against dating: Later episodes will suggest it’s not that simple.
With Reed and Mayweather both off the ship for a huge chunk, Tucker gets to man tactical for the first time. Archer himself takes the helm for the rescue attempt, although an unnamed crewmember (played by regular first season extra Martin Ko) is there for much of the episode. Phlox sits at the science station during the Q&A, although it’s not clear whether he’s actually manning it or just wanted a sit down.
Archer mentions encountering a Vulcan ship that ignored them three weeks ago, which sounds like a story in itself. Koss, mentioned for the first time here, will appear in Season 4. Tucker says that where he comes from, arranged marriages went out with slavery: I’m assuming he’s talking in national terms, because there’s plenty of modern day Earth cultures that have one and not the other. Archer gave T’Pol special permission to have candles lit for medication, another sign that he’s not quite as bigoted as he sometimes comes across as.
Possibly because they were less likely to have the actor’s names at the start (or at least to do it consistently), I think there’s quite a few examples of UK series killing people mid-season. Survivors had a pretty high death rate, especially among the season one characters: They killed three main characters in the course of two episodes in the middle of the first season, killed several more off-screen in the second season opener, then killed one who’d survived that mini-massacre and seemed to be space in the very next episode. Blake’s 7 killed first season regular Gan five episodes into season two. Doctor Who often used to lose companions mid-season in the early days: In fact, it was happening as late as Season 23. Come to think of it, this isn’t wholly a British phenomenon: Highlander killed its original female lead just four episodes into the second season and seemed to drop quite a few characters mid-season, partly down to splitting the shoot between Vancouver and Paris although Charlie gets added back on at the start of season three (having been absent from the second half of the previous season) and then written out in the third episode.
@10. Chieroscuro: Well that’s a sorry thing to learn – for the record I’ve seen multiple episodes of ENTERPRISE (some twice), but I’ve never previously watched the show in any systematic fashion and ‘Shadows of P’Jem’ one of those episodes I missed out on as result, hence my optimistic reading of the situation.
@14. krad: I wonder how (perhaps one should say “I wonder if…”) Vulcan starships have changed over the two-and-a-quarter centuries between NX-01 and the USS Cerritos? (Given Vulcan lifespans and a certain tendency towards conservative thinking, I suspect their High Command vessels have changed a little less than their Starfleet counterparts, but that there would be visible differences – especially between older & newer ship classes).
Thank you @15. Charles Rosenberg & @16. Vulpes for contributing to the discussion! (-:
@17. ChristopherLBennett: I wonder if, per your idea about the etymology of the name ‘Sarek’ (from UNCERTAIN LOGIC), ‘Suurok’ is the Father of Logic’s name rendered in a non-mainstream Vulcan dialect? (Or perhaps a closely-related name from the same language family, like ‘Edward’ & ‘Edmund’).
@23. cap-mjb: Given that this is STAR TREK, I’m willing to give Commander Tucker benefit of the doubt and believe that Florida Man IN SPACE means ‘The Sunshine State’ rather than Planet Earth (Florida IS a different world, after all).
Am I the only one who was bothered throughout the episode that they never retrieved the doohickey that was used as the nose of the snowman?
What bothered me is the fact that they sent a pilot and an security officer but no scientist. It’s supposedly this unusual comet but they send nobody with the specialized knowledge to examine it.
Breaking the Ice is a nice little episode that breaks from the norm. To be sure, the “conflict” between Archer and Vanik is nothing more than juvenile sniping (even Sisko’s baseball rivalry with the Vulcan captain had more meat).
But that’s not what makes the episode shine. As pointed out, it’s a nice little slice of life structure. Reminiscent of TNG episodes like Data’s Day, Family and Lower Decks, this is a nice change of pace, and little tidbits like the T’Pol/Tucker scenes, Reed/Mayweather comet shenanigans, and answering children’s letters help to make this episode stand out from the usual Trek narrative formula. This approach plays very much to the writing strenghts of the Jacquemettons, as seen with their later work on Mad Men.
It’s certainly a flawed episode, and not even close to being one of Enterprise‘s best shows, but it still shows a willingness to experiment and try something new, which was refreshing enough after the stale feeling that was still leftover from those last two seasons of Voyager.
@@@@@Ecthelion of Greg in 25, they abandoned considerably more gear.
@@@@@ChristopherLBennett in 4, I’m sure they could have pretended to be really light. 85 km is considerably less than, say, Vesta, but they could have tried a “moon hop.”
@24/ED: “I wonder if, per your idea about the etymology of the name ‘Sarek’ (from UNCERTAIN LOGIC), ‘Suurok’ is the Father of Logic’s name rendered in a non-mainstream Vulcan dialect?”
It’s long been assumed that the reason so many Vulcan names use the S—K form is to honor Surak, so this could just be another one. An English speaker might think that “Surak” and “Suurok” are just slight variations on the same sound, but a Japanese speaker, say, would see them as two entirely distinct words.
@29. ChristopherLBennett: It’s also possible that being named ‘Surak’ on Ancient Vulcan would have been like being named ‘John’ (or ‘Johan’ or ‘Ivan’ or ‘Juan’ or … this being, in it’s numerous variations, very probably the most ubiquitous personal name on the planet I had better stop here for the sake of brevity); That a name becomes famous does not necessarily mean it was enormously distinctive when bestowed on the one who made it famous, after all.
There’s actually more than one amusing … well, mildly amusing and fairly tragic … example from the American Revolution of a name being disproportionately ubiquitous, despite the owners not actually being related to each other; just try looking up the battle between General Clinton and General Clinton (with General Clinton is support) near Fort Clinton.
@30/ED: Or suurok could not be a personal name at all, just a word that coincidentally sounds similar to Surak — like how, say, “crystal” sounds similar to “Christopher” despite having no etymological relationship (other than both being from Greek roots).
@26: That’s because the away team’s mission wasn’t to examine the comet themselves, but to collect eisillium samples to bring back to Enterprise for further analysis. So they sent a pilot (to land them on the comet) and a munitions expert (to blow a hole in the comet without blowing themselves up). There’s no reason for a scientist to endanger themselves on site when they could just as easily examine what’s interesting about the comet (the eisillium) from the comfort and safety of their own lab.
@32/elcinco: One of the greatest implausibilities of the Trek franchise is the persistent lack of robotic probes to do these things.
@32 – So you send your chief pilot and your head of security? That doesn’t make sense. It was a job that their subordinates could have handled. And if you have a situation that seems so out of the ordinary, you’d want someone there who can look at it and see if they can find out just what made it so unusual.
The real reason they didn’t send a scientist is because T’Pol is the science officer and she was needed on board for the Trip?Vulcan/Pecan pie plot. Sure, there’s other scene types on board but they’re not in the opening credits.
@34
The reason they sent the chief pilot and head of security rather than subordinates is because Star Trek, like most shows, want to feature their primary (that is in the opening credits) characters.
As mentioned, there would not be any reason to send a science officer, in the credits or not, for this mission. Christopher is also correct that a probe would be more rational. But again, people are more interesting.
@35 – If you find something that is that far out of the ordinary, you want to examine it in place before you blow it up. How did this come to be? Is there any evidence of others like this? Blowing up unusual scientific phenomenon is like sending in a backhoe to excavate an ancient city so that someone back in the museum can examine it in comfort.
They’re supposed to be explorers, not a demolition crew.
It’s just as dumb as sending down a landing party that consists of the captain, first officer and chief medical officer. Maybe a nameless red shirt or two. It was dumb when TOS did it. It’s dumb when Enterprise does it.
And yes, sending a probe would make sense but we sent unmanned probes to the moon before we landed. Probes are a precursor to a crewed landing, not always a replacement for them.
@36: You’re assuming that the ball of ice that’s formed around the unusual element is as interesting as the element itself. That’s a pretty big assumption. They sent the people that were needed for the mission they chose to do.
It’s the first time this element has been found inside a comet. That makes it’s location and origin interesting unto itself.
It’s like finding a gold nugget inside a chicken and slaughtering the chicken and sending the gold to be anylized instead if figuring out how it got into the chicken in the first place. Or digging up the Guardian of Forever instead of examining it in the context of where it was. Or the Preserver obelisk. Or Machu Picchu. It’s an anomaly. You first find out why it’s different.
But T’Pol was needed for the “two boyfriends” storyline
@38: I think most people who found a gold nugget inside a chicken would be more interested in the gold than the chicken…
They had detailed scans of the asteroid. There was no need to send a valued science officer over to stand on a comet that was going to be dangerous in a few hours just to see it in person.
The snowman is my favourite part of this episode followed by the children’s letters. :)
The artificial suspense around T’Pol leaving worked for me in a longer term: I expected her to leave at any point in the future due to the engagement. So I think to an extend it was effective. I am not pleased how they handled this story line, I think Trip and T’Pol deserved an actual relationship and it would’ve been interesting to investigate, however this is not a problem of this episode. I think it was great in showing the first signs of their connection, at this point one of mutual respect.
31. ChristopherLBennett: A very fair point (Which also raises the amusing mental image of USS Crystal, for which I thank you). (-;
In all fairness, USS Quartz or USS Diamond might work rather well, which makes it rather curious that the name USS Crystal just makes me giggle (Possibly because it puts me in mind of ‘Healing power of crystals’ – a practice which, it must be said, many take seriously and which I will therefore not traduce).
On a more serious note, you could also use ‘Spear’ and ‘Pierce’ for your example – thought those two words, while not etymologically related (Not to the best of my own knowledge), are at least conceptually related.
@34. kkozoriz: In all honesty keeping Sub-Commander T’Pol on hand to smooth over any rough patches in the relationship between Captain Archer & his Vulcan counterpart makes perfect sense (Especially given how very rough those relations turned out to be).
I also wonder if this rather gung-ho failure to use drones for the sort of task we see in this episode is based on a certain overconfidence prompted by those very sensitive & versatile sensors – if we can’t see anything wrong, then there’s nothing wrong – or more probably just plain BOREDOM at being cooped up in a tin can rocketing through the void (The latter of which might also explain the tendency of senior officers to take the lead where redshirts fear to tread … ).
Also, I do realise that NX-01 is not actually propelled by rockets, but why spoil the beauty of a line with accuracy?
@42/ED: Well, it has impulse engines, which are rockets.
With regards to “why didn’t they send scientists to the comet?” Well, we only sent one professional scientist (Harrison Schmitt) to the Moon, and that wasn’t until Apollo 17…
@43 – Yes, but the Apollo program didn’t have a ship full of people available at a moment’s notice
@44/kkozoriz: How many of them had the requisite piloting or explosives skills, not to mention the EVA experience? Sure, you’d think they would train their scientists for this kind of mission, but then again, you’d think NASA would have chosen to train scientists for the Moon landings.
I actually like this one! I’d just suggest watching it before Andorian Incident.
@46 There’s a thought. If this episode happens before The Andorian Incident, then the Vulcans are babysitting the Enterprise from the jump, only to get blind-sided when Archer manages to expose P’Jem to the Andorians. The Vulcans react by washing their hands of Humanity, only to have to walk it back when Shran kicks up a fuss.
I’d actually prefer that, I think. That the Vulcans start by keeping a casual eye out until Archer insists on taking a seat at the grown up table so they decide not to treat Humans as children needing a minder anymore.
Better than the impression I got on my first watch of the series, which was that the Vulcans were doing everything in their power to keep Earth from going full move fast & break things space cowboy, while Archer is just chomping at the bit to go white saviour on some aliens.
@45 – If only the shuttle pods could hold more than two people. Oh, wait….
@48/kkozoriz: They’d still need EVA experience.
It’s reasonable to assume that all the crew members are trained in EVA suits and procedures. We’ve already seen Sato in a suit and she’s not happy to be there.
I feel for T’Pol. Once again, and not for the last time, her loyalty is questioned and no one gives her the benefit if the doubt. Here she is, on the Enterprise at the express invitation of Archer who wanted her as his second in command, yet as soon as there is any reason to question anything she does, she’s treated as an outsider, and with outright disrespect. Reading her mail? Seriously. How about just coming out and asking her what was in the communication, instead of conducting a clumsy covert investigation like a bunch of boobs.
I’m watching ahead a few episodes, and there’s one coming up where, in a tense moment, T’pol orders the Enterprise to withdraw from a conflict while the captain is still down on a planet. Tucker immediately belays that order, and even goes so far as to circumvent her Authority by finagling something in engineering, so she has to patiently take her time and explain to him that she has no intention of abandoning the captain. And no one else even flinches at what arguably amounts to a mutinous act. But this is how it is with these part-time racist humans. They love what she brings to the table as a Vulcan, so long as she stays between some arbitrary lines defined by them. If she deviates from that, she becomes just another dirty Vulcan, no matter how many times she has already proven herself, rank be damned.
That rant aside, I would agree with most of the comments here about this being a relatively enjoyable episode. Great point about Sato being far and wway the most polished presenter during the transmission for the school children. She’s a teacher, after all…
@51: There’s a flip side to that, though. T’Pol could have just told Archer that she’d received a personal communication from the Vulcan ship. Vanik could have told him that he was there to deliver a message for her instead of stoking his paranoia by saying he’s there to observe them. But instead they treat the crew like dirty humans who don’t deserve basic respect. At the end, T’Pol tells Archer she’s going to transmit a letter to the Vulcan ship before they leave. It’s a throwaway moment, but that’s how the situation should have been handled from the start. Given that she was keeping secrets, Archer and Tucker’s response wasn’t disproportionate and I imagine Archer would feel the same if, say, Reed was receiving secret transmissions from a human organisation…
To be fair, Tucker had to talk T’Pol out of abandoning Archer in “Broken Bow”. And I don’t know why she gives the order she does except to generate artificial conflict. (“Prepare to leave orbit. But don’t actually do it.”)
We can talk about this more when we do “Civilization” on Monday, but all I could think about when T’Pol said she was just preparing to leave orbit was the bit in Stargate SG-1 when Major Marks tartly informed Daniel Jackson, “For the record, I’m always prepared. I just have to push this button here.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Is everyone forgetting Tasha Yar? She was killed mid-season out of the blue and it was a shock that told me all bets were off with Star Trek after that. So yeah, I found it possible that someone in the main cast could die in Enterprise.
# 54 – She got better
Could you make a snowman on a comet? I’d think the snow (if it would even be “snow”) would be too dry. But I live in the Atlanta area, so I know very little about snow or truly cold winters.
Also, I don’t understand why Tucker, an engineer, would even be in the chain of custody for that letter. I’d have expected it to go from Hoshi directly to Archer.
Scientifically, the episode reeks.
Early on, it’s established that the comet has a diameter of 86km. (That’s between about 45 to 50 mi.)
The gravity of a body that size, even if it were a dense, solid chunk of nickel, iron, and rock, would be very light. Our solid metal and rock asteroid would probably have an escape velocity so low that a hard jump could launch a man into the depths of space from its surface.
Comets, on the other hand, have been famously described as “dirty snowballs”; odd bits of ice and dust, grit, sand, gravel, and rock gathered from here, there, and yonder, a little at a time. Loosely packed, under exTREMELY light gravity. It’s safe to say surface gravity on such a body would be measurably less than on our dense asteroid. This leads to other conclusions.
The loose surface would be largely soft and yielding. Tricky for a craft like a shuttle pod to set down on. Descent would have to be painfully slow just before touchdown; on the order of about 1 m/sec (approx. walking speed) or less.
Gravity would be too light to retain an atmosphere; so no one would hear a sound when the landing party’s charges went off.
What’s his name (I forget who fell; Mayweather? Reed? Somebody.) could never have fallen fast enough over that short distance to hurt himself.
Now, yeah, I know this is fiction, entertainment, and stuff like that there. There are time constraints, budget constraints, etc., and the special effects guys can only do so much with what they’ve got. I get it. But if you’re gonna do science fiction, but ignore some of the most basic science around, then maybe it’s time to change something.
And yeah, I know the series is OVER, and every episode’s in the can, now and forever, amen.
But I needed to kvetch, maybe kibbitz a bit, and now I’m done, so it is what it is.
Thanks.
Huh. I thought this was a superb episode, of this series at least, maybe even my favorite so far. I like that so much of it is routine. KRad brings up good points about the events of last episode not affecting this one as perhaps they should. Still, Archer is extra suspicious about being spied on (and the Vulcan response, while predictable, is satisfying). Anyway, it’s a delicate situation, and it’s not up to him to upset the Terran/Vulcan relationship.
As to T’Pol leaving or not. I don’t know if it’s supposed to create suspense so much as advance character. True, I’m watching this many years on, but I don’t think the episodes fails or succeeds based on nail biting. In fact, there’s not a lot of nail biting at all (just as well as you know T’Pol won’t leave, you know the Vulcans will offer to help in the rescue).
There was just a lot for me to like. One thing I think this series has done well is instill a sense of wonder of exploration.
I still cannot abide the theme song — and even with it on mute, the opening credit sequence is far inferior to that of Voyager or Deep Space Nine.