“Minefield”
Written by John Shiban
Directed by James Contner
Season 2, Episode 3
Production episode 029
Original air date: October 2, 2002
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Reed has been invited to have breakfast with the captain, and it’s massively awkward, as Archer wants to have a friendly, non-duty-related chat with his subordinates, and Reed is completely not capable of doing that even a little bit. T’Pol’s report that they’ve found a Minshara-class planet comes as a huge relief to Reed.
Just as they’re about to achieve orbit and Archer is talking about exploration procedures, there’s a big-ass explosion that takes out a bit of the saucer—but, miraculously, no fatalities, though there are a ton of injuries (including a concussed Sato). They quickly realize that it’s a mine, one that’s cloaked, and another attaches itself to the hull but somehow doesn’t explode.
While Reed suits up to go out onto the hull and defuse the mine, Archer, aware that no one in the history of military strategy ever set as few as two mines at a time, deploys the quantum beacons they used to detect cloaked Suliban ships and are able to detect all the other mines.
A ship decloaks and broadcasts a warning, but the translator isn’t working, and Sato is concussed. However, Sato powers through her head trauma to translate the message, though it takes a while. The Romulan Star Empire—a name both T’Pol and Archer recognize—claim this planet and demand that Enterprise leave. Mayweather slowly works his way out of the minefield.
Buy the Book
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
Reed’s attempted defusing is complicated by a strut from the mine suddenly coming out to attach itself to the hull—doing so through Reed’s leg. He’s now pinned to the hull.
Archer goes out to help Reed, letting the armory officer talk him through the very complicated defusing process. While doing so, Archer is able to finally have the friendly conversation with Reed that he wanted at breakfast (Reed being somewhat of a captive audience), though Reed would prefer to focus on defusing the mine. However, Reed eventually opens up a bit, including some criticisms he has of Archer’s looser command style. He also reveals that he broke the family tradition of serving in the Royal Navy, choosing Starfleet instead, primarily due to suffering from aquaphobia. He also tells Archer about an uncle who suffered from the same syndrome, but served anyhow, sacrificing his life to save his crew.
Meanwhile, Tucker works to implement Plan B, which is to detach the hull plating on the part the mine is on. The issue there is that Reed is currently attached to the mine, and they can’t get him off without setting off the mine until it’s defused.
This is only a problem once Mayweather gets them out of the minefield. By this time, they’ve been able to use Sato’s translation work to talk to the Romulans. The Romulan commander insists that they detach the hull plating, having been able to determine that they’ve prepared for that. To the Romulans’ mind, it’s worth the sacrifice of one of their crew, especially since they assume Enterprise is there to spy on them.
Archer does something that rearms the mine, and he has to reset it and start it all over again. They no longer have time to go through it all, and Reed insists that they detach the hull plating and sacrifice him. Archer refuses, instead going back into Enterprise and grabbing two pieces of shuttlecraft hull plating. He goes back out, has Tucker detach the hull bit, then he slices off the strut on either side of the wounds on Reed’s leg which, as anticipated, sets the mine off. They use the hull plating to protect themselves from the explosion and then are brought safely back on board.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Tucker reminds T’Pol nervously that, between a chunk of the saucer being blown away and them removing a slice of hull plating, polarizing the hull to protect the ship from Romulan attack may not be that easy…
The gazelle speech. Archer comes to understand Reed better, and returns the favor by explaining why he has a more casual command style.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol is left in charge while Archer is helping Reed and she gets to negotiate with the Romulans, which doesn’t go all that great.
Florida Man. Florida Man Goes Entire Episode Without Washing His Face.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox has to treat a large number of crew who are injured by the mine—at one point he tells one crewmember that he has to wait his turn for the osmotic eel to cauterize his wound, as the little guy is getting quite a workout…
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… The Vulcans have heard of the Romulans but never had any encounters, according to T’Pol. This is obviously horribly wrong, but most Vulcans won’t know about that until way later. (See next paragraph.)
More on this later… It was established in “Balance of Terror,” the original series episode that introduced the Romulans, that no visual contact was ever made between Earth and the Romulans, and Spock’s surprise that Romulans are Vulcanoid indicates that the same is true for the Vulcans. As a result, there is no visual contact here, either.
I’ve got faith…
“Frankly, sir, from my point of view—that kind of socializing has no place on a starship.”
“I had a CO once, felt the same way. ‘They’re your crew, not your friends.’ I thought about that a lot when I took this command—but then I realized, this is not a typical mission. We could be out here for years. All we have to depend on is each other.”
–Reed and Archer discussing command styles.
Welcome aboard. No actual guests in this one—the closest they come is the Romulan commander, whose voice work is uncredited.
Trivial matters: This is humanity’s first contact with the Romulans, who were established as fighting a war with Earth a century or so prior to the original series in “Balance of Terror.” Had Enterprise gone to a fifth season, that war would’ve been chronicled in that year. Instead, it was chronicled in the two-book The Romulan War series by Michael A. Martin.
Archer uses the quantum beacons that they built with thirty-first-century technology in “Shockwave” to detect the cloaked mines. He first heard about the Romulan Star Empire in the future library he wandered through in “Shockwave, Part II.”
This is the first of five Trek writing credits for John Shiban, who made a name for himself as a writer/producer on The X-Files and its spinoffs Harsh Realm and The Lone Gunmen. He joined the series as a co-executive producer for the show’s second season, though he was only on staff for the one season. He would go on to work on Breaking Bad, Torchwood, and Hell on Wheels, among many others.
The source of Reed’s aquaphobia will be revealed in the novel The Good that Men Do by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, as relating to a childhood trauma from Reed being bullied.
Romulan ships and mines are both cloaked, despite the notion of cloaking technology being spoken of as brand-new in “Balance of Terror.” I’m just putting this here as a reminder that Discovery was not the first Trek prequel series to disregard what “Balance of Terror” implied.
It’s been a long road… “Not a very subtle warning shot…” This introduction of the Romulans to Enterprise shares some qualities with the episode that introduce them overall, “Balance of Terror.” “Minefield” is nowhere near as tense or exciting, but it is significantly more gripping that any episode of Enterprise to date. Part of that is because we get some really nice characterization of both Reed and Archer—especially Reed. John Shiban builds nicely on what we’ve learned of Reed particularly in “Silent Enemy” and “Shuttlepod One.”
But the real thing Shiban brings to the table is an understanding of how commercial television works. For what seems like the first time in twenty-nine episodes, we have a script that ends acts on a gripping, cliffhangery note, starting with the teaser. Where most episodes limp toward Russell Watson crooning the theme song, this episode has an actual exciting teaser that makes you want to suffer through “Where My Heart Will Take Me” to find out what happens next, a vanishingly rare occurrence on this show.
This episode, more than any other so far, had me engaged in what was happening. Yes, I knew that Reed was going to survive, but watching the process by which they got there was genuinely interesting. Archer has been a thoroughly mediocre captain thus far, but at the very least we get some insight into his relaxed command style.
Nothing groundbreaking, but a fun, exciting thriller of an episode.
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido has three short stories out in June: “A Lovely View,” a tale of Zorro in Zorro’s Exploits, edited by Audrey Parente, from Bold Venture Press; “What You Can Become Tomorrow,” a story that features author Mary Shelley, baseball player Josh Gibson, and NASA scientist Florence Johnson, in Three Time Travelers Walk Into…, edited by Michael A. Ventrella, from Fantastic Books; and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a Super City Cops story in Tales of Capes and Cowls, edited by C.T. Phipps, from Crossroad Press.
I’ve always felt it was somewhat sad that the Romulans couldn’t be revealed due to “Balance of Terror” since they really would have been excellent Enterprise villains (and were in a couple of episodes as the oddly-cast Brian Thompson proved in the 4th season). Really, like Discovery, Enterprise should have been going old school with their nemeses.
This was an effective problem-solving story and a nice character story. And I love it that the spacesuits actually have automatic sealant in case of puncture, though that makes it even more ridiculous that Worf in First Contact 220-odd years later had to tie off his punctured suit leg with a cable, which probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.
The one thing that drives me crazy, though, is when Hoshi says the aliens are called “Rommelans” and T’Pol corrects, “It’s pronounced ‘Romulan.'” Arrrghh! How culturally illiterate did the writers of this episode have to be not to realize that in “Balance of Terror,” Romulus and Remus were meant to be human-assigned names for the twin planets, based on the famous twins from Roman mythology? It’s utterly idiotic to present “Romulan” as their name for themselves when it’s such an obvious human/Western coinage. (Of course, Diane Duane got it right in her famous novels, establishing the indigenous names of the planets as ch’Rihan and ch’Havran and the civilization’s own name as Rihannsu.)
“despite the notion of cloaking technology being spoken of as brand-new in “Balance of Terror.””
Well, that’s not strictly true. What Spock says is “Invisibility is theoretically possible, Captain, with selective bending of light. But the power cost is enormous. They may have solved that problem.” If anything, that line suggests that the technology has been experimented with in the past but is just difficult to put into practical use.
And as I’ve said many times, logically, cloaking would not be a single technology, but would be reinvented over and over, because any given cloaking technology would be rendered obsolete as soon as a means was developed to detect it. There’d be a constant arms race between stealth and detection, so there’d be multiple different “inventions” of invisibility — since, after all, a cloaked ship whose cloak can be penetrated is not functionally invisible. Which helps explain the many contradictory presentations of cloaking tech in Trek.
I’ve always adored Reed’s characterization as a man who’s fundamentally obsessed with death. It’s so completely different from most of the human characters on Star Trek. I wish they’d done a story pairing him off with a Klingon warrior at some point.
I remember this episode giving me enormous hope for a solid second season and then being gradually more and more disappointed. And I also bumped hard on the whole “Romulan” thing, for much the same reasons as Christopher (@2).
But this is one of my favorite episodes of the season, between the solid character moments between Archer and Reed and the suspense.
I didn’t have an issue with Romulan name thing. It’s entirely believable that someone along the way would have confused matters by saying, “Well, actually, it’s really pronounced Rommelan. Romulan is just what we call them.,” without the slightest bit of evidence that was the case. Assuming they have the internet in the Trek future. ;)
I definitely liked this one (if it’s no ‘Balance of Terror’ then neither is 95-99% of STAR TREK), not least the way that things actually kick off with a Cold Open Cliffhanger and just keep getting tighter from there.
I also appreciate the way this episode shows how Captain Archer got NX-01 despite being mostly Average White Captain: he’s not the greatest genius in Starfleet, but he’s probably a much more stabilising influence on his crew, over the long term … and he does have his moments.
Also, I’m quite impressed by the discipline with which the show runners kept the Romulans faceless, yet memorable – xenophobic, devious and callous without being mad-dog killers (that booby trap popping up like a middle finger to the bomb squad packs a lot of exposition into a single “Ah crap” moment and the businesslike way the Romulans keep the pressure on NX-01 without executing Our Heroes out of hand is quite revealing).
Finally, I did like the way that the script managed to keep focus on Captain Archer and Mr Reed without ignoring our other heroes – particular credit to Hoshi Sato for getting the job done with a serious headache!
Also, @krad, I finished your SUPER CITY COPS novels and wanted to say how very disappointed I was to learn that The Cowboy was not a Wild West Minotaur Superhero (which was my first mental image of the character, admittedly based only on the brief mention of his name and that clash with Apollo).
Well, that and I also wanted to mention that this is a rather good sequence of books – a little bit LAW & ORDER: ASTRO CITY, if you will, which makes an interesting mix. It must be said, trying to puzzle out a mental image of this setting that balances the need to focus on standard issue cops without losing sight of the more colourful superhumans about them (while not letting the costumed crooks & crusaders* steal more than their fair share of focus was an interesting mental exercise).
*By the way, I call “dibs!” on CROOKS & CRUSADERS as the name for an Old School superhero setting!
@5/Rosco: “It’s entirely believable that someone along the way would have confused matters by saying, “Well, actually, it’s really pronounced Rommelan. Romulan is just what we call them.,” without the slightest bit of evidence that was the case.”
I don’t understand what you mean here. I would’ve been able to accept it if it had been the way you say, with “Romulan” being a human approximation of their own pronunciation of a similar name. But what happened in the episode was the exact opposite of that — T’Pol said that “Romulan” was their own pronunciation. (In Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic, I posited that it’s actuall “Rom’ielln,” which was as far as I could change it while staying consistent with Jolene Blalock’s pronunciation of the word.)
It means I haven’t seen this episode since it aired and couldn’t remember any of the fine details. Like most of Enterprise.
The whole characterisation of Reed as some excessively rigid killjoy shows just how little Americans (or at least American civilian writers) know and understand about the British, specifically the military.
For example wardroom culture is far stronger in the Royal Navy than the USN (whose Wardrooms resemble a particularly grey McDonalds), socialising is positively encouraged and unlike the US navy Her Majesty’s War Canoes are not “dry”. Reed’s attitude would be considered massively dull on a British ship.
@10. Stam Fordly: Given the raw confusion with which Captain Archer reacts to Mr Reed’s casual disinterest in England making the World Cup Finals, I think the ENTERPRISE team had at least some notion that he was an odd duck even by the standards of Great Britain and the RN …
@11.ED Not all that odd by British standards, you are much less likely to find Wendyball fans in wardrooms and messes. Nobody plays mess football at the end of a dinner.
I think this is the best episode of Enterprise so far to this point, and just generally an exciting story with great character work. And of course, how could one not get thrilled by the first “appearance” of Romulans in this show and chronological Star Trek history as well?
I’ve read in this forum how Archer is described as “Average White Captain” and in other Trek rewatches where white characters will be described as, for instance “old-white-guy admiral.” I assume this is okay because such descriptors are only in regards to white people, and this race has historically not been subject to oppression? I mean, we would never say “Average Black Captain” or “old-Asian-woman admiral,” right?
@13/garreth: I think the point is to call out overused stock character types. Of course, “white” is just about the most overused category in Western fiction. Indeed, historically, the culture has equated “average” with “white,” using whiteness as the default, which is the very thing being critiqued. (I find that the white male lead is often the most boring member of a series’ or movie’s cast, as if the filmmakers just assume that being a white male automatically entitles him to our attention and approval, so they don’t bother to do the work of actually earning it. See FOX’s The Gifted, or pretty much every Legendary MonsterVerse movie.)
And there are stock types/stereotypes for other ethnicities that can be called out, like the Grouchy Black Police Captain or the Inscrutable Asian Martial Artist. It’s not the ethnicity itself being called out, but the way it’s used as a trope.
This is probably the first episode where Archer doesn’t feel like the White Guy who Got the Job because his Dad Built the Engine. Learning why he has such a loose style of command does give Archer a bit of context. And of course Reed is always an interesting character study.
A solid episode, gripping from start to finish. Definitely the best episode of the series at this point.
@10: I just wondered what exactly the Royal Navy was doing in the 22nd century.
@14/CLB: Thank you for the thoughtful answer. I was looking for some context in the use of that particular language.
“If I may say so, sir, your style of command does have its advantages.”
This is a good episode for Reed and an even better one for Archer. We know Reed is painfully stuffy and socially awkward (although we’ve seen him let his hair down on occasion, notably in “Two Days and Two Nights”), so being forced to socialise with anyone, especially his commanding officer, is going to be a nightmare for him. He’s probably pleased to be interrupted by the ship nearly blowing up, except it ends up meaning Archer has a captive audience!
Meanwhile, Archer’s command style gets analysed and isn’t found wanting. He considers inviting opinions from his crew and getting to know them on a personal level to be strengths, not weaknesses. And I think he’d echo a future Enterprise captain’s insistence on not accepting a no-win scenario. He spends a lot of time on a plan that doesn’t work, but he’s smart enough to have Tucker working on a back-up plan that does work. And he’s not going to sacrifice Malcolm if there’s even the slightest chance of saving both his officer and his ship. (Interestingly, Archer’s refusal to let Reed sacrifice himself echoes Reed doing the same to Tucker in “Shuttlepod One”.) There’s a great moment when T’Pol says that she assumes there’s no point questioning his plan and he just walks off.
Nice to see the old-style Romulan Birds of Prey, by the way. The Romulans state if Reed is killed there’ll still be 82 crewmembers left, which matches the crew complement from “Strange New World” and “Silent Enemy”. Enterprise’s appalling lack of absence cover continues: With Sato out of action for much of the episode, T’Pol’s left manning two consoles.
Nice to know England’s still making the World Cup finals and probably still living off that one time we won the thing 186 years previous (and I love that even though Archer calls it “soccer”, Malcolm insists on calling it “football”). By my calculations, there are FIFA World Cups scheduled for 2150 and 2154, which this would be slap bang in the middle of when normally they’d only just be starting the qualification rounds, but I guess either the tournament schedule or the qualification process could have changed by the 22nd century!
I’m sure I’m going to be shouted down but I don’t think there’s any basis in canon for the Romulans not calling themselves that, given they’ve never called themselves anything else in 50-odd years of appearances. (I suspect this is one of those occasions where an idea that came from tie-in fiction has entrenched itself in people’s minds so thoroughly that they think the shows are getting it wrong when they disagree.) Yes, okay, “Romulus” and “Remus” are names from Earth mythology, but then so’s “Vulcan”.
@18/cap: “Nice to see the old-style Romulan Birds of Prey, by the way.”
It was a good design in general, but from a continuity standpoint it was problematical. “Balance of Terror” implied that the only way the Romulan ship there was recognizable was by the Bird of Prey painted on the hull. That suggests the shape of the ship was different from what was used in the war.
Indeed, though it didn’t make the final cut of the episode, the intent of the BoP design in “Balance” was that the Romulans copied Earth ship designs (Starfleet/the Federation hadn’t been invented yet), that the design was the result of technological espionage, hence the familiar saucer-and-nacelles configuration. All the more reason why they painted their bird emblem on it to mark it as their own.
“I’m sure I’m going to be shouted down but I don’t think there’s any basis in canon for the Romulans not calling themselves that, given they’ve never called themselves anything else in 50-odd years of appearances.”
Not everything is about “canon.” Whether things fit together is the most superficial, least important aspect of critiquing fiction. Fiction is a creation of human beings, and critiquing creativity is about assessing the creative process itself, the merit of the ideas and choices that were made.
It is obvious that Paul Schneider’s intent was that Romulus and Remus were given those names by humans as a mythological referent for the twin planet system. After all, it’s always been a common practice to give mythological names to stars and planets, so naturally that practice would continue in the future. And since there was supposed to have been very little contact and interaction between the two sides in the war, it stands to reason that humans might not even have known their name for themselves.
And it would be an utterly ridiculous coincidence if the inhabitants of an alien twin-planet system just happened to give it names that matched a pair of twins in Earth mythology. That is an obviously, blatantly dumb idea in and of itself. It doesn’t matter if it’s “compatible with canon” — it shouldn’t be in canon, because Trek deserves better. Star Trek was intended to be a more intelligent, plausible, grounded show than its ludicrous contemporaries in 1960s or 1980s sci-fi television. There should be a basic standard of credibility and intelligence to its worldbuilding. If something is blatantly unbelievable and silly, it falls short of the standards Trek set for itself, and it should’ve been done differently.
“Yes, okay, “Romulus” and “Remus” are names from Earth mythology, but then so’s “Vulcan”.”
And presumably “Vulcan” was also meant to be the human name for Spock’s planet, in the same way that Americans refer to Suomi as “Finland,” Nihon as “Japan,” Bharat as “India,” etc. rather than by their true names. After all, “Vulcan” was originally the name for a proposed planet inside the orbit of Mercury, whose existence was debunked when the perturbations in Mercury’s orbit were accounted for by General Relativity. It was often used in science fiction even after that, though, and given that the original ST pitch document suggested that Spock might be Martian, I suspect that Trek’s “Vulcan” was originally intended to be the cis-Mercurian Vulcan, right here in our Solar system, and only later retconned to be an extrasolar planet. In that case, its name would have obviously been a human coinage.
If anything, ENT seems to imply that the Vulcans’ name for their own planet is Minshara.
Good characterization, a solid plot, and the Romulans portrayed as xenophobic and callous but not mad-dog vicious. This is still one of my favourite episodes.
I do find it odd that the Romulans claimed this planet but left *all* of their mines cloaked. Surely they should have left some uncloaked as a Keep Off sign?
Christopher: while I see your point, I also see cap-mjb’s. In 56 years there’s never been any indication that the Romulans call themselves anything other than the Romulans — ditto the Vulcans. It’s a trope of Trek that we’re pretty much stuck with, and to lament it at this point is veering into old-man-yells-at-cloud territory……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As we’ve already seen on Enterprise, there’s a star system called Rigel that is named in an alien language. The problem of the crew not recognizing it as being pronounced the same as the Rigel named by earth astronomers was never brought up. They simply didn’t recognize the name Rigel at all.
@21/krad: It’s one thing to leave it unspecified whether a species’ name is ours or theirs. What’s annoying about this is the way it blatantly calls attention to it.
And I feel I’m entitled to lament the writers’ cultural illiteracy in not realizing that “Romulan” was meant to be a human-coined mythological allusion rather than an exotic alien term. It’s on a par with the truly mindboggling scientific ignorance Berman and Braga displayed in “Broken Bow,” where they had Archer react to “Rigel” as if it were an alien name he’d never heard before, rather than one of the most familiar, commonly known star names in all of astronomy. That’s just sloppy and lazy, like they cared so little about their work that they didn’t make the effort to research even the simplest things.
A few weeks ago on another forum some friends and I were trying to identify the Star Trek captains by archetype, and we decided that Archer was the Astronaut. He’s not as colourful or charismatic as some other captains, but he’s exactly the kind of stable, reliable, “The Right Stuff”-type person you’d want commanding a Space Shuttle mission (and being jerked around by the suits at NASA Starfleet Command and dealing with unwanted political “observers” is part of the job).
(Kirk is the Officer’s Officer, West Point grad and platonic ideal of a morally-responsible military commander. Picard is the Diplomat, eager to learn about and build bonds of trust with other cultures. Sisko is the Father, with his command style and personality centred around dedication to family/heritage/society. Janeway is the Scientist, who considers their mission of discovery to be just as vital as getting home alive. Georgiou [both Captain and Empress] is the Teacher, dedicated to nurturing the talent under her mentorship. Lorca is the [corrupted] Soldier, willing to do whatever he thinks necessary for his goals. Saru is the Leader, always ready with an inspiring speech to bring forth the best of his crew. Burnham is the Messiah, the only one who can save Everyone in the Entire Universe. Pike, as we see him in SNW, is the Adventurer, reveling in the sheer joy of discovery.)
Ah the beginning of what should’ve been the greatest arc in Enterprise. And wasn’t. And a strong beginning indeed. Also showing off the Romulan Martial culture with them insisting that sacrificing Reed was a small thing to do. I do wonder what the Romulan Commander thought of Archer risking the whole ship for one man. From there perspective it must’ve been an entertaining drama…or perhaps farcical.
I always thought the T’Varo looked a bit too advanced, too rounded for the era, but considering the later T’Liss was supposed to be based on stolen Starfleet tech, it shows a nice difference in aesthetics, the Romulans having a specific unique style prior to first contact, but when copying the Federation a century later adopted their more utilitarian function over form style as they adapted the technology.
@23 – It doesn’t matter if it’s sloppy or lazy. (And really, it’s hardly the first time). It is. It’s been established. And “correcting” it now would just result in a forced situation. By the same token, why would Ilia refer to her homeward as Delta IV? Simple, that’s the human translation of the local name. It just translates from Deltan to Delta IV. It’s not as if Star Trek has ever put a whole lot of thought in planet names.
@26/kkozoriz: “It doesn’t matter if it’s sloppy or lazy.”
What a truly bizarre thing to say. So it doesn’t matter to you if your food at a restaurant is badly prepared? It doesn’t matter to you whether actors or musicians give a good performance? It doesn’t matter if your garage does a lazy job fixing your car? Quality is the thing that matters most. Fiction is not just a listing of factoids. It’s something that people create for our consumption, enjoyment, and edification. Of course we, the customers, are entitled to expect them to do it with quality and care, and to complain when they clearly aren’t trying.
I think it’s interesting that, in one of the only great episodes of the first few seasons of Enterprise, what people seem most interested in talking about is the way the show uses the word “Romulan.” This is why I love fandoms!
@28/David Pirtle: But that’s just it — most of the episode works, so the only things to complain about are the little things.
@12. Stam Fordly: Well admittedly association football isn’t a contact sport, which doubtless handicaps it’s appeal to the branch of the Armed Forces most likely to be kept cooped up in a series of metal boxes with their colleagues (‘concussion therapy’ is still therapy, after all!), but taking not a whit of interest in the World Cup strikes me as downright unpatriotic and I don’t even take an interest in club football!
@19 et al/CLB: “Not everything is about ‘canon’.”
Well, no, but I was trying to make the point that the episode simply follows the precedent of several earlier episodes and movies that refer to them as Romulans, rather than assuming that successive production teams have been getting it wrong and the tie-in fiction got it right. We first see Romulans referring to themselves as such in “The Enterprise Incident”, so if you’re looking for the moment when it was unambiguously portrayed as what they call themselves rather than a nickname humans gave them, then I guess DC Fontana (or whoever wrote the final draft) was the “culturally illiterate” one.
“And since there was supposed to have been very little contact and interaction between the two sides in the war, it stands to reason that humans might not even have known their name for themselves.”
All we’re told is that there was no ship-to-ship visual communication. We’re told the treaty between them was arranged by “sub-space radio”, in much the same way that there’s audio-only communication here. The idea that the Romulans never introduced themselves seems significantly more ridiculous than them introducing themselves as Romulans.
“And it would be an utterly ridiculous coincidence if the inhabitants of an alien twin-planet system just happened to give it names that matched a pair of twins in Earth mythology…If something is blatantly unbelievable and silly, it falls short of the standards Trek set for itself, and it should’ve been done differently.”
Like all aliens being humanoid (and sometimes looking exactly like humans), a proliferation of planets with Earth-like atmospheres, a floating city called Stratos, everyone having a magical technology that makes you look and sound like you’re speaking everyone else’s languages, the Borg not only having an English word as their name but giving their spokesperson a significant name in Latin, the Romulans using ranks and titles analogous with Ancient Rome (whilst using their own term for a starship commander to show that these aren’t direct translations to human equivalents)…Honestly, this is where you lose your willing suspension of disbelief?
“Fiction is a creation of human beings, and critiquing creativity is about assessing the creative process itself, the merit of the ideas and choices that were made.”
Well, from a storytelling point of view, the purpose of the scene is to establish for any audience members who haven’t worked it out themselves from the starship design and cloaking technology that we’re dealing with the Romulans. The episode makers chose to do that by having them introduce themselves as Romulans, like they have been doing since 1968. A scene where the Starfleeters arbitarily decide to name them the Romulans themselves (with or without knowing their home planet has a twin) would have been a tad more ridiculois.
@12, 30 et al: Every now and then I hear someone say association football isn’t a contact sport, and every time I think “Since when?” I mean, the players don’t brutalise each other to the extent they do in some sports, but they are allowed to touch! (Mind you, the increasing tendency to award fouls for what most people would consider legitimate challenges means it might well have become non-contact by the 22nd century!)
There’s at least some armed forces association football teams out there, since it’s one of the ways Pele kept insisting he’d scored over 1000 goals when official records showed only about half that. I agree though that the episode is clearly portraying Reed as an oddball even by British officer standards, since he says he doesn’t follow any sport at all. (I would query how many casual English/British football fans would notice the exact moment their nation qualified for the finals though. Follow the actual tournament, sure, but all the build-up to it..?)
This was a good, solid episode, despite not including Commander Shran, whose presence always made the show better.
@@@@@ 27 – “So it doesn’t matter to you if your food at a restaurant is badly prepared? It doesn’t matter to you whether actors or musicians give a good performance? It doesn’t matter if your garage does a lazy job fixing your car?”
I’m not eating it or trusting me with my life. I’m giving it 45 minutes of my life. That’s it. It’s not that big a deal. The one question I have afterwards is “Was I entertained?”. If yes, then the lazy/sloppy doesn’t matter. And if no, then same answer.
It’s a TV show, not a gourmet meal. That’s why I have higher standards for the movies. Because I’m taking money out of my pocket for that one thing. With TV/cable/streaming, I get a lot more content for my money.
And if it took Enterprise for you to get peeved about Star Trek being sloppy or lazy, you haven’t been watching the previous series and movies all that closely. There’s been some gems but there’s been some contenders for sloppiest and laziest episodes. Much worse than “Their name for themselves is Romulan”
@31/cap-mjb: “We first see Romulans referring to themselves as such in “The Enterprise Incident””
Well, that’s a terrible example. I mean, we also see them speaking English, so obviously their dialogue is being translated for the audience’s benefit. That’s a common enough trope in fiction. If you’re watching a dubbed Japanese movie, the characters will call the country Japan instead of Nihon. That doesn’t mean they actually called it Japan in the original language. Proper names get translated along with the rest.
So it’s a totally different thing for an episode to actually come out and say explicitly and unambiguously that it is their own name for themselves, right down to that exact pronunciation. That’s calling attention to it in a way that precludes it from being taken figuratively.
“Honestly, this is where you lose your willing suspension of disbelief?”
Huh? If you’ve been paying any attention to my posts over the past decade and more, you must know that I’ve complained about many, many implausibilities and bad decisions in Star Trek. So this is an incredibly nonsensical question.
Minefield feels almost like it belongs in the third season. It carries an urgency and intensity we’d rarely get at this point in the show. And it gives us a glimpse of just how dangerous space can be. It gives us more insight into Malcolm Reed, and it provides a visceral introduction to the Romulans while mostly adhering to continuity. Definitely a season 2 highlight.
And it’s so effective that Brannon Braga was wise enough to do a followup with Dead Stop, making it clear that they weren’t going to Voyager the catastrophic hull damage away. It’s thanks to this that we likely got the pseudo Year of Hell approach with the Xindi arc the following year.
As far as I know, Shiban was the only big long-term X-Files alumni to cross over to Trek (unless you count producer/directors like Bowman and Manners; Ken Biller only wrote one X-File before VOY). Of course, he’s just as known for some of X-Files‘ biggest blunders, namely the divisive episode Teso dos Bichos. But all writers have their duds at some point. I’d argue Shiban’s better work came after Trek, thanks to his continued association and collaboration with Vince Gilligan, which produced not only superlative Breaking Bad episodes (Jane Margolis’s demise), but also its outstanding spin-off, Better Call Saul (he also directed a few of those).
And a lot of the credit has to go to James Contner. As I mentioned before, he was directing Whedon productions back and forth at this point. And he knew how to get a lot of mileage out of shoestring budgets, namely the crafty action set pieces at the end of the Initiative story arc on Buffy’s fourth season.
@35/Eduardo: I wouldn’t count Rob Bowman as a crossover from The X-Files to Trek, because he was a crossover from Trek to The X-Files before that. He largely made his name as a TV director through his prolific work on seasons 1-2 of ST:TNG.
@36/Christopher: I should have clarified. I meant crossover in both ways. From Trek to X-Files and vice-versa. And Manners only directed TNG’s When the Bough Breaks himself, years before becoming the main household X-Files director.
And on the writing side, barely anyone else in common, other than Biller and TNG freelancer Sara Charno (The Wounded, New Ground and Ethics).
It drives me crazy that they don’t even mention the transporters in this episode. The most logical way to deal with a mine attached to the hull is to teleport it away from the ship. If they were worried that using the transporter might trigger it, Archer certainly knew there was adequate time once he and Reed got into their 10 vs 20 seconds debate. Failing that, Reed could have been beamed back into the ship rather than using spare parts to create ad hoc shields. They didn’t even try to technobabble it away.
That said, the episode was otherwise enjoyable.
I always really liked this one. Reed was always my favorite character on ENT (mostly because a lot of the time he seemed like the only one with any common sense…) and I think Dominic Keating was able to do a lot with the fairly limited amount of real screen time he got (in terms of actual character moments- not just him standing around shooting a phaser). This was a good use of both him and Archer, and both actors played it quite well.
>38 I’m glad I wasn’t the only one wondering why they didn’t use or rule out using the transporter.
Perhaps T’Pol made up the name Romulans as the English name for the race. She knows the human habit of using mythological names for planets and Romulus and Remus are the first mythological twins she thinks of.
@40/rwmg: No, because Hoshi gave the name she heard in their transmission as “Rommelan” and T’Pol corrected, “It’s pronounced ‘Romulan.'” So it was clearly meant to be their name for themselves, unfortunately.
When I first watched Enterprise (i can’t remember if it was dubbed or not), i very much disliked Reed for being a super boring guy without personality. The best thing i’ve discovered with this rewatch now is that actually he’s one of the most interesting characters in the series. :)
Oh, man, I hit the mute button so fast as soon as the teaser starts to go dark. There’s no reason to suffer through Russell Watson, and no teaser could make me wanna do it.
But a pretty good episode. Enterprise does get into a bit of a formula of putting two crew members in danger so they can bond over the length of an episode. But this is well done, particularly with all the nifty visuals outside the ship. That’s what mostly sold it for me (I didn’t find Reed’s story that compelling, though I quite like him as a character).
My only complaint is that this was an episode about men bonding while doing men things (oh, Archer’s white-guy discomfort that he’s talking to a white guy who doesn’t follow sport). Hoshi is out of action and T’Pol is brushed off by Archer when he comes back aboard. It’s all about the men.