Weekend Trek “Minefield”

It occurs to me that Enterprise may actually feature more scenes of the characters in space suits, walking around on airless voids or in the vacuum of space, than any of the previous Treks.  That’s not to say it never happened, just that it looks like Enterprise is just doing it more often.  I’m mostly just wondering if that was due to advances in special effects or just the nature of this series where, set well-before the other shows, that future Starfleet missions found ways to do the same thing without requiring crewmen to suit up and go outside the ship unless there’s enough air outside.

OK, for the original series, that was most likely due to budget and special effects quality, but that doesn’t explain why there weren’t more spacewalks on TNG, DS9, or Voyager.

This is, essentially, a Malcolm-focused episode, one that starts when Archer invites him to breakfast just to get to know him better, leading to Malcolm’s arriving nervous and there to discuss business.  Malcolm is still played here as the guy no one knows anything about aside from the fact that he’s really good at his job and a very private person.  Archer’s attempts to make conversation throughout the episode don’t get much aside from the fact that Malcolm thinks they’re too informal on the bridge, something Archer thinks is necessary because he wants his senior staff to actually make suggestions so he can make better decisions.

But the main plotline is something involving a minefield, you know, like the episode title.

The ship discovers an uninhabited planet and decides to take a look, but the ship hits a mine, causing visible damage to the saucer-section but leading to no fatalities.  Hoshi gets a concussion while other nameless members of the crew are injured, but no one dies, and I have no idea how they are going to fix that damage.  Anyway, there’s another mine attached to the ship.  It hasn’t gone off yet, and Malcolm heads out to disarm it.  There are, of course, other mines, all of them cloaked with technology that is better or at least different from what the Suliban have.

So, to review, these cloaking devices are better than what the Suliban, the guys who have access to future information of all kinds.  Who are these mystery guys with these great cloaking devices for their minefields protecting and, when they do show up, do so in a ship T’Pol doesn’t recognize and speaking a language that requires Hoshi to work from Sickbay?  Oh, it’s the Romulans.  And hey, the producers and writers remembered that it isn’t until Kirk’s time that anyone in Starfleet knew what a Romulan looked like.  As a result, the Romulans are never seen, but are mostly just a hostile voice on the comm system accusing the Enterprise of espionage and telling them to leave or else.

Though it occurs to me T’Pol certainly knows what a Romulan looks like.  She corrects Hoshi’s pronunciation but says no more.  I know Star Trek eventually revealed that Vulcans and Romulans were essentially the same people, the Vulcans having left to do their own thing at some point.  That makes me wonder if, back in “Balance of Terror,” if Spock was aware of that or not, but that concept wasn’t invented in the 60s.  The Romulans’ appearance was meant to cause McCarthyism-style suspicions against Spock by another crewman, and that makes it an even better reason not to show them here because there’s enough suspicion aimed at the Vulcans as it is.  Sure, they seem to trust T’Pol now, but Vulcans in general are not really the favorite race of aliens for humanity in general.

As it is, much of the episode deals with Malcolm’s being pinned to a piece of hull by a mine leg, Archer’s needing to go out and disarm the mine and then find a way to get Malcolm to safety, the Romulans’ demanding the ship let the piece of hull just go or else, and Travis’s having to do something for a change by flying the ship via joystick out of the minefield, all while Trip and his team work to remove the hull plating as an emergency last resort that they end up having to use.

It’s a good episode, the Reed character work aside maybe, with the Romulans’ being used well for how little they actually do in the episode, to the team effort to get out of the minefield, rescue Malcolm, and go to warp.

Now, can we please get a Travis-focused episode?