If you include the 90 minute pilot as two episodes, then "First Flight" is the 50th episode of Enterprise. I suppose in a sense it's appropriate then to celebrate the milestone with a special episode about the origins of the NX starship program. It fills in the gaps a bit, and shows a little of what it took for the Enterprise to get to where it launched all the way back in "Broken Bow". The problem is, however, that we kind of know what happened. There's nothing that "First Flight" shows us that we couldn't have assumed all by ourselves. This is the core problem with prequels, and of course "First Flight" is a prequel to another prequel. Surely that makes it doubly redundant.
Guest star Keith Carradine is an appealing enough performer, but overall it's difficult to really engage with this story. It's a relatively cliched storyline tied in to a fairly perfunctory present-day storyline about exploring a new kind of nebula. It's nice to see Scott Bakula and Jolene Blalock get some lengthy dialogue scenes to work on, but really it's just not that interesting.
This almost feels like a bookend for the season, as the episode it reminded me of the most was "Carbon Creek" all the way back at the start of Season 2. That story featured T'Pol recounting a story about her great-grandmother in the 20th century, and to be honest was about as redundant and pointless.
So that's a "no" from me. We're 24 episodes in, two episodes to go, and Enterprise Season 2 is scoring 63%.
I thought this was one of the better Enterprise episodes, at least in concept, because it told the type of story that wouldn't really fit in the other Trek series. The warp testing reminded me of Chuck Yeager and other test pilots, and it really created a feel of early space exploration and development, which is what Enterprise was supposedly aiming for. The framing sequence in the nebula is throw-away though and not that interesting.
ReplyDeleteActually that's a very fair point.
ReplyDelete