Stack's Review of Civilization (Spoilers)
Spoilers follow of course...
I would definitely like to see more episodes like this.
One thing I and many others have hoped for (and have been promised) is a return to much of what we saw in the 1960's Star Trek. But I think many people have a belief that the original Star Trek is all about first visual appearance of Romulans in 2266, whether or not phasers or lasers were used in "The Cage", whether subspace radio should be available in 2251, etc.
However, I've always seen the original Star Trek as a lonely starship boldly exploring where no man (or at least very few, given the number of follow-up missions seen in the classic Trek) has gone before. No Starfleet admiral to talk to, not always worrying about triggering a war with every mission. Voyager wanted that, but suffered from the problem that they didn't want to be in the Delta Quadrant. Enterprise wants to be exploring.
And that is what I truly enjoyed about last night's episode. It felt in many ways like an episode of classic Trek. I felt that it did a good job balancing the "reckless curiosity" of humans of the 22nd century with some common sense - "yes we're going to explore this planet, but we are going to do our best to not draw too much attention to ourselves".
The look of the planet was excellent - TOS could only dream of realizing sets like that and they added a lot to the feel of the episode. These people weren't stupid primitive cavemen, they were their own culture. Ironic, since we learned so little about them, but they felt so real to me, perhaps because it focused on little details as opposed to the huge "Klingons = Warriors", "Ferengi = Capitalist" caricatures we so often saw (but not always) on TNG, DS9, and VGR.
The aliens visiting the planet also struck me as interesting. They were not "evil" like the Klingons of TOS. They simply wanted something and these primitives suffer from diseases all the time, what are the deaths of a few thousand more? Still evil, but a more realistic portrayal of evil.
The characters all seemed to portray some level of intelligence and realism. The conflict between T'Pol and Tucker felt very real and I hope it is followed up on - Tucker undermined her authority in a huge way in the climax. And T'Pol's strategy was very sound - I was worried they were going to try to beam the reactor into the other ship, but the solution they came up with - using it as a mine - seemed a lot more realistic.
Archer's mission was also enjoyable to watch. I got a chuckle out of the "Universal translator failed so I had to kiss her" moment. I wonder if Kirk claimed that in his logs a lot a century later. :) I found it interesting the translator went a little loony when discussing pets - given that finding a word for an animal which does not exist on a given world may be difficult, it seemed appropriate that that is where the translator would fail. And being a software engineer, I know that once software gets flakey, sometimes the easiest thing to do is reset the program...
His counterpart (forget her name, only watched it once) was also interesting. She was very attractive - not so much in the physical sense, though there was nothing wrong there - but more so in her intelligence and personality. She knew something was up and despite being "primitive" was very intelligent and resourceful with the knowledge she did have - a metaphor for Humans and Vulcans perhaps? And it was nice to see an out-gunned Enterprise think her into winning a battle without a silly "invert the polarity of the neutron flow" technobabble moment.
Finally, the salute to the real U.S.S. Enterprise at the start was a very nice touch. I've heard that many of her sailors are fans of the show, so I hope they enjoyed that.
Overall rating: A.
By way of comparison, Dan's episode ratings, on a A-F grading system. (Subject to change on his personal whims... )
Broken Bow: B+
Fight or Flight: B-
Strange New World: C+
Unexpected: C
Terra Nova: C+ (downgraded from B-)
Andorian Incident: A
Breaking the Ice: B-
Civilization: A
