Enterprise: Rate "The Xindi"

[IceGiant]

Originally posted by Rayaru
Nah... I saw this as the responsible commanding officer showing to his subordiates who is the top dog on Enterprise.

Except as a major, he should be answering to Archer, not the armory lieutenant. (My opinion anyways)

They should have made him a lower rank if they wanted him to cow-tow to Reed.

[Sea Tyger]

Originally posted by IceGiant
Except as a major, he should be answering to Archer, not the armory lieutenant. (My opinion anyways)

They should have made him a lower rank if they wanted him to cow-tow to Reed.

Except that there's this tiny little thing in the military called "positional authority." That means if a junior officer has been given command over a location or situation, all officers must defer to the OIC in that instance (with the exception of the JO's captain, exec and other superiors in the chain of command, although they would tend to let the JO make his own decisions unless the situation warranted taking over).

In the case of Reed, it appears that Archer has placed the MACO under his operational control. So, AFAIC, Reed has positional authority over all security-related issues, and the major must defer to him.

Now, the "sir" thing may just be an honorific, to acknowledge Reed's positional authority...or, MACO may be subordinate to Starfleet in some way...we really don't know anything about the unit's culture and traditions at this point, so it's folly to really speculate until we see more...

[qerlin]

Sea Tyger beat me to it on the positional authority thing.

[Snake_Plissken]

I rather liked the episode as well. The flashback scene were Trip sees his sister was chilling. The only thing that I thought overall was real cheesy was the whole 9/11 theme. The producers obviously tried to appeal to the lowest common denominator by substituting the WTC for Florida and the Taliban/Muslim extremists by the Xindi. The inclusion of 'marines' was a good idea; there's a lot of interesting story-telling material with that. I really liked the Xindi 'council', even if it was a TOTAL rip-off of the separatist council in SW:AOTC (but hey, fair enough since Lucas has ripped off ST on several occasions). I was really glad that for once we got to see really different-looking and 'weird' aliens instead of the 'headpiece' of the week crap. The last time we've seen really interesting aliens in ST was in the council chamber scenes in ST4. I really liked the Insectoid alien and the aquatic aliens. And finally I'm not to fond of the new theme song. They should have kept the tempo of the old one.

[Calcoran]

I was thinking again about that scene with the Vulcan Love Slave beta 0.1 (VLSb0.1, TM ) ... and I just wondered: In the 50+ previous episodes, have we seen T'Pol, or any other Vulcan, for that matter, use the Nerve Pinch on anyone?

Just wondering. These ... how did they call them anyway? ... well there <I>IS</I> a similarity with the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, don't you think?

[C5]

T'Pol used a Nerve Pinch in one of the early episodes, Strange New World IIRC.

[Calcoran]

Oh well, so much for my speculations then ...

[tmutant]

I liked it. I think it follows a Star Trek tradition of commenting on current events by placing them in the fictional universe of Trek, changing names and faces. It isn't even intended that you agree with the way it's handled there, just that you think about it. "A Private Little War" from TOS is a good example.