User Reviews

Most of the Enterprise actors do not appear in this episode. With Trip and Archer playing a very small supporting role... it's all T'Pol.

It's a fun well done episode. Light hearted, reminded me of "Coneheads", but with some touching moments (my wife cried at one scene). Much of Enterprise tries to answer question from early Star Trek Series... the first Holodeck, the beginning of transporting humans, etc; this episode does that with First Contact... making first Contact the Second Contact.

***major spoilers below***

I agree with the review that the "great grandmother" might has been T'Pol herself, her mother or T'Pol might even be the daughter of the Vulcan who was left behind. It would have been fun if they would have come back to this episode in a later show.

We all know the story of Humans first meeting with the Vulcans but this is the low-key first meeting of the Vulcans with Humans. Jolene Blalock gets to really shine in a duel role as series mainstay T'Pol and as T'Mir , T'Pol's great grandmother who crash lands on Earth. Blalock gives T'Pol an air of mischief and also shows the journey T'Mir goes on has you unsure whether this is a tall take or fact. The episode also stars frequent Trek guest star J. Paul Boehmer who is always brings tremendous depth to his characters.

It has been mentioned that this episode breaks canon. I disagree. What you see is how Vulcans go to great lengths to not contaminate cultures. Of course the Vulcans had been to Earth long before " First Contact".

This is a beautifully acted, well balanced episode that has humour, lovely costumes, that shows how much heart the logical Vulcans have.

The very best of Star Trek and an easy episode to show to anyone.

Identifying what is or is not one's favorite of anything is strictly a personal endeavor. I'm more than sure I'm probably the only trekkie/er on the planet (or universe) that identifies 'Carbon Creek' as their favorite Star Trek episode.

It seems the least expensive episodes ring stronger for me. TNG's Inner Light, ENT's Shuttlepod One, DS9's Explorer's, VOY's 11:59 to name a few.

Carbon Creek wasn't just a "filler" episode made to conserve money to make up for other more graphic intensive episodes, it had a purpose. This episode not only revealed some interesting unknown Star Trek history, but provided a needed back-story for the character T'Pol.

This is a wonderful, heartwarming story. At this point in the series, T'Pol continually takes abuse for being 'Vulcan' even though she has time and time again proved unwavering loyalty to her Captain, the mission and the crew of Enterprise. So why does she put up with this? Until this episode we really had no idea and didn't know much about her background at all.

While she doesn't reveal the 'truth' to Archer and Trip over dinner, she does indicate to us by revealing her "mother's mother's mother's" purse that the story she has told us is true. One can only imagine the impact her grandmother had on a young T'Pol, telling stories of her experiences with humans, etc. Now we can surmise why she volunteered to serve on Enterprise and moreover why she decided to remain aboard when she has had the opportunity to leave. T'Mir was an explorer that ended up gaining firsthand experience with humans while being stranded on Earth in 1957. Humans intrigued her and she passed that curiosity and interest on to her granddaughter.

We see how important education is to T'Mir and we see how she just can't fathom that a brilliant kid wouldn't be afforded an opportunity to receive a higher education. T'Mir's introduction of Velcro technology fit nicely into history as we know it. The first Velcro was completely made from cotton when Georges de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, patented the zipperless zipper 1955. The problem was the cotton hooks quickly stopped doing what Velcro does as they quickly wore out. Nylon had been around since 1935. It wasn't until shortly after Velcro was patented that Mestral discovered that nylon worked much better than cotton (circa 1958) because it didn't wear out nearly as fast with use. Seeing Maggie's expression as she found the money in the tip jar realizing her son could go to college was priceless.

Listening to baseball on the radio, bus rides, 'I Love Lucy', 'Moe', old vehicles, frozen fish sticks, family owned restaurants, the small coal-town atmosphere all added to the realness of this episode. The lighter tone during the encounters between humans and our Vulcans was fun.

It would have been nice for the series to revisit Mestral, but they did not. We can only assume he melded in nicely and contributed to human advancement where he could.

So this episode links Star Trek's future with humanities past and provides back-story for a main character that gives some justification for her continued interest in serving with humans on a star ship. All done with humor and knowledge of our real past that makes this occurrence as plausible as they come in trek.

Well done, Rick Berman & Brannon Braga & Dan O'Shannon, well done. So the next time you see T'Pol unveil her Great Grandmother's purse, I hope you give this review a thought and I hope you might appreciate this Star Trek gem little more.

All right, I'll admit: I adored every minute of this episode. I thought it was brilliance wrapped in ingenuity.

I really enjoyed the fact, first, that it took place some 200 years ago, by Enterprise's time-line. (The episodes from TOS where Kirk went back to the '60's or whatnot, or Carpenter Street, from Season 3 of ENT? Genius.) It was the not-so-original crash-landing-on-a-primitive-planet-and-we-all-have-to-fit-in plot, but it worked out /splendidly/. It also highlighted looking past what you've been told (Mestral's obvious start of some chemistry with that Maggie gal? Sarek x Amanda Grayson, much?) and really having an open mind.

A very good second episode for the second season of a great series. Besides, who's to say our friend Mestral wouldn't have lived to see "First Contact" occur? ;D

This episode is frequently sited by fans of Enterprise as their favorite episode of the series. Ironically, most of the show takes place, not on the ship or even in the future, but in Earth's 1950s.

The episode succeeds despite, or maybe because of, the absence of hostile aliens out to destroy earth, hostage situations, shipmates being transformed into disgusting monsters or any major violence. It's a light-hearted episode that poses a simple premise: prior to first contact a few Vulcans become trapped on earth during a survey mission and face the prospect of not being able to return home. How will they adapt? Do they interact with humans risking discovery? And it's how these questions are answered provide the conflict and make the show compelling.

The main character of the story is T'Pol's Great Grandmother, but you relate to the character as being T'Pol herself, which is not unreasonable since T'Pol is telling the story. And since what we're watching is a story, any concerns about believability are irrelevant. We don't know if this is real or fiction.

I loved the ending and the way they left Trip and Archer not knowing if the story is true and then that very last scene with T'Pol alone in her room.

More episodes like this and less on endless protracted inter-stellar wars and the show would still be on the air.

This was on the cusp of turning into my favorite ST:E episode thus far before the ending occurred. The concept of 3 Vulcans trapped on Earth is a cool concept, a bit of a mirror on the classic "Human Trapped on an Alien Planet" plot. We get to see it from the opposite perspective. All the acting and set design is pretty cool and it's interesting how the Vulcans acclimate to our society as time passes.

Now to the bad stuff: the end. I don't enjoy this piece of revisionist history that occurs in this episode. Leaving a Vulcan behind to live on for another 100 years had me rolling my eyes. This show gave itself an out by positing the possibility that T'Pol made all this up to entertain them. Leaving this up in the air would have been a good finish and would have left the audience wondering. By showing T'Pol with her grandmother's handbag at the end, it throws away any intrigue or opaqueness this episode contained. Now it is established that this story (at least the part about the crash landing and how Vulcans invented Velcro) is true. ST:E really ruined one of it's better episodes with this ending.

Lackluster episode with Tpol telling a story about her great-grandmother visiting earth before the believed designated encounter, during the 1950s.

All the ideas that there were in-jokes to William Shatner appearing on Twilight Zone and I Love Lucy falls short.

You might as well take the entire episode as some tongue-in-cheek reference to Scott Bakula's Quantum Leap show. It isn't there.

Biggest annoyance is Tpol (supposed to be her great-grandmother? Might as well be the same character) attempting to display a lack of emotion, yet her indifference to trapped miners is definitely an emotion; indifference, callousness, insensitivity.

Emotions aren't just wonderful feelings.

If I were a Vulcan, I wouldn't trust either depictions of these Klingon women to bring back any worthwhile information on foreign lifeforms, as the idea 'dont get involved' falls strangely short of studying said lifeforms.

Second irritation is Trip's pitiful down-hominess toward's Tpol.

"If she's yore granma, how old are you?" "Why, captain, she just rewrote history!" -- at a dinner table.

"Captain, I think she just pulled one over on us!"