Reviews

As a fan of 1978 Battlestar Galactica I originally dismissed this remake series. I tried watching it in 2005 and didn't make it very far before disappointment set in. Now in 2014 I can let go a little and try to judge it on its own terms. I enjoy the high production values and some of the performances but it always leaves me wanting a little.

Olmos and McDonnell carry the show and are the reason to watch. I find it sort of amusing that Apollo and Starbuck have been limited to supporting characters in this version. They do okay, I suppose, but they are fairly one-dimensional characters which stand in contrast to Roslin and Adama.

Baltar is perhaps the most frustrating character. In the beginning of the miniseries he has the opportunity to steal the old blind woman's winning lottery ticket, thus saving his own life at the expense of hers. He does not do this, presumably because his morality will not permit him. Yet by the end of the miniseries he does that very thing, accusing an innocent man of being a Cylon in order to save his own skin. So when did Baltar's change in moral compass occur? Off-camera? Was his own skin ever really in danger, though? Adama wanted a Cylon detector so Baltar framed an innocent to prove he had a working detector. What if he hadn't? What would Adama do? He didn't have anyone else who could build one. He'd be forced to work by Baltar's timetable not the other way around. So Baltar put himself in a position of saying he had a working detector when he really didn't which would throw suspicion on himself later when they wanted to use it again. He always makes choices like that; he lies when no lie is called for and then has to squirm his way out of it. He's the dumbest smart guy I've ever seen. He also has a habit of talking to a person whom no one else can see, yet no one ever comments on this. He is the craziest acting person on the show yet everyone trusts him implicitly in positions of great power. You can only assume conversations are taking place off-camera where the other characters question his motives but the audience is left to fill in the blanks.

Now, in the season finale, we get another such instance. Boomer tells Helo she's pregnant. Helo's first reaction should be "you're lying, you're a robot, you can't get pregnant" or just "prove it." Boomer has lied about everything else she's said to him. Now she tells another lie, so he should think, to get him on her side. He doesn't wrestle with this decision, at least not that we see. In the next scene he's telling Starbuck that Boomer is pregnant and he's rushing to her defense. Again, it seems like the most dramatic part of the Helo-Boomer relationship has been left on the cutting room floor.

Why can't you just cut open a Cylon and see that it's not human? If it's indistinguishable from a human, then isn't it in fact human? The idea of a Cylon detector is talked about in vagaries and these questions are never answered. Helo asks if the Sixes he sees on Caprica are some kind of clones, or humans coerced to work with the Cylons. Then, presented with no evidence either way, he decides they are robots.

Was Adama lying about Earth or not? It doesn't really matter. What matters is early on he seems to discuss it with Roslin as if they both believe Earth is real. Later, they both believe it to be a myth. It feels like so much happens without letting the audience in on the secret. We're supposed to just enjoy what's presented without question, but that's difficult.

Does Baltar really have a chip in his head? Is that how Six talks to him? If so, why doesn't he scan for it and see if it can be taken out?

Cylons can appear at will on board the colony ships including Galactica. Yet once they have a real working detector they never test Roslin, Adama, or Baltar, who should be one of the first. Of course if Baltar's a Cylon then his test is invalid and they should know this, and have a second scientist working on a second test. So much is left undone.

Early in the season we wonder if the Boomer on Galactica knows she's a Cylon. What's of more concern is the Chief who knows that she is and never does anything about it. With all the angst and drama over his being accused of planting the bomb, of letting one of his men take the fall for the incident, when he finds out it's her he just lets her go? Continuing to put the rest of the fleet in danger? It seems so out of character. It might make sense if he was going to continue a relationship with her, but if he's not, then what exactly is his motive?

What is the Cylons' plan? Not to exterminate the human race, obviously, because with the access they have to Galactica they could do it at any time. So I guess they are herding humanity to a specific place. Why? To breed with them? Why not just kidnap a few humans and conduct breeding experiments? Hopefully their goal will make sense because so far it seems like a series of unrelated incidents.

The pace of the show is already somewhat slow and methodical yet it feels like if each episode had been expanded, even 10 minutes, they could have answered some of these questions and satisfied the viewer a little more. I just have a feeling that they left the best scenes on the table at the writers' meeting.

In reviewing the Season 2 finale I guess I'm really reviewing season 2. I didn't really like the premise of Dexter's recovery in the first place, turning him into a normal guy is not what the audience wants. Then to have him couple up with rehab skank Lila was salt to the wound. Dexter's acceptance of his addiction and newfound ability to overcome it somehow leads him into the arms of the woman who fans the flames of that addiction instead of the woman who has been with him for so long, that's he's been trying to over the addiction for, Rita? It makes no sense. But then Dexter does finally explain that he's a confused man.

Doakes was always such a one-note character, the guy calling Dexter a weirdo and psycho. It was a welcome surprise to find that in these last few episodes he became a real highlight of the season. When he dropped the macho posturing and actually tried to have a real conversation with Dexter for the first time it felt like we were really going somewhere. Sprinkling in the bits earlier in the season about Doakes' questionable past and killer instincts strengthened the bond between them. It came as no surprise that he would die once he found out Dexter's secret, he had to or else the show would be over.

This set up a great moral conflict for Dexter. According to Harry's Code he cannot kill an innocent man, but he also cannot allow himself to be caught. The two are in direct conflict. We all knew that there would be a Deus Ex Machina that let him off the hook without making the choice. As it turns out he has ample time to make the choice before he's let off the hook. Dex spends days preparing to turn himself in rather than frame or kill Doakes, and we know that when Doakes is inevitably killed, Dex will be free and clear and maybe even feel bad that Doakes took the fall for him, but it was out of his hands. It really saddened me to see him pitch it all in favor of "nah, I'll go ahead and frame Doakes anyway," and then "oh well he's dead? I'll go on enjoying my life then, it's what Doakes would want me to do." No, no he wouldn't.

Beyond profiting from an innocent man's death, Dexter also seems completely fine with letting Doakes' family and the entire police force go on believing this innocent man was a murderer, just to spare his own smaller family. This season was about Dexter abandoning Harry's Code and finding his own, and I guess he has, it's just not as good. I'm disappointed.

And really, a badass like Doakes being taken out by someone like Lila, that is really insult to injury. Just sad. And while I'm glad they killed her off and didn't leave us hanging for years as to whether we'd ever see her again, just how exactly did Dexter find her? Dexter has always had incredible luck with tracking people, abducting them, carrying bodies around and dumping evidence in broad daylight without being seen by anyone, but this seemed beyond ridiculous.

Decent acting, mediocre writing, overall season storyline was a bit sub- par.

Like most of Season 4, "The Forge" is mere fan service. What is "fan service?" When a writer spends much of the screen time making references to past episodes just so fans can say "oh cool, I remember that!" even though it doesn't help the current story.

The writers decided to do an episode on Vulcan so they had to have a Sehlat (Spock's pet from "Yesteryear"), a "katra" (from Star Trek III) and of course T'Pau (from "Amok Time") and Surak (from "The Savage Curtain"); and then the Syrranite starts asking Archer the same test questions the computer asked Spock in Star Trek IV. By the time we got to the IDIC (from "Is There In Truth No Beauty?"), which most TOS fans remember was first and foremost a product placement for a medallion Gene Roddenberry was trying to sell, I was seriously groaning. Making a reference for the sake of a reference is just not interesting.

The next two episodes were slight improvements in this regard. Still, I always had a problem with "Enterprise's" portrayal of all of Spock's ancient, treasured Vulcan practices as brand-new only a hundred years earlier. Vulcans in "Enterprise" don't know much about mind-melding and even less about the katra even though they are supposed to be time- honored customs in TOS. Besides, Vulcans' life-spans are too long. Most of the characters currently alive on "Enterprise" will still be alive when "Star Trek" rolls around. When the Priestess in "Star Trek III" says the transfer of katras from one person to another "has not been done since ages past, and then only in legend" what she should have said was "this was done about a hundred years ago, successfully, also between a Human and a Vulcan, by someone who is probably still alive and a member of this council, and the katra belonged to the Jesus Christ of the Vulcan people ... so it was a pretty famous case that we should all remember."

The rest of this arc was better service for the characters of Trip and Soval but another poor showing for the Vulcan High Command, this time being run by a particularly irrational Vulcan who favors hanging on to outdated beliefs even when presented with new evidence, which is usually the act of a religious zealot, which is what he accuses the Syrranites of being. Like most of the Season 4 arcs, this could have been shortened to one episode without losing anything. That would have left room for many more stories and then even the stinkers would mercifully only take up a single precious hour of the season.

When this "Star Trek" prequel series debuted we wondered if it would attempt to fit into the established history leading up to TOS or if it would rewrite history. I think they tried to hint at both to please old and new fans alike, but the latter is obviously where they were going. In the movie "First Contact" we saw Picard's TNG crew go back in time and alter first contact between humans and Vulcans, which was the entire basis for the formation of Starfleet and the Federation, so it stands to reason that everything that follows would be altered, sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes not so subtle. How many of Cochrane's crew were killed, what role would they have played in the creation of the Phoenix or relations with the Vulcans? How were Cochrane's attitudes and actions altered by his encounter with Picard's crew? Cochrane appeared on the pilot episode of "Enterprise" showing that this new timeline would follow on from that movie. Now in season 2's "Regeneration" we did up some leftover Borg from the movie just to hammer home the point that this is a continuation of that movie. Even though Archer remembers some random bit of nonsense Cochrane had muttered 100 years earlier that everyone else wrote off as a drunken yarn, apparently his encounter with the Borg will not be remembered 200 years later when Shelby is researching the Borg in preparation for their invasion of the Alpha Quadrant. Or will it be, in this timeline? If Archer had gone 200 years into the future perhaps he would have encountered a very different TNG than the one we watched on our TVs.

Yet the episode ends with a warning that the Borg contacted their friends in the Delta Quadrant and they should get the signal right around the time Picard is captaining his Enterprise. So the writers choose to rewrite history but not too much, leaving the appearance of perhaps fitting with the old history. It's a bit of having your cake and eating it too. Or perhaps more a case of rewriting continuity but not having the guts to actually do it in any meaningful way. I find this kind of thing unappealing to the old-school fan but too business- as-usual to please a newcomer.

As for the actual plot, the Borg continue their magical evolution into indestructibility. We saw on Voyager that they could revive a drone that had been dead for several days. Now they can revive drones that have been dead 100 years or more! Not just frozen in ice for 100 years, but who have also survived the destruction of their ship by photon torpedoes, survived the heat of entry into Earth's atmosphere and a rather harsh impact onto the ground from orbit. Those magical Borg.

The action plays more like a horror movie with a bunch of zombies infecting humans and multiplying possibly without end unless they can be stopped. It's a serviceable but predictable action episode that has been seen many times before. Where is the promise of this first encounter with an entirely different culture, not just a hive mind but now an enemy who absorbs everything it touches? Not unlike the one Enterprise encountered in "Vox Sola." This time however there's no emotion, no surprise, just action. I guess if they found out too much about the Borg it might just finally break the canon irreversibly so they couldn't go there. Couldn't have Phlox learn the species' name while he was mind linked with them, for instance. Just like they never learned the Ferengi's name because that would wreck Picard's first contact with them 200 years down the road.

This is all the same road JJ Abrams took with the 2009 "Star Trek" movie. Not surprising that would name-check Archer as his movie is a continuation of "Enterprise's" altered timeline and alters it further. Another remake that tries to change things but keep enough the same that it could still kinda-sorta fit with the old stories, but really can't, not at all. In the attempt to offend no one they created a product that I don't see how it can please anyone. It's very boxed into an old product which limits where it can go, while it really doesn't fit into the box either. This episode shows exactly what's wrong with "Enterprise" and Abrams' Trek.

As the other reviewers said, it was a predictable episode. It's not unlike the episode of TNG where Troi, Data and O'Brien are possessed by ghostlike beings trapped on a planet. Here it's ghosts in a ship trying to take over all the bodies on Enterprise.

The first plot hole is when they decide they can defeat the non- corporeal beings by killing the host body. T'Pol says it will be like they are in space, they will die. We have already seen the beings travel through space from their ship to Enterprise and it doesn't kill them, so the explanation doesn't make sense.

Secondly, the crew members in the catwalk are shielded from possession but Trip is possessed anyway. Did the beings find a way through? Or was he simply still possessed from earlier in the episode and had been pretending to be okay for the middle of the episode? Never explained.

Third, when the beings take over the crew members, we see the crew members' "soul" or whatever leave the body and take flight, becoming non-corporeal as well. So if Archer's final plan involves killing the host body and driving out the evil beings, how can he be sure that the crew members' soul will come back to its body once the body is revived? How can he be sure that the evil being won't hang around and come back to the body once it's revived? Especially since the being inside Trip knew what the plan was; kill the host, drive out the possessing spirit, then revive the body for the crew member to return. What's to keep the evil spirit from returning first?

The ending was all very rushed. I also wondered why Phlox was acting so strange towards the end of the episode. Counting out loud as if he's never read English before, asking how to open a hatch and how to turn a handle and what to with the hatch once it's released, to which Archer says "I don't know, set it on the ground or something." Phlox seems to lack basic life skills which is exactly how the aliens act. Were we supposed to suspect he might be possessed? Not answered.

To add to what ShogaNinja said, Picard expresses a lot of anger at Nikolai for creating this situation and coming up with such a ridiculous solution. Then at the end of the episode Crusher asks Picard if he regrets saving the tribe and he says "No, and our plan worked perfectly." Even though the tribe now believes in a magical Worf and some God called "La Forge" the same way the proto-Vulcans in "Who Watches the Watchers" believed in "The Picard." I thought Nikolai's use of the holodeck was rather brilliant but the line of BS he came up with sell it to the tribe was utter lunacy. "Duck inside your tents and my brother will make the storm disappear!" Won't they be questioning him for the rest of his life about his magical brother? Why not just knock them out with some gas and then later say the storm dissipated while they were asleep?

The episode also entirely avoids the ethical question of letting someone die rather than violate your policy of non-interference. The Prime Directive is supposed to prevent them from negatively impacting another culture. Since the only alternative is the extinction of that culture does it really apply? Wouldn't a culture influenced by alien visitation still be preferable to no culture at all? This episode really makes Picard out to be a puppet of Starfleet dogma. I'm reminded of Jor-El's words in the 1979 movie, "Is it now a crime to cherish life?"