STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE 10/01/'03: "Rajiin" (1 Viewer)

[Andrew Beacom]

I kind of enjoyed last nights episode once I got through the opening scenes without thowing up. Rajiin being a spy and the rescue were very predictable but at least the execution of ideas is getting better.

I also agree on the Hoshi front. She seemed very interested before she was touched. T'pol was hostile until she was touched.

 

[DaveBB]

I caught part of the episode but was cooking dinner so I couldn't pay full attention. (Yes I know: get a TiVo)

So are you saying:
Capt Archer is gay?
Hoshi is gay?
Both?

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

[doug zdanivsky]

Didn't Hoshi get it on with a guy in season 1?

 

[Will_B]

I thought Hoshi, too. Just because she's had a boyfriend doesn't mean she wasn't leaping at the thought that she was about to be the one to Tucker an exotic, beautiful alien, to coin a term.

 

[Nelson Au]

Doug-

Yes, that's why I said what I said earlier. This Rajiin girl was just there to get the goods on human physiology and she likely needed a man, and a woman, and then she tried to get a Vulcan and likely got Dr. Phylox too. So she has this power to seduce, so she can temporarily disarm her targets, man or woman makes no difference to her. At first I thought that she was trying to do a vampire thing and get some life force from Archer and Hoshi and then T'Pol. Sort of like The Man Trap from TOS.

Nelson

 

[Anthony Hom]

It was pretty obvious she seduced Hoshi, but in the hierarchy of the show, it's very well established now that Hoshi is the "sweetheart" of the series, while T'Pol is the sexy glamourous character. It would be too redundant to show her seducing Hoshi and T'Pol, they had to choose one and leave the other to your imagination. And of course, they would choose T'Pol because of the emotion conflict. Hoshi's character would not have resisted so much, and we saw that with Archer, so if anything it would be the same scene but with Hoshi, so T'Pol's scene would be different outcome. Although one wonders if there is some outtakes of Hoshi being seduced and scanned somewhere in a film can or on an editor's hard drive...

 

[Art_Courville]

Anyone think that Archer keeping the sample of the virus at the end of last week's show ties into the Xindi bioweapon arc?

 

[Ivan Lindenfeld]

Very good episode. The story continued along nicely. AND THERE WAS GIRL ON GIRL ACTION! Um, heh. I'm ok now.

For anyone that likes women, this episode seemed to serve as a verification exercise. Good lord.

OK, now that I got that over with, (for real this time) I like the fact that the writers always have the Enterprise two steps behind their adversaries in intel, technology. The difficulty of their task is well defined, and it isn't getting any easier. If only they had their own Raijiin. Or could follow the Xindi into that wormhole thingy. Or could synthesize Trellian D (So it has a decongestant in it, too?!

I also would propose that this season of Enterprise is a mix of the best of Trek TV. There are elements of TOS, elements of DS9 and (egad!) elements of VOY. They are in an Expanse, unable to communicate with Earth, and other parallels to Voyager's setting. And it's all working for me.

I haven't been this stoked about Trek since First Contact.

My absolute favorite moment was when T'Pol and Trip blew up the lab. They tried really hard. They were tenacious. They were intelligent. And it blew up in their faces anyway. This ain't your father's Trek. This is Frontier Trek. Despite what Mr. Roddenberry said back in '67 about TOS being American West analagous, they are going for an even harder Frontier edge here.

In any event, tittilation that forwards the plot is gooood.

 

[Nelson Au]

From Trekweb, this relates to Rajiin and the other TV thread regarding moving Enterprise to Tuesday to avoid competition from Smallville.

Star Trek Enterprise episode Rajiin had the highest ratings this year and amongst the highest rated show of the series inspite of being killed by Smallville:

Trekweb article regarding Rajiin ratings

The new changes to this season appear to be working to get and keep the target audience. With so many bailing out on the series, they must have gathered new viewership and perhaps lured some old ones back.

Nelson

 

[Rex Bachmann]

A so-so (and SOSO) episode. Not bad, but nothing to write home about either. The preview-trailer makers did their best to play upon older episodes of Trek vis-à-vis the beautiful space-girl alien.


Nelson Au wrote (post #14):

Almost everything about the show "sounds familiar", as we've been saying week to week. No surprise there. But, then too, maybe your Buck Rogers analogy---actually it sounds more like Flash Gordon to me---, if valid, is telling in a not so complimentary fashion. The more I think about the Xindi, the more trouble I have with the concept. I can't remember, are all these species supposed to have evolved on the same planet? If so, what's happened to the food chain? If not feasting on each other, did they all go "vegetarian" at some point? Space "vegans

" with their own death ray?


Nitpick of the week (every week, actually): They still drop the ball on the language/translation issue.

(a) Tucker sets his little electronic pad in front of the chemist merchant, Barat, as if for the latter to inspect it. "I'm confident we can agree on a fair price," he declares. Now how does Tucker expect him to be able to read what's on it?

(b) Hoshi Sato tells the space girl: "I'd love to hear your language", which I take to mean she's not hearing it from her at that point, and, in fact, the latter is speaking English (or is there a UT device going somewhere nearby?). (Apparently some of you have interpreted this as a "pick-up" line.)

Rajiin: "Actually I speak quite a few." If she's speaking English, though, where did she learn it, since the Enterprise crew is supposed to be the first Earth people out there, no?

Oh, well, may as well surrender on that issue. (I won't.)

 

[Dan Rudolph]

I don't think Archer is gay. He seemed pretty interested in that woman in the Risa episode. Malcolm and Hoshi are really the only plausible options at this point. before this ep, I would have said Malcolm, but now I'm going with Hoshi.

Although that would take basically all possible romances between regulars not involving T'Pol out of play.

I really liked this episode. Forst I've seent hsi seasons thanks to the local affiliated maddening tendency to move the show up when there's baseball. So when you tune in and it isn't on, it's already been over several hours.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Dan Rudolph wrote (post #31):

You know, I think some people posting around here already had the impression that he was "gay" from his preöccupation with water polo. (As I recall, somebody labelled him "wussy" last season on that basis.)

 

[Nelson Au]

On the issue of the UT, I believe Rajiin was likely taught to speak and understand the Human english language by the Xindi so she could infiltrate Enterprise.

 

[Dan Rudolph]

No one seemed to think it odd that she spoke English, though. Maybe by coincidence, English developed simultaneously in several places across the galaxy. That would explain a lot.

 

[todd s]

Rex,

I agree with the Xindi council being split. I even get the impression the Human-looking Xindi are stalling with the weapon to try to make peace with Earth.

 

[Randy Tennison]

the composer gave the sequence when Rajiin "scanned" Archer a very retro-Classic Trek feel

I noticed that myself. It made me instantly think of Kirk getting it on with some green chick.

The UT thing is a little nitpicky, IMHO. If we didn't allow that bit of dramatic license, we would spend 15 minutes of each episode watching the crew trying to learn to communicate with each new species.

My nitpick is the new Archer. He's pissed at everything. He's become even more one dimensional. Hey writers, give the guy some emotions to play besides seething anger!

Otherwise, an interesting episode!

FYI, I called Time Warner, and they sent out a repair person. He checked the cable signal to my house, and said that the static was a main line problem. So, it seems that everyone may be having a problem with the WB. It did clear up considerably for the Saturday rebroadcast!

 

[Ivan Lindenfeld]

REx, the Enterprise is the first warp 5 Earth ship. Other slower ships have been traveling the galaxy (the near Earth galaxy, but nonetheless.) Recall that there are warp enabled cargo ships from Earth too.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Ivan Lindenfeld wrote (post #37):

Okay, but my understanding was that the whole schtick on Enterprise is that these are the first Earth people to get out so far as they have. (I remember the cargo ship from the episode #46, "Horizon", and my recollection is that the Enterprise had to turn back toward Earth to get to it.)

Oh, well, it's a good point. There are other Earth people out there somewhere.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Randy Tennison wrote (post #36):

Yes, I admit it would hamstring the drama a bit. (Actually, I think there might be inventive end-arounds to the problem, but the producers seem totally uninterested in trying anything that both meets the needs of the drama and satisfies decent plausibility criteria.) But some here have said repeatedly that Star Trek "aliens"---the humanoid ones, they mean---aren't "alien enough" for them. (They usually mean they don't have enough make-up on.)

After actual appearance, biological (i.e., phenotype) or cultural (e.g., through dress), what more marked signal does one get that some other guy is "not one of us" (that is, foreign ("alien"))? In the real world, I think it's through language. Whether it's "funny sounds" (like "speech defects" (e.g., "lisping")), misused expressions, "bad grammar" (confused or absent verb endings, funny plural forms, elements out of order, etc.), or the like, these are all manifest codings that tell us "so-and-so is not one of us". Note how much fun people have traditionally gotten (and still do, "political correctness" notwithstanding) out of mocking "accents" from regions, racial/ethnic groups, social classes other than their (perceived) own. (Aren't there enough jokes about "bitches and 'ho's" floating around these days to convince anybody of that?) It's a (normal) form of associative (or, rather, disassociative) behavior. Yet, in most Hollywood productions, not only do the "aliens" speak "our lingo", they usually don't even have any outworldly accents. (Shakespearean English or a little lispy-sounding German-English ain't good enough.) I, for one, get tired of hearing characters supposedly coming from the other side of the galaxy sound as if they came instead from Southern California.

A good deal of Star Trek's traditional philosophy has been about interplanetary/interstellar misunderstanding and how to bridge it. ("Can't we talk?") For the sake of realism---not reality; realism---shouldn't that lack of understanding start with the verbal communication among its sentient beings? That seems to me to be both the easiest and the most realistic way to go about presenting some of the fundamental dilemmas of interspecies confrontation.

 

[TheLongshot]

Certanly understandable, and some of Trek's best episodes are on the subject of language differences. But, while it would be more realistic, it tends to get in the way of telling a story. It is the reason why, for expediency sake, most SF shows have some way for characters to understand each other, like the "Universal Translator" that Trek has.

Jason