Episode 19: Acquisition

If I'm not mistaken, this episode is supposed to be a comedy.


It is based on a Berman and Braga story. It features Star Trek regulars Clint Howard, Ethan Phillips and Jeffrey Combs as Ferengi pirates who render the entire Enterprise crew unconscious, then board the Star Fleet ship and begin to strip it of all of its valuables.


And then, in an extremely common action trope, we find out that one Enterprise crew member actually managed to avoid being knocked out -- Tucker was in the Decon chamber when the Ferengi knock-out gas was administered and so is available to save the day. Remember the Klingon engineer in the freezer in "Sleeping Dogs"? That's Tucker, in his underwear, here.


There are some nice touches:

• I like seeing (and hearing) Clint Howard again -- as a boy, he played Balock in the TOS episode "The Corbomite Manuever" so it's nice to see that he manages to appear in the original and the last Star Trek series;
• It's nice to see Ethan Phillips in Ferengi prosthetics -- we all fondly remember him from his role as Neelix in Voyager;
• It's a surprise to hear Jeffrey Combs' voice coming out of a Ferengi face -- we are so used to him as the Andorian Schran that it kind of throws us off to hear him here;
• It's neat to hear an attempt at a Ferengi language -- the first 10 minutes or so of the episode have no dialogue except in Ferengi; and
• Isn't it cool to see the Ferengi whips make a comeback? They were featured in the TNG episode that first introduced the Ferengi, then all but disappeared.

Unfortunately, the show is not funny. It's not charming either. And, like any episode that comes from the minds of B&B, it focuses on Vulcan baiting, sexualizing female characters and an awful lot of male crap.


And isn't it getting a little bit tiring that every group of antagonists that Enterprise encounters has to have at least one weak-minded member whom Archer and his gang can manipulate?


From the start of the episode, I couldn't help but wonder:

1. Why didn't the Ferengi just kill the Enterprise crew with its clever ruse to introduce a gas into the ship rather than just knocking them out, giving themselves the chance simply to take Enterprise wholesale?
2. Why didn't the Ferengi toss the entire crew out of an airlock once they boarded the ship rather than leaving them all lying around with a clock ticking as to when they will awaken?
3. If they didn't want to kill them, why didn't the Ferengi use the unconscious time to move all the Enterprise crew members into a single compartment and then lock them in, giving themselves more time to plunder and/or fly Enterprise to a habitable planet and leave the crew behind?
4. If the Ferengi ship is already so crowded with stolen goods that Archer can't find space for another box of stuff, where do the Ferengi intend to put all the female crew members they have gathered in the Enterprise cargo bay to sell as slaves?
5. Why is slavery still such a going concern in this B&B galaxy?

And, let's face it, Archer's little plan to defeat the Ferengi is pretty stupid and way too convoluted. With Tucker and T'Pol now awake and with the element of surprise on their side, couldn't they just ambush the FOUR Ferengi and overwhelm them?


No, wait, if they wrote a plot that made sense, B&B wouldn't have been able to put T'Pol into so many ridiculous hyper-sexual situations, would they? Nope, it's much preferable to go with an idiotic plot than to miss out on an opportunity to have your Vulcan science officer caress the lobes of a Ferengi for a cheap thrill.


Awful awful television. If there were still viewers hanging in, these last three episodes must have proven the death knell for Enterprise.