Episode 3: Fight or Flight

It's hard not to look back now on "Fight or Flight" and think: if only they had continued to develop the many strengths of this episode as Enterprise developed, rather than its few problems, the series might have been more successful.

"Fight of Flight" was the first regular episode of Enterprise, after the show's two-hour premiere, "Broken Bow". Written by executive producers (and "show runners") Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, "Fight or Flight" actually feels like Star Trek. It blends moments of humour with moments of action but foregrounds character development and philosophical discourse over everything else.

Archer and his crew grapple with the basic question: why are Humans out in space?

Separated from the rest of the Vulcan contingent, T'Pol seems more traditionally Vulcan, not so angry, cunning, or manipulative as were Ambassador Soval and his colleagues. If we really try, we can actually forget that B&B had basically re-interpreted Vulcans in that premiere episode and recognise that T'Pol sees her role as reining in her Captain's more irrational impulses, providing the logical voice of experience in the crew's adventures and trying to adapt to her Human crewmates.

The scenes in the Captain's mess, in which Archer, T'Pol and Tucker share means and discuss the ship and her crew, create the possibility of a three-part relationship developing, reminiscent of the Kirk-Spock-McCoy bond in TOS.

The plot of the episode is fairly linear but offers lots of opportunity for the us to get to know the characters, their ship and their relationship to the Star Trek universe.

Enterprise has been out exploring for two uneventful weeks and the crew is already bored. Sato has adopted a slug from some planet and worries over its ability to adapt to its new surroundings; she is also having problems sleeping because she's on the wrong side of the ship. Archer is frustrated by a squeaky deck plate in his ready room; Reid and Mayweather are having problems calibrating the targeting sensors.

In a nice introduction to the ship's armory, the weapons systems, and the rocket fueled torpedoes, Archer decides to attempt to alleviate the boredom by engaging in some target practice. Unfortunately, the targeting sensors are still not functioning well and the ship continues on its way.

We are treated to a fun little scene in the mess hall as Phlox regales Tucker with insights into how much he is enjoying getting to know the human crew. He even mentions Nausicaans, a nice reference to a race first introduced in TNG.

T’Pol finds a ship floating in space, which gives the crew a welcomed distraction. We are treated to seeing Archer, for the first time, hailing an alien ship (which, we find out at the end, belongs to a race called the Axanar), trying to work out the right wording. Meanwhile, T’Pol reminds Archer that some aliens don't respond because they don't want to talk, that scanning the Axanar ship may be construed as an invasion of privacy and that mere curiosity is not an appropriate reason for anything in space.

Archer ignores her and leads the away team to the Axanar ship. He wants Sato along, though she complains she finds the environmental suits claustrophobic. He denies Tucker's request to go on the away mission because the Enterprise needs its Engineer. Reid comes along but Archer has to stop him from bringing the artillery and then opening the Axanar ship's hatch with explosives, rather than just looking a little harder for the door knob.

The investigation of the ship finds the crew, hanging dead like so much meat in a packing plant, and Sato screams when she first discovers the crew’s bodies (“I screamed like a 12-year-old,” she later complains to Dr. Phlox.n“Nobody else screamed”).

Upon returning to Enterprise, T'Pol warns that, with nothing it can possibly do for the crew, Enterprise might be itself in jeopardy if it sticks around. Archer finally listens and order Enterprise to leave the area. This decision, however, leads to a confrontation between Archer and T'Pol at dinner in which Archer expresses his guilt over leaving the Axanar crew in that condition. Over T'Pol's objections, Archer orders Enterprise back to the Axanar ship, declaring that "Humans have a code of behaviour" that requires them to help others.

Upon reaching the Axanar ship, Archer allocates jobs: Tucker to get the ship's comms working so that they can track down its home world and call for help; Sato to figure out its language so that their message is understandable; and Phlox to figure out who the aliens were and what is being done to them.

Phlox figures out that the Tri-Globulin is being siphoned from the aliens' bodies, likely for use in medicine, vaccines, or aphrodisiacs. He warns that Humans have a similar substance in their lymphatic glands.

As she tries to decipher the Axanar language, Sato tells Tucker that she has decided she needs to go home. “The Captain needs a translator he can count on, someone who shows a little bit of grace under pressure,” she says. They manage to send a message to the aliens' home world.

The attackers return in a really cool ship. Reid has to admit that he is not ready to defend the ship. Enterprise's sensors can’t penetrate the attackers' shielding and they get no response to their hails. As the shuttle pod tries desperately to get back to the ship, the killers attack, damaging Enterprise's warp drive. Enterprise fires a torpedo and it just bounces off. They fire a second one; the killers destroy it. Enterprise's crew is subjected to a submolecular bio-scan and it becomes the attacker plans to do to the Star Fleet crew what they did to the alien crew. Enterprise is taken into a tractor beam and a drills descends from the killers' ship to cut Enterprise open.

Another vessel arrives It’s Axanar. Sato tries to translate but the Axanar commander decides, for some reason, that Enterprise is the problem, not the bigger, more powerful ship that is about to cut Enterprise to pieces. Meanwhile, the killer ship decides to ignore the Axanar ship completely, despite the fact that the Axanar ship is more powerful and clearly belongs to the same species that the killers attacked earlier.

Enterprise is about to be diced and sliced by the killers and blasted by the Axanar and it’s all up to Sato to gather up her courage and talk to the Axanar captain without using the translator. She finally does it and the Axanar ship attacks the killer ship. Mayweather uses impulse engines to move Enterprise out of the way and Reid manages to align the targeting scanners at the last minute and hit the killer ship with a torpedo.

Amazingly, this time the torpedo proves effective. The Axanar then destroy the killers ship. Enterprise makes its first friends. In the final scene, Sato returns the worm to another, similar planet. “It’s not that hard to adapt," she tells it.

The episode suffers from a number of issues, most significantly with regard to the decision of the Axanar ship to ignore the killer vessel and focus on Enterprise and the decision of the killer ship to ignore the newly arrived Axanar vessel, but also offers several reasons for Trek fans to be hopeful, as discussed above.

That being said, however, hindsight also identifies certain elements in this episode that serve as seeds for problems to come. Archer's anger, for example, is exaggerated here, ill-befitting the commander of Earth's first vessel of galactic exploration. It's clear that the good Captain has a problem with Vulcans and, as later episodes would confirm, a significant case of xenophobia of a more general nature, and I wonder if the powers that be on Earth would really choose him to command NX01.

If anything, Archer comes across as a typical American man of the middle part of the 20th Century, conservative, racist, aggressive and angry, not as one of the 21st Century's leaders.

It is further clear that Enterprise is practically a males only club. The two females with significant roles -- T'Pol and Sato -- are both presented as being problematic (T'Pol is haughty and disdainful, failing to fit in and questioning/challenging everything the Captain proposes, while Sato is weak, over-emotional, whiny and unsuited for the mission) while the men all come across as good ol' boys, fun and fit, their "quirks" more charming than disruptive.

At least, for one episode at least, B&B manage to control their juvenile urge to sexualise one or both of the female characters. But, as we know, there's a lot more of that to come.