90: Bound – Star Trek Enterprise Season 4, Episode 17

In this episode of Trek in Time, we’re gonna be talking about the Orion’s and the yada, yada yada of it all. That’s right. We’re talking about enterprise Season four, episode 17 bound. Welcome to Trek in Time, where we’re watching all episodes of star Trek and chronological order. We’re also taking a look at what the world was like at the time of the original B.

Currently, we are almost at the end of season four. Mm-hmm. of enterprise, which means we’re almost ready to leave enterprise behind and move on to discovery. It also means we’re currently talking about what the world was like at 2005 when enterprise. Was originally broadcasting it’s fourth season. And who are we?

Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci-fi. I write some stuff for kids. And with me is my brother Matt. He is that Matt Ferrell of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, how are you doing today? I’m doing very well. How about yourself?

I’m doing okay. I’m enjoying a sunny, sunny weekend right now, which yesterday was not so sunny. It was terrible. It was cold, it was rainy, and then today it’s sunny. It’s warm, it’s breezy. It’s like a tail of two weekends. . As usual, before we get discussing our current episode, which as I mentioned before, is bound.

We’d like to share some thoughts from previous episodes. So Matt, what do you have from us? From the comments from our

last episode, which was episode 89, which was talking about two episodes at once. The two-parter, affliction and Divergence. We had some feedback on doing two episodes at once, which is the first time we’ve done this one was from Dan Sims who said, oh cool.

I have another episode to watch. That is a nice surprise. I like that you go, you guys are covering both episodes at once. and then PaleGhost wrote. I love the new change with the story arcs. Maybe I won’t embarrass myself anymore by commenting ahead of the current episode. . Also, I’m waiting for the day when someone realizes it’s a read alert.

R E A d, as opposed to R e E D.

Yes. Yeah. And then top of that, PaleGhost had a second comment, which was in reference. It was near the end of the episode. You, we were talking about how Seth McFarlane was in those two episodes. Mm-hmm. , but then suddenly he just like disappeared and was never seen again. Yes.

And you brought up how there was a, um, a cut scene of him getting brutally murdered and slammed and smeared across , across the enterprise. Yep. , it was kind of graphic and he wrote, makes me wonder about your children’s books. .

You’re not the only one. PaleGhost. You’re not the only one. I don’t want to spend too much of this episode talking about my own writing.

I don’t like talking about myself in that way, even though it’s probably a good idea from a publicity perspective. But I do write a lot of different types of things and there is an element to some of my adult books that would make somebody say, wait, you write picture books as well. And I also think a little bit of vice versa.

I think there’s probably some stuff in my picture books that make people say, you write stuff for. You’re so childless.

As, as, as somebody who’s read most of Sean’s books, he is very eclectic in his writing style. .

Yeah. A little bit from this, a little bit from that. And you know, again, I did not, this was not by design to allow me to try and pitch my new book, but my new book that’s coming out in June of 2023.

In case anybody in the far future has listened to this and is curious about when the books are available, the Sinister Secrets of Singe is a middle grade novel, and it really is a very strange bridge between the picture books and the adult stuff because yeah, it is a f it is a sci-fi, uh, kind of steam p punkish adventure about a boy who discovers that his father is the, uh, mad scientist who almost destroyed the city.

But it is also, it’s got those novelistic elements of the deeper storytelling, uh, deeper character arcs than the picture books would normally allow. But it’s more of a fun adventure than my adult novels would allow. So it is really a, a, a bridge between those two things. So I’m interested in people’s response to it, and I, and I hope that people who are listening to this might be interested in checking it out, but enough of that, ah, It.

Yep. You hear it right there. That’s the read alert we were talking about before, and that means only one thing. It is time for math to try and tackle the description. Good luck on this one. ,

oh God Bound is the 17th episode of the fourth season of the American Science fiction television series, star Trek Enterprise, originally broadcast on April 15th, 2005.

It was written by Showrunner Manny Coto, and directed by Alan Kroger. The episode featured the Return of the Orion Slave Girls, which had been originally seen in the original pilot of Star. The original series, the Cage. Can we give the word original in here a few more times? Yeah. Set In the 22nd century, the series follows the Adventures of the First Star, Starfleet Starship, enterprise Registration, NX-01

very important detail we have to happen every single description In this episode, three Orion Slave Girls come aboard the ship and the crew, with the exception of Commander. Trip Tucker and Commander T’Pol, who seem to have resistant psychic, who seem to have a resistant psychic bond, begin acting strangely.

That was awful.

Yeah. . Yeah. That’s a wild ride right there. Geez. Sometimes the descriptions, sometimes Matt reads the description and sometimes the description reads. Matt, and this was, this was, this was the latter. This It was. It’s a rough one. I didn’t even like, I didn’t even like copying. it. I was like, should I just write something about, no, no.

I’m not gonna bother . So as Matt mentioned, season four, episode 17, directed by Alan Kroger, written by Manny Coto, Manny, Coto being the showrunner. This being his entire reason for this season. Let’s build a bridge between enterprise and the original series. The original air date, April 15th, 2015, 2005.

Excuse me. Guest appearances included William Lucking as Harrod Sarr. William Lucking passed away in 2021. . He was 80 years old and he was one of those consummate that guy actors, he would show up. Mm-hmm. and things occasionally, and it’d be like, oh yeah, that guy, I always like him. And when I saw him pop up on the screen in this one, I was like, oh yeah, that guy.

It’s nice to see him. . Guest appearances also included Sya Batten as Navaar Derek Magyar as Commander Kelby. Crystal Allen as D’Nesh and Manina Fortunato as Maras as I mentioned before, the original air date, April 15th, 2005, and what was the world like? Well, Matt, you’ll never guess what you were belting out at the top of your lungs.

That’s right. It is a song that is best listened to while riding in a red wagon with no breaks, straight down a mountainside since you’ve been gone. The song that is the equivalent of having somebody holding onto both your ears and screaming into your.

Geez.

And at the movie theaters, well, we weren’t really lining up for it.

A little movie called Sahara. That’s right, man. Oh boy. That’s Sahara. Sahara is the 2005 action adventure film directed by Breck Eisner, based on the bestselling 1992 novel of the same name by Clive Cussler. It stars Matthew McConaughey. Steve Zahn, Penelope Cruz, and follows a treasure Hunter who partners with a World Health Organization doctor to find the lost American Civil War ironclad worship in the Sahara Desert.

I’ve got a few comments about this movie’s description. I recommend anybody who is interested in seeing a description that is almost entirely hyperlinks to go to Wikipedia, look up the movie Sahara and take a look at the hyperlinks. In that paragraph that I just read, there’s only a handful of words aren’t hyperlinked because there is so many details there that Wikipedia’s like you could find out more about that over here.

I also have this to say, this is the movie that made everybody think Matthew McConaughey career was. This movie came out and did so terribly that Matthew McConaughey was largely written off. He would go on to eventually win Emmys and Oscars and be just fine. But at the time, in 2005, there were lots of people who were like, yeah, remember Matthew McConaughey, pu.

I guess you could say Sean. It turned out all right. All right, all right.

It . We’ll just move on from there. Thank you so much, . What were we watching on television? Well, on abc, we were still watching eight simple rules. Joan of Arcadia on cbs. The Friday night movie was Mr. Deeds. That was on Phlox Dateline, N B C, getting almost 8 million viewers.

What I like about you and Reba both getting between two and two and a half million viewers and then their star Trek getting 2.5 million viewers. A little rating of 1.5, which means that they had only 1.5% of American households watching, and this is, these are the, the end times effectively for enterprise.

I think at this point, I think, I wouldn’t be surprised if everybody at the network knew enterprise wasn’t coming back at this point. Yeah. I don’t know if the people making this show would’ve known it yet, but the people at the network probably knew, and that’s part of the reason why there’s such a big.

I believe in when this episode aired. This is April 15th. Our previous episode that we talked about last week was a mid-February episode. Mm-hmm. , we’ve gone almost two months without a new episode. A network that is trying to keep a show going and build an audience and rescue a show does not take a two month hiatus like that.

Especially not when in a season like this with enterprise. where they’ve been trying to build little story arcs and building, you know, multiple stories that are connected between multiple episodes. They would shorten the number of episodes that Enterprise would get. Again this year. Episode Seasons one and two, both got 26 episodes.

Season three got 24. Season four will get 22. So at this point for them to shorten the number of episodes to build in a two month hiatus. This at this point, I don’t think it is likely that showrunners and producers may have also known that they weren’t coming back, but it is definitely. Paramount at this point.

U p N was like this, this show’s not on its way into the

next year. I’d, I’d be really curious to know about what that, that two month gap, if it was deliberate, to give the showrunners time to rewrite some episodes to like wrap the show up. Cuz they knew at this point it was a done deal and so then they, they were given an opportunity to kinda retool things for the end.

Yeah. We, in the coming episodes, this is to give a little bit of a teaser, so as I mentioned, we are in. End days of enterprise and what that means as Matt’s questioned, like what does it mean as far as like rereading, retooling, what was the plan? Next week we’ll be talking about another two-parter, so this is kind of a heads up for everybody who’s planning on wanting to watch along with us and be ready for our next discussion.

Next time around we’re gonna be watching in a mirror, darkly parts one and two, and then after that it is three effectively standalone episode. So, and I think once we get to it, if it’ll be interesting what our discussion around the finale looks like, because I remember the finale in certain ways created a lot of debate around what it did and why it did it.

And so your question of what did they give them that two month window for? What was the purpose behind it? Did the show actually know it was coming? I don’t. because based on what I remember about the finale, if those two months were given to them to prepare for an ending, I don’t know that they did that.

So, right. You know, as we get closer we’ll do that. But for next time, uh, for anybody who wants to watch along, just be ready. You have to schedule enough time to watch two episodes cuz we’re gonna be watching in a mirror darkly parts one and two, and just from the title alone, I think we know where we’re in.

Mm-hmm. store for. Enough of that we’re gonna be talking about this current episode, which is, as we mentioned in April 15th, 2005, just to wrap up our comments about what was going on in the world from the New York Times, Ford and GM were in serious sales slumps as people were looking outside Detroit for cars.

And Matt, that’s probably not too big a surprise as we look at what’s going on in the automotive, automotive industry today. You know the change. Where people buy their cars and including what kind of cars, what was the year that Tesla made its first big splash and emerged as a place you could actually purchase a car?

I can’t remember the exact year, but it was right at the beginning of the two thousands that right around the time of this right.

also in the news from nasa. NASA reported that the Gulf Stream was slowing the resulting cold or climates could cause severe climactic and an economic disruption in Northern Europe.

And, well, I hate to say it, but here we are. Yep. So onto the episode. This episode takes place on December 27th, 2154, and we find the enterprise is basically looking for real estate. In this episode. They’re cruising around saying like, we’re gonna build a star base. We gotta find a place. And they don’t want, I like the, the in the cold open is basically making the argument like we, yeah, we wanna build a star base, but we don’t affect.

We want a star base that’s not going to cause a disruption on a planet that has indigenous life of some sort. So they’re looking at a planet that might have, according to early Vulcan research, describe something that sounds very much like dragons and there’s a lot of eyebrow raising T’Pol says, yeah, there’s been some debate about the authenticity of this report.

but they end up getting contacted by an Orion ship Herad sarr is the captain and he suggests that there is a reason for an invitation to meet and discuss business, and he does this in not the friendliest of ways. Effectively shows up loaded for bear and makes the statement. We need to talk business, and if you aren’t open to it, then I’m gonna be extremely insulted and then we’re gonna have a problem.

What did you think about this entire cold open, the return of the Orion’s, the like, the setup of what the tension in this show would be about? Did you find yourself looking at this and thinking, oh, Into more interesting territory between the original series and the enterprise, or did you have a different opinion

That’s a loaded question. More interesting territory. No. Absolutely not. I was intrigued. I thought it was a decent cold open. I had some good humor with the comments about the dragons, and then when Ryan showed up the tension of like, you know, I’m going to kill you if you don’t, you know, stop aiming your weapons at me and I’m gonna, or I’m gonna kill you.

That basic kind of tension. . It worked. I thought it was a decent cold open, but everything that came after it was extremely hand wavy, and not it’s, it’s like I was having to do a lot of work as a viewer to make the logic work. Mm-hmm. , it was there, gossiper threads, it was there. I was having to do a lot of extra legwork as a viewer to read into the subtext of what was going on, to explain away why would the captain.

over to this ship that is a hostile species. Yeah. His his explanation of like, I don’t wanna like , what was, how he phrased it? I, I just want to have one less hostile species out there against us. You know, let’s take the, it’s a risk, but I’m willing to take this risk to try to build that bridge. . I was like, okay, here’s a very thin okay.

Stretching logic a little bit, but okay, I can kind of go along with this cuz I, this is kind of a Friday night. Uh, we’re gonna have some fun here. It’s the original series. Ooh, Orion’s. That was kind of like for me, where I’m saying it’s not more interesting territory because this is not territory I gave a crap about.

At all. So the cold open. Okay. Yeah. Subject matter, not so much. I thought they could have picked a different topic, different species done something

completely different. I, I felt the same way. I felt like of all the species to lay claim. Yeah. To like, here is the potential for, I mean, like you pointed out arch’s comment of like, I’d like one less species.

That’s antagonistic for us out there. Yeah. It really, that statement kind of ignores the successes that the enterprise and Archer specifically have been having recently. They have built bridges between the Andorians and the tele rights. They have helped resurrect the original philosophical mindset of the Vulcans and removed the Vulcan.

Like, we’re gonna keep our hand on your shoulder until you’re big enough to go out there alone. Like they’ve, they’ve made so many incredible advances that I felt like the line that he says is almost something that should have been in season two. Like, yeah. At this point you’ve done away with like the Xindi threat is over.

You’ve built a bridge there with like the, the remnants of the Xindi, you know, collective is looking toward the earth as like, boy, we really blew that one up. Like we really like screwed up the, the first contact situation there. I didn’t see anything about the Orion’s as being like, oh, I can’t wait till they revisit that because the Orion’s we remember from the original series.

Mm-hmm. in only like, literally like the closing credits. Like they were not a linchpin of the show and I thought, they’re slaves. Yeah, that’s it. They’re slaves. They’re slaves. And we have seen them previously in the show and I almost felt like this, well cold open, almost ignored the fact that we have seen the Orion’s.

And for him to say, I’d like there to be one less hostile species out there like. , but you’re already on their shit list. Like it’s too late. How do you,

I mean, I, I think this discussion of this episode should be a little different than our previous discussions, cuz there’s not really much happening in this episode.

Yes. It’s really just they go over to the ship. , these three slave girls come out and dance and trance everybody. They come back to the ship with the girls and the girls kind of slowly work their way through the ship and stuff kind of ensues and all the men become obsessed and everything kind of goes downhill and then yada, yada, yada.

The episode ends. Yeah, that’s at a nutshell, not a whole lot going on. The one thing I will say about this whole setup is that I did enjoy some of the filmmaking, and I did. Go in like, like even though this is territory that didn’t really need to be mined because the Orion’s are just slaves. It’s very one dimens, they’re very one dimensional species in all of star Trek lore.

Even the lower deck’s animated show makes fun of that cuz one of the characters is a, an Orion. And in one of the episodes she’s like, you know, everybody assumes that all Orion’s are slaves or, or, or criminals. And then in the course of that episode, it turns out yeah, they all are. Yeah. It’s like, it’s, it’s, they even make fun of that concept in that.

So for me it was like what I was enjoying was more the filmmaking of it. Because when they go over to this ship, when the slave girls show up, I thought the filmmaking was very well done to kind of show that there was something hypnotic, something drug-like that was hap happening. Mm-hmm. immediately, because it starts with him clapping to bring in the slave girls and the first woman, the lead woman comes in and she kind of is like doing like the little dance thing through the group of them, and the camera is showing.

walk in. So you see her from behind and then she turns around and then the camera does this jump cut to her straight on and then two women come out from behind her. Yeah. And it’s like, where the hell did they come from? And then it cuts to the guys and everybody’s just kinda like, everybody’s starting to look kind of entranced.

Like they have like little spinning like spirals in their eyes. Yeah. It was like the filmmaking I thought did a very good job of emphasizing something’s not right here. There’s something unusual going on here. There’s something in intoxicating about what’s happening. Mm-hmm. . Um, so. It did well as far as that aspect of it, but again, your mining territory that has already been mined again and again and again and again, it didn’t really offer anything new.

Um, we’ve seen Kirk deal with Orion’s. We’ve seen pretty much, you know, the image series dealing with, dealing with Orion’s. It’s like this is not something that really needed to be done. Uh, but I thought they did well. They were starting to present. It kind of goes off the rails for me, as we get further in the episode, but I thought the establishment of that initial introduction was really well done.

I, I, I hear what you’re saying and, and really trying to separate filmmaking from Yeah. The content itself, because I felt like for me, the content in this was, . Yeah, it went, it went beyond just being nothing. It went into really just. Tasteless content that was really mm-hmm. , it really made me wonder like, why did Manny Coto think that this was fertile ground for an aspect of Trek that needed to be talked about?

There

was an, it’s obvious, Sean, it’s no, it’s obvious. It’s obvious they were just trying to be titillating.

Yes.

Let’s show as much skin as we can. There’s ly cloud women. Yeah. And be as sexual as we can. And that’s what this episode was about. It’s, it’s, and me

episode included a a half thought out name drop for fan service.

That immediately made me think that would’ve been more interesting when he mentions that the. The origin of this beverage is the Gorn, and I was just like, give us the gorn, give us a modern special effect version of the Gorn that would’ve been far more interesting. Mm-hmm. . And to set up the anta, the idea of an antagonism with a species that when we see the future episode where Kirk and the Gorn are on the planet together, and the entire setup of that is the most recent interaction between humans and the gorn turned.

Like, give me that episode as opposed to this, where it hinges entirely on two things that are unrealistic. It hinges on the idea that the enterprise has nothing but men. And we know that it doesn’t, and they dis, they do a hand wavy dismissal of the women on the crew not being affected, but they’ve got headaches and it’s mm-hmm.

and it’s this very. Nobody on the crew is there to actually do the work. And it’s presented as if once the Orion women have such a sway because of the pheromones that they’re releasing. They have such a sway on the male crew members that fights are breaking out and the ship can’t run. And I’m like, what about the female crew members that are not supposed to be affected?

Mm-hmm. . And then there’s also the element that was present. By a reviewer at the time of the original broadcast, which was, it presents everything with not only a misogynistic tone. Yep. But it presents everything with a, a almost, uh, almost an anti gay dismissal of like, this is operating on a level where it’s affecting every man.

But it’s not presenting there being anybody on the crew who based on their own gender or sexual identity, right. Being separate it, the only thing that saves two of the crew members is romantic entanglement. So it’s this strange pro. Hetero relationship agenda, and I do not think it is intentional. I do not think there’s anything about this.

I do not think that the writers, I think Manny Coto was just like, we gotta promote a pro heteronormative. Agenda, but they stumbled backwards into it in such a sloppy way for, and here’s my second element of what’s upsetting to me about this episode. The culmination of T’Pol and Tripp being back on the same ship and really having the conversation about what their relationship is to be.

and where they are with each other felt like it fell so flat in this episode. It’s anti-climactic for me. It did. And it just feels like they squandered. They had built up such a nice will. They, won’t they? Tension. And it feels squandered in this because topa is going to trip and basically saying like, look, there’s a thing that’s happen.

and here’s why. And Tripp’s dismissal of that moment, being overly playful in that moment and not giving it anything. There’s no media response to it. It is so flip in the way he responds to what this potentially could mean, that as a viewer, I sat there thinking that was it. Like that’s all we get. Well, I wanted, I wanted there to be a more heartfelt moment of like, I don’t know what the future holds.

but yeah, I’m coming back. So, so that

whole ending with Tripp and T’Pol were, Tripp is saying, tell me you, you want me to stay here? Tell me you wanna stay here. Okay, no, I’m gonna leave. And then she says, trip, I want you to stay here. She kisses him and he says, well, guess what? Three days ago I put in for a transfer to come back.

Mm-hmm. . As soon as he said that, I was like, wait a minute. The entire beginning of this episode was all about how Kelby the new chief and engineer was get hit cuz of the pheromones. He was getting all worked up that Tripp was coming back to take his job. My job. Yeah. And then he confronts him saying, you’re just coming back to take my job.

And Tripp’s like, he was like, no, I don’t. No, I’m not . It’s like, wait, you literally just, the of the episode said three days earlier, this whole sequence of the he takes part in this episode is not three days. Which means he’s lying to him, just lie to the face. Or you just forgot that you wrote that part in the script by the time you got to the end.

So it was like, there was like this dissonance to the entire episode of nothing. Makes no sense. Nothing from scene together. Scene. Yeah. No,

it felt very much like, like what you’re saying is like from scene to scene, nothing mattered. Every scene ended and it, the next thing could pick up wherever.

So I do.

I’m gonna put on my defender hat for this episode. Okay. Because there were scene to scene, didn’t matter. Everything, just kind of like things didn’t. But scenes, individual scenes, there were individual moments I freaking loved in this episode. I thought were really funny. Like the exercise scene where Mayweather is just trying to work out this Yeah, sexual tension just by working out, lifting the heaviest weights he can and hurting himself.

And then Reid comes in with the same idea and maybe whether keeps saying to him, you’re gonna need heavier weights. And the two of them have this funny kind of back and forth of they know something’s not right. and they’re like trying to work it out. I thought that was very funny, but at the same time, I’m like, you guys know something’s not right.

Why aren’t you talking to other people saying, Hey man, something’s not right here. I feel weird. He feels weird. We’re all feeling weird. What’s going on? The fact that nobody talked about it in that way bothered me. Everybody,

every male is walking around with sweat Yes, covering their entire forehead and nobody is like, I think something might be happening.

And I think it happens to coincide with those Orion slave girls. Yeah. The fact that when Archer, that, that was

probably having his But that scene, the scene was good. Yeah. That scene was funny. It worked for what it was meant to be, which was a comedic moment between two friends. Same thing for, um, flocks when I think it was Hoshi was in there trying to get medicine.

Yeah. She said she

had a headache. Yeah, she

headache and took, and he basically is like, he looks like he just rolled outta bed and then he’s like sliding off of things. He’s falling over. He basically, yeah. Yeah. He basically falls over. It’s like the, his performance was so good throughout the episode cause he was basically acting like almost like he was a little drunk the entire time.

Yeah. Because of the way it’s affecting a delin physiology, which I thought was fantastic, but at the same time, he wasn’t like a horn. . It was just making him incredibly sleepy. Yeah. So it’s like, I just thought that was like a really funny affectation and the way he talked about it and the scene where he’s like constantly injecting himself with stimulants, like he’s talking to

everybody just to his neck,

It’s like that stuff, the, the comedic moments in this episode I thought were really well done. But again,

I even think, even think the comedic moment of Archer talking to T’Pau about there’s this. and it’s covered in Magnetite and he’s promised us, promised us he’s gonna give us the location. We just need to cut him in on the profits out of getting this resource.

And Archer is talking like he is completely coed up. He is talking way too fast, . He’s marching back and forth and it’s just this like, we got this great business opportunity. Listen, we’re gonna put it in bottles. When we put it in bottles, it’s gonna fly off the shelves. It’s this kind of mania. That lets you know right away something is not normal.

And T’Pol’s expression, as he’s marching back and forth, she’s just like, Whoa, cowboy, slow down. . Like she’s just, yeah, you gotta take a, a breather because what are you doing? What are you talking about? Like you’re talking about profit. Like it really is, it’s, it’s hitting her as being very strange. And it is funny and I feel like you, in talking about that are keying in on the main thing that I wonder if what was happening was, should this have been a funnier.

should they have pushed? Yes. Deeper into a humor. And I also wonder like the whole Orion slave girl affecting men. Okay, let’s pull back from it affecting men. Let’s say that it affects. , everybody. Let’s make it gender neutral. It just affects everybody and it affects everybody in different ways. Make some of the men turn into this, like, I gotta get to the gym and work this off.

Make some of the other men focused intently on their work. They refuse to take time off and they’re just, Intensely focused on getting their job done, make some of the women do the same thing. Make people who don’t think they normally would be attracted to this particular type of person. Suddenly like, I’ve never been attracted to this type of person before, but I can’t stop thinking about them now.

Push it in those ways so that it goes beyond just like sexual. Make it about addiction, make it about like, push it really deep into that and play with humor in a way so that you’re across the board with like flocks. He’s just extremely sleepy T’Pol could have had a different response, you know, trip and T’Pol’s psychic connection being highlighted.

Basically by a reverse negative in this episode, I think is okay. I didn’t want it to have to be Orion slave girls. I didn’t want it to have to be Horn dog crew members. Making the two of them demonstrate like, oh, we have a special relationship here. . Yeah. But I think in what you’re describing, like the strengths of the episode are in the performances and the strengths of the episode in performances tended to be funny.

So maybe this just needed to be, I agree with you, really over the top in the form of, in the original series, whenever Hardcore Fenton mud showed up. It was like Exactly. You had special music for him and you knew what was gonna be funny and you knew like the trouble triples one of the best episodes they ever did and played for laughs constantly like that.

Well, entire, it’s kinda vibe exists within Trek. Do it here.

It’s kinda like the, it’s like the Fen, it’s like the Frankie word comic relief. It’s like when the friend got involved, you knew it was gonna be a comedic episode. Um, and to tie back, that kind of ties back to me for the whole premise of the episode made no.

and it was never explicitly like explained as to why the Orion’s went this path. Yeah. When, if they’re an equivalent ship, why wouldn’t they just try to knock. Snot of the enterprise. Just take everybody. Yeah. When the captain and some of the crew went over, why not just kidnap them? Why? Why were you going through this process of this subterfuge of sending the women over to kind of intoxicate everybody to, it’s like, you’re just making this, you’re making your plot so complicated, there’s so many points of failure.

Why would you do that? Take the easiest path if it’s, if there’s a bounty on the captain’s head, you’ve got ’em on your ship. Take ’em and. And get your bounty. It’s like, why would you, why would you do what you’re doing? They could have very easily explained that they were trying to do it with this least, uh, the least amount of possible damage as possible.

And they thought, well, if we can get the captain who’s worth a lot of money, what if we got the entire crew and the ship? We could make like a huge profit. They could have made comments like that by the end of the episode to explain why they did what. , but they didn’t, and it probably would’ve worked better if the ship was underpowered compared to the enterprise.

Yes. Which is why they did what they did. Like we can’t go to toe to toe with the enterprise. It’s too big of a ship and we’re a smaller ship and we can’t take them down. But we can go over there and do this method to try to do this. And you could have played all of it for laughs. Here comes the farge, this kind of ineffectual species.

You could have had it played the same way. This underdog Orion. ragtag group is trying to basically kidnap the entire enterprise by using these women to do it right and had fun with. But it, it, it wasn’t presented that way, and so the logic falls through and the humor was not amped up enough. So it’s, I agree with you.

They could have really gone a different direction with this and had a lot more

fun with it. I also didn’t like the supposed reveal at the end of, and it turns out the women were in charge the whole time. Like it, like, it’s just, it’s just a silly hand wave to dismiss something. Mm. The, it felt like the 2005 writer’s room was like, you know, this is really kind of problematic unless the women are in charge, so they literally just say it as opposed to actually demonstrating it.

It’s, mm-hmm. , it’s a, it’s a statement that is not backed up at all. By any of the scenes that we’ve just watched, it is not backed up at all by the history of how they were presented in Star Trek previously or how they’ll be presented mm-hmm. in the future. And it is, it’s just, it, it’s a nonsensical thing.

So it goes back again to like, if you were to take a different approach and really just kind of like make the, the motives clearer and make the method funnier. and then you can have the punching bag of the joke be the Orion male. He can be. Mm-hmm. doing things in a way that’s like, okay, we’re supposed to be mocking this guy.

We’re supposed to be laughing at him because he’s not going to be as good at what he’s trying to do as possible. The way this villain is presented, he almost gets away with it, and the only thing that keeps him from getting away with it is trip. And T’Pol figuring out a last minute way to reverse a power surge to his ship.

And I liked kids. The special effects of all of that I liked, I liked the, the showing the arc go through the tether and then a series of explosions deep within his ship. I was like, I was like, that’s kind of like interesting stuff and the kind of method of. , how they get, how they recognize it when the tepa and Trip are looking at the scans and they’re like, do you see what I see?

Yeah. I see it like, okay, let’s figure this out. Mm-hmm. like showing the two of them, figuring that out is nice, but ultimately it’s not to the value of an episode that is worth having that. . So it’s like, yep. I found myself thinking when there were cool moments in this, I was like, oh, it’s too bad they didn’t save it for a better episode.

So . Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And as I mentioned this, my response to it seems to be in the vein of some of the reviews. The reviews of this at the time that this episode came out were extremely divided between those who said, wow, this is great. This is in the vein of the original Trek, and this is what enterprise should have been the entire time, or mm-hmm.

people saying, This is misogynistic crap and there didn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground, and the fact that this is, as I mentioned before, one of the final episodes of the season. Part of the vision being let’s build bridges. I still wonder like what did Manny Coto see about the Orion’s that he thought we really haven’t figured out enough about them.

I think we did. They’re slaves. They used their women as slaves. For me, that was enough . Yeah. So as I mentioned before, the next time we’re gonna be watching two episodes in a mirror, darkly parts one and two, and I think that it won’t be any surprise to any of. That this is gonna be the mirror universe.

I’m looking forward to that, but my evil version is not. You’re already the

evil version with your, your, your beard.

This is true. Maybe I’ll show up clean shaven next time. Just to throw everybody off. , jump into the comments, everybody let us know what did you think about the Orion’s in this episode? Do you agree with Matt and me that this didn’t really amount to much and felt a little bit like a speed bump in the season, or do you disagree that there was something here that was worthwhile?

Let us know. Before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you wanted to share with the audience about your upcoming episodes on your main? Yeah, check

out undecided for this at the time this episode comes out. My most recent episode will be about antics update, which is putting solar panels over farms because it’s kinda like peanut butter and c.

It plants waste less water and then we can also generate electricity from the same plot of land. So it’s dual use of land. That’s really, really cool. A lot of interesting, uh, technologies springing up over the past year or two since I did my last video, so I thought it was time

for an update. Sounds good.

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