Hey, wasn’t that the name of a TNG episode? Well, whatever. Some of you may recall my post last week wherein I critiqued the premiere of the third season of Star Trek: Enterprise. The second episode of the season aired yesterday evening, so I gave it a look. And all I have to say is “Wow.” Now this is what this show is supposed to be about!

Yesterday’s episode, “Anomaly,” felt like a glorified installment of Voyager, except without all the annoying technobabble and long, dry spells filled with static shots of Seven of Nine’s bust. Yesterday’s Enterprise was well-rounded, action-oriented through the whole thing, and conveyed still more of that real sense of danger. Plus, I swear Scott Bakula has never had quite so commanding a screen presence. So it is possible for this guy to be halfway cool after all!

Perhaps best of all, the show played up the mystery angle that Trek always does so well. TNG was chock-full of mystery stories, and they were all done well. Maybe it’s just because I like a good mystery that keeps the viewer guessing ‘till the end, but I think that it works especially well in the Star Trek universe. In a way, the entire story arc of Enterprise’s third season is a mystery in itself, one that keeps getting more complex each week.

Yesterday’s episode found the crew of Enterprise suffering from still more gravitational distortions, courtesy of the whacked-out area of space they’re in, the Delphic Expanse. In the opening moments, we’re treated to such cool visual tchochkies as the floor actually rippling like someone had lifted up the carpet, causing hapless crewmen to fly across the corridor—and even better, Captain Archer’s coffee cup actually jumping off the table, spilling its contents, and then freezing completely in mid-air as if caught in a pocket of zero-gravity. (From a nitpicker’s perspective, the only problem was that even with gravity reduced to zero, the inertia of the flying coffee would have caused it to keep moving…but oh well, inertia is routinely ignored in Trek.)

Anyway, after these distortions temporarily cripple the ship, Enterprise gets raided by a bunch of pirates. One of them gets knocked out by Trip during the raid, Archer throws him in the brig and tries to coerce some useful information out of him as the ship goes limping off in pursuit of the invaders. And Archer is not very patient with this guy. During one scene, he tosses the pirate into the airlock and begins to decompress it, giving the pirate forty seconds to cough up some useful data before he ends up coughing up his own lungs. The scene is brilliantly executed, and the music is some of the best I’ve heard in the last decade of Trek. Cinematography all throughout the episode was top-notch as well, with hard pans and wide-angle effects being put to great drama-enhancing use.

Never once did the action let up. There was never a scene that lasted for more than a couple of minutes that had you starting to relax before the tension built up again. Near the end, the crew encounters what could be a sort of Dyson Sphere, but with sinister undertones that suggest we’ll be learning more about its origins (and purpose) over the course of the season. I like these continuing stories. Our dear friend T’Pol was used only as an effective member of the crew during times of crisis, not once as a scenery-chewing prop. (Instead, that honor was bestowed upon some blonde chick in hotpants who is apparently a member of this new “military strike team” assigned to Enterprise for the big mission. Which smells of “Hazard Team”, I might add.)

Again, I’ll reiterate that I’m pleased with Enterprise’s new direction, and state that with the season’s second week, that direction doesn’t seem to be letting up any…yet. This would still allow the show to follow tradition set by most modern-day Trek series, in which the first one or two seasons sucked severely.

At this point I’d say the only thing that needs changing is UPN’s accursed “bumper music”…supposedly the channel has slightly updated its “look” for this fall, but they need to throw away the audio bumpers and take the re-recordings more seriously. I swear, they’re horrible. My wife came in last night just in time to hear one and nearly died laughing. Basically it sounds like a bunch of “hip” people singing “U! P! N!” in the most over-acted voices possible. Come to think of it, though, UPN has always had the stupidest bumpers in existence. UPN 65 in Orlando was no exception…although at least theirs just smacked of “low budget,” not “gross stupidity.”

Okay, given how far off topic I’ve wandered, I think it’s time to put the lid on this one.