Star Trek: Enterprise 1-01: Broken Bow - Part 1

Episode:

1

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Writer:

Rick Berman & Brannon Braga

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Director:

James L. Conway

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Air Date:

26-Sep-2001

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm reviewing the 629th story in the Star Trek franchise, Broken Bow! I figured I might as well, seeing as it's its 20th anniversary today.

But unlike all those other episodes, this story doesn't push the timeline forward. Trek had spent 14 years in the Next Generation era, but this took a huge jump 227 years backwards from Star Trek: Voyager to tell a story about Starfleet's early days. Prequels were in at the time, with Star Wars returning to cinemas with The Phantom Menace, so I suppose it wasn't a surprise that Trek would want to jump on that bandwagon. This was a real turning point for the Star Trek franchise though, as after the final Next Gen movie, Nemesis, the franchise spent the next 17 years stuck in its own past.

Personally I would've preferred to find out what happened next in the 24th century... and now I've got Lower Decks, Prodigy and Picard for that, so I'm happy. At the time though the franchise wasn't really inspiring much enthusiasm in people. Deep Space Nine had been over for a few years, Insurrection had been a real disappointment, and Voyager had kind of rolled past the finish line on fumes. Plus even though Trek hadn't exactly been heavily serialised, it had built up enough mythology during its Next Generation era to be daunting to some viewers. Enterprise had a premise different and interesting enough to bring some hype back to Trek and it promised to provide a jumping on point for people who didn't know the difference between a Cardassian and a Kazon. It definitely got me to jump back on board after skipping the last few seasons of Voyager... though I may have jumped ship again a few months later. It's not my favourite of the spin-offs to be honest.

I'll be going through the entire episode writing comments under screencaps, so this will contain MASSIVE SPOILERS. There may also be spoilers for episodes and movies from earlier shows as well; anything before 2001 is fair game. Though unlike the commentary tracks on the disc, I'll not be spoiling anything that comes after it.

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Here's my first bit of amazing Broken Bow trivia: they got Reed and Trip's shoulder stripe colours wrong on the VHS cover.

Enterprise isn't the most well known of the Trek spin-offs, but everyone knows it's the one that stars Scott Bakula, of Quantum Leap fame. They were looking for a rugged Harrison Ford type to play a rugged Chuck Yeager type and he signed on when he was told he could play the very first captain in Trek. The guy that Captain Kirk had wanted to be when he grew up

The studio wasn't actually keen on making it a prequel though. In fact they weren't keen on a lot of the choices that creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga wanted to make, like setting the entire first season on Earth, but they were able to reach a compromise. Braga had come up with the idea for a TV series where factions from the future fought a cold war across time, and he gave it to Enterprise so that it could technically be a prequel and an sequel at the same time.

One thing the studio wouldn't compromise on though was the air date. It had to be on TV just 4 months after the end of Voyager. Berman and Braga weren't keen on this as they were exhausted and burned out after so many consecutive seasons of Trek (Berman had been working on the franchise for 14 years straight, Braga 11), and they felt that Trek was exhausted too. They called it 'franchise fatigue', saying Trek needed a break to regain people's interest. I think there's some truth to that, only it was mediocre Trek that people were really tired of.

The two creators weren't the only people on the production crew to return for Enterprise, as there was production designer Herman Zimmerman, costumer designer Bob Blackman, the same makeup artist, same concept artists, same visual effects producer, same composer... they just invited everyone from Voyager over it seems. It was pretty much Star Trek: The Same Generation, which is very different to Discovery, which basically had a clean slate when it came along. Director James L. Conway also had plenty of Trek experience, as he'd started way back in season one Next Gen and had directed episodes like Duet, The Way of the Warrior, and, uh Justice.

The very first shot in Enterprise is of this guy, sitting in his model spaceship, next to his identical buddy in the other chair. A bit ironic seeing as this is the first Trek series to have 100% CGI visual effects.

Deep Space Nine and Voyager both began their first episode with some dramatic scrolling text to set the scene, before going straight into a space battle. This goes straight into... a kid painting around the cockpit window. There's also the sound of a ticking clock in the background, which is a bit weird and annoying.

They've given the footage a sepia tint to show that we're in the past and that just makes it even less appealing to look at, to me anyway. This doesn't feel like a TV series filmed in the 2000s, and these two don't act like real people. The first line's very Star Trek though, with the kid saying "Where no man has gone before." His dad replies that Cochrane would be proud of him, apparently because he successfully remembered a line from his speech. Incidentally this line also appeared right at the other end of the show as the very last line of dialogue in the series, so I've got to give the writes credit for that.

Their conversation turns to the dad's ship and when it'll be ready to fly, and he literally says "It hasn't even been built yet. You know that." It is nice of the two of them to share information they already know just for our benefit. The kid also reveals he's a little bit racist, describing the Vulcan ambassador as Ambassador Pointy. His dad's not keen on Jonathan talking like that, but he does admit they'd have a warp 5 ship by now if the Vulcans weren't inexplicably intent on keeping things from them.

Okay I think this is a pretty terrible scene, but it does hint at an interesting situation. The series is set midway between the first meeting with the Vulcans in Star Trek: First Contact, and a United Federation boldly exploring space in The Original Series, and even though Earth's getting on okay with the Vulcans, there's clearly a bit of resentment there.

BROKEN BOW, OKLAHOMA
30 YEARS LATER

Well we didn't have to wait long to learn what the title refers to.

The scene fades to a shot of a crashed spaceship lying in a cornfield in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, and then we see the pilot making a run for it, pursued by two other aliens. It's a Klingon, played by Tiny Lister (the president in The Fifth Element... amongst other stuff) and he's got the proper makeup!

Though hang on, aren't the Klingons supposed to have flat foreheads at this point in the timeline?

Actually, I have a better question: where is Broken Bow, Oklahoma anyway?

Ah, Google Maps knew the answer. It is a real place, and it's very picturesque apparently. Lots of nice lakes and forests. Not many Klingons.

Now I'm wondering where that first scene with the model kit took place. Oh you can see the Golden Gate bridge out of the window, so it's San Francisco.

The Klingon runs for a futuristic grain silo to get some cover from the other two aliens that are shooting at him. Meanwhile a farmer looks out of his front door, sees the smoke and energy beams, and goes back inside to get his space rifle. He poses for a moment with the gun, then smacks the power clip to show it's loaded and ready to kick ass.

They've dropped the sepia effect but the cinematography still looks strange to me somehow. It almost looks like black and white footage that's been colourised; I'm not sure what's going on there.

The two aliens find that the Klingon's locked the silo door behind him, so one of them decides to go inside and unlock it.

He does this by squishing his head under the door, turning into a CGI model that looks like it was borrowed from an early Resident Evil game. That can't be good for his brain. I really hate these costumes by the way, with the bits of rubber glued on. They almost look designed to be just as unrealistic in real life as they are in CG, so that it matches properly.

It seems like they have the Klingon cornered now, but he just leaps out of a second door. He gets a bit of distance from the silo, draws his pistol, and blows the whole thing up while the aliens are still inside!

No, don't dive in front of the explosion! They built a silo and blew it up just for this shot and you're getting in the way!

Actually we get plenty of angles of the exploding silo, they really show it off. It's fair to say that the episode has some flaws, but I can't think of anyone who'd have any complaints about this scene. Well, except for the farmer. He's not keen on this at all.

The guy runs up with this rifle and tells the Klingon "Drop your weapon!"

This is Farmer Moore, named after writer Ronald D. Moore, who was Brannon Braga's friend and writing partner for a long time until their time on Voyager together drove a bit of a wedge between them. I'm not sure if they'd patched things up by this point, but this Moore sure comes close to ruining everything here.

The Klingon shouts something in Klingonese, but the farmer doesn't have a universal translator so he doesn't understand a word of it. The Klingon doesn't seem to understand what the gun pointed at his chest means either, and he takes a step forward. The farmer decides he's coming right for him, and takes the shot. To be fair, the Klingon was standing there with a gun, next to the smoking wreckage of the silo he'd obviously just blown up.

And that's it, the teaser's over. This means that this is the first time a Star Trek series pilot has started with an entirely planet-bound teaser. We don't get to glimpse a single star here. Plus it is a bit weird how the flashback prologue had absolutely nothing to do with the action in Broken Bow.

OPENING CREDITS

Oh right, this.

Sometimes when I'm watching a TV show and the opening credits come on, for a moment I worry that it's going to play the Enterprise theme. This time my worst fears came true.

Here's some facts about the Enterprise opening titles!

• The logo is written in Microgramma, which is the font they generally use to write the names on Star Trek ships. It is not the font used on the actual ship this time though.
• The temp track was "Beautiful Day" by U2. They knew they weren't likely going keep it for the final episode though, as it would've been too expensive.
• The song they ultimately went with, "Where My Heart Will Take Me", was a cover of a song from the Patch Adams soundtrack.
  
• It's somehow not actually called "Faith of the Heart", but the songwriting is so cliché that you can take any line from the lyrics and it'd plausibly be the title of a cheesy soft rock tune.
  
• There are all kinds of other songs you can put over the opening titles and chances are the end result will be better than the song they chose.
• "Archer's Theme", the theme that plays over the end credits during the rest of the series, was apparently written to play over the opening credits. It's just as cheesy.
  

I think what's happened here is that Rick Berman's taste in music really doesn't align with mine. I had the same problem with Deep Space Nine and the swing music that kept showing up in the later seasons. The producers deserve credit for taking a risk and not just giving it a typical theme, but music's so subjective that you can lose a lot of people by doing that.

The actual visuals are great however, as we get clips showing humanity's journey to the stars. Early sailing ships, a hot air balloon, the Wright Brothers, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Space Shuttle Enterprise, and so on. Stick "Beautiful Day" over the top of this and it's one of the best Trek openings!

It's implied later in the series that the NX-class Enterprise was named after the Space Shuttle Enterprise, which was named after Kirk's ship from the original Star Trek, so the series is getting a bit meta here. In fact Gene Roddenberry and most of the main cast dropped by when the shuttle was rolled out of the assembly facility, though I don't think any of them are in this shot.

After all the fuzzy footage of real things we start getting clear footage of fake things as the montage continues past the year it was filmed in. I mean there's nothing fake about the International Space Station, but I don't think it was anywhere near this far along back in 2001.

This shot might actually be my favourite CGI in the whole episode. It came out looking really nice.

There is one last bit of softer grainier footage here, as we get the launch of Zefram Cochrane's Phoenix from the movie First Contact. The film did make use of CGI, but this shot was all done with models I believe. Which means there is a proper model shot in this episode after all!

One great thing about this sequence is that it lets us see where the Phoenix fits in context with the all the other developments that led to humans exploring space. It also hints at how the series is actually following on from that movie, showing what Cochrane's warp flight and the first contact between humans and Vulcans led to.

Finally we finish on the hero ship herself, the Enterprise NX-01, looking a bit less realistic than that space station for whatever reason. It's nothing to do with the quality of the model, as it had a ton of detail for the time.

It's weird how introducing the ship in the opening credits became a thing in Trek for a while. Voyager, Enterprise and Discovery all make you wait before they reveal the ship for real.

ACT ONE

See, now the episode's hinting at what the ship looks like, even though we've already gotten a clear look in a flyby!

This is Charles 'Trip' Tucker III on the left and Captain Jonathan Archer in the baseball cap, checking out their new ship. It remembers me of a scene early in The Orville's first episode where the captain and his best friend fly around their ship in a pod, except in that the pilot is drunk and almost hits something, and in this Tucker is presumably sober and still manages to bump into the ship. The characters are more casual and fallible than the ones we're used to, and they're pretty likeable so far.

Both these characters had a different name earlier in the series' development, with Trip being called Spike until someone remembered Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Jonathan being called Jeffrey until former politician Jeffrey Archer was found guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice.

We learn that they'll be trying to bring the ship up to warp 4.5 next Thursday, which will apparently get them to Neptune and back to Earth in six minutes. I was going to say that probably depends on where they are in their orbits, but it seems that the planets are so far away that it barely matters.

Something about the look of the CGI in this series bothers me, perhaps because of how sterile it all is. It's giving me a weird craving for lens flares. And why are the cores of those blindingly bright floodlights grey?

There's a lot to like about this shot though. I don't know if this was a close up section of the ship built just for this scene, but I can believe it's actually the main model and it's just that detailed. You can also see how the ship has a hint of a bronze colour to its hull compared to the grey pod, which sets it apart from the slightly blue-tinted Voyager. It was designed to be even more bronze, but it was really toned down for the final model for whatever reason.

The episode required so many CGI shots that two visual effects studios were brought in, with Babylon 5/Voyager veterans Foundation Imaging focusing on the space shots and the relatively new Eden FX handling the VFX composited into live action. So this would've been a Foundation Imagining shot.

Hey it's a future city! They don't mention which, but judging by the bridge I'm guessing it's San Francisco again. Also Archer gets a call to go to Starfleet Medical, which is presumably located there.

The episode takes place in 2151, over a hundred years before The Original Series and before the founding of the United Federation of Planets, so it's a bit strange that Starfleet is already around. Though I suppose it's Earth Starfleet and not Federation Starfleet.

Starfleet Medical is a heavy redress of Enterprise's armoury set, with curved glass recycled from Voyager's sickbay, and right now it's full of high ranking officers and Vulcans. This Klingon situation is a major concern and the Vulcans are determined to handle everything themselves, much to the annoyance of the human officers who'd like to at least know what's going on.

The humans are so clueless about the galaxy at this point that they don't even know what a Klingot... Klingon is. We do though! We also know that this is going to be a pretty important event in Star Trek history, at least according to the Next Gen episode First Contact which revealed that "Centuries ago, disastrous contact with the Klingon Empire led to decades of war." It's two centuries before that episode, so this seems to be the disastrous contact.

The Vulcans have at least revealed that this particular Klingon is a courier who was on his way back to Kronos with important information, though their information also comes with a recommendation that Enterprise's launch should be postponed until this all cleared up. It's just 'Enterprise' in this, by the way not 'the Enterprise'. I guess because Brannon Braga got too used to working on Voyager.

Archer is a little bit pissed off to hear this, but not surprised. The Vulcans have been finding reasons to delay his ship for 30 years now. He is a little surprised though when they tell him they'll be taking Klaang's corpse back to Kronos, so he opens the regular hinged door to go ask a doctor if they're currently treating a corpse in there.

Dr Phlox here is the series' alien outsider character, following in the footsteps of Spock, Data, Odo and Seven of Nine. It's his job to make observations about humanity from his own unique perspective (and also to treat patients, seeing as he's a doctor). Some fans had an issue with a Denobulan being introduced in a prequel, as we've never seen one before in all the other series that came before it. I'm fairly sure we've never seen one in all the series that have come after it either though! The live-action ones anyway. There are almost 600 sapient alien species listed on Memory Alpha, and I've no idea what percentage of them have reappeared in a crowd scene on DS9's promenade or whatever, but I have to imagine that the vast majority have never returned.

The Doctor confirms that their Klingon is currently alive and may well stay that way, but the Vulcans believe killing him will be ideal as the Klingons are all about dying in battle. Archer clearly doesn't understand the complexities of interstellar diplomacy! Plus humanity still needs to control its volatile nature.

There are three Vulcans here, Ambassador Soval, his assistant Tos, and T'Pol, and they're all roughly equally condescending. Though they do not have equal eyebrows. They've tried to make T'Pol more sexy it seems. Shame that was impossible with that Liam Gallagher wig she's wearing (they fix all this in later seasons).

Archer points out to T'Pol that if he didn't have his volatile nature under control he'd be knocking her on her ass right now. Humanity aren't exactly 24th century paragons at this point, but at least they're not attacking alien ambassadors in hospitals. I'd like to see him try that against three people who could likely pick him up with one hand though.

There's a pretty notable set of actors in this scene. Gary Graham had a one-off role on Voyager, but is better known for starring in the series Alien Nation (he played the human). Thomas Kopache and Vaughn Armstrong are two of the five actors who've played more than seven characters in Trek (the others being Jeffrey Combs, Randy Oglesby and J. G. Hertzler). And Jim Beaver's been all over TV, most notably on Deadwood and Supernatural. Their characters have some notable names as well, with Tos named after The Original Series, Admiral Forrest named after DeForest Kelley, Admiral Leonard named after Leonard Nimoy and Commander Williams named after William Shatner.

Soval's actor raises his voice in anger here, which isn't very Vulcan. Scott Bakula knows his Vulcans and immediately quipped "When your logic fails you raise your voice? You've been on Earth too long", which is a bloody good ad-lib. The producers thought so too as it stayed in the episode. That's pretty rare for Star Trek.

Anyway Archer tells Admiral Forrest he'll need three days to get Enterprise ready, because that's the kind of line that sounds good in a scene like this (also that's how long Trip told him it'd take in the scene in the pod earlier). They're going to take the Klingon to Kronos themselves! And it seems like Phlox is getting invited too!

Damn, now I know where JJ Abrams got the idea to put lights in everyone's faces in his Trek movies.

This is Travis Mayweather and Malcolm Reed, though we don't know that yet. Their discussion about the transporter is cleverly packed with other information though, as we learn that it's been approved for use on helmsmen and armoury officers, and that they'd much rather take a shuttlepod. The producers didn't want a transporter on the series but the studio insisted, so they compromised by making it too scary for people to want to use. In fact I'm a bit confused why it doesn't have its own room, with protective barriers and warning signs around it.

It's a very fast transporter though, plus it's got blue sparkles like in Next Gen even though the Original Series one featured gold sparkles. I guess because gold would've clashed with the monochrome look they've got going on here.

You get a good look at the new uniforms here and they're a bit dull. But they've got pockets! And zips! They were inspired by NASA flight suits, as the producers wanted to make the series feel a lot more modern day. These are also the first and only Starfleet uniforms since the Original Series to be missing the delta shield symbol, which would unthinkable now seeing how every bit of fabric has to be covered in little arrowheads these days. They actually made of blue denim with the back of the fabric facing forwards though I've never been able to tell. Well, okay they were more like purple denim in season one, but they get bluer uniforms in season two.

Something about the glow on those lights is giving this a bit of hazy dreamlike look. Or maybe I'm just dozing off.

Voyager had inherited the sets from Next Gen, which had inherited them from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and so on, all the way back to Star Trek: Phase Two. They rebuilt those sets dramatically each time, but they always followed the same basic layout. Enterprise, on the other hand, was working from a clean slate. That meant they were able to build an entirely new corridor layout without the dead ends, and the actors could walk around them in a circle or a figure 8 if a conversation was dragging on. Though the downside of building everything from scratch is that it took 16 weeks to build the Enterprise sets and they cost 5 million dollars, which is almost half the budget of the episode.

Unfortunately these corridors are somehow even more grey than Voyager's, and Voyager's corridors were entirely grey. The only colour on screen is coming from the costumes, and you can see how well that's working out. How is this a prequel to the most colourful of the Trek series?

Oh no, the warp engine has colours all over the front! Don't worry, Trip's got his little cloth out and he's sorting it out.

We learn here that Mayweather is a 'space boomer', which means he's really into the classics like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D etc. No actually it means that he was raised on one of the slower cargo ships, which is another nice idea that Enterprise introduced. Space travel is currently so slow that freighters can take years travelling between planets, with families living on the ships in isolation. But technology is marching forward, and when those freighters become as fast as Enterprise, Mayweather's family's way of life is going to become obsolete. Either that or they'll just travel between destinations that are further away.

Awesome, some actual colour! It looks very strange to me though somehow. I keep saying that, but it does, and those CGI-looking buildings just don't have the charm of an old fashioned matte painting. It's nice to actually see a part of Earth that isn't San Francisco or Paris for once though.

This is the part of the episode where Archer has to get a team together to pull off this mission. Except they're all on board the ship already except for Hoshi Sato.

Ensign Sato is currently trying to teach students how to speak an alien language with clicking sounds and isn't ready to come back to Starfleet for a couple of weeks. Sure Archer could force her to come back, but she points out that Starfleet rules mean that she'd be reprimanded for it and unable to serve on Enterprise. I'm glad they took the time to explain that!

Hoshi's apparently the best there is though and second best isn't going to be good enough for Enterprise. Clearly humanity needs to get better at alien languages.

So Archer gets out his mp3 player and plays a bit of the Klingon language for her, which immediately gets her attention. Turns out he's got the Vulcan edition of Marc Okrand's 'The Klingon Dictionary' from Soval, though Starfleet's had to make some compromises in exchange for it. The Vulcans come across as really overprotective parents in this, who won't let their kid get a car until they're 50 and even then they can't drive it without one of them in the passenger seat. It makes sense though I suppose, as they had to wait until Hoshi was born and had graduated before they could even think of allowing Earth to send an explorer ship out.

Anyway Hoshi puts her own desire to be the first human to speak to Klingons ahead of the needs of her students, and she's on the team!

When I was writing about Voyager's first episode Caretaker last week, I suspected that the director was deliberately avoiding wide shots of the sets to keep the audience curious about what they look like. Well this is our first shot of Enterprise's bridge! Archer and Trip leave the turbolift and walk across to his ready room, and we catch a tiny glimpse of it behind them along the way. In fact there's no way to know that this is the bridge on a first viewing.

We learn here that one of the compromises they've made is to put a Vulcan spy on the ship. Or a chaperone you could say. She'll only be with them for a week though, four days to Kronos and four back, and then they'll be free to do some proper human exploration!

Here have a picture of a dog:

Did I mention that Archer's got a cute little beagle called Porthos and he apparently didn't get the memo that absolutely everything in this ready room has to be blue/grey.

Their Vulcan officer arrives and it's T'Pol, the one who was with the ambassadors in Starfleet Medical! She's in full 'Seven of Spock' mode now, with a tight Vulcan jumpsuit on to show off her curves. At some point the producers were thinking of making her T'Pau, the one who appeared in the Original Series, but that ultimately didn't happen as it would've cost money.

It doesn't take her long to pick up Porthos' scent. She's clearly not keen, but she's been "trained to tolerate offensive situations". We never actually see the actors and the dog in the same shot though, probably because it would've slowed filming down. Well okay we see T'Pol's leg when he jumps up at her. She's not keen on that either.

It's clear that the three of them don't get on, with T'Pol practically sneering at Archer the whole time (as much as Vulcans can), but Trip at least makes the effort to shake her hand. She ignores him.

I remember when I first heard that they were casting a captain, a southerner from the US, and a Vulcan to be the main trio for the new Star Trek series I thought it must be a fake rumour or a cunning lie or something. Especially when I heard what their names were going to be. It came across like such an shameless low-effort attempt to replicate the dynamic of TOS that I couldn't believe they'd actually do it.

I like this set though. Well, I like the idea behind it anyway, with all the metal beams and a ceiling so low they're in danger of smacking their head on it. The ship was designed to be more cramped, utilitarian and military than later Trek ships, more like a nuclear submarine. I feel like they got halfway there.

By the way, the pictures in the background were inspired by the pictures in the Motion Picture Enterprise rec deck and the sculptures on the back wall of the Enterprise D observation lounge, and they depict previous vessels to carry the name. There's the US Navy vessel USS Enterprise, (not to be confused with the Royal Navy vessel HMS Enterprize featured in the opening), the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise CVN-65 (as seen in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home), the Space Shuttle Enterprise (which did show up in the opening), and the NX-01 herself.

Now we get to witness the historic launch of Earth's first true explorer ship! The other Trek ships might have become a big deal over time through their adventures (except for the Cerritos), but Enterprise was special from day one.

In fact this is such a special event that we've got a cameo by movie star James Cromwell, reprising the role of warp drive inventor Zefram Cochrane. Every new Trek series up to this point featured a cameo from an earlier series in its first ep, with Leonard McCoy in Next Gen, Jean-Luc Picard in DS9 and Quark in Voyager. Unfortunately Cochrane couldn't be here in person as he vanished years ago, so they're playing a recording from the dedication ceremony for the Warp Five Complex 32 years ago. Which would be 2 years before the sepia prologue and 56 years after First Contact.

"On this site, a powerful engine will be built. An engine that will someday help us travel a hundred times faster than we can today. Imagine it. Thousands of inhabited planets at our fingertips. And we'll be able to explore those strange new worlds, and seek out new life and new civilizations. This engine will let us go boldly where no man has gone before. Like astronauts, on some kind of Star Trek."

Okay he didn't say that last line this time, but it would've been fine if he did, because Zefram Cochrane is the one person who can get away with it. He's the closest thing to an in-universe Gene Roddenberry and that's why he gets to be the source of the speech Kirk and Picard make at the start of every episode. No split infinitive in Cochrane's version of the speech by the way, so Kirk and Picard have been misquoting him slightly.

Meanwhile the crew take their places on the bridge, which we still don't get a good view of. The bridge scenes were apparently the first to be filmed, and they didn't get the bridge monitors working until like 30 seconds before the cameras rolled. There was a lot more hardware driving those displays than you might expect.

The bridge was designed using the opposite approach that they used when designing the Enterprise D: instead of taking the Original Series sets and making everything slicker, simplified and more open, they made things clunkier, more complicated and more cramped. Fortunately they planned ahead and used a camera crane on the bridge to allow them to get the camera in there without necessarily having to pull the walls out. The sets were also designed to be lit by the practical lighting built into the rooms, so it didn't matter if the lights showed up on camera or not. The downside of making everything look less advanced is that to some viewers the ship actually looks more advanced. More than the Original Series, more than even Voyager! Personally though I think it looks ancient and ready to fall apart the moment they get a bit too optimistic with the throttle.

Unfortunately this is another scene where my own taste clashes badly with the taste of the people involved, as this is just too cheesy for me. It's supposed to be an awesome, emotional moment where Archer finally gets to live out his dream and put his father's engine into use, but the use of "Archer's Theme" has me cringing. It's definitely a lot less dramatic than the launch of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

It doesn't help that we get another sepia flashback to kid Archer and his dad, as he puts the hovering warp core into his model spaceship. I guess it's a hover core in this case. Scenes like this really expose how clueless I am about cinematography, as I'm struggling to understand and express exactly why this is bothering me so much.

Here's a pointless fact for you: this version of Archer is 9 years old, meaning that adult Archer is 39 years old. Scott Bakula was 47 though, so was playing a character 8 years younger than himself. Patrick Stewart was also 47 when he took command of his Enterprise, but he was playing a character 12 years older than him.

I just thought of something, why is Archer the captain? I mean he's had no experience captaining an explorer ship obviously, has he commanded any other ships? Has he served on a Vulcan ship learning how it's done? What qualifies him for this role? Why is no one explaining this?

And there she is, the NX-01 Enterprise! She's got the basic shape of an Akira-class, a saucer from an Excelsior-class, warp engines like the Phoenix, and the twin boom design of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning.

A lot of fans had a problem with this design, a lot probably still do, because it doesn't look old enough and references too many designs from 100-200 years later. I mean even the deflector dish and impulse engines are straight off the NCC-1701, just squished and split in half respectively. Despite that I think designer Doug Drexler did a good job at making it look more primitive than the ships that came before it, as the extra detailing and slightly awkward shapes make it seem like it was built by engineers who had to make more compromises.

Personally if I was the King of Star Trek, I would've told them ditch the saucer as this is a pre-Federation ship and I want to feel like the NCC-1701 was the product of engineers from different worlds coming together, instead of being an evolution of a human design. I also would've told them to thicken the pylons, to indicate that materials weren't as strong at this point.

Not an actual screencap

Drexler's original plan was to make the pylons much thinner actually, so it would've looked more like this. He also wanted to give the ship a refit in season 5 to add a cylindrical section underneath and make it look more like the Original Series Enterprise, which I don't understand. Why not just let 100 years of starship evolution happen in the meantime?

It could've been much much worse though. The producers apparently just wanted to reuse the Akira-class design unchanged, which sounds too ridiculous to be true. It'd be like making a Hornblower series set on a modern aircraft carrier and expecting no one to notice.

How big is the NX-01 anyway? The number we've been given is 225 meters long but how does that relate to the later ships?

That puts it around here on the size chart, so not actually as small as it seems. (Though I think the official numbers have the classic NCC-1701 Enterprise scaled too small).

You can kind of see here why people nicknamed the NX-01 the 'Akiraprise'. Though look at how similar the original Enterprise and the Enterprise D are as well! Starfleet just latches onto shapes it likes and keeps reusing them.

Fans have never complained about Enterprise's warp core at least. Well okay I'm sure someone has, but it really looks the part. Previous warp cores were designed to be the centre of attention in the room but this one's so primitive that it basically is the room. It was also pretty well built as a set, as actors were allowed to go walking on the top of it.

You'd think that advances in technology in the real world would've made it much easier to get the warp core light show going, but it was actually pretty complicated on the inside, and loud. Not ideal when you're trying to record dialogue, but that's the price for pretty lights.

Back on the bridge Archer orders them to prepare to go to warp for the first time, but T'Pol goes and ruins the moment by pointing out their coordinates are off by 0.2 degrees. That actually seems like quite a lot if you're travelling billions of miles, but is it? Assuming they can't fine tune their course during warp it'd mean they'd arrive somewhere maybe 20 minutes away from their destination, so it's not all that big of a deal. Stop being such a nerd T'Pol! Archer still probably should've had Mayweather correct for it though, because they're astronauts and precision is kind of important.

Meanwhile, inside a strange looking space station, within a murky nebula, something sinister is happening. At least that's what the music is hinting at.

Come back tomorrow to find out what!

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO

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TOMORROW

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, Broken Bow continues. Will Enterprise's first mission encounter any complications or are they just going to drive to Kronos and back? And who's this person Archer's kissing? Check back tomorrow for the shocking answers.

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