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Enterprise

Episode 2.02, "Carbon Creek"
Story by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Written by Chris Black
Directed by James Contner
Air Date: 09.25.02

Well, I’ll be the first to admit when I’m wrong. And boy was I wrong about “Carbon Creek.” When I first saw the preview last week, I thought we were in store for a world of pain. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised – it was actually pretty decent. Might I even say good?

It’s a very unusual episode in that it barely deals with the crew of Enterprise at all. We start with T’Pol telling Archer and Trip the story of humanity’s first contact with the Vulcans over dinner. And guess what – it wasn’t Zeframe Cochrane in Montana. Say what? Well, needless to say Archer and Trip aren’t buying it. But then she proceeds to tell an extremely detailed account of four Vulcans who crashed in Pennsylvania in the 1950’s, one of which was her grandmother no less.

The Vulcans had been studying humans from low Earth orbit shortly after the launch of Sputnik. Now this could been viewed as contradictory to established continuity since I’m pretty sure they said in First Contact that Cochrane’s warp signature first attracted their attention. But I supposed it’s debatable, and B&B have made it obvious for some time now they aren’t really sweating the continuity that much. So whatever. Not a huge deal I guess. Anyway, something goes haywire and they crash. They sent out a distress beacon but have no idea if anyone heard it, so it quickly becomes apparent that they’re going to have to learn to live amongst the humans. T’Mir is typically T’Pol-ish in her attitudes towards humans, but one of her crew, Mestral, becomes fascinated with humans. He’s basically the main character of the episode since he’s the only one really doing anything interesting. At one point, he risks cultural contamination by using some of their advanced tools to rescue some trapped miners. In the end, though, a rescue party does finally come for them. Interestingly enough, Mestral actually decides to stay behind and study humanity firsthand, and apparently did so for the rest of his life.

Now this is certainly not the stuff of classic episodes, but I gotta say I really enjoyed it. Something I don’t get to say nearly enough about Enterprise. I thought it would be handled really lamely with tons of stupid fish-out-of-water jokes, but it was all done pretty well. And my favorite part – the fact that we got the idea for Velcro from the Vulcans. Nice.

So there’s not much more to say really. Fun episode. Pretty light fare with little to do with the overall story arc, but it doesn’t matter. Chris Black’s good script salvaged what could have been a very poor episode.

Episode Rating: 7.5 out of 10.

-- Ultra Magnus is deathly afraid of being stranded in Pennsylvania.

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