First Flight

DVD, Enterprise S2 (First Flight)

This was meant as a nostalgic look back at the origins of the warp program and the first steps toward human starships, but I felt more confused about it than pleasantly informed. The time span was the first thing I wasn't sure about. It's fun to see the first meeting of Trip and Archer (or it should have been, but it was a fairly low-key introduction with Trip appearing to let some steam off at the Vulcans), but because they look almost exactly as they do in the series, do the same things, where the same kind of uniform it seemed like a very short time before the start of the series. At the end we learn it was about six years or so before, but that makes me question why it took so long for humans to go from warp 1 (Zefram Cochrane first broke the warp barrier in 'First Contact' set in 2063), to going above warp 2 (about 2145?). Trip says it took the Vulcans over a hundred years to go from 1 to 2, and it's almost that here. So why in the following years did they get up to warp 5 and produce the Enterprise NX-01? The timeframe seems 'warped' itself!

If a little thing like fiddling with the intermix of the engines got them half a warp faster (2.5), surely it wouldn't have taken so long to get to warp 2 in the first place? And is Henry Archer, Jonathan's Dad, responsible for the warp 2 engine or something less than that, as I can't remember from the pilot. Jonathan Archer's never seemed like much of an engineer yet he's the one giving all the advice on the engine, and what exactly was the cause of Henry's death, and have we even been told? Apart from all these questions, and the suggestion that sometimes the problems take years to solve and other times they only take a few months, it was interesting to see back to those earlier days. I just wish more had been done to show this as an earlier period beyond Archer being a Commander and Forrest a Commodore. That was another confusing thing as I thought Commodore was a step up from Admiral, so was Forrest demoted or (more likely), am I just confusing the ranking system?

AG Robinson wasn't a bad character and seeing a bit of the rivalry between him and Archer for the first flight of the title gives the series some background, but it didn't bring the period or the situation to life for me. It's probably an episode that would appeal more to the tech-heads and those interested in the real dynamics of spaceflight and charting the progress between present day advances and the future of Trek, but I'm more interested in the fantastical areas of the series. I like that there is a basis of fact and reality that the technology and history is founded upon, but I can't see this appealing on a story level to that many people.

Again the 'senior staff' are missing, even Archer says a line for Phlox - "'Optimism,' as Phlox would say," but the doc doesn't even appear. I'm all for exploring individual characters, and this is definitely an Archer story, but I didn't feel like I'd learned that much about him. We already knew he hated the Vulcans at this point, and it's more about AG, this character that's been created for the episode. As always, if this had been a name we'd heard before, or someone we'd seen, as Admiral Forrest has been, there would be more of a connection, but we're supposed to get all that from the interaction between Archer and AG, and, I wouldn't say it was forced, but it wasn't particularly engaging. The framing story of Archer and T'Pol going off to look for Dark Matter was a bit ho-hum and although there were interesting aspects to the episode (seeing the launch ramp of the NX-Alpha and -Beta models, a step along from Cochrane's Phoenix; mention of the inevitable NX-02, maybe the first time it's been talked about?), it didn't spark.

I believe this was the 50th episode and was deliberately meant as a tribute to the space program and the connection between it and the series, and while Levar Burton, returning as director, didn't mess it up, it didn't quite become that work of feeling and momentous occasion it should have been due to the time and progress of the warp program not being clearly enough spelled out for me and not much heart to the story and characters. We should have felt Archer's grief over his Father not being there to supervise, the intense joy of getting to warp 2.5, and the sense of relief that the human warp program would continue. But the episode didn't deliver on those things and remains merely interesting from a coldly logical point of view, just like the Vulcans who watched over it.

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