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Star Trek ... love it or hate it!
Boldly rubbing bodies
By BILL BRIOUX
Toronto Sun
Okay, the shower scene is pretty damn hot. In fact, that steamy sponge bath alone is worth watching tonight's otherwise endless and boring two-hour debut of the fifth Star Trek series, Enterprise (CITY-TV and UPN at 8 p.m.; repeated Sunday at 8 p.m. on Space).

If you are a dyed-in-the-polyester Star Trek fan (see Slotek, left), you'll eat it up. If you're not, like me, you might keep watching to see more shower scenes, but that's about it.

More about that shower scene in a moment. The pressure tonight is on Scott Bakula, the former Quantum Leap star who has been hired to skipper Enterprise as Capt. Jonathan Archer.

Using the universal "Three Stooges" measure of acting greatness, if Moe is William Shatner and Curly is Patrick Stewart, then Scott Bakula is Joe Besser.

Bakula is a very likable personality and has a warm, vulnerable screen image. He seems most at home in scenes where he is petting his beagle and staring wistfully into space.

However, he's no Kirk. Whenever the script calls for Archer to snarl and assert, he's about as convincing as Woody Allen.

That's a bad thing in Archer's corner of the universe, where Earthlings are constantly being pushed around by snooty Vulcans.

Enter T'Pol (stunning Maxim covergirl Jolene Blalock), an aloof Vulcan snobette ordered aboard the Enterprise to keep an eye on the Earthling space rookies.

As you read this, millions of Trekkers will be downloading Blalock's bodacious image and wallpapering their homepages with it. Her breasts are hands-down the biggest special effect in the series. They're better designed than the ship and probably even more otherworldly.

Naturally, she wears one of those clingy Seven of Nine/Marlen Cowpland sex suits. She peels if off for the completely gratuitous shower scene, where she and space cowboy/Chief Engineer Charles "Trip" Tucker (Connor Trinneer) have to give each other a thorough decontamination scrub after flying through space goo or something.

While not quite as sleazy as the endless Shannon Tweed movie loop currently airing 24 hours a day on CHUM's new digital wank Sex TV, Blalock and Trinneer definitely boldly go where no Star Trek series has gone before. By the time he gives her pointy little ears a scoop, there's more than one T'Pol in the tub.

Sex scenes aside, the newness of this Enterprise is the most charming aspect of this series. The show is set in the 22nd century, about 90 years before the time of Kirk. It's fun to watch these guys try to figure out their clunky new phasers and flinch at hopping into the untested Transporter.

I just wish that producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had tossed all the arcane Trekkie references and just stuck with sex and violence. The laser-tag, shoot-'em-up scenes were cool, even movie-like. And that shower scene!

Unfortunately, you have to sit through a lot of blah-blah-blah technical exposition about Warp 4.5 in order to get to those scenes. There was a reason Kirk delivered ... all ... his ... lines ... like ... this.

After a while, it all sounds like Klingon to me.

My other, chronic complaint is the overall lack of humour. In space, it seems, no one can hear you laugh. These pyjama-wearers always take themselves way too seriously.

Personally, I'd like to see more of John Billingsley, who plays portly alien Dr. Phlox, a bumpy-headed Bones and the closest thing to cheap-laffs this series has to offer.

Not that any of this nit-picking will matter to the millions of Star Trek fans who will be glued to this series for the next seven years (not to mention clogging my e-mail for about as long).

Enterprise is escapism with a capital 'E,' which, these days, couldn't arrive a century too soon. Me, I'll stick with The Simpsons.

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His counter part was a little more on the mark!

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Escape to deep space
By JIM SLOTEK
Toronto Sun
Is it the times, or was it something else that made watching the first episode of Enterprise, the fifth Star Trek series, such escapist pleasure?

Admittedly, there have been occasions during the tenure of Voyager and Deep Space Nine when I felt like I was watching the thing strictly out of a 34-year habit, from age 9.

But what you can say about the series after hundreds of episodes of Treks, Next Generations, Voyagers and DS9s, is that it is a marvel of continuity, such that those who've been buying into it now know as much about the "history" of the 21st to 24th centuries as they do about the real thing.

Born in the fractious '60s, Capt. Kirk and Co. hit a nerve with the wish-dream notion that humans can one day put aside their differences to go on together to the stars. Enterprise, a new series set 90 years BK (before Kirk), fills in the pieces on how that's supposed to happen.

And once you've glommed the cool blue Gore-Tex bomber jacket uniforms, heard the "whizzzz" of their "phase-pistols," and otherwise absorbed the Flash Gordon-esque adolescent charms of Capt. Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) and the crew of the Enterprise, the latest "history" lesson inadvertently provides bonus food for thought for those now seriously pondering the tradeoffs between freedom and security.

From the movie Star Trek: First Contact, we know that the Vulcans, the pointy-eared guys, are the first aliens that humans meet, in 2061. What we find almost a hundred years later in TV's Enterprise, is that Vulcans have ushered in the end of disease, war, racism and, by extension, earthbound politics. On the other hand, they treat humans patronizingly and limit our access to new technology until we are deemed "ready."

That is the context for Enterprise, in which Capt. Archer and crew set off for strange new worlds over the Vulcans' objections.

Oh, and by the way, grammarians will be pleased to know the world's most famous split-infinitive -- "to boldly go" -- has been scotched. In a cameo reprising his role of warp-drive inventor Zephram Cochrane, James Cromwell delivers a bon voyage with the words: "You will go boldly where... (yatta yatta)."

There's a crew of defined personalities, a captain who resents Vulcans, and a babe, Vulcan Science Officer T'Pol,

who is not fond of humans (Jolene Blalock, who has a completely gratuitous "decontamination shower" that shows off her tremendous assets).

There's an alien doctor named Phlox (John Billingsley) who has the cheery bedside manner of the cook, Neelix in Voyager, hot-shot pilot Ensign Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery) and a linguistics expert, Ensign Sato (Linda Park), who inherits Dr. McCoy's dislike of space travel.

The muddled plot involves first contact with a Klingon (Tiny Lister) who gets waylaid (shot by a farmer) on Earth while fleeing to the Klingon home world, with news of an anti-Klingon plot by a race of shapeshifting mutants called the Suliban.

And there's humour based on viewer familiarity -- both technical (a first-ever human beam-up, Capt. Archer fiddling with the stun-and-kill controls of his prototype phaser) and situational.

Archer, for instance, is supposed to be Horatio Hornblower-esque in the Capt. Kirk mould, though he doesn't appear to yet have a comic sense of that.

A female Suliban appears to him in human form, is instantly turned on, and on liplock turns back into a mottled alien. "That's never happened before," Archer says, a line that would be hilarious out of Bill Shatner's mouth, but which loses something with Bakula's dry delivery.

Still, he has time to learn. And I'm anxious to watch.

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[ September 28, 2001: Message edited by: Alshrim Dax ]

"...that steamy sponge bath alone is worth watching tonight's otherwise endless and boring two-hour debut of the fifth Star Trek series..."

"If you're not, like me, you might keep watching to see more shower scenes..."

"...stunning Maxim covergirl Jolene Blalock..."

"Her breasts are hands-down the biggest special effect in the series. They're better designed than the ship and probably even more otherworldly."

"I just wish that producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had tossed all the arcane Trekkie references and just stuck with sex and violence. The laser-tag, shoot-'em-up scenes were cool, even movie-like. And that shower scene!"

"Me, I'll stick with The Simpsons."

What idiot hired this guy to review sci-fi? If he wants to see sex, violence, and humor, let him review that sort of stuff. But, if his definition of a "good" show requires those things, don't have him review things that have nothing to do w/ that.