{"id":6574,"date":"2017-10-09T13:00:29","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T20:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/?p=6574"},"modified":"2017-10-02T06:52:10","modified_gmt":"2017-10-02T13:52:10","slug":"mark-watches-enterprise-s04e04-borderland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/2017\/10\/mark-watches-enterprise-s04e04-borderland\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Watches ‘Enterprise’: S04E04 – Borderland"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the fourth episode of the fourth season of Enterprise<\/i>, one person saves this whole thing. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to watch Star Trek<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Trigger Warning: For talk of slavery<\/b><\/p>\n

I have more interesting in the possibility<\/i> that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s given to us at the end of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Borderland\u00e2\u20ac\u009d than for the actual execution of this story. It was brilliant of Enterprise<\/i> to give us an ancestor of Dr. Noonien Soong (given the timeline, it has to be someone further down the line, right?), and Brent Spiner is EASILY the best part of all of this. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just so fun<\/i> here!<\/p>\n

But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to care about characters who have had so much development and drama off<\/i> the screen. The Augments might have been interesting to explore in more detail, but we meet them right as Malik has orchestrated the takeover of a Klingon ship. Before<\/i> this, they lived an entire life on… a planet? Somewhere? What was it like there? We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t actually know! Apparently, it was a terrible experience, but no one ever tells us why that is. <\/i>The worldbuilding is TERRIBLE here, and it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re expected to care about the power struggle between Malik and Raakin without knowing anything about them, except that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re the only two white men in this group who are somehow, coincidentally, the only two possible leaders in this group. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like either of them, and I actually thought Persis was the one that was being hinted at as the actual<\/i> person aiming to lead the Augments.<\/p>\n

So, the personal politics of these characters weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t interesting to me at all, which is unfortunate because that took up so much time in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Borderland.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d They are brief flashes of brilliance early on in the episode, though, so I held out hope. I loved the crew taking a quiet moment to appreciate that they were getting the opportunity to go out on another mission together! And if they hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been interrupted twice<\/i> by the Orion Syndicate, T\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Pol and Tucker might have actually finished having a conversation about what T\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Pol\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life had been like after her marriage. I STILL NEED THIS CONVERSATION TO HAPPEN.<\/p>\n

Then there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Dr. Soong. Oh, Brent Spiner, YOU ARE SO MUCH FUN HERE. He plays Soong with a wackiness that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s infectious, and he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the kind of antagonist who dominates a scene every<\/i> time. I could excuse most of the silly politics given to us \u00e2\u20ac\u201c there is literally not a drop of nuance to this script \u00e2\u20ac\u201c because it allowed Spiner to grin while giving us a character who truly believed that he was better than everyone else. That arrogance manifests in scarier ways, of course, since it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s clear Dr. Soong and the Augments (great band name) don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care about anyone but themselves. That<\/i> element of this story is what leads into the second part, after it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s revealed that Dr. Soong DELIBERATELY guided Enterprise<\/i> into the Orion Syndicate\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s space, allowed people to be captured as SLAVES, and then notified the Augments so they could rescue him. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s awful \u00e2\u20ac\u201c undeniably so! \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and yet he remains the most intriguing part of the episode.<\/p>\n

I wish this was more interesting, but I hope there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a better story in this next part. I mean, I get more Brent Spiner, so that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a positive thing! Hopefully, he doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t lecture another person about slavery, though. Yeah, Star Trek<\/i>, can we not do that? Like, how you gonna have Soong make reference to Tucker\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s accent as a way to comment on America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s participation in chattel slavery, yet have a slave auction full of white people in the very same episode? Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not.<\/p>\n

The video for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Borderland\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can be downloaded here for $0.99<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n

– My YA contemporary debut, ANGER IS A GIFT<\/a>, is now available for pre-order!\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong>If you’d like to stay up-to-date on all announcements regarding my books, sign up for my newsletter<\/a>! DO IT.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"