30 – Dead Stop

Grade: C+

Summary

The Romulan minefield from the last episode caused considerable damage to Enterprise. Archer decides to send out a distress signal and in response, he finds out about a place where the ship can be repaired. When the price turns out to be fairly inexpensive, he begins to be skeptical about their motives.

Commentary

This was the type of episode I like – something new and different that hasn’t been done a zillion times before in this franchise. Well, actually, some parts of it were taken directly off other episodes from the franchise, but it was kind of new. Well, maybe that doesn’t make sense. I enjoyed the episode anyway.

Tucker starts wandering off to try to find out how this machine works and how it can replicate the exact parts they just happen to need for the repairs to the ship. I’m not sure why he thinks this is a good idea, but maybe it’s just curiosity. After all, this repair station can fix anything for a relatively low price – so why not try to investigate? Well, it turns out to be a bad move on his part, so maybe he’ll learn his lesson.

One thing bugs me though. Mayweather ends up getting killed and we’re all supposed to gasp at this, but then does anyone really believe he’ll be dead forever? I mean this is Star Trek and only a few regular actors have ever died in any series. Well, it turns out it’s just a clone of Mayweather who gets killed, so the joke’s on us. Yeah, whatever.

Actually I think it would have been more effective if they had used a previously unknown Redshirt for this purpose because it wouldn’t have been obvious from the start that Mayweather wasn’t really dead. Like I said, Star Trek rarely kills off a regular character, so we knew there had to be something else going on here. On the other hand, if it had been a random Redshirt, then maybe we would have been surprised and they could have done something else with the plot.

Overall it’s a decent episode that could have been a bit better.

Of Note

Roxann Dawson (who plays Voyager’s Chief Engineer B’Elanna Torres) was the voice of the computer on the repair station.