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01/22/2004: Enterprise: 3x13 Proving Ground
My thoughts on this week's Enterprise...
I thought Proving Ground was fun, much better than last week's ep. (And btw, has that been an episode title for another show recently? Somehow it seems very familiar, but I can't place it.)
I liked the Shran and Archer scenes, and I thought it was great that we got to see more of the Andorians as an advanced civilization, who have technology far better than Starfleet, and probably even advantages over the Vulcans in some areas. At least the Andorian ship has remarkably few problems in the Expanse, which is more than the Vulcans can say. I also liked the snark between Reed and Talas.
I was a bit disappointed though that the visible Andorians were shown just like males and females and that Talas spoke of her "mother" when I thought that it had been said in some earlier appearances of the Andorians that they have four sexes (maybe in DS9? at least I don't think that I got the idea fanfic or such). I thought that was a cool idea, to have some alien races with different genders, but all the interesting points become moot when they are shown as if they were like humans. I mean, I know there are Andorian "females" also, like the physical appearance Data's child considered in that TNG episode (though iirc that hologram did not have such visible boobs as Talas), but it would have been cool if the more complex Andorian family structure had become visible. This episode would have been a great opportunity for that.
And when Archer compared the test site to Bikini Atoll, I wondered whether the official Starfleet historians (or maybe just Archer) chose to forget that Bikini Atoll wasn't uninhabited before the Americans relocated the people there in the 1940s (and not even far enough, considering they had to be relocated again in the 1970s because of the radioactive contamination). The moon where the Xindi try their weapons didn't look like they had relocated inhabitants.
