Star Trek Randomized Rewatch: Horizon

ENT "Horizon"

The Randomized Rewatch spits out its first Enterprise episode! Not my favorite Trek series, and a rare Travis Mayweather-focused episode at that, exploring the backstory of one of Star Trek's blandest regular characters. So call me pleasantly surprised when I report that "Horizon" is a pretty lovely little episode.

The episode gets off to an underwhelming start. One of my pet peeves in TV is the lame duck teaser, or the teaser that gives the viewer nothing to work with, no special motivation to come back after the opening titles. "Horizon"'s teaser features Travis getting a call to come to the Bridge because Admiral Forrest just called. That's it.

Riveting stuff.

My theory is that at this point in Trek history, the mandate was to make the teasers as short as possible. But that's no excuse.

Anyways, this episode sees Travis reunite with his mother and brother, and reckon with the sad news of his father's death. The whole family are space freighters, in contrast to the infinitely more resourceful Starfleet. This actually brings up something like class issues, but that's not a main focus of the episode.

There's a touching scene where Captain Archer consoles Travis on his father's passing, and it's nicely and sensitively done, with a warm score from Mark McKenzie. Same goes for Trip's notably thoughtful gesture of giving Travis pictures Trip's taken of him over the past two seasons to show Travis' mom. See, I'm used to Enterprise characters behaving like incompetent reprobates, so this is all a nice change of pace.

Continuing with that theme, there's also a pretty delightful subplot where Trip programs a film festival of Frankenstein movies, consisting of the 1931 original, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. (I've seen all four of those movies.) T'Pol's bemused reaction followed by her insightful reading of Frankenstein's themes reflects well on her.

The main jeopardy of the episode comes from Travis' family's ship being attacked by space pirates, but there's also an Enterprise-bound subplot where they observe a planet that's been superheated by an unusual orbit and thus seeing widespread volcanic activity. This is little more than a footnote in the episode, so I won't get into the fascinating history of volcanic Prime Directive scenarios in Star Trek. I'll save that for if the Randomizer lands on the TNG episode "Pen Pals".

Speaking of TNG, which the Randomizer last sent me to, "Horizon" gets real cute talking forward to that show. Travis wonders aloud if future Starfleet ships will carry families onboard, and Malcolm jokes that if that's the case, they'll also need a psychiatrist aboard.

A warm-hearted outing that's part of the way to a hang-out episode. 7/10.