Star Trek Randomized Rewatch: Silent Enemy

ENT "Silent Enemy"

A sickly green-colored alien ship drops out of warp in Enterprise's face, stares it down for a few minutes without responding to hails, then warps away. As Travis puts it, "Maybe they checked us out, decided we weren't that interesting".

The setup is too easy; insert punchline here.

But while encounters with that mysterious craft dominate the main plot of the episode, the subplot also is textually about how uninteresting the regular character Malcolm Reed is.

In a memorably unusual setup for a B-plot, Captain Archer tasks Hoshi with figuring out Malcolm's favorite food. Since Malcolm's birthday is coming up in a couple days, there's a ticking clock. Archer contacts Malcolm's parents on Earth, Hoshi calls his sister and best friend, running into a wall every time. It's a lightweight subplot, amusingly generated basically by how boring Malcolm appears to be. That's one way to develop your characters.

The enigmatic aliens do keep coming back, eventually boarding the ship and skulking around like the aliens in Signs. Their ship tactically outmatches Enterprise, leading Trip and Malcolm to spearhead a project to install phase cannons on the ship. This is all pretty perfunctory stuff, but it succeeds in Enterprise Season 1's mandate to portray Starfleet's origin story. The ship can't even shoot phasers until this episode. Technology later Enterprises take for granted are coming together gradually for the first time. On that point, Archer and Trip have a conversation in the Kirkian "risk is our business" tradition, framing Enterprise as a true pioneer ship.

A functional episode, with a workmanlike A-plot and an entertainingly odd B-plot. 5/10.