That’s right, boys, put on them spacesuits and land on that comet
and show me that sweet, sweet astronaut shit.
This is a review of my favorite episode of Star Trek: Enterprise,
“Breaking the Ice.” If you have not seen this episode,
and you don’t want to know what happens in it, be warned: spoilers beyond this point!
So, of course this is my favorite Enterprise episode. How could it not be? For one thing,
it’s an excellent episode — and Enterprise didn’t make a whole lot of those. And for another, it
features the crew engaging in a significant amount of astronaut shit, which I always love to see.
One of the most compelling things that Star Trek can do for me as a viewer is to frame its heroes
as the future descendants of our present-day astronauts, cosmonauts, taikonauts — whatever
provincial term you want to use. That’s one of the first things that attracted me to Star Trek
as a little kid. I loved and admired astronauts, and here was this TV show and series of movies
about people in the future who were doing what astronauts do, just at a much higher level.
“Breaking the Ice” begins with the ship encountering an unusually large comet,
and Captain Archer deciding to follow it for a while so they can study it. I love the excitement
and sense of wonder that the encounter with the comet evokes from the crew. Archer tells them,
“Look out a starboard window to see something amazing.” And they look, and it’s amazing — more
amazing for the characters on this show than it would be for those on other Star Trek shows. This
is an example — an unfortunately rare example — of Enterprise taking advantage of being set in
an earlier era of Star Trek history than the other series to show us something different.
The crew of, say, Captain Picard’s Enterprise were also futuristic astronauts,
but they visited new planets populated by exotic aliens on a weekly basis,
and lived in a world where that sort of thing had been normal for centuries. A comet was no
big deal to them. But to the crew of Archer’s Enterprise, most of whom are humans who have
never ventured so far into space before, a close encounter with a newly discovered
comet is exciting enough to warrant prominent mention in letters to home. Hell, it’s exciting
enough to warrant writing an extra letter to home — “Dear Mom, Guess what? We saw a comet!”
The episode does a very good job of building a story around the discovery of the comet that feels
natural and logical — and not just because we’ve also got some extra Vulcans hanging around. They
find the comet — great. What next? They discover something special about the comet — it contains a
rare mineral. But, the mineral is located too far beneath the surface to collect a sample remotely,
which means they have to send two crew members to the comet in a shuttlepod to do
some drilling. They do that. What next? Malcolm and Travis don spacesuits, do their comet walk,
but in the process of blasting through the comet’s frozen surface so they can
drill down to get at this mineral, they alter the comet’s rotation, which means the area of
the comet they’re currently on will be turned toward the sun earlier than they planned. When
that happens, the surface temperature will rise to a dangerously high level,
putting Malcolm and Travis in jeopardy and creating a ticking clock scenario.
Malcolm and Travis collect their mineral sample, but as they’re hurrying to pack up and get back
to the shuttlepod, Travis slips and hurts his leg. They get back to the shuttle before
the sun comes up and cooks them in their spacesuits like a couple of baked potatoes
wrapped in aluminum foil — which isn’t the best way to do baked potatoes, by the way — rub them
with some oil and bake them unwrapped for a nice crispy skin — delicious. Anyway,
they make it back to the shuttlepod, but the surface ice has been weakened by the sunlight,
and the ice breaks — eh? Ehhh? — and the shuttle falls into a fissure. Archer tries to pull them
out using Enterprise’s grappler, but can’t do it, so he’s forced to swallow his pride and
ask for help from the Vulcan ship that has been hanging around observing them from a subplot.
And that’s pretty much it for the comet stuff, which serves as the spine of the episode. It
all makes sense, it creates a situation with some suspense, it ties in to the other plot
about Archer’s resentment of the Vulcans, and it includes opportunities for some nice
character moments, like when Travis and Malcolm build a snowman on the surface of the comet,
then Archer chastises them for messing around and building a snowman when they
know the Vulcans are right there watching, so Malcolm adds a set of huge pointy ears to the
sides of the snowman’s head and then they blow it up. Characters make choices it feels like
they would make given the situation they’re in, and when unexpected things happen — like
their blasting changing the comet’s rotation, or Travis slipping and falling, or the shuttle
falling through the ice — they’re the sort of things we can easily imagine would happen if two
people were hurrying up to do some science on the surface of a comet, so nothing feels contrived.
And I haven’t even mentioned my favorite scene in the episode, which has nothing directly to
do with the comet, but is also an example of the crew doing astronaut shit, just of a
different kind. It’s the scene on the bridge where Archer and the rest of the crew attempt to answer
questions sent to them by an elementary school class back on Earth. I love everything about this
scene — the way Archer carefully phrases his answers to be appropriate for young children;
the way Hoshi doesn’t, and ends her bit with an example of how a slight mistranslation
when talking to an alien race can make the difference between telling someone to take your
hand or to take your life — you’re speaking to grade-schoolers, Hoshi, for god’s sake! — the way
Dr. Phlox gets so involved in his own answer that Archer feels the need to cut him off so the kids
back home don’t have to sit through a rambling germ-related anecdote; and, of course, Trip’s
annoyance at having to answer a toilet-related question, and his adorable insecurity about the
kids thinking he’s the sanitation engineer. It’s a perfect scene, it reminds us that these people
are away from home and they miss their friends and families and favorite places, and it lets us
see them doing the sort of thing actual astronauts living on the International Space Station do all
the time — correspond with students on Earth, and use their experiences in space as a teaching tool.
It roots this outlandish sci-fi/adventure show in our real, present-day world,
makes it feel grounded, in a way that — again — doesn’t come across as forced or manufactured.
Every time I watch this episode, I find myself thinking, “I wish the show was like this more
often.” Because in terms of setting and level of technology, Enterprise is really in the sweet
spot to do episodes like this. They’re advanced enough so that sending a couple of guys to land
on a comet to do some science is no big deal, but not so advanced that any emergency that occurs
during the mission can be solved with the push of a button. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect
that every episode could have been like this — or should have been — this is still Star Trek,
after all, you want ‘em to run into some Klingons at least every once in a while. But
more episodes like this, where the story and the drama comes from these people exploring,
getting into and out of trouble while acting like astronauts, would have been nice.
There’s no villain here. The jerkass captain of the Vulcan ship serves as an antagonist to Archer,
but he’s not actually a bad guy — in fact, he saves the day,
using his ship’s tractor beam to pull Travis and Malcolm out of that fissure.
The drama comes from the circumstances. It also comes from the characters — the Vulcan
ship hovering nearby creates tension between Archer and the Vulcan captain,
as well as between Archer and T’Pol — and Scott Bakula is clearly having fun playing
Archer’s poorly disguised resentment toward the Vulcan captain during their scenes together.
There’s also another character-driven subplot about T’Pol’s upcoming arranged marriage, and
how she has to choose between returning to Vulcan to get married or remaining on Enterprise. This
is episode eight of season one, so there’s not a lot of suspense as far as what T’Pol will choose,
but it’s still handled very well. And again, the way the story brings Trip and T’Pol together
feels natural — the Vulcan preoccupation with secrecy clashes with the human paranoia about
Vulcans operating behind their backs when T’Pol receives a coded message from Vulcan;
wanting to know what the Vulcans are trying to hide, Trip, who discovered the message,
has Hoshi decrypt and translate it, only to discover that it’s a personal message
about the wedding. Feeling guilty about invading T’Pol’s privacy,
Trip comes clean and apologizes to T’Pol, and later, when T’Pol realizes she needs someone to
talk to about the decision she has to make about leaving or remaining on Enterprise,
she talks to Trip, because he’s the only other person aboard who knows her private business,
and why tell anyone else about it when she doesn’t have to? Perfectly logical.
So, yeah — a well written main plot built around futuristic astronauts doing astronaut shit,
some great character driven scenes, multiple meaningful character beats between Trip and T’Pol,
and Archer having to swallow his pride and ask the Vulcan captain for help,
and everything coming together in the end to form a single, cohesive story. They even find
an appropriate, simple image to end on — we see T’Pol meditating in her quarters,
about to enjoy a piece of pecan pie, established earlier as a favorite of Trip’s,
to signify not only that she has chosen to remain on Enterprise rather than return to Vulcan,
but also that she is growing closer to Trip. It’s just a nicely executed show at every level. And,
like “The Thaw,” my favorite episode of Voyager — hey, “The Thaw”? “Breaking the Ice”? Coincidence?
Yes, definitely, it means nothing. Anyway, as with my favorite episode of Voyager,
my only regret about “Breaking the Ice” is that it’s not more representative of its series.
Those are my thoughts on “Breaking the Ice,” my favorite episode of Star Trek: Enterprise.
What’s your favorite Enterprise episode? Please share it with me
in the comments. If you’d like to support this channel — and I sure wish you would,
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Don’t forget to watch for my review of the fifth episode of season three of Star Trek:
Picard coming this weekend. I’m teaming up with my best friend and podcast co-host Jason Harding
to review this final season of Picard, and our next review should be up sometime this weekend,
hopefully on Saturday. And please join me again at this time next week for another retro review.
Next time it’ll be my favorite episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, “Yesteryear”!
I’ll see you then. Thanks for watching and take care, everybody!