'E²' Earns Mixed Numbers From Critics

See Also: 'E²' Episode Guide

The first online reviews for last Wednesday night's Enterprise episode, "E²", were quite mixed, with some reviewers greatly enjoying the plot and character work while others found it derivative or confusing.

• The Great Link's Michael Marek admitted that time travel episodes are a guilty pleasure of his and awarded the episode marks of four out of five. “'E²' has a nice balance between [the] character-driven scenes and ship-to-ship combat action sequences, including one in which the two Enterprises fire on each other," he said. He appreciated the parallels between Archer's actions in stealing the warp coil and Lorian's attempt to steal plasma injectors, as well as the elder T'Pol's moving explanation of her emotional life. The full review is at The Great Link.

• By contrast, O. Deus of TrekWeb found the episode overly dark after last week's "The Forgotten" and was unimpressed with the Trip/T'Pol developments. "Enterprise does Voyager and encounters its future in the form of reruns of previous Star Trek episodes hashed together," he wrote. Referring to Lorian as "the first Redneck Vulcan on Star Trek" Deus said that he "combines Trip's boneheaded stupidity with T'Pol's emotionlessness to produce a truly boring idiot." Though Jolene Blalock's performance impressed him, David Andrews as Lorian put him in mind of "a coma patient." The full review is at TrekWeb.

• Monkee gave "E²" a 9.5/10, saying, "When we're looking back at Enterprise five years from now, this one's going to stand out." Praising the episode for closing some holes in continuity, the emotional development of the characters and all the might-have-beens it suggested, she felt that Lorian behaved "exactly as you'd expect a Vulcan-Human hybrid to be, under his circumstances, with the emotional T'Pol as his only Vulcan role model," and noted that Andrews "did an outstanding job" in the role. For the full review, visit Monkee's Place.

• Keckler of Television Without Pity had not recapped the episode at press time, but her brief summary stated, "As fate and the 'shippers would have it, Trip and T'Pol have made a large, old baby, Quantum has some great-ish granddaughter born with a perma-furrow (natch), and Phlox has proven to be quite fertile with Not'Pol." She also casts aspersions on Reed's sexuality and notes of the plot, "It's really quite confusing." The full review will appear here.

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