Well, I just watched this week's Enterprise last night. (I was going to watch it on Wednesday, but something came up and I ended up taping it instead.) And I find that my reaction to it, like my reaction to most episodes, and quite possibly to the series in general, can be summed up quite succinctly as: "Eh."

It's not that the episode didn't have anything going for it. It was a decent enough story in the traditional Trekkish social-commentary mold. (Now, admittedly, as time goes on I find my taste for the traditional Trekkish social-commentary story is diminishing steadily, but that's my problem, not Enterprise's.) And it was great to see Dean Stockwell again, as a very different character than the one he played opposite Scott Bakula on Quantum Leap. It was also nice to see that they hadn't forgotten the Suliban story arc. Even if this episode didn't really add much of anything to it, it did at least indicate that the writers haven't forgotten about it, and serve to keep us viewers from forgetting about it, either.

So, really, there was nothing at all about the episode that I could actually point to and say "this was bad." But I found my attention wandering as I was watching it, anyway, something that seems to happen to me a lot with this show. There may not have been anything wrong with it, you see, but there also wasn't anything in particular to point to and say "this was good." Like most Enterprise eps, it was there, it was watchable, and I'll probably have forgotten what it was about tomorrow.

Enterprise, in my opinion, has only had two really good episodes so far: "Shuttlepod One" and "Dear Doctor." (And, actually, I had some serious problems with the ethics/morality of the latter, but we'll let that go for now.) Both of those episodes, it's interesting to note, were very strong on characterization, with plot playing a fairly minimal role. I don't think this is coincidence. In fact, the main reason why I find Enterprise as unengaging as it is is that the stories generally tend to be pretty much just standard variants on the same things I've seen before a zillion times, with nothing added to make them feel new, and fresh and exciting. After 30+ years in the Trek universe, the strange new worlds just ain't so strange and new anymore. Now, you can make up for that by having these familiar things happening to interesting new people and here, I think, is where Enterprise is really dropping the ball. It's got a good cast, and it's got characters who obviously have the potential to be very interesting when they're given the chance. ("Shuttlepod One" would never have worked, otherwise.) But the depth of characterization on your typical Enterprise episode (e.g. this week's) is practically nonexistent. And if the characters don't come alive, you can't care about them. And if you don't care about them, it's hard to care about the things that are happening to them or the things they care about. Which means, you're not going to care about what you're watching.

I don't mean to dump on Enterprise too much, really. It's, potentially, at least, not a bad show. It certainly doesn't have anything remotely approaching Voyager's level of suckitude. In a way, though, I almost wish it did, so I could just turn it off and not suffer the vague feeling I have now that I'm pretty much wasting an hour of my time watching it every week. But, hey, it deserves the chance. And if it does improve (as, in my foolish optimism, I hold out a strong hope that it will), I don't want to miss it happening.