Singularity
Mission Date: Unknown
Original Airdate: November 27, 2002
Reviewed By Chris Burt

Summary | Review | Screen Caps | Cast | Guest Cast | Creative Staff

Summary

"Vanishing Point" starts off with Hoshi and Trip examining and photographing ancient ruins. Onboard the Enterprise in orbit, Archer tells Trip and Hoshi to hurray up and get back to Enterprise because a storm is approaching their position. After giving them five more minutes to survey the site, Archer is informed by T'Pol that another storm has arrived and it is too late. The shuttlepod is out of the question because of the storm, and thus, Hoshi and Trip must be transported up. After Hoshi tries to find any other way of transport back to the ship other than the transporter, she gives in and allows herself to be transported. She makes Trip go first to make sure it works, then goes herself.

As she materializes on the ship, she seems to be fine. But soon after Hoshi starts to experience weird events. The guys (Trip, Travis and Malcolm) act if she isn't there while they eat lunch and leave without saying goodbye. Phlox doesn't respond to her when she calls him in Sick Bay. She sleeps until eleven hundred hours when her shift started at O' eight hundred and when she arrives on the bridge she finds that Trip and Travis had been kidnapped by aliens on the surface, even though she and Trip had found no aliens down there previously. After a botched attempted at translating the language, the captain tells Hoshi to get off the bridge and assigns Crewman Baird to communications. Later, in a shower, Hoshi finds water running right through her hand. As she goes into the mess hall, once again it seems as if she does not exist. She asks T'Pol permission to sit with her, but T'Pol does not respond. After finally noticing her there, T'Pol tells Hoshi the hostage situation has already been solved, in only a mere hour. She tells her Baird translated the message easily and the Captain had assigned him permanently to communications.

Hoshi then starts to notice that objects wont respond to her touch either. The turbolift doesn't move until another crewman tells it to. In the gym, after a heart to heart with Trip, Hoshi notices that none of the equipment responds to her touch either. Then, she sees herself in the mirror disappear. After falling asleep in the gym, unable to leave, T'Pol and Trip enter, looking for her. Hoshi screams "Here I am!" but it is as if they cant see her. After following them around, Hoshi realizes the crew thinks her molecules disintegrated because of a misaligned transporter component. After watching Trip and the doctor search for remains of her molecules in the bowels of the ship, Hoshi sees aliens placing bombs on the ship. As she tries to warn the captain, she sees him tell her father of her death. Hoshi tries to create an S.O.S out of Moors Code with a light she can alter, but T'Pol convinces Archer he is seeing things where there is nothing. As Hoshi tries to deal with the Aliens by herself, they beam off the ship on their own transporter pad. Hoshi jumps onto the pad herself and materializes onto the Enterprise's pad, covered in dirt and with Trip and Malcolm waiting for her. It had all been a dream in the last few seconds of the transport up form the surface. It seems, the storm caused complications with transport and she was in the buffer for about eight and a half seconds. The end.

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Review

The plot of "no one can see a crewmember who can walk through walls" is nothing new, for it has been done before in The Next Generation's "The Next Phase," but to Enterprise's credit, "Vanishing Point" is far from a carbon copy. It was definitely a new take on the idea. Instead of spending the entire episode finding out what happened to the disappeared character (Hoshi in this case) and how to fix it, "Vanishing Point" showed the other character's reactions to knowing nothing could be done. I liked seeing Archer and crew's response to Hoshi's death, especially Trip who seemed to blame himself. Archer's conversation with Hoshi's dad seemed extremely forced. I think they were trying to make the conversation shaky to show Archer's trouble of trying to coming up with the right words to tell a father his daughter was dead, but it came across as just badly written and badly acted. Hoshi's dad's response to hearing the news of her demise was missing something. He didn't seem surprised or distraught at the news, more angry, but grieving, I guess, is something everyone does differently. Other than that exchange, I thought the cast's performances were really good, especially Park and Trinneer. They were all believable in their respected roles. Even Blalock seemed to get the non-emotional depression look down correctly when hearing of Hoshi's death.

The beginning of this episode started off really well, with a very long teaser, especially long for Enterprise's standards. It was almost five minutes, a stark contrast to the extremely short teaser for last week's episode. The only problem with the trailer was: why couldn't Hoshi and Trip stay in the ruins? Hoshi repeatedly told Archer she thought the ruins were strong enough to protect them, but Archer never really responded to that. He told her what was wrong with staying in the shuttle, but kindly ignored Hoshi's requests to hold up in the ruins.

I liked that once Hoshi was onboard, everyone seemed to be ignoring her and not realizing she was there, instead of her just disappearing right off the bat. It showed Hoshi's deepest fears of isolation. I didn't like, however, that Archer acted extremely out of character. Archer throwing her off the bridge for not being able to translate a message, and then promoting someone new into her position? Right then and there I knew that it was going to be some sort of dream or hallucination. It ruined the ending for me, which otherwise would have been a surprise. Trip, Malcolm and Travis' response to her could have been easily explained by boys being boys, all excited for a trip and not realizing they were ignoring her. It wouldn't have been the first time something like that happened when a woman joined a bunch of guys in a middle of a conversation. T'Pol's slow response could easily have been explained as Vulcan arrogance or just the simple fact that she was in the middle of a book. But Archer's response could not have been explained as anything other than a dream or hallucination. And the fact that it was a dream is another issue all together. It was a sort of reset button. I would have liked to see the development of the characters to be real. Archer actually having to tell Hoshi's father that she was dead, and the crew having to actually deal with someone's death would have been nice to have actually have happened, but this may leave the book open for an episode dealing entirely with how the crew deals with the first crewman's death. Though the rest of the episode didn't necessarily truly develop the rest of the cast, Hoshi's character was developed truthfully, and that was definitely a plus. It would have been nice to have told us, the audience, that dreams don't necessarily happen in real time though because at first I was confused how she could have a 40 minute dream in 8.6 seconds.

The big problem with this episode, isn't really just isolated to this episode, but is the same problem with a lot of episodes that hold this type of moving through walls situation. If they can go through walls, why don't they fall through the floor plating – what's stopping them from simply falling until they reach space? At one point Hoshi even lies down in a vent over looking Engineering. Why doesn't she fall through? In this episode it could possibly be explained as the fact that it was Hoshi's dream, though.

It was good to actually see the gym again. I'm glad the set wasn't forgotten. In fact, we got to see a few ‘in the bowels of the ship" sets we haven't seen in a while. The small room where Archer and Silik fought in "Cold Front," was used for the aliens to plant the bombs. This time, in the gym Trip was using the "spiny" machine seen in the back of the gym in "Marauders." But, what exactly was he working out? He didn't seem to be using any muscles or exerting any force, but what do I know? It's future technology. I also liked Hoshi's "supped up" sneakers.

Another high point for this episode was the use of characters. Though the development of them may not be entirely accurate because it was a dream, it was good to see the characters. Hoshi especially – obviously it was a Hoshi episode so she got a lot of screen time. I believe it's the most she has had since the second episode of the series ("Fight or Flight"). Plus, I've notice Hoshi's character seems to have good chemistry with a lot of the crew. I always enjoy her conversations with them. The conversations with Trip in the gym, T'Pol in the mess hall and the guys at the table- they all seemed real and unforced.

Overall this was an average episode. Not the best Enterprise has offered, but certainly not the worst. It was a little slow in parts and seemed to be missing something to give it a big "humph" for a lack of a better word. Some good character moments, but it just needed a certain…je ne sais quoi.

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Grade: C+

Cast:
Scott Bakula as Jonathan Archer
John Billingsley as Dr. Phlox
Jolene Blalock as T'Pol
Dominic Keating as Malcolm Reed
Anthony Montgomery as Travis Mayweather
Linda Park as Hoshi Sato
Connor Trinneer as Charles "Trip" Tucker III

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Guest Cast:
Keone Young as Hoshi's Father
Gary Riotto as Alien #1
Morgan H. Margolis as Crewman Baird
Ric Sarabia as Alien #2
Carly Thomas as Alison

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Creative Staff:
Director: David Straiton
Written By: Rick Berman & Brannon Braga

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