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Released by: CBS Paramount
Released on: August 20, 2013.
Director: Various
Cast: Scott Bakula, John Billingsley, Jolene Blalock, Dominic Keating, Anthony Montgomery
Year: 2002-2003
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The Series:
Picking up where the first season left off, the second season of Star Trek: Enterprise, which ran from 2002 through spring of 2003, once again catches up with Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula), the man behind the helm of the Enterprise NX-01, a ship designed with warp 5 capabilities in mind and the first of its kind to have been built on Earth. Along for the ride are crewmembers like science officer T'Pol (Jolene Blalock), chief engineer Trip Tucker (Connor Trinneer), tactical officer Malcolm Reed (Dominic Keating), communications officer Hoshi Sato (Linda Park), helmsman Travis Mayweather (Anthony Mongtomery) and chief medical officer Phlox (John Billingsley).
Their mission is to explore worlds beyond Earth using the advanced technology that The Enterprise, a prototype for models to come in the Federation's future, provides. As the ship can break the Warp 5 barrier, it can go further in less time than any ship that came before it. When the season begins, we see how the crew overcomes an invasion courtesy of the Suliban. From there we learn a story from Vulcan history involving a crash landing on the Earth's surface in the 1950s, we see the crew deal with a minefield and a Romulan threat, and we see Porthos get ill from something he picked up while on a diplomatic mission. As the season continues, Archer takes on some nasty Klingons, the crew investigates a strange black hole, Hoshi is turned invisible by the transporter leading the crew to assume she's dead, and Archer tries to barter a peace agreement between the warring Andorians and Vulcans. The season closes out with a few storylines in which the Klingons show up again, Travis gets homesick and debates leaving the team, Archer's past as a test pilot is revealed and last but not least, the crew gets involved in a quest to track down an alien probe that laid waste to millions of people on Earth.
The twenty-six episodes that make up the second season of Star Trek: Enterprise are presented across six Blu-ray discs in chronological order as follows:
DISC ONE:
Shockwave Part II / Carbon Creek / Minefield / Dead Stop
DISC TWO:
A Night In Sickbay / Marauders / The Seventh / The Communicator / Singularity
DISC THREE:
Vanishing Point / Precious Cargo / The Catwalk / Dawn / Stigma
DISC FOUR:
Cease Fire / Future Tense / Canamar / The Crossing / Judgment
DISC FIVE:
Horizon / The Breach / Cogenitor / Regeneration / First Flight
DISC SIX:
Bounty / The Expanse
The first two seasons of Enterprise are widely regarded as problematic and it's easy to see why when revisiting this material. Plot lines are predictable and play to the lowest common denominator. In much the same way that Doctor Who writers seem obligated to give the Daleks a go at least once a season, Star Trek writers seem to get coerced into bringing the Klingons around at least a few times a season simply because they're popular villains and they equal ratings. What they don't necessarily allow for is for the series to come into its own, and while it would get there with some of the later seasons, it hasn't done that yet at this point in its four season run.
With that said, the cast make this series more fun and more interesting than it probably had any right to be. Where hokey digital effects make the series' early 2000s television roots painfully obvious at times, Bakula is fun as the lead and he's surrounded with decent support. Blalock is very good as the science officer, cold and logical but at the same time very alluring - she's sort of a sexy Spock, really. Keating, Montgomery and Billingsley are also all quite good here. Together the cast create a decent sense of team play, and as the season progresses the character development gets strong and the show more enjoyable for it. As the show carries on we get a fairly even mix of good and bad. As often as the series plays to stereotypes and cliché ridden predictability, so too does it sometimes go in interesting directions and offer up some clever backstories about the characters and even sometimes the Star Trek universe itself. If this is hardly essential viewing, it's a good mix of action and drama with all the sci-fi elements crammed in you could ask for. Not classic material, but fine as harmless entertainment.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Each episode in this set is presented in 1080p AVC encoded 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen. Generally the episodes all look very nice here with some very lifelike color reproduction throughout. Skin tones look lifelike and natural and detail is very strong even if some scenes do exhibit some general softness to them periodically. There aren't any problems with edge enhancement or mpeg compression artifacts and the image stays clean and clear throughout. Many scenes look a bit soft, they seem to have been shot this way, but this is an ice upgrade over what standard definition could provide. Some of the darker scenes don't look quite as good as those with more light but they still look quite good and the series as presented in high definition really shows off the production's great use of color in certain scenes (the interiors shot inside the ship are fairly drab, however). Really, the material does transfer very nicely to the Blu-ray format and while it isn't reference quality, fans should be pretty pleased with how the transfer has shaped up on this release.
The best audio option in this collection is an English language DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio mix that sounds pretty good. The rears come to life nicely during the more intense scenes involving action while most of the more dialogue heavy bits come at you from the front of the mix, as you'd expect. Dialogue stays clean and clear and there are no problems with hiss or distortion at all. The score is spread out very nicely throughout the mix and there's some pretty solid bass response here as well. Optional subtitles are available in English, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish and there are Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound tracks offered in German and Italian with Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo tracks provided in Spanish, French and Japanese.
Extras include commentary tracks on the Carbon Creek, Dead Stop, Regeneration and First Flight episodes from members of the writing team and a few different cast members. These are decent talks that give us some insight into the planning and preparation that went into these specific storylines. There are also text commentary options from Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda on the Stigma and First Flight episodes. These play out in a subtitle stream that same way that the trivia tracks do on the BBC's Doctor Who releases and they're a pretty effective way to garner some scene specific info as they play out alongside the episodes.
Spread across the discs is a bunch of featurettes under the Archival Mission Logs banner. Disc one contains the nineteen minute long Enterprise Moments: Season Two segment (a general overview of the season with cast and crew input) and the fourteen minute Enterprise Profile: Jolene Blalock segment (a look at the work of the actress who plays T'Pol). Disc two includes the eleven minute Inside A Night In The Sickbay which goes fairly in-depth as to the pros and cons of this particular episode. Disc three is the lightest one, it has a photo gallery and that's it. Disc four includes the seventeen minute Shooting Future Tense segment, which also examines this specific episode, as well as the five minute Enterprise Secrets segment in which David Trotti talks about his work on Star Trek. Disc five contains the seven minute Levar Burton: Star Trek Director piece, and as you'd guess it focuses in on his work on the series. It also contains eleven minutes of mildly amusing outtakes.
Disc one also has a lengthy ninety minute featurette on it called In Conversation: The First Crew that gathers up Anthony Montgomery, Dominic Keating, Jolene Blalock, Scott Bakula, Linda Park, Connor Trinneer, and John Billingsley to join in on a discussion with Brannon Braga on the series. They talk about bringing it back, about some of the series' highlights, about working with one another, about good things and bad things relating to the production and quite a bit more. It's a well-structured talk that turns out to be the best extras in the set. Disc six also houses the three part Uncharted Territory that runs just under an hour and thirty minutes. The three parts are Destination Unknown (which covers the issues with the writing staff employed on the first two seasons), The First Crew (which is a look at the cast who starred in the show and how the series tried to put a more human emphasis on the Star Trek universe than we'd seen in the past) and Course Correction (an examination of the strife that grew between the writing team, the producers and the studio types that eventually hurt the series - this is quite interesting and another highlight of the set). Also found on the sixth disc are three NX-01 File entries: 04 lets Bakula talk up life on the set, 05 discusses Hoshi and 06 lets Anthony Montgomery wax nostalgic about Whoopi Goldberg and Star Trek in general.
Also spread across the discs are Deleted Scenes for the following episodes: Minefield, A Night In Sickbay, Dawn, Stigma, Cease Fire, and The Expanse. Rounding out the extras are a Season Two promo spot, five minutes of vintage archival cast interviews, animated menus and chapter selection. There is a mammoth selection of supplemental material here - all of the new documentaries are in HD, and the archival bits in SD - enough to keep most fans busy for quite some time.
The Final Word:
Thought the series itself is wildly uneven, there's enough good here that Star Trek fans will probably enjoy more of the stories than not. The video quality is good, if never reference quality, and the audio is solid but the Blu-ray release of Star Trek: Enterprise Season Two really hits it out of the park with its supplemental package, a collection of extras that is extensive, thorough and genuinely interesting.
Click on the images below for full sized Blu-ray screen caps!
