ent s2e26 the expanse

oh boy, season finale. i guess this marks the show's tonal shift. we start with a death laser blasting the shit out of earth, now we're at war with an unknown enemy.

i was annoyed in the first part of this episode. the klingon capture plot has been done before, in the last episode, even. while it's interesting to see the sulaban working together with archer (or the person puppetting the sulaban, rather), it seemed like their plotline was finished early in the season. why are we retreading old ground?

this is nitpicking, but if it took enterprise two years to get to their position in deep space, how did they get back to earth in a few days after being recalled? don't tell me you guys were flying at impulse the whole time.

turning around a space cloud to explode the warbird from behind is a very enterprise thing to do. i appreciate that. big explosion for enterprise to fly straight through. that crew is definitely dead, though

the character moments in this episode didn't show anything new, for the most part. we've seen t'pol be ordered to leave enterprise and decide to stay before. the only difference here is that archer was encouraging her to go instead of keeping her aboard. i think the most interesting scenes in this regard were the ones with trip and malcolm. their relationship has looked surface level in the past, so trip choosing to show malcolm the wreckage of where his sister lived demonstrates that they've developed more genuine openness with each other. after getting back on the ship, they have a sort of role reversal where malcolm, who usually has the emotional intelligence of a piece of styrofoam, tries to be sensitive towards and comfort trip meanwhile trip is the one blocking everything out. Fascinating. trip and archer also had a scene together, but it didn't really amount to anything other than both of them saying "damn. This sucks."

this isn't labelled a two parter with the s3 premiere like the s1 finale and s2 premiere were, but i think it would make a better viewing experience to go straight to the s3 premiere after watching this. i'm not going to do that, though, because i'm really tired and need to go to bed (i got 2 hours of sleep last night and i've already spent more time typing this up than i meant to). next episode will have to wait til tomorrow