Vox Sola

ENTERPRISE: "Vox Sola" Discussion Thread
Terry -- 1 May 2002, 20:57 EST

Following a series of misunderstandings that sent a group of visiting aliens off the Enterprise in a huff, an unidentifiable alien parasite boards the ship to feed off the crew's bodies. It falls to insecure Hoshi to save her comrades by communicating with the creature.

Why did I keep thinking....
D'Alaire -- 1 May 2002, 21:05 EST

...when I looked at Malcom of Kane in Alien?

Good thing he didn't have the spaghetti, too. (grin)

Comments later, but I will say RD did nicely...but of course.

Re: Why did I keep thinking....:agree: , D'laire!
Mindy -- 1 May 2002, 21:34 EST

I thought of ALIEN, too (who wouldn't, actually?), and I really would have liked to have seen the ENTERPRISE crew unable to communicate with the creature, or discover that it was just a "shark" in different form, i.e., an eating machine with no "higher brain functions" that would allow us to communicate and understand it on a human level, totally "ALIEN," and/or totally unreachable ("We eat. We breed. We live."...something like that) and so the ENTERPRISE crew would have to just kill it...that would have made a nice "opposite" to the misunderstanding between the aliens the crew inadvertently antagonized...hmm, hope I'm clear on this...let me know, okay?

The ending, imho, was stupid and way too predictable.

And since when has Hoshi been feeling T'Pol has been riding her? I thought they were bonding...at least, that was the impression I've gotten from previous shows, as when T'Pol showed her how to calm herself.

A "B" for effort and nice effects, an "A" for direction ('cause I love RD!) and a "D" because of the "happy" ending.

Mindy

(Message Deleted by Poster)
D'Alaire -- 1 May 2002, 22:06 EST

Vox Solis left me a little cold....
Eric -- 1 May 2002, 23:16 EST

Roxanne Dawson's directing was the best part of this episode. She is really starting to stretch her directing muscles. There was a lot of fun camera panning, going through walls and up through ceilings. Plus more of the Enterprise, light the set with flashlights trick.

After that Linda Park put in her usual excellent performence, although the tension with T'Pol seemed artificial since they came to a understanding in Sleeping Dogs!

It was nice seeing the crew off duty. And it was fun seeing another engineer. Archer and Trip watching the Water Polo game was hilarious. Buuuuuuut....

It was all tied up in a nice Voyager bow at the end to be forgotten about.

I hate that! Give me the Detained endings, the open ended episodes like Cold Front!

*sigh*

Anyway, i'll give it a 7/10. Just not to much to say this week.

Eric

Actually, you pretty much summed it up for me.
D'Alaire -- 2 May 2002, 06:29 EST

(reposting this becauce I really shouldn't try to type when I have a headache )

Too bad they took an easy out. Sort of a reach out to the Changeling thing, I'd been thinking.

RD did a great job, however. She pulled the tension through nicely, did a great job capturing the weird and the effects. I really liked Phlox's defense of the "tendril," and I liked Hoshi's tension and insecurity with T'Pol, and T'Pol's explanation of high standards.

Though, I agree I'd rather expected T'Pol and Hoshi's developing comraderie to not harken back to episode #2-styled Hoshi insecurity, even if what we got doesn't surprise me. They'd want to keep tension up wherever they can find something to pick on, I suppose. Frankly, I liked the Reed/Phlox tension better. They should have left the T'Pol/Hoshi tension to the strain of time vs. their task.

What really bothered me is an old problem I have with this certain style of storytelling: Over and over, I really miss the point of it all, particularly for the characters. This time around, I know there had to be something...Was it confidence? Water polo and believing you'll win, fighting the urge to give in, contrasted with Hoshi's want to believe in herself (again) and finally getting the boost from T'Pol, contrasted with Malcom's expediency and Phlox's self-assurance and the creature's making a new collective after being separated from its own? (shrug)

Some of it might be good stuff, but in the end, I'm left with a "so what?" feeling.

One thing that was very sad was Travis' scene on the bridge. This was just jarringly bad, performance-wise. It actually managed to surprise me, it stood out so much. --And darnit, I wanted Hoshi and T'Pol to be there to hear Hoshi had been right after all. (smirk) If Hoshi had been defending herself the whole time and butting heads with T'Pol instead of moping, that could have been a neat scene.

So, it's a mixed bag, for me. Parts of it I liked--certain scenes really came off well, and the FX were lovely--some was all right, some was bleah and/or annoying. And the end...ho hum. Overall, more developed characterization on Hoshi's part and a more complex "solution" would have helped this ep a lot. But maybe it's too much to ask.

Or maybe some other time.

My literary contribution...(and you thought I was donewith them)
Roxanne -- 2 May 2002, 12:26 EST

Based on "Little Miss Muppet"

An alien starship

Docked with this spaceship

But didn't want to stay.

They left her a spider

That twisted inside her

But they sent it on its way.

No one said I had to be William Wordsworth, or Mother Goose for that matter

Roxanne

It was okaYYYYYYY....
Fliteman -- 2 May 2002, 12:41 EST

Good point made above about the alien presence being like a shark - I wanted that too. I thought the Doc made a good point (and, way to go, doc, sticking to your guns in sickbay), but I also thought he was wrong. Whether intelligent or not, the thing was basically attacking our people. Also, if it *were* intelligent, why couldn't it start... y'know... communicating with those all wrapped up in cotton candy goo? Or, when Hoshi was talking to the thing, using them for the replies..? I mean, they were knowing what the other guys were thinking... I wanted the aliens that left in a huff, when contacted again, telling them more than just where the planet was. I kinda wanted them to HELP our guys. It held my attention for an hour. That's about it. Next week - *two* new episodes.

Flite

No, but you are the Neb's own Poet Laureate
Ruth -- 2 May 2002, 13:55 EST

Brava, Roxanne!

Ruth

Not bad, but again not a standout.
D -- 2 May 2002, 14:04 EST

There ought to be a section in the Starfleet training manual that says "Warning: unidentifiable goo, particularly when oozing from the overhead, walls or deck plating, is inherently dangerous; evacuate the area immediately!" ("Macrocosm"; a founder lurking about; at least 1 TNG episode I can't remember at the moment). I imagine the idea for the one huge organism came from the fungus that covers many acres but is a single organism. That cannot have been pleasant to film, though the web may have been augmented by CGI the actors must have been wrapped in fabric and covered with water or oil. I can see why Dawson said it was a difficult episode.

So Starfleet's first portable force field was jury rigged in an emergency. Appropriate since we've seen engineers & security people do basically the same thing many times; now we see who figured it out first.

Shades of Voyager - working late in the mess hall with a thermos of coffee . I though it was interesting that T'Pol apparently holds Hoshi to a higher standard, that she apparently feels Sato is a lot more capable than she sometimes thinks she is. Though I'm not sure why Hoshi was so defensive in the first place; it didn't seem to me that T'Pol was blaming her, just frustrated (as much as a Vulcan will show frustration) at not being able to solve the problem.

Water polo? When Trip said he had a copy of Stanford v Texas that was not a sport I thought of. It makes sense for Stanford, they've always had champion swimmers, but UT? One thing I don't understand it that, between a comment of Trip's here and the scene on the boomer ship in Fortunate Son its apparent people still play football yet baseball, at least professional baseball, is no longer played.

Note to TPTB: Enough already with the crew poking around on dark sets with flashlights.

"I may not be soup, and I may not be from a store, but I love you Ashley... "
Deb47 -- 2 May 2002, 17:45 EST

I think that's the funniest Sprint commercial I've seen in a long time.

I agree with those who channeled Alien last night, esp since I rewatched #2 last weekend. I found it strange that Hoshi had such difficulty interpreting the Biped's language but that she and T'Pol were able to communicate so effectively with the Amoeba from He!!

I had no problem with Hoshi's paranoia over how T'pol viewed her. It was good to see her finally voice it and to come to a realization that it really was only Paranoia. Recall, although Hoshi volunteered to go on the derelict Klingon ship with T'pol's away team, it was actually T'pol that had first brought the possibility up to the Captain. I never got the sense from that ep that Hoshi ever really caught on to the significance of that fact.

Other than the progress in their relationship, and the great way Phlox deflected Malcolm in the sickbay torture debate, I thought it was nice to see Travis actually take the initiative in suggestions on going after the aliens and in interacting with them. Still I would think hearing her ensign had diverted Enterprise to follow the aliens without informing the acting captain first, would have at least rated one raised eyebrow from the SubCommander.

Otherwise, the ep left me feeling hohum. A factor more of my bias about the entire series than the storyline of a single ep.

(Go Roxann!)

D47

Actually, i found this ep poignant
david g -- 6 May 2002, 23:44 EST

i liked that the creature just wanted to get home--the final effects were very haunting.

myabe it's cuz i got to see the characters other than Archer and Trip shine, but i enjoyed this one...

btw, i LOVE the WAGES OF FEAR...one of the great films of the 50s!

I agree, that solo Travis scene was glaringly bad, D'Alaire. NIM
david g -- 6 May 2002, 23:46 EST

I thought Hoshi came off as immature and even arrogant
david g -- 6 May 2002, 23:51 EST

now, i did like this ep, but mainly for the milky-tentacled-but-benevolent creature and the communication with it and the Reed-Phlox scenes...

i liked TPol a lot here--she came off as competant (a far better Cap/n than Archer)...

but Hoshi just seemed like, well, an undergrad, complaining about the midterm...i like Hoshi but not as this insipid whiner.

Actualy she came off as a human being!
Eric -- 7 May 2002, 09:19 EST

Unlike the superior beings that were the staple of the 24th century shows Hoshi and the rest of the crew are only human.

I like that.

Eric

My thought on that is a bit different.
Nina -- 7 May 2002, 09:35 EST

I saw Hoshi and T'Pol ironing out a major misunderstanding, a two-sided one. Hoshi feeling that her superior officer was "riding" her, and T'Pol not realizing how much human subordinates need feedback.

So for me it was just character development.

I liked Archer reassuring panicky Trip, too. But I'm worried about Porthos. What a boring life that poor animal must lead!