User Reviews

The Enterprise stumbles upon a gas giant with a broken down ship sinking into it's depths. The gang goes down to investigate and only too late realizes it's a Klingon ship.

This episode's a fun one. Captain Archer and the crew try their hardest to save these Klingons and get the reward that every Star Trek fan already knows they'll get. While the lack of gratitude was to be expected, I was a little shocked by Archer's naivete.

This is the 3rd encounter the Enterprise has had with the Klingon race. By now, Archer should know this warrior races' values, beliefs, and just how dangerous they really are. Yet, midway through the episode, Archer's reading Vulcan Sparknotes on these guys and going, "Huh, I guess these guys like to die with honor and don't like outside help... I didn't know that. That Lady Klingon probably thought I was weak when I asked for her help." How did Archer not already know all this information? He should have known it way back on Earth before they even shipped off with Klaang.

Besides that little tidbit rubbing me the wrong way, this was an entertaining episode that helped cement the relationship between the Klingon Empire and Star Fleet. T'Pol seems to be more and more warming up to human culture. Hoshi grew a backbone out of nowhere: All the sudden she's taking command, where'd that come from? Her sea-mind exercise?

This episode's not mandatory viewing but it's still enjoyable.

This was a fun episode, as almost any episode with Klingons is. The Enterprise crew is still getting to know them as a race and learning how best to interact. That part of it is fun but I'm starting to feel like the show runners care little about continuity in this series. The pilot episode was literally about returning a Klingon to his home world. Wouldn't Archer and the crew have brushed up on Klingon background at that time? Instead we get Archer reading from the Vulcan database for apparently the first time saying they're big on honor and duty, as if that's entirely new information.

Anyway, some nice character building moments with T'Pol helping Hoshi with her away team anxiety and Archer realizing he needs to show more strength with the Klingons.

What was the point of Malcolm being sick in this episode? It didn't seem to have any influence on the plot. Otherwise a fun episode especially the tour of the Klingon kitchen galley!

Sleeping Dogs is a fast paced drama with plentiful intrigue and a satisfying race-against-time.

Quite how the members of an Enterprise away mission manage to get themselves trapped on a damaged Klingon ship which is gradually sinking down through the layers of a gas giant where it will soon be crushed into the dimensions of a car radio, we should not examine too closely. Clearly; Malcolm is more incapacitated than we thought by that pesky head cold, T'Pol is bowled over by the smell and Hoshi is too busy overcoming her phobia of the week.*

The writers are still portraying one-dimensional, stereotypical Klingons, presumably because this is a prequel to the Original Series where the race received little development beyond being used as an Adversary of the Week. I don't think this goes down particularly well with an audience that has been schooled by the more than ten years of cultural backstory supplied by The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine but, during its first season, Enterprise hit a number of snags like this. At least actor Michelle Bonilla who played Bu'Kah got to show off some cool moves as the female of the species.

The decontamination scene at the end of the episode also felt a bit contrived. This time, instead of engaging in a lot of unnecessarily prolonged touching, as had been so explicitly showcased in the pilot, the crew members joke about how bad the Klingon ship smelled and keep their hands to themselves. Decon gets only a cursory mention from here on in so the sexploitation obviously didn't play as well with audiences as the creators expected.

Senior Trekker scores every episode with a 5

* Linda Park, who played Hoshi Sato got lumbered with some very poor characterisation in some of the early episodes; I think the idea may have been to convey the danger and uncertainty of early space exploration but putting it on just the one crew member's shoulders like this failed to help the narrative and made her unpopular with a number of viewers. Fortunately, things will begin to look up for her soon.