Star Trek: Enterprise Rewatch: “Sleeping Dogs”

The Enterprise tries to rescue a Klingon ship that has crashed in a gas giant, and everything goes horribly wrong, because if it didn’t go wrong, why do an episode about it? The Star Trek: Enterprise Rewatch lets “Sleeping Dogs” lie.

An excerpt:

Indeed, something I’ve noticed about this season so far is that the show very rarely ends an act and goes to commercial break on a note of tension or suspense or curiosity. I can’t imagine what the thinking is there, but it’s been happening often enough that it seems to be a preference in the writers room. It’s actually less of an issue watching it now on Paramount+ or Netflix or your own DVDs, as there are no commercial breaks, but it still leads to a curtain of inconsequentiality hanging over the entire program.

This is especially problematic on a show that’s supposed to be all about the wild and wacky world of early human space travel, which should be chock full of danger and difficulty. But there was more tension, more sense of danger, in DS9’s “Starship Down,” which also had ships bopping about in a gas giant, even though the Defiant and the Jem’Hadar were way more technologically advanced and more experienced than the Enterprise and Somraw crew here.