text: In watching Enterprise for the first time, as we all no doubt do with all shows, I went into it with an open mind, enjoying about half of the past Star Trek efforts and disliking the other half.<br /><br />Enterprise has fallen short, but this episode "A Night In Sickbay" made me seriously question why I bother tivoing the shows from Monday night on Sci Fi.<br /><br />Masking some idea that it is one of those 'A Day In The Life' episodes, in which we learn about what makes certain characters operate as humanoids, the writers seemed to forget that this was supposed to be a starship vessel, not the Ricardoes and the Mertzes.<br /><br />A planet, especially one whose people had been offended previously by the Enterprise crew (for eating in public), was no place for a dog. As an animal lover myself, I would have never taken one of my pets into an environment that had proved in the past to be tense.<br /><br />But what made this episode even more ridiculous was the endless problem with all of these ST shows, constantly depicting things that are sacred and insulting to other cultures, as tho they are offering some insight into American religious zealots.<br /><br />The aliens were now offended when the dog urinated on a sacred tree, yet the aliens were quite capable of taking the dog urinating as an insult.<br /><br />Strange how the dog's urinating wasn't regarded as some form of worship. I wonder how that one got by the show's writers.<br /><br />From there, we are subjected to a captain who was misguided by his duties. In watching the episode, I found it very easy to forget that Bakula was supposed to be the ship's captain.<br /><br />He chose to sleep in sickbay and from there we are given more inanities of behavior (sigh) that we aren't supposed to understand and that causes us to furrow brows.<br /><br />The doctor non-chalantly clips long, hairy toenails and feeds them to hungry caged animals. Ewwwwww! Then a white bat creature escapes.<br /><br />Oh, how is anyone supposed to sleep with all of this going on! Toenail clipping, for crying out loud! I was waiting for something that feeds on vomit to be presented.<br /><br />Then we were inexplicably given some idea that the captain was in love with T'pol, and that perhaps he was masking those feelings with his concern over the dog.<br /><br />Endless amounts of rubbish.<br /><br />"your dog is ill, so go have sex. You'll feel better." And of course, the captain had to apologize and we humans had to regard his apology as completely ridiculous, because we are so (everyone smile very sarcastically) narrow-minded! Saw depictions such as this endlessly droned out on TNG.<br /><br />Oddly enough, the only thing missing from this awful episode was that Trip person offering his smirks and downhome boyisms, tho Bakula seemed to be covering all of that with the silly dog.<br /><br />Oh, the dog survived, so now go play fetch.