So far ENT has done a good job providing appropriate amounts of time to each of the crewmembers. Archer gets the lion's share, to be sure, but down through T'Pol and Reed to Mayweather and Sato, already so early in the show's run one can quickly summon to mind a favorite sequence for each. We're getting to know them, and round-about coming to appreciate what they individually contribute to the effort.

Were there to be an election, for example, challenging fans to choose their "most excluded or ignored character," I would take the preceding paragraph into consideration, "change the conditions of the test," and nominate the NX-01 itself - and more particularly the magnificent computers which must regulate and power it. NCC-1701 had a subtle effect of integrating its science officer's computer skills into a pre-moon landing world in which computers crunched numbers and filled up entire rooms. The Deus Ex Machina for many TOS plots was housed in a literal box surfaced with unlabeled switches and blinking lights. Such then was their capacity to launch many trips into heretofore unexplored, unimagined space.

Computers could do miracles then. And they - along with the Vulcan - inspired many to take up the task of making such miracle boxes into reality. Remember the old ASCII charts made of fanfold printer paper, pinned up on walls, row after row, page after page of letters forming an image when viewed from the blur of a distance? Perhaps you remember the same common image that I do - that of Spock. (Unfortunately, for all her other talents, T'Pol doesn't come across to this nerd as a credible computer type, not that she's been intentionally or unintentionally scripted that way of course.)

And today's world of series television knows better. Both producers and consumers work and play with computers daily, and these tool or toys grow Moore sophisticated every, well, eighteen months last I checked. As Spock noted - continuing the "ultimate" thread! - "Computers make excellent servants." Yet as Norman ("I, Mudd") points out, an over-dependence on service can be a subtle path to subjugation.

Other science fiction has dealt with the arrival of human-class minds housed in non-humans, some of those dealings pleasant, others not so. Enterprise computers (old) could solve incredible problems (like the ion storm replication in "Mirror Mirror" or mind-reading lie-detector in "Wolf in the Fold") and even giggle on occasion "... dear." Enterprise computers (new) can't even talk. But isn't it fun to consider, what the first words of a starship computer might be?