Last week I pointed out something "Enterprise" is doing right. This week points out something they're doing dead wrong. As in, no one dies. Any tension disappears when despite every scruffle no one ever gets a scratch. Yeah sure, some of the crew have almost died, there's been a few hurt thighs, and once a dog got sick, but mainly it's all been A-Team suffering barely worth a band-aid. (T'Pol actually killed someone but that was long ago and just another Vulcan anyway.)

Fresh out of the gate TOS had no problem killing anything that moved. In "The Man Trap" several colors of shirt die, security guards and a scientist die, and several bridge officers almost die, all horribly at the hands - er, suckered mitts - of their alien killer (who also dies). Halfway through its second season and here the Great Warrior and his company have barely killed off 3000 people. (And that was all at once and in a planetary colony, and of course Archer didn't do that, his subordinates did. By its freshman season TOS already had a mass murderer with 4000 people dead at his particular colony.)

The TCW is largely non-lethal. We'll have to see how pansy the Romulan conflict proves to be, but our primitive space shuttle has already lost more than the primitive Starfleet, extending as well to the nigh-indestructible NX-01. Battered by ships many times more powerful she's yet to experience serious damage or crew fatalities. In "Minefield" the ship blindly strikes a mine tearing a huge hole in the hull but no one dies, and within days she fortunately (!) runs across a miraculous repair-and-reset station. (In all fairness the ships of TOS rarely showed battle damage either, with notable exception of Matt Decker's Constellation. Yet that was before ships were stored in tiny computers though and can serve as no excuse in today's production.)

Obviously we can't go killing off senior officers (can we?) but something soon must introduce the necessary if unpalatable taste of realism - c'est la vie. (And I'm not requesting pitiless entertainment either, inured beyond the capacity to relate to the next guy even as he's gored. We already had that, brought to us by Jupiter VIII.) Yet Archer needs to feel and share those losses every real commander faces, lest he be written off as less than a "real" commander. Portraying space as childproof would be necessary only were children aloft. Please ... give an adult - and not so "timid," as Q said - audience a break.