Oh, Enterprise. Your fate as a sucky series was sealed the moment Jeri Ryan’s catsuits saved Voyager from cancellation. Prompted by the popularity of Seven and her, uh, Borg implants, your creators decided the surest road to ratings was to sex things up.
Alas, Enterprise, hard as it tried, was always less sexy than it was hilariously gratuitous. This is the program, after all, that brought us the decon chamber and Vulcan neuropressure, perhaps two of the most obvious devices for creating sexual tension ever to hit the small screen. But, in the absence of any chemistry between the cast members, these sequences came off more as outrageously blatant than anything. Which, given the general blandness of Enterprise, meant that they were some of that series’ most fun moments.
So, set your phasers to “ogle” and your brain to “snark” as I bring you the Top Ten Most Gratuitous Moments on Enterprise:
10. Get That Grav Plating Back Online! Stat!
A malfunction with the gravity plating means we get to see way, way too much of Captain Archer in “Unexpected.” In some ways, this scene is pretty cool: On all the later series, the characters take things like transporters and artificial gravity for granted, so it’s fun watching Starfleet grapple with new technology. It makes the Enterprise crew a little more believable – hey, we think, these could be my great- great-grandkids! And the CGI water is nicely rendered. But, still, it’s Archer. Naked. It’s an instance of that phenomenon where a person’s objectively decent-looking, but you find them repugnant solely because of their personality. Naked Archer would probably tell you he doesn’t have any clothes on because he can’t find any that were made with 100% organic cotton using sweatshop-free labor or something like that. Not sexy. Moving on.
9. Civvies and Skivvies
In “Vanishing Point,” a strange transporter malfunction makes Hoshi invisible to her crewmates, but not to the viewers. And it just so happens that this happens while she’s in the gym, so she spends the entire episode running around in tight-fitting gym clothes that show off her midriff.
Hey, you’re thinking, didn’t that happen to Geordi and Ensign Ro in “The Next Phase”? And wasn’t that episode a lot better? And didn’t Ro stay in full uniform throughout? There, in a nutshell, you have the differences between TNG and Enterprise.
In the interest of equal-opportunity exploitation, though, Enterprise does give the women some eye candy in “Acquisition,” when it’s Trip who has to spend the whole episode in his tighty-blue-ies. Of course, Trip looks exactly like a young Dubya, negating any attractiveness he might have possessed, but at least they tried. It’s more than they’ll do in later seasons.
8. Pon Farr Constitutes a Red Alert
As if two crew-members-in-skivvies episodes weren’t enough, in Season 3 Enterprise decided to have a crew-member-in-skivvies-with-the-pon-farr. It’s a full 45 minutes of T’Pol in teeny gray tank top and shorts, sweating, growling, writhing on the floor, and coming onto every crew member in possession of a Y-chromosome.
I did find it amusing, though, that Vulcan horniness is considered a shipwide emergency, complete with lockdown procedures and EV-suits. But why couldn’t they just send a female crew member to sedate T’Pol? Oh, right, because that wouldn’t be nearly as amusing as having her hit on Reed.
His facial expressions after turning her down almost make it worth it, though. If that doesn’t say “I did the right thing, but, boy, am I gonna hate myself for it,” I don’t know what does:
7. That’s What You Get With a Ship Full of Celibates
In “Rajiin,” Archer rescues a sexy slave woman – named Rajiin, natch – who proceeds to seduce her way through the entire crew, women included. (Knowing Archer, I’m surprised he didn’t try to free all the female slaves and throw in 
an Up With Humans! lecture about how we abolished slavery years ago.) Okay, she doesn’t sleep with them but just runs her hands all over their bodies to, uh, study their anatomies. So she can report back to the Xindi on the best way to kill them. Of course.
Rajiin is supposedly from a race that has irresistible erotic powers, but I think she was successful mainly because the crew lives like a bunch of monks. Seriously, you can count on one hand the number of times all seven of them get lucky over the course of four years. You could be a Nausicaan and have your way with these tools.
6. Um, I Think I See a Virus on Your Ear
The Enterprise crew may not have much sex, but they get plenty of foreplay, thanks to one of the most gratuitous excuses to get actors stripped down in television history – the decontamination chamber. And not only do they strip down, they rub each other with ‘decon gel.’ The pilot episode featured Trip and T’Pol slathering gel all over one another – even though they supposedly dislike each other, and even in spots they could easily reach on their own, like the tips of T’Pol’s ears. Trip gets his hands inside the waistband of her shorts at one point, a suitable excuse for a nerve pinch if ever I saw one. Meanwhile, the camera pans lovingly over his pecs and her thighs. It would have been hot had it not been so glaringly, hilariously obvious.
5. Ménage à Decon Chamber
And if that wasn’t soft-core enough for you, in Season 2 Archer gets in the decon chamber with T’Pol and Hoshi. And Porthos, which is kind of disturbing. It’s a girl-on-girl-on-jerk-on-dog gelfest! Then Hoshi takes Porthos out, and Archer and T’Pol hook up. Ew! Fortunately, it turns out to be a dream sequence, but still, ew.
4. “She’s Got a Nice Bum.” We Know!
When Trip and T’Pol finally do the deed after countless “neuropressure” sessions, she drops her robe to reveal all of her back . . . and more than a little of her derriere. Afterwards, she tries to pass it off as an “experiment in human sexuality,” but we know she was just embarrassed at having slept with someone who doesn’t know what “incorrigible” means.
3. Orion Girls are Easy
In “Bound,” one of Enterprise’s worst groaners, Archer is made a present of three strippers painted green Orion slave girls, who proceed to charm all the men with their feminine wiles so that they can steal the ship. The women, conveniently, are stricken with “headaches” which render them powerless, leaving Trip, who’s immune to the green gals because he’s in lurve with T’Pol (I kid you not) to save the day. In the meantime, we viewers are “treated” to the spectacle of the guys on the crew following the Soylent Green Trio around all dopey-eyed and drooling, while the women act whiny and catty. Are there any redeeming qualities to this piece of targ droppings? Well, Archer does get shot . . .
2. I Knew I Should Have Worn My Sports Bra Today
In Season 2’s “Shockwave,” when the Enterprise is taken over by hostile aliens, Hoshi crawls through the air ducts to free her shipmates, when, suddenly, she falls through a loose panel. In defiance of the laws of physics – and good taste – her shirt gets caught on the panel and is ripped right off her, forcing her to roam the corridors topless. There is no point whatsoever to this scene except to get poor Linda Park half-naked. I hope she had a long, long talk with her agent afterward.
1. I Did It All for the Neuropressure
Oh, man. Just when we thought it couldn’t get more gratuitous than the decon chamber, Enterprise comes up with extended foreplay sessions Vulcan neuropressure. Basically, T’Pol has to give Trip some neural node nudging to help him, uh, sleep. Which she does. In her teeny silk pajamas. With candles burning. And Trip has to “disrobe,” too. 
Methinks someone just wanted her some Southern boy. I can’t blame her for that – we grow ‘em cute down here – but, as with most things Trip and T’Pol, these scenes would be much hotter if the actors involved had any chemistry. As it is, Trip might as well be massaging an Antedean.
And, Enterprise being Enterprise, there’s no way we could let the season go by without some girl-on-girl neuropressure. In “Harbinger,” T’Pol has to massage her rival for Trip’s affections, FACO MACO Corporal Cole (whom we never see after that episode). Alas, T’Pol doesn’t nerve pinch her by accident, though she sure looks like she wants to.
Honorable Mention: Standard-Issue Vulcan Undies
Somehow I always thought of the Vulcans as a stoic, no-nonsense race: Practically every time you see them out of uniform they’re wearing these stifling, priestly robes. But apparently, under those robes, they all have on skimpy, tight gray underwear that shows off all their curves. And they like to sleep in adorable little shorty pajamas with the tops left half unbuttoned. And wear tight catsuits, even when they go on away missions to planets where they need to be comfortable and move quickly. None of this strikes me as very logical, but what do I know? I’m only a human.
