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SST423: Can a black hole make you obsessive? In “Singularity,” the ninth episode of Star Trek: Enterprise Season 2, the NX-01 skirts a black hole in a triple star system and the entire crew succumbs to its radiation — each one fixating on a single trivial task to the exclusion of everything else, including a very hungry beagle.

Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler work through one of Enterprise’s slowest outings and land on a rare unanimous verdict: this one drags. In this Star Trek: Enterprise “Singularity” review they trace the obsessions one by one — Archer can’t stop rewriting the preface to his father’s biography, Trip pours himself into rebuilding the captain’s chair, Malcolm Reed invents the tactical alert that will one day become Red Alert, Hoshi throws herself into a family recipe, and Dr. Phlox turns a routine headache into a case for exploratory brain surgery.

The problem, as the panel sees it, is structural. Nobody notices anything is wrong until the halfway mark, the ship escapes mostly because the episode is running out of time, and the whole thing reads like an idea that never quite became a script. That leads to Jimmy’s rule against building a story on a pun — the title means both a black hole and single-minded focus, and neither meaning carries an hour of television.

The conversation ranges well beyond the episode: the in-media-res cold open as a TV writing crutch, the unseen “Chef” gimmick measured against Morn on Deep Space Nine, Phlox as a genuinely creepy mad doctor, and the literary DNA this shares with Larry Niven’s “Neutron Star” and the earlier Trek episodes “The Naked Time” and “The Naked Now.” There’s also the small irony that Reed’s obnoxious new klaxon is the very thing that saves the ship — and a closing bit of listener feedback from an exhausted new father of five.

It may be a weak episode, but it makes for a lively conversation about what makes Star Trek storytelling work.

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