LogFAQs > #884334265

#60. Charles “Trip” Tucker

Trip had a pretty hellacious first couple of seasons on Enterprise. By a mere four episodes into the series, Trip Tucker has already had an episode where he gets high on hallucinogenic air and starts threatening to kill T'Pol, and an episode where he gets pregnant, handled with all the grace you'd expect from UPN in 2001. This quickly becomes a trend, as Season 1 Trip spends a vast majority of his time failing at tasks, womanizing, and otherwise being a liability to the crew.

Towards the very end of Season 2, though, things start to improve a bit for Trip, as he finally starts having a likability to him instead of just being “what TV writers in LA think the average southerner is like”. He gets a good, sympathetic spotlight episode called “Cogenitor” (which has a terrible ending but more on that later). Then the season ends and the Xindi arc turns him dark... kinda. “The Expanse” probably promises more darkness for him than the show ever actually fully delivers on, and after awhile the amount of focus put on Trip still gets a bit annoying, as he has this tendency to leech screentime from more interesting characters.

At the very least, by the end, he had improved. He still got too much screentime (proving that the engineer really shouldn't be one of your primary leads on a Star Trek show), and he also served as a delivery boy for a lot of the show's worse “everybody's in their underwear in decon” moments, but he did improve, peaking with the Xindi arc which gave him actual stakes and a reason to exist other than to randomly fail at missions or get pregnant or go to Risa or some shit. At least I'll give him this - he does have good taste in classic movies (certainly much better than Tom's!).

Best Episode: The Expanse
Worst Episode: Unexpected