With the U.S. debut of the STAR TREK ENTERPRISE third season premiere now just hours away, the reviews are beginning to flow in. Salon weighs in on tonight's episode, "The Xindi," saying it adequately jump starts the series.

"In the season premiere, we see Archer bribing a sleazy mining official for an interview with his Xindi employee," writes reviewer Sumana Harihareswara "Far from home and out of its depth, the crew is bound to experience some blowback, as it indeed does here. I want to see more of this. I want to see ENTERPRISE compensate for drawing the analogy between 9/11 and this ahistorical, unpreventable alien massacre. "Enterprise" can redeem itself by emphasizing that our incidents and relationships with other races have ramifications, that there are other fish in the pond."

She concludes that "ENTERPRISE's new, darker and denser story arc holds a promise even more alluring than Jolene Blalock's bum."

Over at IGN FilmForce, reviewer KJB lets his opinion known immediately: "a pile of dung still smells like a pile of dung even if you try to call it a rose."

IGN gives the episode only one out of five stars in its blistering review.

"The 'tension' aboard the ship is expressed mainly by the characters acting pissy instead of pissed off, which is what I'm assuming they were going for," KJB continues. "Despite Brannon Braga's statements to the contrary, the emotions are obviously meant to mirror the emotions right after the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States but we just don't get that from our main characters."

IGN wasn't impressed with the Xindi, either.

"The alien species that populate the Expanse look like little more than bad Farscape knock offs - they look weird but still way too conventional to be truly unique (as many of FARSCAPE's aliens were) but too strange to buy any sort of credibility with the audience."

Meanwhile, producer/co-creator Brannon Braga is on the horn again today, in new interviews with several newspapers around the country. Speaking with the Baltimore Sun, Braga reiterates remarks made all summer long that putting Earth in jeopardy--like STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME--should lead to success.

"We're making very dramatic, and hopefully, effective changes to the show because they are creatively stimulating and because we're trying, of course we're trying, to generate viewer interest," Braga told the Sun. "A lot of people are like, 'Are you doing this because of the ratings?' Well yeah! What television show in the history of television doesn't try to get better ratings?"

The director of the cited top-grossing TREK pic, Leonard Nimoy told the Sun he's not sure if the formula is so simple.

"It just doesn't seem to me to start out on a premise that if Earth is in trouble we'll have a success," Nimoy says. "I just don't get it. We had an enormous number of wonderful episodes in the original classic series where Earth was not in danger. I thought the episodes worked very well."

Braga continues with the Salt Lake Tribune: "The challenge we face is ourselves. But, you know, it doesn't mean that we're not still having fun and feeling very creative about the show. And we believe very strongly that 'Star Trek' is still a very viable franchise."