Episode 10: Fortunate Son

Enterprise presents itself, at least from time to time, as something of an old style Western. The galaxy is the untamed frontier and the new Warp 5 ship is Star Fleet's first effort to bring law to this vast new territory.

"Fortunate Son" approaches this theme from the point of view of the people who first explored that new frontier and made a life for themselves, despite the risks of trying to survive in a world where the only justice was the justice you carried with you, where the law comes only from the pulse cannon on the top of your cargo ship.

And these people don't seem to be all that pleased to have a new sheriff in town.

Enterprise is dispatched to come to the aid of a deep space cargo ship, Fortunate, which sent a distress call while under attack by a Nausicaan raider. When Archer and his crew arrive on the scene, however, they find Fortunate adrift, in a field of debris, but with a crew that does not seem interested in Star Fleet's help. They're hiding something, you see: a capture Nausicaan crewman from whom they hope to learn valuable information about Nausicaan defenses through torture.

Fortunate's captain is in a coma after the latest Nausicaan attack and his first officer, Matthew Ryan, has decided to take justice into his own hands; he doesn't want the new sheriff telling him what he can and cannot do.

Once common sense and Dr. Phlox's advanced medical skills convince Fortunate's crew to accept help, Mayweather makes fast friends with Ryan as the two compare space-boomer backgrounds. It turns out Ryan lost his family aboard the North Star in what was apparently a legendary incident, though I'm not sure we ever learn what happened, leaving him an angry, vengeful boomer who tries to make Mayweather feel guilty for abandoning his family and his boomer life.

T'Pol's scans of the ship finally find the Nausicaan's bio-signs and Archer attempts to intervene. Ryan's too quick, however, and the Enterprise boarding party is left adrift in a leaking cargo pod as the repaired Fortunate fires a few shots at Enterprise and then takes off at warp.

Ryan believes he finally has beaten the information he needs to disable the Nausicaan shields and defeat their ship out of the prisoner and he sets a course to find the raider. Enterprise, meanwhile, is trying to find Fortunate before it's too late.

Fortunate falls into a trap and is attacked by three Nausicaan ships. The raiders board the cargo ship and a fire-fight ensues as the Nausicaans search for their lost comrade. In an amazing gun duel, seven different characters fire about 100 shots between them and only one... ONE... finds its target.

Even more amazing, Fortunate has a crew complement in the mid-30s and yet only four of its crew decide to engage the three-member Nausicaan boarding party. What are the other 30+ Humans doing while Ryan and his small group get pinned down in a cargo pod? Why don't, say, three of the other Fortunate crew come up behind the Nausicaans, whose attention is focused intently on Ryan and his team, and defeat them?

Enterprise arrives and the weight of her weapons causes the Nausicaan captain to hold his ships off to leave Archer time to negotiate the release of the captured prisoner. Ryan, still pinned down in a firefight, resists until Mayweather, in a long winded speech, finally convinces him that his actions will have a lasting impact on all boomers, causing the Nausicaans to kill rather than simply plunder. Ryan gives up and every flies away happy.

Fortunate's captain, finally out of his coma, mourns the loss of his lifestyle with the recognition that his competition will soon have Warp 3 ships (Fortunate maxes out at Warp 1.8) and Star Fleet will be bringing the law.

I wish I could like this episode, I really do. One of the lesser characters, Mayweather, plays a large role in it and the idea -- the impact of "progress" on those over whom progress will steamroll -- is an interesting one.

But there are so many flaws, so many gaps in this episode that it really is hard to stomach.

We start with Anthony Montgomery's "golly gee" portrayal of Mayweather. He has clearly been told to play the ship's pilot as an innocent in this episode but he goes way beyond that to the point of irritation. Whether he's chumming up to Ryan, gushing about the advantages of Star Fleet and the Enterprise (including everything from the food to the transporter to the cool new engines), or acting like a bashful school kid talking to his principal when he approaches Archer, Montgomery slathers on the golly gee. It's almost unwatchable.

And then there's Archer. He's dealing with a boomer crew and it doesn't occur to him to approach the only crew member who might have an insight into the why's and wherefore's of the boomers' behaviour? Remember when Picard sought out Chief O'Brien in the TNG episode "The Wounded" in order to get a handle on what is going on inside O'Brien's former captain's mind and how to deal with him? "Fortunate Son" would have been a much better episode (and Archer would be a much better captain) if Archer had called on Mayweather early in the show to get his take on how to approach Ryan and the boomers. Instead, Mayweather has to approach Archer himself and be subjected to a patronising speech from his Captain on what it is to be Human.

And help me to understand the whole cargo fleet, boomer lifestyle anyway. These very slow, very vulnerable ships are running freight so far away from Earth that Star Fleet's Warp 3 ships can't protect them. For whom are they running freight? Are there Earth colonies out this far? Why? How? And if there are aggressive alien species out there with technology that can threaten Enterprise (Klingon, Romulan, Tholian, Andorian, Nausicaan, Ferengi, Orion, etc.), how is that these freighters, slow and poorly protected but carrying large quantities of valuable cargo, haven't been eaten alive years ago?

The Orions attacked Enterprise and stole members of her crew to sell as slaves. Why bother when there are apparently dozens of Fortunates out there, teeming with Humans, ripe for the picking? And why not just go to these Earth colonies that the freighters are apparently supplying -- they must have several thousand or more Humans each and little protection?

I like the idea of the boomers and the freighters (and the parallels to early sailing ships and pirates, to the wild west as well) but it doesn't make sense to me in the context of Enterprise.