Episode 34: The Communicator

"The Communicator" is one of those episodes that might have worked, that might just have been interesting, if the writers had actually taken some level of care in the creating the story.

Not surprisingly, this one was written by our friends Braga and Berman, who have proven over and over again that they don't take Star Trek fans (or Star Trek itself) seriously. Like so many earlier (and later) episodes written by BB, "The Communicator" manages to ignore the basic rules of the Star Trek universe and leaves plot holes galore.

One of the basic principles of the Star Trek universe, for example, is that the transporter hones in on the communicator's signal. Except in this episode. On an undercover away mission to a pre-warp planet that is on the verge of a world war, Mr. Reid manages to leave his communicator behind.

Uh oh. Contamination! We must retrieve it. You would think the sensors could find it and the transporter simply beam it back up but... nope.

Reid and Archer beam back down to try to recover the communicator and manage to get themselves captured. Identified as spies (and discovered to have different internal organs than the natives of the planet), they are sentenced to die.

Of course, in returning to the planet, they bring with them more technology which, of course, falls into the hands of their captors. While testing their new toys, the aliens discover that a phaser set on stun can actually cause minor fireworks in a wall (!!!!) and a phaser set on kill can cause the wall to explode (!!!!). I'm sorry. I thought stun setting had little or no impact on inanimate objects. And didn't it take one of the ship's full phaser batteries to make a wall of rock explode in "The Cage", which takes place apparently decades in the future?

Nifty.

Okay okay okay. So the Enterprise crew have to stage a rescue before Archer and Reid are hanged. And, thank goodness, despite not being able to find a piece of their own technology on the planet below, the good crew of the Enterprise are able to intercept and decode highly classified communications within the military of the alien world.

And Tucker and Mayweather, in about 10 minutes, can repair the Suliban cloaking device on their captured pod ship they had captured several episodes earlier, despite the fact that Tucker admits he had been working on it without success for the previous several weeks.

And Tucker then figures out how to fly the ship, despite the Suliban lettering, and off they go to stage the rescue.

But, oops, the cloak fails momentarily and more contamination occurs. Then, well, you know, we've already contaminated this culture significantly, so we might as well stage a fire-fight to rescue the captain, even if we're not really capable of hitting any target with our phase pistols.

On the happy side, at the end of the episode, T'Pol (who approved of the violent rescue mission and actually took part in it) tells the recently-rescued Archer that he is admirable because he was willing to die rather than permit any more contamination. Additional contamination in which she happily took part.

And, thankfully, we get the chance to hear an alien bartender tell Archer, for no apparent reason, that Sato is not hard to look at. Joy.