Episode 43: Canamar

A classic Trek action yarn, "Canamar" finds Archer and Tucker trapped aboard an Enolian prison transport on their way to a trial and internment for smuggling. Written by Allan Koeker, the episode moves along well enough and even manages to avoid some of the usual tricks of earlier shows with similar story lines.


I liked the fact that Koeker doubles down on the drama by having two of the prisoners stage a successful revolt and take over the transport. Archer immediately decides to throw in his lot with the escapees on the basis that their original captors must be corrupt, only to find out that Kuroda, the man in charge of the breakout, is actually a savagely violent sociopath who plans to leave the other prisoners to die in a decaying orbit. Archer's challenge: to find a way to keep everyone alive until help can arrive while still convincing Kuroda that he and Tucker are on his side.


It's also neat to see a Nausicaan for the first time. If I'm not mistaken, this violent race of people did not appear at all in TOS but made several memorable appearances in TNG, including during a flashback to Picard's Academy days. In "Canamar", the Nausicaan behaves according to expectation: he is big, strong, nasty and not particularly bright.


It also works well that Koeker decides not to make the Enolian government part of the immediate problem. When T'Pol returns to Enolia looking for her Captain, the Enolian representative admits that they have problems with smugglers and that it is entirely possible that Archer and Tucker have been arrested leaving the planet.


The Enolian rep then agrees to help them track the prison transport that the Enterprise officers are likely aboard and even sends a message out to the transport telling them to release Archer and Tucker.


In most stories of this kind, the Star Fleet crew must battle their way through a corrupt government to rescue their mates from the prison colony. Not here: Koeker's story is fresher and more challenging.


That being said, there are flaws. Significant ones.


For example, Archer and Tucker are arrested for smuggling. They admit that the Enolian security forces searched their shuttlepod. What did they find that caused them to arrest the Enterprise officers? The implication seems to be either 1) that Archer did in fact have something inappropriate with him or 2) that the Enolian forces are in fact extremely corrupt and arrest just about anybody they encounter.


I guess the second one must be the right answer (since I cannot imagine Archer and Tucker smuggling [but, then again, Archer has shown himself to be pretty culturally insensitive in previous episodes]) but that makes no sense at all. If they run a busy space port with lots of smuggling problems, why would the Enolians bother to arrest innocent people? Don't they have enough to do with the truly guilty?


And why wouldn't the Enolian government, knowing that their own security were pretty strict with ships leaving orbit, have ordered that the shuttlepod be given pre-clearance after confirming that Archer and Tucker were on a diplomatic mission?


Second, where was Enterprise while Archer and Tucker went to Enolia? I don't think Koeker ever establishes a plausible explanation for why the Captain and Chief Engineer would be sent alone in a shuttlepod to visit such a busy spaceport for the first time.


Third, how did Enterprise manage to overwhelm and take control of the small ship that arrives to carry Kuroda and his Nausicaan friend away? Koeker tries to be clever by showing Enterprise tracking the little vessel as it drops out of warp and then T'Pol raising a cunning eyebrow (which of course telegraphs the ending entirely) but I still don't get how the Enterprise crew were able to take over the small ship so quickly.


They must have fired on the ship to disable its weapons, then somehow grappled it into the Enterprise's shuttle bay, then defeated the ship's crew in an armed exchange, then re-launched the ship to rendezvous innocently with the prison transport. Very very quickly.


Or maybe Enterprise used the transporter....


All I'm saying is -- that bit of military magic is glossed over a little too easily in my opinion.


And finally, I actually said "Give me a break" out loud as I watched Archer put himself, his crew members and all the rest of the prisoners at significant risk as he tried to force Kuroda to abandon the transport with the rest of them. Our good captain first fought Kuroda in a hand-to-hand dust up to try to get Kuroda to abandon the rapidly burning up transport, then actually resisted Reid's efforts to get him to leave the doomed transport even after Kuroda had run to the transport's bridge.


Sorry, but that just doesn't fly. Sure, we want to see Archer as noble and honourable and as valuing life, even sociopathic life, even if it means risking his own survival, but that went way too far.


All of that being said, "Canamar" at least manages to avoid the juvenile pitfalls of many Enterprise episodes. It's not great science fiction but at least it's not insulting to its viewers.