"Terra Nova", written by Braga and Berman, is a good ol'fashioned Star Trek episode. It would slide in well into any of the earlier Star Trek series, with an interesting mystery, good character development, thoughtful discussions among the crew and a well-paced, suspenseful story.
Sure, T'Pol's suggestion late in the episode that the Star Fleet crew force the Novans to leave their radiation-soaked caves using stun grenades and physical restraints is a bit out of character for a peace loving Vulcan but, other than that, the show even seems to adhere to most of Star Trek's fundamental principles.
And, despite their later predilections, B&B manage to avoid sexualising the female characters and showing their male characters as xenophobic jerks.
Enterprise is sent to investigate the fate of a lost colony, Terra Nova, that hasn’t been heard
from in 70 years. As a sign of the creative team's original commitment to sharing the screen among all of the major characters (not just the white men and T'Pol), Mayweather and Sato have the teaser almost entirely to
themselves as they set the stage for the rest of the show. It's nice writing, weaving needed exposition into a charming scene of character development.
Upon arrival, Enterprise discovers that the colony is vacant and blanketed with levels of radiation that permit only a few hours of exposure before causing damage. T'Pol advises that, 70 years before when contact was lost with the colony, the
radiation levels would have been lethal. It's the same basic set-up as TOS' "This Side of Paradise" but then transitions quickly into a story line that combines elements of the TOS episodes "Miri" and "And the Children Shall Lead".
The landing party soon realises that they are not alone, that some form of bipedal being lives in a network of tunnels under the colony. Archer and Reid enter the tunnels to investigate, leading to a nicely-paced, suspenseful sequence puncuated by dramatic drums. When they finally find the beings, Archer shouts "We’re not trying to hurt
you," then watches as Reid shoots the first one to approach them.
In the ensuing gun fight, Reid gets hit by a bullet and captured. Meanwhile, T'Pol manages to stun one of the beings and take a scan. They're human. Archer, T'Pol and Mayweather return to Enterprise to plan a rescue and we get our first look at the “Situation room”.
At this point, Archer makes an insightful point as they struggle to understand why the human tunnel dwellers received them with violence (other that, of course, the fact that Reid shot the first one to step forward). “Maybe we looked as strange to them as they do to us,” Archer says. It's a brilliant point and one that Archer and his crew don't seem to have understood until that moment. Maybe their human-centric approach doesn't work in deep space.
When Mayweather protests Archer's proposal to negotiate with the beings, Archer's initial response is angry: “If I can’t make first contact with other humans,” Archer barks, then visibly calms himself before continuing, “I don’t have any business being out here.”
The puzzle slowly gets unravelled. The "Novans" are actually the descendants of the original Earth colony. Shortly before contact was lost, they deduce, an asteroid struck the planet, sending a deadly radiation cloud over a massive area of the northern hemisphere. The dying adult colonists blamed the humans back on Earth for the "attack" and only their very young children proved adaptable enough to survive the radiation and move underground. These children grew up without adult supervision and their bodies adapted both to the residual radiation and their life underground. They also grew up with a distinct distrust of the legendary "humans" who "gutted" their foreparents.
Archer wisely targets his negotiations at an older woman named Nadette, who is the mother of the apparent leader of the Novans. Nadette, Dr. Phlox discovers, is dying of lung cancer. Archer convinced Nadette and her son to return with them to Enterprise for treatment, leaving Reid in the tunnels as a continuing hostage.
Phlox cures her cancer but makes an even more disturbing discovery: residual radiation in the Novans' water source is causing micro-cellular decay in their bodies that will kill them in a matter of years and even Phlox cannot treat. The only chance they have is for them to leave.
The matter then becomes a question of trust: Archer must gain the trust of the Novans to convince them to leave their home in order for them to survive. But their distrust of humans is ingrained so deeply that this might not be possible.
Archer's first step is to convince the Novans that they are, themselves, descended from humans. He finds a photo in the database of a family at the original colony, a family that includes a five year old girl named Bernadette. Nadette recognises that this little girl really is her and becomes an ally.
In discussing options for the Novans' future, T'Pol uncharacteristically suggests stun grenades and restraints be used. When Archer challenges her on the ethics of moving them without their consent, T'Pol turns the tables and questions Archer on his assumption that moving to Earth, where they would not fit in and would lose their community and their culture, was appropriate at all.
Further research discovers another option: they could help the Novans move to another area of their planet, one uncontaminated by the asteroid's radiation, with similar conditions as their own.
Archer and Mayweather then return with Nadette and her son to the planet, only to have their shuttle's weight collapse some of the tunnels beneath it. Archer and the Novan son must learn to trust each other so that they can work together to rescue a Novan trapped in a rapidly filling underground pool and, once that barrier is surmounted, they go together to propose the move to another part of the planet to the Novan community.
In the ensuing gun fight, Reid gets hit by a bullet and captured. Meanwhile, T'Pol manages to stun one of the beings and take a scan. They're human. Archer, T'Pol and Mayweather return to Enterprise to plan a rescue and we get our first look at the “Situation room”.
At this point, Archer makes an insightful point as they struggle to understand why the human tunnel dwellers received them with violence (other that, of course, the fact that Reid shot the first one to step forward). “Maybe we looked as strange to them as they do to us,” Archer says. It's a brilliant point and one that Archer and his crew don't seem to have understood until that moment. Maybe their human-centric approach doesn't work in deep space.
When Mayweather protests Archer's proposal to negotiate with the beings, Archer's initial response is angry: “If I can’t make first contact with other humans,” Archer barks, then visibly calms himself before continuing, “I don’t have any business being out here.”
The puzzle slowly gets unravelled. The "Novans" are actually the descendants of the original Earth colony. Shortly before contact was lost, they deduce, an asteroid struck the planet, sending a deadly radiation cloud over a massive area of the northern hemisphere. The dying adult colonists blamed the humans back on Earth for the "attack" and only their very young children proved adaptable enough to survive the radiation and move underground. These children grew up without adult supervision and their bodies adapted both to the residual radiation and their life underground. They also grew up with a distinct distrust of the legendary "humans" who "gutted" their foreparents.
Archer wisely targets his negotiations at an older woman named Nadette, who is the mother of the apparent leader of the Novans. Nadette, Dr. Phlox discovers, is dying of lung cancer. Archer convinced Nadette and her son to return with them to Enterprise for treatment, leaving Reid in the tunnels as a continuing hostage.
Phlox cures her cancer but makes an even more disturbing discovery: residual radiation in the Novans' water source is causing micro-cellular decay in their bodies that will kill them in a matter of years and even Phlox cannot treat. The only chance they have is for them to leave.
The matter then becomes a question of trust: Archer must gain the trust of the Novans to convince them to leave their home in order for them to survive. But their distrust of humans is ingrained so deeply that this might not be possible.
Archer's first step is to convince the Novans that they are, themselves, descended from humans. He finds a photo in the database of a family at the original colony, a family that includes a five year old girl named Bernadette. Nadette recognises that this little girl really is her and becomes an ally.
In discussing options for the Novans' future, T'Pol uncharacteristically suggests stun grenades and restraints be used. When Archer challenges her on the ethics of moving them without their consent, T'Pol turns the tables and questions Archer on his assumption that moving to Earth, where they would not fit in and would lose their community and their culture, was appropriate at all.
Further research discovers another option: they could help the Novans move to another area of their planet, one uncontaminated by the asteroid's radiation, with similar conditions as their own.
Archer and Mayweather then return with Nadette and her son to the planet, only to have their shuttle's weight collapse some of the tunnels beneath it. Archer and the Novan son must learn to trust each other so that they can work together to rescue a Novan trapped in a rapidly filling underground pool and, once that barrier is surmounted, they go together to propose the move to another part of the planet to the Novan community.
Amazingly, in the last scene on the planet, Nadette seems to have regained her command of English as she argues passionately for them to move.
The show ends with Enterprise back at warp, the Novans apparently safe, and Archer giving Mayweather the honour of writing the report on the re-discovery of the Terra Nova colony to be sent back to Earth.
There are many strengths to this episode that I have highlighted above. One, however, has so far not received the attention it deserves in this column. The Novan language is an interesting bastardization of English that feels right when one remembers that the only survivors of the original human colony were children, younger than four or five, when the adults all died. At that age, they would have already developed reasonable language skills but, without adult guidance, they would likely have strayed further and further from traditional English as they grew up, forgot words they might once have learned, needed new words for things they had never encountered, and passed their language on to their children.
I especially like the fact that the Novan word for a lie, a fabrication, is "shale": an interesting choice in light of current debates about the truth about shale gas.
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