Episode 51: Bounty

If earlier episodes like "The Crossing" didn't convince Star Trek fans that Enterprise was too sloppy, too insulting, too juvenile to merit watching, "Bounty" must have sealed the deal.

Not surprisingly, the story idea comes from Berman and Braga, with screen writing credits going to Hans Tobeason and Mike Sussman & Phyllis Strong. It has already been made abundantly clear that, despite being strong Star Trek fans with at least a wish to remain true to established Trek traditions and history, Sussman and Strong were unwilling or unable to stop B&B from indulging in their most childish fantasies in the stories they created.

"Bounty" is a classic B&B episode filled with plot holes, boys-behaving-badly moments and the hyper-sexualization of T'Pol.

The episode combines two basic story lines: a soft-hearted Tellarite bounty hunter captures Archer with plans to sell him to the Klingons for enough currency to get his awesome freighter out of hoc while an outrageously horny T'Pol, stripped of both her uniform and her emotional control by a microbial organism she picked up on a planet, is trapped in Decon with Phlox.

 I have to admit, I am having a very hard time writing coherently about this episode because it is so remarkably offensive in so many ways. It is quite literally and honestly an insult to Star Trek's core fanbase and not only because of the T'Pol plot. It is quite clear that the five people who contributed to the writing of the script had so little respect for their viewers that they didn't care to ensure their characters behave in a manner consistent with their past behavior and their training, they didn't give a damn whether the plot made any sense and they chose to throw almost 40 years of settled Trek lore out the window, all because they couldn't be bothered to try to do any better.

It was easier to insult us than to take the time and invest the energy to write a good episode.

Even if we accept that we should not expect more from B&B, and we accept that Sussman and Strong could not have forced changes even if they wanted to, I have a hard time accepting that episode director Roxann Dawson should be so willing to indulge them all. Dawson's major contribution to the episode is a series of long, lingering shots that pan slowly up and down T’Pol’s body, pandering to the masturbatory fantasies of some non-exist teenage male viewer -- for the rest of the show, she stitches together a series of uninspired scenes in a plot riddled with holes.

By this time in the series' history (the end of season two), it was abundantly clear that Enterprise was hemorrhaging viewers and was in danger of cancellation. Core ST fans were either long gone or on their way out (I know that I had stopped watching consistently before the end of season one and had given up complete by the time season two rolled to a close) and B&B were desperate for a quick fix.

What was their apparent resolution? Do even more of the things that have driven away most of your viewers in the first place. Be more insulting and more juvenile. Ramp up the sex, degrade your female characters even further and make it clear that you don't give a damn about the established knowledge-base of the franchise and its fans. Don't worry about making things make sense; just throw a bunch of garbage on the screen and hope someone decides it's worth watching.

I'm not going to go into all the plot holes. There are too many to cover (I mean, why is every bounty hunter soft-hearted? how is that the locking mechanism on the Decon chamber can be pried out of the wall and disabled so easily? why would Archer ever agree to be delivered to a Klingon ship, just to help out said bounty hunter when we all know that the Klingons are more than likely to execute him as soon as he steps aboard? where did the bounty hunter get those nifty handcuffs with a hidden chamber for contraband Klingon door-opening technology? why would the Klingons not take further steps to secure a prisoner they know to be dangerous [such as beat him unconscious]? how did the Tellarite manage, by himself, to repair his ship while guarding Archer who has just managed to increase the damage to the engines caused by the attack of the other bounty hunter? etc. etc. etc.).

Let's talk instead about the many instances where "Bounty" manages to make a hash out of well-established Star Trek lore, including the following:

1. The Klingon prison planet is pronounced "Rura Pen-tay", not "Rura Penthay". This is well established in The Undiscovered Country. yet both Archer and the Tellarite pronounce it "Penthay";

2. A Class D planet is a small, barren rock in space with little to no atmosphere. There are many examples of this in Star Trek throughout the years. How is that Archer and the bounty hunter manage to land on the rock and work on the ship without the need of atmospheric suits;

3. The physical strength of Vulcans far out matches that of humans and most other races. T'Pol, in her over-heated condition, would likely kill Phlox when he tries to stop her, not beat him back with a series of slaps (note, this problem is ubiquitous in Enterprise where Archer and his band of merry men consistently win hand-to-hand battles with representatives of alien races which are clearly established as possession physical strength far outstripping that of humans, like Klingons and Vulcans, for example);

4. Klingon warriors are warriors. They are good at what they do. The idea that Archer, a human who has been beaten, stunned and imprisoned, who has had little sleep, little exercise and little actual combat experience, could, upon being brought on board a Klingon ship, escape their prison, overcome a warrior guard (I admit, at least they made it a real fight and Archer has to use the handcuffs as a weapon to win it), take his weapon, learn how to use said weapon, then defeat several other Klingon warriors in a fire fight (hitting two of them in rapid succession in a split second in one scene), then make it to an escape pod and escape, is absolutely ludicrous. I had the same reaction when the revisionist Khan managed to overwhelm an entire platoon of Klingon warriors in that awful second reboot movie; and

5. I’m sorry. A female in Pon Farr? You talk about your revisionist biology. The concept of Pon Farr is introduced in the Original Series episode "Amok Time" wherein it is repeated on several occasions that Pon Farr affects Vulcan males. The Star Trek Concordance, published in the 1970s, confirms this. Further, in The Search for Spock, Saavik mentions again that Pon Farr affects Vulcan males. Later ST series confirm this fact, with only Vulcan males experiencing Pon Farr. Then along come B&B, with their juvenile need to sexualize T'Pol, to change what is considered established Vulcan biology. Apparently, female Vulcans experience Pon Farr too. What really bothers me about this is that B&B could easily have avoided this problem and shown some respect for Star Trek lore either by having Phlox establish that it is the microbial organism that is affecting T'Pol's body chemistry and causing her emotional behaviour (without even mentioning Pon Farr) or by having T'Pol admit to Phlox at the end that she must have been lying, in her heated state, when she tried to excuse her behavoiur by blaming it on Pon Farr, since Pon Farr only applies to males.

Is it too much to ask that they at least try to bring us intelligent plots that are respectful both of us as viewers and of Star Trek lore that has been so well established?