I have resented since the first episode of Enterprise the way Braga and Berman "re-wrote" the Vulcans, turning them, basically, into Romulans: cunning, aggressive and confrontational, xenophobic, discriminatory and abusive, using violence freely to accomplish their aims, using logic and rationality as a cover for their brutal, self-serving ways.
Braga states in one of the DVD extra interviews that they wanted to find a way to make the Vulcans "interesting again", which says a heck of a lot more about him and his inability to appreciate what Vulcans (and Star Trek) really are about than about the Vulcans themselves.
So I watched Episodes 83 ("The Forge"), 84 ("Awakening") and 85 ("Kir'Shara") with a sense of gratitude as the episodes' respective writers, Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Andre Bourmanis and Mike Sussman, tried to create an exciting story that both explains the behaviour of the Vulcans in the first three plus seasons and sets the basis for the creation of the Vulcan culture that Star Trek fans know and love so well.
When bombs go off in Earth's embassy on Vulcan, Enterprise is sent to assist in the investigation. The chief of Vulcan Security uncharacteristically turns the matter over to Archer and his crew on the basis that the Embassy is technical the sovereign territory of Earth. Reid and Mayweather soon discover the smoking gun in the wreckage: an unexploded bomb. Scans of the device show Vulcan DNA which is quickly matched to T'Pau, who is identified as a leader of an anarchist sect called the Syranites.
If you are a Star Trek fan, you are already intrigued because you recognize T'Pau as the person identified in TOS' "Amok Time" as the matron of Vulcan society, the only person ever to turn down a seat on the Federation Council. It's a brilliant decision by the writers both to have T'Pau serve as the chief suspect and to identify her to the audience as such so early. We know something is amiss -- the T'Pau we know is no violent anarchist -- but what?
Reading our minds, Ambassador Soval warns Archer that his investigation should not accept evidence at face value. T'Pol's husband then shows up with a gift for T'Pol from her mother, who has gone into hiding. The gift (an IDIC medallion that will also be immediately recognizable to ST fans) contains a hidden map of "The Forge", a Vulcan badland prone to murderous climactic conditions that render most technology useless. T'Pol surmises that her mother must be hiding, likely with T'Pau and her sect.
Archer and T'Pol beam down to search The Forge on foot, leaving Tucker to lead Enterprise in its ongoing investigation and its relations with the volatile head of the Vulcan High Command, V'Las.
Thankfully, unlike when Tucker visited Vulcan earlier in the season, Archer is warned of the effect Vulcan heat and thin atmosphere may have on him.
Phlox discovers that the DNA they found on the bomb was planted there to frame T'Pau and the Syranites and Tucker realizes, upon reviewing the video of the Embassy's security desk on the night of the bombing, that the security guard recognized a hooded stranger and let him pass without scanning. Further, he points out that the same security guard (quite handily) is lying in a coma in Enterprise's sickbay.
Soval is convinced to perform a mind meld on the guard to find out who the hooded stranger was and discovers that it was, in fact, the Vulcan Security Chief. When Tucker confronts V'Las with this evidence, V'Las is more concerned about the fact that Soval is willing to perform a mind meld than about the apparent guilt in a horrendous act of terrorism of his lead security staffer. V'Las later announces that they have incontrovertible evidence that the Security Chief is a Syranite, evidence that Tucker and his crew highly doubt.
It soon becomes clear that V'Las is out of control and that the bombing of the embassy was simply an attempt to create cause for the High Command to hunt down and destroy the Syranites.
Meanwhile, back on Vulcan, Archer and T'Pol enter The Forge and, in a strange homage to Star Wars, they are saved from a marauding Selhat when a Vulcan pilgrim draws the beast away from them by imitating its own call. The pilgrim turns out to be Syran himself, the leader of the sect, who uses two questions about Vulcan philosophy and science taken directly from Spock's retraining program in the TOS movie The Voyage Home to prove that Archer is not a devotee of Surak as he claims to be.
Syran saves them from a sand-lightning storm anyway but, in the process, gets fatally hit himself. With his dying breath, he places his hand on Archer's forehead and whispers "Remember" in Vulcan. Star Trek fans immediately think, "Uh oh, that's the sound of a Katra being transferred". We soon learn that Syran was the keeper of Surak's Katra, which he has now placed inside Archer's head, via a practice we first experienced at the end of The Wrath of Khan. Archer immediately begins to act strangely, worrying T'Pol who is already highly suspicious of the Syranites and their quest to bring Vulcans back to the true teachings of Surak. There's some pretty heavy Christian references going on, with T'Pol playing the role of the skeptic who doesn't even believe that the society's "saviour" ever even existed.
Whatever has happened to Archer, however, he certainly does become more than capable of leading them immediately to the Syranite hideout. There, they are taken prisoner by the Syranites themselves with T'Pau at the head. T'Pel is also there and she and T'Pol try to sort out their mother/daughter baggage as things start to fall apart around them. T'Pau mind melds with Archer to prove that he really is the carrier of Surak's Katra, then decides to attempt to perform the very dangerous ritual to move that Katra from Archer's head to her own.
During the process, Archer meets Surak in person in a strange scene in his own mind and learns that Surak wishes Archer to lead the remainder of the campaign to return Vulcan to its proper path. T'Pau's effort fails and she tells the others, with undisguised surprise, that Surak himself resisted the move.
Soval is excommunicated by the Vulcan High Command but we are starting to see signs that some of the other Ministers are beginning to look askance at V'Las and his increasingly violent, irrational decisions. V'Las outlines a plan to bombard The Forge with torpedoes to eliminate the Syranites completely, to the horror of this colleagues who seem powerless to challenge him. Wanting no witnesses, V'Las orders Enterprise to leave orbit but Tucker, with Archer and T'Pol still on the planet and one of his shuttle pods on its way to try to rescue them, resists the invitation. Both the pod and Enterprise are then fired upon by Vulcan ships and Tucker choses to recover his pod and withdraw rather than to be destroyed.
This gives V'Las the chance to put his bombardment plan into action and, as the torpedoes start to rain down on The Forge, Archer announces that he knows the location of the Kir'Shara, the fabled vessel that contains the original writings of Surak.
Soval, for some reason now aboard Enterprise, tells Tucker that the Vulcan High Command is planning a surprise invasion of Andoria and has managed to draw the Andorian fleet out of position in preparation for the attack. Tucker ignores Star Fleet orders to return to Earth and sets a course for Andoria at maximum warp to warn of the planned invasion.
Archer, T'Pol and T'Pau find the Kir'Shara and decide that the best course of action is to bring it to the High Command on the basis that its discovery will shake the foundations of Vulcan society and put an end to V'Las and his persecution of the Syranites. On their way, however, they are waylaid by an element of the Vulcan security force.
Archer, despite the heat and the thin air, beats up several of the security guards and T'Pau proves herself pretty handy in a fight as well. Since energy weapons will not function in The Forge, the guards use Lirpas, another welcome reminder of "Amok Time", and Archer turns out to be as fast a learner as Kirk will later be.
T'Pol is separated from them, however, and is captured. She convinces her captors that Archer and T'Pau are taking the Kir'Shara to Mount Seleya rather than to the capitol before she is sent to the High Command for punishment.
Enterprise arrives in Andorian space and, with Soval's help, finds Commander Schran. Soval tries to convince Schran that the Vulcans are massing for an attack that will create an interstellar war that will swallow up Vulcan, Andoria and probably Earth too, but Schran takes some convincing. He doesn't want to move the Andorian fleet from its current location only to find out Soval is lying.
After kidnapping and torturing Soval using a device that strips him painfully of his emotional control, Schran finally believes him and, under fire from Enterprise, returns him to the humans. Enterprise joins the Andorian fleet as it moves to intercept the Vulcan invasion force, though the Andorians are out-numbered two to one.
Archer and T'Pau arrive at the High Command, thanks to some help from a friend who turns out to be T'Pol's husband, and delivers the Kir'Shara to the Council. V'Las is overpowered and word spreads quickly throughout the planet of the discovery.
The Vulcans and Andorians begin their space battle and, when several Vulcan ships focus on Enterprise, Schran intervenes and announces that Archer now owes him twice. Of course, saving Andoria from invasion doesn't seem to count for one in repayment but we quibble.
Despite Schran's intervention, the battle goes poorly and the Vulcans slowly take the upper hand. Then, as Enterprise faces its end, the Vulcan fleet suddenly withdraws. Enterprise receives a signal from Archer at the Vulcan High Command: Vulcan society has come back to its logical ways and everything is going to be fine.
In three last scenes, T'Pol's husband drops in to tell her that, with her mother's death (did I mention T'Les was killed in the assault on The Forge?), their marriage is no longer necessary and he is releasing T'Pol from her bond; a Vulcan priest removes Surak's Katra from Archer's head and we learn that the High Command has been removed from power as Vulcan moves back to the peaceful teachings of Surak; and a disgraced V'Las confronts a mysterious stranger who turns out to be a Romulan, apparently working with V'Las toward the extermination of the Andorians and the re-unification of their two people.
Yes, a lot happened in these three episodes. And it was a refreshing change to see Vulcan society finally brought back on course. Of course, I'm not so sure V'Las is to blame for the degradation of Vulcan society as much as Braga and Berman but, whatever.
The expansion of our understanding of Vulcan history and Surak's role in it lines up fairly well with what we already knew and the writers do a nice job of integrating Vulcan lore into their taut, tense story line. If their goal was to repair the damage done by earlier seasons, they did a pretty good job of it.
I'm not big on the Romulan scene at the end, however. First, there is absolutely no hint of Romulan involvement anywhere in the first 124 minutes of this trilogy so it really seems like something tacked on at the end to create intrigue. Second, it is absolutely and fundamentally clear from the TOS episode "Balance of Terror" that the discovery of the connection between the Vulcan and Romulan races comes as a complete surprise to Spock in the 23rd Century and the idea of "Reunification" of the two races does not surface until 100 years later.
It makes no sense that V'Las was already in on the secret in the 22nd Century. A sloppy slip up but one that is consistent with the scene being an afterthought, something tacked on at the end without much thought or consideration.
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