Episode 45: Judgment

This could have been a wonderful two-part episode.

Too bad, after a pretty strong first 35 minutes, the episode tries to wrap itself up in the final seven minutes.

Written by David A. Goodman, "Judgment" joins a long line of Star Trek episodes that are as much courtroom drama as science fiction. And it shows nice respect for Trek lore by recreating, in lesser detail and less grand scale, the Klingon courtroom first introduced in The Undiscovered Country and reintroducing us to Klingon families (Duras, in particular) and actors (including, with a particularly strong performance as Advocate Kolos who defends Archer and bemoans the deterioration of the Klingon society into a warrior world, J.G. Hertzler) with whom Star Trek fans would have been very familiar.

The episode even borrows lines from the earlier TOS film when the Klingon judge delivers his verdict.

Unfortunately, Goodman spends so much time on his wonderful trial scenes that he has none remaining to permit Enterprise to rescue Archer in a believable way.

Instead, we are supposed to accept the hasty explanation that T'Pol has friends in the Klingon administration who manage to get Enterprise free passage to Rura Penthe, the penal colony that is located deep in the Klingon Frontier. In accepting this, we are also required to forget that, in Kirk's time, Star Fleet did not know where Rura Penthe was located and Spock and his crew had to locate it using extreme long-range sensors and the veridium patch Spock had placed on Kirk's uniform before he was taken prisoner.

Still, despite these reservations, Goodman has produced a strong and entertaining episode that shows respect for Star Trek lore, gives us an interesting relationship that develops between Archer and Kolos, and provides us with further information about the development of Klingon culture.

One last question (that I forgot when I wrote this entry originally): How does Archer end up in the custody of the Klingons in the first place? I don't think that's ever established.

Episode 44: The Crossing

"The Crossing" provides the clearest example so far of the reasons Enterprise failed. Not surprisingly, it was written by our friends Berman and Braga who, I continue to argue, are the authors of that failure.

Enterprise is overtaken and then swallowed up by a massive ship that houses what turns out to be a race of non-corporeal beings capable of taking over the bodies of the Enterprise crew. Although the entities present themselves at first as being peaceful "explorers", T'Pol's superior mental control permits her to discern that the entities' ship is breaking down and they face extinction unless they can take over the crew permanently.

The concept of a more advanced, non-corporeal race requiring corporeal bodies to survive is "borrowed" from TOS season two episode "Return to Tomorrow". Unfortunately, even if the TOS version of the concept is uneven, "The Crossing" is frankly regrettable.

And filled with elements that would likely have driven true Star Trek fans to distraction.

Characterization: As so often happens with episodes written by B&B, the humans respond to the unknown in childish, undignified ways. Archer is suspicious from the beginning, reacting with anger and petulance to the overwhelming superiority of the entities and to their initially peaceful-seeming advances. He wastes not a minute's thought that this encounter might be an opportunity for some true "exploration" and cultural learning.

When it turns out that the entities' behaviour is driven by its own need to survive as the result of the failings of their own ship, Archer fails entirely to consider what any other Star Fleet captain would have immediately considered: making at least some attempt to work with the entities to find a way either to repair their ship or to rescue the entities in some other way. Instead, he shows no hesitation at destroying their ship and murdering them all when he has the chance.

I cannot imagine a single Star Trek fan (by that point in the Second Season, the only people who could possibly have been continuing to watch Enterprise) finding the outcome of "The Crossing" in any way acceptable. Even if we accept that Archer represents a Star Fleet captain in early development, there is imply no way that we can accept that a human being placed in that position could possibly murder these entities in "cold blood" as Archer does here.

The Masturbatory Male: As soon as I saw, in the opening credits, that "The Crossing" was written by B&B, I knew it would feature childish behaviour on the part of the crew and at least one scene involving the hyper-sexualization of T'Pol. I said to myself: "Okay, when and how are they going to get T'Pol into a state of undress in a sexual situation?" B&B played true to form by having the second entity take over Reid and send him on an over-sexed stroll through the ship. He harasses a female crew member in the turbolift and then proceeds, with unerring aim, to T'Pol's quarters where the science officer is, inexplicably during a time of such danger, meditating in her pajamas.

As with the previous turbolift scene, Reid's aggressive approach to T'Pol (in which he demands that she remove her clothes to make sexual contact easier) is played for laughs. It almost seems that B&B expected their viewers to find the scene both exciting and funny.

Again, Star Trek fans are known for their commitment to the dignity of all, to equity and diversity. This scene, as so many others before it, would be viewed with extreme distaste and discomfort by such fans. B&B, as was their wont, ignored what made Star Trek so successful in the past in their desire to attract the immature male viewer.

Plot Holes: Again, as was their wont, B&B didn't seem to wish to waste their time and energy in attempting to construct a logical, rational plot.

Why would a race of non-corporeal entities have such a massive ship with the capacity to swallow up other ships so easily?

It is established late in the episode that the entities cannot survive in space yet, somehow, they can travel through it to invade Enterprise.

If the entities were planning to take over the Enterprise crew, why didn't they do it as soon as they discovered that the humans were suitable and while they had the Enterprise, powerless, within their own ship? And all at once? Why would they release the smaller Earth ship? Why would they permit the crew to carry out repairs?

Why was T'Pol, who requires little rest, off duty in the middle of this crisis?

Why did Archer not issue a ship-wide warning to all crew members as soon as it became clear that the entities were starting to take over individuals?

Why, when Tucker displayed such abnormal behaviour late in the show, did Mayweather not immediately take action to stop him?

Why did T'Pol, who was also relatively immune to the entities, not accompany Phlox on his mission?

Why did the entities, once they found themselves locked in different crew quarters, not leave their then current hosts, float through the walls and find another host who was free? Why did they docilely accept the fact that they were trapped?

I could go on and on.

One of my favourite quibbles is the fact that, in describing for Phlox what he must do to flood the ship with gas and drive out the entities, the human crew (and the Vulcan) tell him to set certain valves at the "3 o'clock" and "9 o'clock" positions. I'm sorry? They are still using old-fashioned clock faces in Enterprise's time? Alien species would understand what "3 o'clock" and "9 o'clock" mean? Not buying it.

"Crossing Over" is an awful episode of Star Trek. It suffers from practically every ill that B&B introduced to the franchise, every insult B&B continued to perpetrate on the dedicated Star Trek fanbase.

If you want to figure out why Enterprise failed to earn and retain an audience, even among the most loyal of Star Trek fans, "Crossing Over" would be a pretty good place to start.

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.

Episode 42: Future Tense

If you can put aside your reservations about the whole "Temporal Cold War" subplot, "Future Tense" is actually a really strong episode. A really really strong episode.


So strong, in fact, that I was very upset when my brand new DVD (the fourth DVD in the second season of Enterprise, purchased through Amazon) turned out to be damaged such that it abruptly quit with about seven minutes left in the episode.


I had to scramble to find out what happened. Since I'm no good at online streaming and am hesitant about giving my credit card information to anyone online, I ended up having to find out how the episode ended by finding a version of the script on some website somewhere.


I am very much looking forward to seeing the ending someday.


"Future Tense" was written by Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong, who were apparently members of the "writing room" for Enterprise. According to Wikipedia, they spent the first season creating scripts from stories written by B&B (which accounts for why they were so bad) but were allowed to create new scripts from scratch in season two. This would appear to be one of them.


There is a lot going on in this story which deals with the aftermath of Enterprise's discovery of a tiny space ship, drifting along on its own at a distance from Earth far greater than any Earth vessel had ever travelled until Enterprise, with an apparently human corpse at the controls. The mystery deepens when Phlox discovers that the corpse is mostly human but contains DNA from numerous other alien races, including Vulcan, and Tucker and Reid figure out that the tiny ship is actually huge inside and has some form of biological circuitry.


So, it comes from the distant future.


And apparently everybody wants it, including the Suliban and the Tholians, who send warships after Enterprise to get it back.


The episode moves along at a break-neck pace and is so frantic that the viewer never really knows what will happen next. The breathtaking climax, when Enterprise reaches its rendezvous with a Vulcan Battle Cruiser (??!!??) only to find the massive Vulcan ship floating helpless in space, is (or would have been had I been able to see it) awesome and the battle between the Tholians, the Suliban and the Enterprise (who are all fighting for custody of the future ship) epic.


We learn just how formidable the Tholians are (they disabled the Vulcan ship and win the battle over the Suliban fleet) in their star-shaped ships that capture the essence of the ships that appeared in the well-known TOS episode "The Tholian Web".


We also get hints that the Temporal Cold War doesn't just involve the Suliban against everyone else.


Too bad Sussman and Strong felt they had to buy into the good ol' boys relationship between Tucker and Reid as they decide to explore the unexpected depths of the future ship without reporting their discovery to anyone, in direct contravention of procedure and good sense.


Other than that, however, this is a riveting episode. I can't wait to see it.

Episode 41: Cease Fire

Captain Archer seems to be developing a bit of a rep by this stage in the series: a galactic reputation for fairness and honesty. Neat.


A small, lifeless planetoid floats in a strategically important location between Vulcan and Andoria, the subject of decades of conflict between the two planets. Tensions have flared up again and a full-scale war threatens to break out. Archer's old friend Schran is in command of the Andorian forces and communicates to the Vulcans that the only mediator he will trust to intervene in the situation is the Enterprise Captain.


Vulcan ambassador Soval complies with the request but has distinct reservations, thanks to his long history of conflict with Archer and his crew.


It's a neat little spin on TOS' Organia storyline and offers a nice measurement of Enterprise's impact on the galactic community over the first 18 months of its mission.


Chris Black's script is tight and suspenseful -- he even takes the time to establish plausible reasons for Enterprise's inability to intervene when its shuttlepod is shot down. And the casting of Star Trek stalwart Suzie Plakson as Tarah, Schran's treacherous sub-commander, is a stroke of genius -- Plakson is an imposing figure with just the right amount of menace; the Andorian Tarah represents the fourth different race she's portrayed, following star turns as a Vulcan, a Klingon and a member of the Q continuum in earlier series.


I'm not sure why Tarah's battle uniform requires her to show a significant amount of cleavage (Schran's breast-plate is complete and shows no skin) but I won't comment further on that issue.


"Cease Fire" continues the revision of Vulcan society as being much more war-like at this point in its history than it appears in TOS, where Spock continually searches for any alternative to violence in every situation. The Vulcan High Command is clearly a military operation and the supporting Vulcan characters are all soldiers who are quite willing to shoot first and enter negotiations later.


At least Black avoids the predictable stratagem of having Archer discover that it was the Vulcans themselves who shot down the shuttlepod with their own ambassador in it -- that would have been going a little too far.


If I have one significant problem with the episode, it is this: Soval is hit by fire from an Andorian weapon in one scene and suffers minor injuries to his shoulder, severe enough to require medical attention but not so severe that he cannot take part in later fire fights. That being said, Tarah states quite clearly in her confrontation with Archer in this same episode that Andorian weapons only have one setting: kill.


How is it that Solval survives a direct hit in the chest/shoulder from a weapon that is set to kill? Are we to believe that the Andorian weapon, like a regular gun, only kills if it hits a particular part of the body? That certainly isn't how ST weapons usually work (except, of course, where it is really really necessary that a key character get injured but survive).


Black could have avoided this problem by having Soval get injured as a result of a near miss that causes a wall or roof to collapse on him. Simple but workable.

Epsiode 40: Stigma

Ahh, yes, another episode written by Berman and Braga, another episode that focuses on T'Pol and the demonizing of the Vulcans.


To be frank, "Stigma" is a pretty strong episode which attempts, at least, to introduce larger philosophical/moral themes and to build on earlier shows.


I am even willing to ignore that this episode appears to steal from Voyager the plot that the only significant Vulcan officer onboard suffers from an untreatable, progressive, private disease that the ship's doctor tries to control without disclosing it to the Captain.


T'Pol appears to have picked up her disease from the mental sexual assault she experienced in the season-one episode "Fusion". T'Pol is hesitant to reveal that she has the disease 1) because it will stigmatize her in the minds of the Vulcan High Command as potentially being part of a despised sub-culture and 2) because the fact that a member of the subculture assaulted her would expose that sub-culture to even more negative attention on Vulcan.


Although the episode manages to deliver the goods, it does have a number of significant problems that are attributable directly to its writers:


First, Phlox is uncharacteristically clumsy and naiive in approaching the Vulcan medical people for information on T'Pol's disease, apparently not realizing they will see through his flimsy excuse immediately and T'Pol's career will be put into jeopardy. This is just plain sloppy writing. B&B prove themselves consistently willing to take the easy way out in their scripts: rather than working harder to figure out a way to resolve a plot issue in a manner that is consistent with their established characters, they simply make the character behave, well, out of character to help out the plot.


Second, the portrayal of the Vulcans is highly problematic. Even in the B&B universe, the Vulcans value logic above all else. The prejudice the Vulcans display in this episode to the despised sub-culture is not at all logical and neither is their fear and suspicion of the mind meld itself. Vulcans would be interested in studying the practice as a different, potentially more efficient manner of communication. They would not simply vilify both it and those who are capable of it.


Third, the Vulcan assumption that, if you have the disease, you must be part of the despised sub-culture, does not hold logical water. There are a number of other possible explanations for how a Vulcan could contract the disease, including assault as an adult or exposure to a mind meld as a child, or simple experimentation. The leap the Vulcans in this episode make to guilt based on the fact of the disease is most illogical, to a level not even explicable by the prejudice attributed to them.


Fourth, the hearing Archer forces the Vulcan doctors to hold makes no sense. If the doctors cannot take any steps to affect T'Pol's career other than report her to the Vulcan High Command, then a hearing of this kind would not be applicable. Since the hearing does appear to be required by the Vulcan policies, however, there is no way the Vulcan commander would fail to hold it.


Fifth, the manner by which the Vulcans confirm their suspicion that T'Pol has the disease is dishonourable and highly suspect for any civilized race. Earlier series established many facts about Vulcan culture, including the aforementioned commitment to logic and to infinite diversity in infinite combinations and their almost pathological obsession with privacy. Yet, in this episode, we have high ranking Vulcan doctors deliberately violating T'Pol's personal privacy by setting her up and stealing her DNA to run their tests.


Sorry. That's not the Vulcan way. Even if B&B's screwed up universe.

Epsiode 39: Dawn

A common Star Trek trope involves isolating one of our regular characters on a planet with an unknown and potentially dangerous alien and seeing how things play out.


We've seen this trope in TOS (with Kirk and the Gorn getting dumped on some remote planet to battle to the death) and in TNG (most famously, and impressively, in the Darmok episode but also in an episode that forced LaForge and a Romulan officer to work together to survive) -- the other series may have offered similar episodes but, to be honest, I can't call them to mind right now.


"Dawn" is Enterprise's version of the trope and, despite some fairly obvious deficiencies, it works well. John Shiban's script is tight and well-paced with a nice balance between the shipboard drama and the events taking place between Tucker and the Arkonian on the planetoid below.


I like the last twist at the end when Dr. Phlox warns them against using the transporter to save Tucker's life on the basis that the Arkonian might be too susceptible to the shock of the temperature change, forcing Tucker to find an alternate solution. It's a nice touch and shows the level of the Chief Engineer's commitment to the tenuous bond he's created with the alien that he is willing to put his own rescue at risk to save the Arkonian.


My concerns with the episode are fairly minor. First is the fact that I didn't actually get to see the episode on my new collection of Enterprise DVDs because this disc arrived at my house already damaged. I was only able to see the second and third episodes on the disc, not the first and fourth.




Second, the fact that Tucker does not have access to the Universal Translator creates barriers to communication yet Tucker has a "pad" and several other pieces of technology. This raises the objection that should have been raised much earlier in the series: the UT should be simply a software program, capable of being included in any piece of equipment. Why would it not come pre-loaded on the pad? or, if that's not possible, why would it not be standard equipment on the Shuttlepod?


Further, why would the Arknonians, who have technology at least equal to that of Star Fleet, not have one of their own?


Second, as there is a TOS episode called "The Return of the Archons", why couldn't the Enterprise writers come up with a different name for the aliens in this episode to avoid confusion?


Third, why is it necessary, yet again, to have Tucker strip down to his skivvies? I mean, sure, maybe it's nice that there's some unnecessary sexualisation of the male characters from time to time to balance out the sexualisation of the women but... is any sexualisation necessary at all?