Episode 54: Anomaly

A fairly standard action yarn, written by Michael Sussman, "Anomaly" follows Enterprise deeper into the Delphic Expanse where it encounters a powerful spatial anomaly that renders most of its systems inoperative and a raider vessel of Osaarians who board the crippled Enterprise and steal crucial supplies. Desperate and angry, Archer tortures the one Osaarian crew member they managed to capture into giving Enterprise information on how to track and defeat the Osaarian vessel and retrieve their lost supplies.

As a surprise bonus, Archer also discovers that the Osaarian ship can provide much needed data about the Xindi, information he steals while disabling the Osaarian vessel and then fleeing.

This is probably the episode they should have used to launch Season Three. It is tightly written and well acted with strong action and direction. It's not a fantastic bit of film-making, to be sure, but it manages to avoid many of the pitfalls to which so many Enterprise episodes fell victim.


The most troubling thing about "Anomaly" is the complete lack of discussion, challenge or debate in response to Archer's sudden decision to torture the Osaarian prisoner. Reid is the only one who seems to have problems with Archer's decision but he shows it only in his facial expressions as he watches the torture take place. No one else steps forward to say: "Hey, wait a minute, this isn't what we're all about".


I wonder how any remaining true Trek fans still watching Enterprise (sorry, Star Trek: Enterprise) at that point responded to this development. Certainly, the parallels between this entire story line and the then current hunt for al-Qaeda in the wake of the 9-11 attacks are fairly clear. But even in the highly charged atmosphere post 9-11, the question of using torture for the protection of one's community was heavily debated and, from what I could see, opposed by a strong segment of society as an abandonment of what that community stands for in the first place.


Surely, Archer's decision to resort to torture should have drawn strong reactions in the moment and even more discussion and debate in the aftermath.



Beyond that, the episode also suffers from some pretty major plot holes that just don't seem to stand up to scrutiny. After being damaged by the anomaly, Enterprise finds an alien ship floating dead in space. Their investigation discloses that the ship had been attacked after the anomaly had done its worst yet Archer takes very few steps to prepare his own crew for what seems like a pretty obvious development: the attack of the Osaarians.

In fact, despite the fact that he clearly understands the tactics of the then unknown adversaries, Archer fails to have his crew arm themselves to prepare for an attack, nor does he increase the watch around the ship. Osaarian fighters manage to beam over to Enterprise in small parties over a period of time and, every time they appear, they surprise the Star Fleet crew members.

I also can't figure out how an Osaarian crew could have built or found the massive space station they use as a depot -- T'Pol clearly states that it is made of the same alloy as the Osaarian ship so it is apparently Osaarian in origin.

I am also bewildered by the fact that Sato, who has managed to master several alien languages well enough to be able to speak them after only hearing a sentence or two in previous episodes, cannot work out the Osaarian language even though she has an entire database of it to study.

From a plot standpoint, the show manages to undermine the usual expectations of these kinds of stories by not having the Osaarian ship surprise Enterprise as it searches for its supplies in the space station and then brings them home -- instead, Enterprise has enough time to recover its goods, then set up a trap for the Osaarians which permits the Star Fleet crew to steal the Xindi data from the Osaarian computers.

Watching this episode did raise in my mind a couple of questions that I should have asked in the season premiere:
1. Why did Star Fleet put a group of soldiers on Enterprise but not bolster its crew of technicians and repair people? Enterprise expects to be gone a very long time and to encounter significant resistance -- shouldn't priority one be on ensuring that Enterprise has the staff and the expertise to repair damage and continue to function effectively? Shouldn't Star Fleet have added about 50 more engineers?

2. Where are the soldiers bunking? One cargo bay has been converted to the command centre, another still has supplies and cargo and the ship was already pretty cramped with just the Star Fleet crew aboard: where are they storing the soldiers?

3. Why wouldn't issues of who is commanding who (between Reid and the soldiers) have been settled before they left?

4. Would the soldiers (and even the Star Fleet crew) be willing to take orders from some Vulcan in a red jump suit who has no official status whatsoever yet still walks around like she's second in command?

Episode 53: The Xindi

OK, so maybe I was wrong. Maybe B&B didn't learn much. The first episode of the third season shares many of the same flaws that the worst of the episodes from the first two seasons suffered.

Interestingly, they seem to have added the words "Star Trek" to the show's title, which now displays on the credits as "Star Trek: Enterprise" over a much sped up, more guitar-based version of the theme song. The gesture of adding "Star Trek" to the title seems to me to be a bit of a desperate effort to re-capture core Star Trek fans.

Instead of moving back toward the core approaches, plots and philosophies that earlier versions of Star Trek used to attract and retain so many intelligent fans, however, Enterprise's show runners instead bump up the military focus, the male dominance, the violence and the unnecessary sexualisation of the female characters.

In other words, episode writers Braga and Berman choose, instead of coming up with an interesting, intelligent and thoughtful plot, to have a lot of men shouting at each other (starting with Archer treating Reid to an extended lecture), a lot of fist-fights and weapons fire and, of course, T'Pol taking off  her clothes.

Remarkably, the episode is incredibly slow in developing, with the action  climax taking place 10 minutes before the end of the show.

There are many things that don't work and don't make sense about the episode, both as a stand-alone story and as the introduction to the season-long Xindi arc, and I don't really feel like listing them here.

Suffice it to say, this introductory episode proved a significant disappointment to me and I'm sure to the 4.2 million viewers who apparently tuned in. B&B seemed to have been given an opportunity to start to rebuild their audience but chose instead to continue making the same mistake they made during the first two seasons that drove their viewers away: they disrespected the intelligence of their viewers and their commitment to all that Star Trek stood for.

Thoughts before entering "The Expanse" (and the third season)

My journey through all four seasons of Enterprise has reached its midway point: two seasons lie behind me while two seasons, like the Delphic Expanse itself, lie ahead.

I think I have a pretty good idea why the show failed to attract and retain the core group of Star Trek fans but I am now interested to see what the show runners chose to do in Season Three to try to build an audience after the first two, less than successful seasons.

In summary, I believe Enterprise failed to appeal to Star Trek's loyal fan base simply because it failed to show them sufficient respect, as exemplified by the following four facts:

1. Enterprise failed to respect Star Trek in its greater sense. It tampered with, undermined or ignored many of Star Trek's long-established truths, starting with the social and cultural fabric of the Vulcans and moving on from there;
2. Enterprise failed to respect the intelligence of the Star Trek loyalist. Episodes that took on important social, intellectual, philosophical or political themes (a hallmark of the best of Trek) were few and far between and, when they came, they were usually marred by other significant flaws. Instead of intelligent, thoughtful, thought-provoking shows, we were offered laser-gun action, childish humour and the hyper-sexualization of the female crew;
3. Enterprise failed to respect the maturity of the Star Trek fanbase. It appears that the target audience for the show was the masturbatory teen male, who the show runners assumed would rather see a respected female character stripped naked for no apparent purpose than a thoughtful, well-designed, well-thought-out story that challenged his perceptions. It failed to respect the fact that Star Trek fandom is a magnificently diverse, must-faceted, intelligent group that found, in Star Trek, an escape from the kind of male-dominated,  white-dominated, heterocentric, misogynstic society Enterprise chose to depict and a hope that the human race would soon leave that kind of society completely behind. In many episodes, the society shown on screen was decades behind the society of the people watching.
4. Enterprise failed to respect the discernment of the Star Trek fans. We know what separates a well-written episode from a poorly-written one. We see holes in the plot; we understand when characters are made to say and do things that contradict their basic character as created by earlier shows, simply to get past a plot problem. The people who created the Enterprise episode apparently felt they could slide things by us on a regular basis: that we would say, "Ah, who cares that this plot makes no sense and this character is ridiculously inconsistent; they're all wearing Star Fleet uniforms so I love it!"

Brannon Braga said some very interesting, telling things in the DVD Extra documentary on Jolene Blalock that, I think, give us a glimpse into why things went so wrong on his watch.

First, he says that he felt it was the mission of the creators of Enterprise to "make the Vulcans interesting again". Unpack that for a moment. The statement suggests 1) that Braga felt no responsibility to respect that which came before, with regard to the Vulcan society and with regard to Star Trek as a whole and 2) that Braga considers a race that no longer permits itself to be governed by its emotions but embraces logic in all things, infinite diversity in infinite combinations, and respect for all life and ways of living as "boring" and "needing improvement".

In his mind, it would appear that white men shouting at each other, threatening and bullying others, sexualizing everyone, choosing violence over any other approach on a regular basis, fearing and disrespecting anything even remotely different, is "interesting" and worthy of depiction.

I ask you Brannon Braga, who ever told you the Vulcans of TOS, TNG, DS9 and Voyager needed improvement? And who ever said you, of all people, were the appropriate person to "improve" them?

Second, he admits that he tried to write a particular script for TNG but was not permitted to, so he saved it for Enterprise. This statement confirms for me that Gene Roddenberry and others controlled Braga's less-worthy impulses in earlier series and, further, that Braga refused to learn from them. I can imagine B&B, working away under the Roddenberry yoke, dreaming of the day that they would have full control and could make Star Trek their own. I can imagine them cringing when the powers that then were refused to allow them to sex-up the story lines for nor reason, required them to respect Trek lore and challenged them to ensure that the episode plots made sense and did not contain massive holes.

They got that chance during the later seasons of Voyager and with Enterprise and, in my opinion, Star Trek, as a television franchise, was doomed.