3x02 The Enterprise Incident

[9.5/10] Dorothy Fontana is my favorite writer from The Original Series. Her record is not without blemishes, (I’m looking at you, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday”) but more than any other writer on the show, she understands the balance between plot-advancing excitement and meaningful character moment that help make an episode of Star Trek both thrilling and affecting.

That’s “The Enterprise Incident” to a tee. The first half of the episode is a feint. Kirk is acting erratic, being testy with his bridge crew and ordering them into Romulan space without Starfleet authorization. McCoy is entering medical logs questioning the captain’s fitness. Spock himself questions Kirk’s decisionmaking to his commanding officer’s face. Nevertheless, Kirk pushes back and declares that it was his choice and he made it.

That choice leaves the Enterprise surrounded by three Romulan Warbirds who have unveiled that they have cloaking technology for the first time. The Romulan Commander has Kirk & Co. by the short hairs and beams Kirk and Spock over for a parlay, with the only chip our heroes have left being the fact that the Romulans would love to bring the Enterprise back to Romulus intact.

In that meeting, Kirk claims that they stumbled into Romulan space after an instruments malfunction, a lie the Romulan Commander easily sniffs out. She brings in Spock, and after confirming that Vulcans are essentially incapable of lying, he essentially pleads the fifth when asked if what Kirk said is true, and admits that his captain has not been acting sane. This, naturally, sends Kirk into a rage, and sets of a series of events where Spock colludes with the Romulan Commander and goes so far as to use the Vulcan death grip on Kirk in front of her.

It’s a testament to the strong characterization on the show that even before Spock “killed” Kirk, it was clear something was up and Kirk and Spock were running some kind of ploy. Kirk can be a jerk to his bridge crew at times, but leaving the neutral zone with no good reason seems beyond him. And Spock is loyal to a fault, to his effectively undercutting his captain in front of an enemy commander, let alone killing him, is beyond him as well.

Perhaps I should ding Fontana’s script for not convincing me that there really was the possibility that Kirk had gone mad and Spock had switched teams, but I think the episode works just as well with the knowledge (or at least suspicion) that the whole thing is a ruse. Even if you know Kirk and Spock must be playing a part, seeing how far they’ll go, and trying to figure out why they would go to such lengths, propels the first half of “The Enterprise Incident” just as well.

The second half of the episode reveals why -- the Federation has intel on the Romulan cloaking device and wanted its top officers to be able to retrieve it from the Romulan flagship, but to have plausible deniability if things go wrong. It’s a diplomatically sound form of espionage, one where as few people know the truth as possible (Kirk is working the boys, so to speak) and should this whole operation go pear-shaped, Starfleet can chalk it up to one commander gone nuts rather cop to an act of war.

After the reveal, the episode essentially splits into two parts: Kirk disguising himself as a Romulan and recovering the device, and Spock canoodling with The Romulan Commander. The former is standard but reasonably exciting stuff. It’s a minor thrill to see Kirk given the pointy ears and slanted brow (and it sets up a jokey tag that’s genuinely amusing for once). And while his adventures around the Romulan ship once Spock tells him where the device is located turns into pretty typical karate chop, “watch my foot, mook” material, the show wrings some actual tension out of him nabbing the device and beaming out before the Commander knows what’s afoot.

But what really sets “The Enterprise Incident” apart are the scenes with Spock and The Romulan Commander. There are more than a few advantages to having a female writer in the boys’ club of the Star Trek writers’ room. One of them is that The Romulan Commander is one of the most lived-in, full-fledged, and multi-faceted female characters the show has presented so far.

The Commander (the only mention of her real name is an unheard whisper to Spock) loses, and given the nature of the show, she must lose, but she’s treated as the equal to Kirk. She quickly figures out his lies, strategizes well, offers self-sacrifice when captured, and accepts the loss with dignity. More than any starfleet officer gone rogue or grumbling Klingon tough, she feels like a match for our heroes, and that adds weight and tension to the mission Kirk and Spock are trying to accomplish here.

In a show that can be incredibly inconsistent as to whether its female characters are legitimate characters or just props for William Theiss to dress up in his barely-there costumes, it’s heartening to see a woman not only depicted as the leader of an opposing ship, but as a smart and dignified presence opposite Kirk and Spock.

That ties into her attempts to flip Spock. The Romulan Commander tries to persuade him to join the Romulans, playing on the Romulans’ and Vulcans’ common ancestry and a sense that the Federation is holding him back. Maybe it’s just my own bias that Spock and Kirk should probably switch places in the command structure, but her pitch that Spock’s earned his own command is a compelling one.

That’s heightened by the subtext to their exchanges -- that the Federation is holding Spock back, not giving him his own ship after eighteen years of service, because he is a Vulcan, the sort of prejudice that would not be at play among the Romulans. That’s coupled with the fact that while the highest ranking female officer we see on the Enterprise (and as far as I can recall, the whole show) is a communications specialist, the Romulans have a woman commanding their flagship. There’s the implication that the Federation is a bit stodgy and backward in who gets to command, and that the Romulans are much more open and fair. Again, it’s all subtext, but it accentuates the point of the Commander’s hard sell, and creates at least the cloud of possibility that Spock would accept it.

Of course that’s bolstered by the fact that Spock and The Commander make goo goo eyes at one another for much of the episode. One of the other advantages of having a female writer on the show is that these scenes come off as legitimately passionate and full of heat rather than eye-roll worthy or creepy. The commendable depictions of a strong female commander could easily have been undercut by her being enmeshed in a romantic interlude with Spock, but Fontana’s script (not to mention Nimoy’s and guest actress Joanne Linville) convey it as a convincing and real attraction, not a schoolgirl crush.

The episode legitimizes that too. While it’s kind of adorable watching Spock flirt, and it’s surprisingly steamy watching he and the Commander caress one another’s hands, the part of “The Enterprise Incident” that really sells it is their final scene together in the turbo lift. Spock admits that he has his duty and his loyalty, and he would not give those things up, but that his affections were genuine. It gives the whole thing a mildly tragic air, a more powerful, affection version of the “I might have called you friend” principle.

Of course it’s also preceded by the exchange of the episode, where the Commander realizes the ruse and asks of Spock “Who are you? What are you that you could do this to me?” being shocked that a Vulcan could engage in this sort of subterfuge. “I am the first officer of the Enterprise” he responds. (And I say “awwwsome” like Dean Pelton on Community). What follows is the usual race against time, where Scotty works his miracle to get the cloaking device working for the Enterprise, Spock beams back just in time, and Kirk evades the Romulan ship to win the day.

It’s that sense of balance -- of the thrillride that is an espionage mission to recover technology that could change the tide of the cold war between the Federation and its enemies, and the human stakes of the interactions between Spock and the Romulan Commander, that make “The Enterprise Incident” more than just another adventure. Fontana understands, in a way that few other Trek writers do, the need to have that rough-and-tumble excitement, but also something with a little more heft to make those skirmishes matter. Thank goodness she was there, to help create these sorts of episodes that are a cut above.