1x20 Oasis

[6.7/10] I hate to complain about Star Trek being formulaic. There’s certain beats the franchise likes to hit or tropes it likes to deploy, but that’s part of the charm. The series has never been a procedural exactly, but even with the vast reaches of space at their disposal, there’s certain types of stories that are familiar, but pleasantly so. Star Trek has always had a certain sensibility, with repeated elements particularly recognizable for fans who’ve been following it for decades, that make the execution of the idea more important than how fresh or well-worn it may be.

But “Oasis” feels like paint-by-numbers Star Trek to me. It is not bad by any stretch of the imagination. It is a sturdy, tidily-constructed episode that parcels out its mysteries and reveals nicely, features from able performances, and bakes in a little of that moral thought experiment material that usually elevates the franchise. It’s all just very familiar, and never transcends being “pretty good” instead of “great”, without anything that could truly surprise or pull the rug out from under a longtime viewer.

The episode starts with a dinner engagement between the Enterprise’s main trio and Harry Mudd-esque alien who tells them of a ship containing precious materials in exchange for some bags of coffee. But he warns them -- it’s haunted! It’s a cute way to start the episode that diverts from the usual “Captain, we’re getting a strange reading from that sector” kick-off that so many installments begin with. Granted, there is a strange reading here -- the fact that scanners reveal no life signs on the ship, but the away team discovers any entire crew of humanoids living in secret there -- but it’s at least a fun way to dive into that material.

From there, “Oasis” plays into the usual mystery angle. Once the Enterprise crew discovers the ship’s secret inhabitants, we learn the story that they were attacked by some aliens and standed, putting up a dampening field in case the aggressors returned and building a new life on the ship after it was too damaged to make the flight home or even contact help. Naturally, Archer and company want to do everything they can to help these people, which mostly means fixing their computer systems and upgrading some others, while the locals are surprisingly resistant to notions that the Enterprise would help them make the year’s journey back to their home planet.

All of this material is perfectly fine, in the usual “local community has a jam, and the spacemen try to help them out of it” sort of way. But things quickly proceed into the usual “this seemingly normal group has a dark secret” rigamarole. Reed and others discover that the ship has been stranded for much longer than its residents admitted, and the ship itself shows no sign of being attacked. When they take in an escape pod with a dead body in it, it becomes doubly fishy. Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. It’s just the standard beats for Trek, where you discovery some new group, things seem fine if a little odd, then the oddness starts escalating, until some terrible secret is revealed that forces the crew into a difficult moral choice.

I have nothing against that structure, but without an intriguing idea or a crackerjack performance or some really sharp writing, it becomes replacement-level Star Trek, without much objectionable but also not much to recommend it either.

The two things Enterprise does to try to spice up the proceedings are also familiar ones. The first is that Trip falls in love with one of the locals, Lyana, with a dynamic that feels strikingly like Pike’s and Vina’s in “The Menagerie” from The Original Series. Their chemistry is cute (with a particularly amusing exchange about rocky road ice cream), and T’Pol’s references to the last time Trip got involved with an engineer on another ship are well-taken, but there’s not much novel to it. It’s meant to give the Enterprise crew, and the audience, a more personal stake in what happens to these stranded humanoids, but if you have romantic entanglements on a nigh-weekly basis that are quickly forgotten, both on this show and Star Trek in general, it’s hard to get too invested in the relationship without some extra spark.

Some of that spark is supposed to come from Rene Auberjonois (who played Odo on Deep Space 9) guest-starring as Lyana’s father (getting the “And” credit to boot!), who is more than meets the eye. After the locals try to take T’Pol and Trip hostage to make the repairs, Lyana intervenes, pulling some circuits in the control room and making almost all of her compatriots disappear. Her father then confesses that they’re all holograms he created after their ship crashed, meant to give his daughter some companions and a normal life to grow up with, and assuage his guilt for being part of the reason the ship crashed after he left his post to try to rescue her.

(As an aside, it’s fun for fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender to see Auberjonois playing a character who lives in an isolated community where he engineers all kinds of wild inventions in order to give his child a better life.)

As reveals go, it’s not bad. There’s a personal reason behind the exposition and explanation, and Auberjonois gets a good monologue about being afraid of change but pushing past it for the good of his daughter. It all just never really rises above that. It leads to the Enterprise crew helping make the ship fly again, so that Lyana can see the world, and she and Trip have a sweet little goodbye. It’s a pat, but serviceable ending, that doesn't really challenge the characters or the viewers. It’s satisfying enough, but not much more than that.

Friends who watched the series in real time have told me that Enterprise was, at least in part, an effort to expand the reach and popularity of the franchise beyond the die-hards. If you’re new to Star Trek, and chose to start with Enterprise for some reason, maybe there would be more novelty to all of this. And it’s probably unfair to judge these episodes from the perspective of someone who’s seen these tropes and story beats deployed across decades of shows. But alas, it’s the only perspective I have to give. From that vantage point “Oasis” is an ably-done version of several things Star Trek has done and done better elsewhere, which never rankles, but never soars either.