2x15 Cease Fire

[7.6/10] One of Enterprise’s most interesting series-length story threads is the slow but steady development of the Federation. Part of the knock against prequels in general is that you know how the story ends. But that actually helps Enterprise here. We know from The Original Series’s “Journey to Babel” that eventually, the humans, the Vulcans, and the Andorians all become part of the same association. Enterprise gets to look at these groups a hundred years before, show them at one another’s blue/green/pink throats, and ask “how the hell did we get there?”

“Cease Fire”, then, is about the slow steady progress toward some sort of mutual understanding. The episode’s best asset is its premise, which sees the Vulcans and the Andorians fighting over a formerly uninhabitable planet near Vulcan. There’s old treaties and forced evacuations and longstanding enmities that have led to the current conflagration, and inevitably, the only person who can solve it is Archer. When Shran, the Andorian leader who keeps popping up, wants a fair mediator between him and the Vulcans, he calls for the Enterprise captain to fill the role, to the chagrin of Ambassador Soval and his pointy-eared friends. (T’Pol’s right, it’s clearly ear envy.)

What follows is fairly predictable. The Vulcans shrug off help from those illogical humans. The Andorians bristle at Archer’s requests for concessions as a sense of good faith. But through trial, error, and a foiled attempt at sabotage, Soval and Shran eventually come to believe in one another and, in their own way, in Captain Archer.

Honestly, the story shouldn’t work. It’s effective not because of Archer, who does his usual Winger Speech routine here, but because the story of two cultures, at odds with one another for a century, gradually starting to set aside their differences is an enticing one. Enterprise seems to be going for Kashmir or other disputed territories here as a real life analogue, and the show does a good job of sketching out what feels like a genuine international dispute. It builds on the previously laid groundwork for the Vulcans’ and the Andorians’ mutual mistrust, and the sense of Archer as a figure in the middle who neither fully trusts but neither fully hates either.

“Cease Fire” belabors the point, but there’s the sense that this is humanity’s value as part of the interstellar community. Part of the legacy of Star Trek is in its metaphor for America in its “world police” role. Lord knows The Original Series had tons of episode where Kirk went to some heretofore unknown place, decided he didn’t like how the society was structured, and so just toppled it to remake it in Starfleet’s image. But as the franchise went on, there came to be more a sense of Starfleet as a flotilla of diplomats as much as it was of scientists, helping to resolve disputes between peoples and be fair mediators for Klingons, Vulcans, Andorians, and any number of other random, contentious groups they’d meet on in space.

This episode suggests that’s part of a long legacy, where we can see the first steps toward the United Federation of Planets taking shape. Some of that is cheesy. The episode’s final lines about compromise and Archer being “not as meddlesome as usual” are on the nose. But they’re also fun and endearing in that heightened Star Trek sort of way.

The only part that I truly didn’t like here is the aforementioned furtive plot to disrupt the talks between the Vulcans and the Andorians over the disputed planet. The notion that there would be Andorians who think the Vulcans are never trustworthy, and that talking to them is a sign of weakness, is a strong one. That’s a true-to-life landmine in any negotiation between longtime enemies, and the fact that Enterprise acknowledges it, and doesn't instantly resolve the dispute here, helps make the geopolitical metaphor feel well-observed.

The problem is that the Andorian lieutenant who concocts this whole thing spits only the most generic, predictable lines on the subject. And the fact that she staged this whole thing to scuttle the talks seemed so obvious and telegraphed that I assumed it was some sort of double-swerve on the part of the show, to make us think it was her when really Shran was sabotaging his own talks or something. It just seemed too plain and boring of a twist. It also didn’t help that the whole incident leads to some underwhelming, Kirk-ian fisticuffs between Archer and the Andorian lieutenant. (His little leap off the building earlier in the episode was downright laughable.)

Still, it’s a good outing for Trip and the rest of the crew back on the Enterprise without their captain and first officer. It’s nice to see Trip in the command position now and then (he’s a mighty improvement on Archer). And the way he maintains that neutrality, by threatening to fire on either the Andorians or the Vulcans if they try to go to the surface, and positioning the Enterprise between the two species’ ships, gives him points for courage. It’s a little convenient as a task to occupy him and the rest of the characters, but it works in the moment, and the Andorian ships arrival does a nice job of creating a ticking clock to add urgency to the events down on the surface.

(As an aside, it’s amusing to see John Balma, who played Barney the accountant on Parks and Recreation, play a stoic Vulcan here, when his P&R character laughs at the lamest of jokes.)

But my favorite scene in the episode is the conversation between Ambassador Volar and T’Pol. I’ve mentioned before that one of my other favorite long term story threads in Enterprise is the gradual evolution of T’Pol away from her Vulcan upbringing and education. When Volar emphasizes both what she’s given up professionally by staying on Enterprise, and his concern that she’s been contaminated by the humans and emotion, it underscores both her sacrifices and the prejudice she faces by doing what she’s doing. (His line about her picking up a human accent is a nice touch in that regard). And her retort about respect for Captain Archer not being a failing, or failure of self-discipline, is a great indicator of her self-possessed belief in her mission and her own moral compass. It seems to move Volar when he meant to move her.

It’s symbolic of the larger movement within the episode, where the Vulcans are starting to see the humans’ value, the Andorians are starting to see the potential for peace and compromise with their pointy-eared enemies, and the humans are starting to see that they may genuinely have a place in the interstellar community, however dangerous that position may be in time. It’s all part and parcel with a story of disparate nations of disparate peoples starting to form an association that will outlive and outlast them, and knowing the destination makes the bumps on the road to get there that much more compelling.