3x17 Hatchery

[7.6/10] I complain a decent amount about Captain Archer and Scott Bakula on this show. I don’t think that Archer is a particularly good character, and I don’t think Bakula is a particularly good performer on Enterprise. But part of my frustration with both is that the show nevertheless seems to want to frame him as the bestest, most important, and most noble captain that Starfleet has ever or will ever see, despite the fact that he makes dumb decisions and weak speeches on a near-weekly basis.

Imagine my surprise then, watching “Hatchery”, an episode that uses that fact as part of its central mystery and reveal. The episode features the crew coming across a titular hatchery of Xindi Insectoid eggs, which Archer goes to great lengths to protect, eventually beyond any point of reason. It reaches a level where the senior staff starts to question Archer’s behavior, and even considers trying to relieve him of duty over it.

I’ll cop to the fact that I pretty much guessed the cause and effect here by midway through the second act. Fairly early in the episode, Archer gets sprayed with a neurotoxin by one of the egg stalks, and once he starts seeming a little erratic and overzealous in wanting to look after the eggs, it’s not too hard to guess that this little spray is messing with his brain and making him overprotective as part of some Xindi insectoid biological defense mechanism. I may not have been able to come up with Dr. Phlox’s “reverse imprinting” idea, but it’s easy enough to piece together the basics.

The trick, though, is that the episode plays nicely coy as to how much this could be the result of some crazy alien chemical messing with Archer’s brain, and how much it may just be Archer’s own stubborn to devotion to high-minded Starfleet principles beyond any and all logic or reason. The latter is a fairly consistent quality in Archer, with him going out of his way not to kill any opponents, or disrupt relations with other species, even when the most pragmatic thing to do would be to make those sorts of sacrifices in the name of protecting his ship and his mission. Sure, it seems crazy to go to such lengths to protect some eggs when you’re days away from finding your enemy’s WMDs, but Archer is consistently that crazy.

“Hatchery” even has him offer pretty convincing excuses for his behavior. When Trip calls him out on the energy and effort they’re expending to keep those eggs alive, Archer responds with an anecdote from the Eugenics Wars. He tells a story of enemies reaching a brief truce to let schoolchildren escape, and suggests that kind of altruism and kindness helps forge common ground between opposing parties. He’s hoping that this gesture will help signal to the Xindi that, contrary to what they’ve been told, humans are not ruthless, remorseless killing machines set to destroy their civilization.

He even offers a fairly decent reason for why he relieved T’Pol of duty and confined her to quarters. Trip notes that this is far from the first time T’Pol has questioned him, but Archer responds, not unreasonably, that here she violated a direct order in front of other members of the crew, and he can’t let that stand. Is it a little extreme? Yes, but there’s a plausible reason for it, and Archer offers it in a traditionally Archer-like way.

That’s the best trick this episode pulls off. As Phlox says at the end, Archer doesn't even realized he’s being influenced by the alien goop to protect the eggs. That results in the show doing a good job of having that particular urge being filtered by Archer’s usual principles and predictions, just stretched into a funhouse mirror objective to protect a pack of insect hatchlings.

Of course, eventually the show has to give up the game and push Archer’s behavior in a direction so crazy that there’s not really any ambiguity to it. The fact that he goes without sleep for days and lets himself become downright filthy in the process is a nice pair of signs that he’s losing his grip. And when he relieves Reed of duty for firing back and destroying an Insectoid ship, you can sort of see hidebound Archer doing that in the name of the sanctity of life, but it’s a little too much, and all but confirms that this is not just the captain chasing his morals at the expense of any practicality as usual.

It leads to a mutiny, which becomes one of the episode’s most exciting setpieces. It’s neat seeing the usual senior staff secretly collaborate with one another to retake the bridge and the ship from Archer, Major Hayes, and the MACOs. The tensions there play with the preexisting friction between Reed and Hayes, and the fact that the military men, with their stricter chain of command, would fall in line behind Archer is a nice touch for making the story work.

Of course, apart from the story, there’s just a certain cool factor to seeing Trip, T’Pol, Phlox, and Reed marauding through the bulkheads and taking out MACOs. The resulting stand-off on the bridge even allows Hoshi and Mayweather (who continue to be seriously underused) to have strong moments on the side of the good guys. Apart from the “what’s really going on with Archer?” question that the episode does well with, the creative team crafts a nicely-paced action finale to show the good guys retaking control.

In the end, Trip stuns Archer with a phase pistol after he lets the creepy little insect babies crawl all over him like he’s their caretaker. Archer gets treatment from Dr. Phlox; Reed and Hayes kinda/sorta talk it out, and that’s all she wrote. The episode cements that Archer is back to being his old self when he’s willing to listen to Trip (and by extension, Phlox), rather than push back on them in a self-assured sort of way.

It’s a noteworthy final beat. In any number of episode of The Original Series, Captain Kirk would be replaced or possessed or otherwise affected by some interloper, and the crew could usually tell it wasn’t really him because of some sort of cruelty or cravenness on the double’s part that was out of character. When Enterprise tries the same trick, it does so in the opposite direction, with an infection that makes him all the more moralistics and focused on raw ethics over pragmatism than usual. That choice makes the turn more ambiguous, and plays nicely on the Archer we know, even if we don’t exactly love him.