LeftHandedGuitarist

Fuji's silent reaction shots during the tea negotiation are all gold

[5.2/10] For a while I’ve worried about Enterprise falling into the same pattern that The Original Series did, where the three main characters get all the stories and the rest of the crew, give or take the occasional Scotty episode, have to fend for scraps. It doesn't help that Enterprise, like the 1960s series, relegates the people of color in its cast to being supporting characters most of the time. So I’m inclined to appreciate the installments where Mayweather or Hoshi or Dr. Phlox get the spotlight for an episode.

The problem is that those episodes need to be, you know, good, and “Horizon” pretty much tops out at “boring.” A story with tinny emotions, slack pacing, and a sort of knowingly inessential vibe make Mayweather’s day in the limelight feels like a big waste. The threats here are minor, the personal relationships are stock and weakly-developed, and the conclusion is predictable and rushed.

The premise of the episode sees the Enterprise passing by the freighter owned and operated by Mayweather’s family. Travis asks for a brief leave to visit them, only to learn that his father, who captained the ship, died before word could reach him. What follows is an awkward, semi-presumptuous visit home, where Mayweather is excited to see his old digs and impart what he’s learned, but his brother, Paul, is far less welcoming.

“Horizon” is basically doing a less traumatized version of “Family” from The Next Generation here. Travis’s brother is resentful that his brother left the family trade to go join Starfleet. He is contemptuous of his brother’s vaunted place in the world, and has an implicit inferiority complex while trying to succeed his father in running the freighter. Travis, meanwhile, is conflicted between his desire to help his family and their ship run better and be safer while he’s there, with his own remorse at wondering if he’s abandoned his family and his old crew, and if he even has a place with them anymore.

That’s strong stuff! As befits the product of a writer who would go on to pen scripts for Mad Men, there’s complex familial and generational issues at play. The rub is that the delivery of those ideas, in story, dialogue, and performance, is all facepalm-worthy.

I feel bad for singling out Anthony Montgomery, but he’s just not really up to conveying the complicated emotional situation the episode wants to depict. Granted, the script does him no favors, being riddled with tin-eared dialogue and on-the-nose statements about what everyone’s thinking and feeling. But Montgomery does little in these stretches to suggest he should get this sort of focus more often (not that it stops the show from giving it to Bakula). While he does some nice nonverbal work in the moment where he’s crying in his little crawl space, every time Mayweather’s called upon to actually say a line, it feels like he’s announcing it rather than delivering it.

The other side of the coin is that maybe it’s not Montgomery’s fault, because the same thing happens with every other character on the Horizon, from Mayweather’s brother, to his mom, to his childhood playmate. There’s a stagey atmosphere to all of this, where each of the characters gives performances with the vibe of a high school play. Star Trek isn’t always a den of naturalism, but the hokiness of the line delivery across the board robs the episode of whatever tiny bit of emotional force the script might be able to muster.

That’s part of why the most enjoyable part of “Horizon” is its B-story. It sees Trip arranging a screening of Frankenstein, and he and Archer cajoling T’Pol to come to movie night and see it. It is, without a doubt, a trifle of a subplot, and it yet again teases romance between Archer and T’Pol that I just don’t buy. But it’s fun! Not everything has to be a high stakes outing, and just seeing the Enterprise’s senior staff goof off around an old movie without having to carry all the dramatic weight makes for an entertaining, seven-minute lark.

Still, it ultimately offers a more worthwhile point than the main story does. Maybe this is a cheap thing for a critic to like, but I particularly appreciate how T’Pol pulls out a different interpretation of the film than her colleagues intended. The idea of the story as a rumination on how humans treat those who look and act different from them, something that T’Pol and by extension, other Vulcans could relate to, causes Archer and Trip discomfort, but is a legitimate take.

Beyond the humor of T’Pol preferring a dramatic reading of the original novel or Dr. Phlox nitpicking the medical procedures, there’s some nice irony in the fact that T’Pol’s crewmates wanted her to learn more about humanity through its art, and she did, just not in the direction they were hoping. There’s a statement about the malleability of stories and the way we share them that is as worthwhile as it is pithy.

Were that I could say anything else in the episode was pithy. Back on the Horizon, Travis has predictable friction with his brother, predictable reminiscing and uncertainty with his old friend, and predictable reassurance from his mother. There’s a lot of “Did I ever tell you about the time?” scenes, and a lot of painfully ruminating on the same “You left us! The whole world is leaving us!” issues over and over again. This episode loses the thematic punch of the same topic in “Fortunate Son” by couching it in a tired kitchen sink drama and a barely-there action-y threat. The whole thing ends up dull.

That’s frustrating, because it suggests a lack of care or quality from these sorts of outings that suggests we won’t get many of them. One of the best things about Star Trek is that, from the beginning, the franchise has been about ensembles. It would be nice to see Enterprise taking advantage of that, and featuring other characters more often. But given the middling work and middling results in “Horizon”, that doesn't seem very likely.

Good episode. :thumbsup_tone4:

Did we ever find out what happened to Kolos? Was he able to make a significant impact like he wanted? I don't recall if it's mentioned in Klingon history? Does anyone know? I tend to think not considering what became of the Klingon Empire. Maybe they mention him later in this series... will just have to keep watching and find out.

[9.4/10] I tend to like naturalism in most things, even in stories in outer space. It’s why I found found the original Star Trek difficult to warm to at times, with all of Kirk’s grand pronouncements about this and that, and a certain pulpiness that was always the intent of the show. All else equal, I want the conflict, the characters, and their reactions to feel real, even if the setting or scenario are outlandish.

But by god, somehow the Klingons just bring out my inner cheese. (Surgeon General’s Warning: If you or a loved one start autogenerating dairy products internally, please consult a physician.) There is just something about those growling, shouting, gesticulating aliens that works for me, and turns a tone that might seem over the top elsewhere into something I can absolutely vibe with.

The same goes for courtroom drama episodes for that matter. There’s an artificiality to the setting, one where people are called upon to make big speeches in a structured setting, that lends itself to a certain amount of grandiosity and presentation. Lawyers “act” when making presentations to juries or arguing in front of judges, so it makes sense that actors playing lawyers would, well, act as well.

So when “Judgment” presents a Klingon legal drama, it can be loud and boisterous and grandiose in what it offers the audience, and it goes down as smoothly as a nice slug of bloodwine, even for sticks in the mud like me.

The episode sees Archer brought before a Klingon tribunal and charged with fomenting rebellion. Using a Rashomon type presentation, the courtroom scenes are, in part, a frame story to depict a skirmish between Archer and Klingon named Captain Duras (a name that raises instant suspicion among Next Generation fans). Captain Duras tells his side of the story, a tale of a duplicitous, Klingon-hating, terrorist-helping human who defied the Empire and dishonored a proud warrior. And then Archer tells his side, of his crew rendering aid to a group of beleaguered refugees harassed by the Klingons like the ones we met in “Marauders”, of defending his ship from a Klingon-instigated attack, and of the mercy she showed his enemy despite the opportunity to slay his opponent.

It’s all done well enough, with some cool firefights and explosions. The true set of events are predictable enough, but it’s fun to see the Enterprise through a lying Klingon’s eyes, and the episode adds enough wrinkles and new details to what really happened to make the retelling of the story compelling. It all sets up Archer as someone resourceful, proud, and noble, who not only outflanked a Klingon battle cruiser, but who is willing to sacrifice his own life in order to save a group of people he’s barely met, because it’s the right thing to do.

That’s not the most interesting part of the episode though. It’s fine to see Archer presented as the good captain yet again, but it’s far more fascinating to see another glimpse of the Klingon legal system, to hear about the degradation and change of the Klingon society, and to see the story of one man (er, Klingon man) seeing Archer’s stand as an object lesson for standing up for his principles.

The Courtroom drama part of it is just downright fun. Sure, theoretically Archer could be sentenced to death, but c’mon. The spark of the judge’s weird ball glove gavel, the rabble of the chanting crowd, the tet-a-tet between the defense advocate and the prosecutor are all great texture and great television. There is a certain amount of enjoyable scenery-chewing that goes on when Orak, the mercenary, decorated prosecutor, goes full “j’accuse!” with Archer, and it’s just as fun when Advocate Kolos is roused from his complacency by Archer, and starts using his craftiness to meet Orak head-on.

But what’s even more engrossing is Kolos’s recollection of a more enlightened Klingon society, and his lamenting how much his people have devolved into rank warriorism. I’ve watched literally every other Star Trek series, and outside of a few notable exceptions, I only know Klingons as the proud, revelrous warriors that they’re typically presented as. The idea that there’s other classes of Klingons than the ones the likes of Kirk would likely meet on the interstellar frontier is neat in and of itself.

Even more compelling, though, is the notion that the Klingons were once a diverse set of people who had scientists and teacher and real lawyers, who devolved into an “honor and war above all” corruption that would overtake the culture as a whole. There’s an antiquated sort of species essentialism to Star Trek: all Vulcans are logical, all Klingons are war-like, all Ferengi are greedy. Different stories have subverted these ideas on the margins, but “Judgment” is the first Trek story I can remember to suggest that it didn’t have to be this way, that for Klingons at least, this was a regrettable cultural homogenization, rather than a speciesist inevitability.

Kolos aims to fight against that tide. He tries his hardest for the first time in years, and earns Archer a commuting of his death sentence to life in prison. Inspired by Archer’s example, he publicly questions how far these Klingon courts have fallen in his time, regretting his complacency, challenging the hypocritical sense of honor, and speaking truth to power. It earns him the same trip to the penal colony of Rura Penthe that Archer gets, cementing the ways in which “Judgment” is a spiritual successor to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which dealt similarly with kangaroo courts and hard-won shifts in Klingon society.

In truth, the episode runs out of gas a bit once the setting changes to the frozen prison. The enjoyable Klingon bravado, the heightened reality of the tribunal setting, fade a little into standard Trekian folderol. Still, the convenient rescue is an enjoyable post script to these proceedings, and even better is Kolos resolve to stay and improve his people’s lot.

The show isn’t subtle about it, with Kolos outright stating why he’s had a change of heart, what he means to atone for, and how he’ll have the will to go on. But maybe with these operating Klingon stories, subtlety is overrated. There is something heartening, maybe even stirring, about this cynical man finding reason to believe in something again. Even I would be hard-pressed to ask Enterprise to turn the volume down.

Kolos: says one word
Me: OMG that's J.G. Hertzler!

[5.6/10] For me, the greatest sin of a television show is wasted potential. Some episodes are liable to be great. Some episodes are liable to be terrible. A good many more will vary between “fine” and “pretty good.” As I’ve exhaustively detailed on this website, there’s a ton of reasons for that, some of which are understandable and some of which are maddening. But the most frustrating thing when taking in a story of any stripe, is feeling like somebody had a great idea, or great premise, or sniffed greatness, but then left some of the best possibilities on the table.

“The Crossing” leaves more than the best possibilities on the table. It leaves most of the possibilities on the table. The prospect of non-corporeal beings, touring the human body as a vessel of choice through meatspace, is a thrilling one. As “Return to Tomorrow” from The Original Series showed us, the notion of what beings without bodies do once returned to them can be an illuminating experience for the characters and the audience alike.

But Enterprise dispenses with all of that for a rote pod people story. Instead of any philosophical exploration of what it means to encounter a new form of life or the costs of their form of existence versus ours, “The Crossing” does a cheap spin on a horror tale, with Stepford Smilers and “who’ll be brainwashed next?” questions that don’t amount to much beyond some bargain basement scares.

That wouldn’t be so bad if the show’s would be ghost story were any good. As much as I enjoy Star Trek’s more philosophical side, there’s nothing wrong with just telling a simple, creepy tale in the confines of a spaceship. The problem is that the invasion of the “wisps” is pretty dull, and doesn't make much sense.

Most good stories that involve the supernatural (or the “may as well be supernatural”) have rules for how things have to operate. These rules take the nigh-magical and not only ground it in something the audience can relate to, but make the characters earn their success (or failure) in dealing with it. Here, the rules are all so opaque and nonsensical that it’s hard to invest in any of the problems or solutions.

Are you unsure whether or not a fellow crewman is inhabited by a wisp? Well that’s no problem, because Dr. Phlox just invented a wisp detector! Are you running from a being that can go through walls (which, in fairness, are the episode’s best sequences)? Don’t worry about it! These things that the sensors can’t even really detect are repelled by the alloy in the catwalk for some reason! Is a third of your crew infested with these beings who might have evil intentions? That’s fine! We can just gas them out of the ship without any ill effects to the human beings they’re inhabiting! What about that massive alien ship that you can’t outrun and which is so technologically advanced that it takes over all of your systems? Just blow it up!

I’m used to easy Treknobabble solutions to what ought to be thorny problems, and I’m not a nitpicker, but “The Crossing” takes the cake. It stacks arbitrary implausibility on top of arbitrary implausibility until you wonder if the writers even began to think this whole situation through. I’ll concede that there’s something clever about T’Pol using her psychic abilities and disciplined mind to discern the wisps’ plan after one tries to take her over. But for the most part, the episode introduces a series a big, difficult problem and then comes up with all sorts of convenient answers that don’t pass the smell test.

Some of this would be more tolerable if the episode didn’t feel like it was stretching to fit the required runtime. My compliment for the last episode was that it knew how to evolve its central problem to create new challenges for our heroes to overcome. “The Crossing” does nearly the opposite, giving us the gist of the problem early on and then letting us watch Archer and company tread water for most the episode before figuring out how to solve it. In the meantime, we get a bunch of lifeless scenes of Archer yelling generic missives at his wisp-possessed crewmen and, bafflingly, multiple silly fight scenes starring Dr. Phlox: action star.

The episode also tosses in some weird sexual harassment material with the wisp who possesses Malcolm which is, dare I say, problematic. Either it’s meant to be a source of menace, in which case it feels cheap and especially galling for the show to try to pull that crap using T’Pol as the victim again. Or it’s meant as comedy, which may be even worse. There’s something interesting about a non-corporeal being experiencing sexual curiosity and desire, without understanding human mores, but Enterprise doesn't have the skill to explore that fraught material with any grace or nuance, and the whole thing comes off as uncomfortable for other reasons than what the show seems to be going for.

That’s the cinch to all of “The Crossing.” There’s grand metaphysical questions at play about what it’s like for a being without a body to suddenly find itself able to talk and eat and feel again, and for a human to suddenly experience the world through a different lens. There’s grand ethical questions about whether it’s right for a wisp to do this, and how much leeway to give a species that’s long removed from issues of bodily autonomy. And there’s compelling moral dilemmas about a group of dying lifeforms seeking salvation and how we measure their lives against ours.

But Enterprise just blows them up, literally and figuratively. Gone are the engrossing questions of different forms of life, and in comes a procedural horror story that’s rife with boring interludes and quick fixes. When the series had the chance to tell us a story about the famed “new life and new civilizations” from the once-famous, now-jettisoned intro, it gave us a mostly-fine but uninspired possession story that barely bothered to graze any of the imaginative qualities and curiosity that made Star Trek great.

I can handle bad Star Trek episodes. Hell, I love some of them. What I truly don’t like are episodes like this, that feel like they waste something great to settle for something less.

Sure, ok, make the first non-corporeal species Enterprise encounters evil, because two legs good, no legs bad, right. The xenophobic undertone of this episode is hilariously ironic when you consider the whole point of Star Trek is to examine and embrace other cultures and ways of life.

Also, I've come to the conclusion that the theme of Enterprise is "Star Trek, yes, but make it sexy."

"If you call yourself enlightened, then you have to embrace people who are different than you are." - Jonathan Archer

I chuckle silently whenever I hear someone say the world has changed a lot and has largely embraced the LGBTQ+ community and people living with HIV/AIDS. It's easy to say you see no problem when it doesn't directly affect you and you're far removed from it. Yes, there has been some (mostly superficial change), but stigma and discrimination still exists, its just more subtle and insidious in many places, still brutal and life threatening in others. Remember, the United States of America isn't the only country in the world, and it's still (in 2022) very much a danger to live "differently" to the norm in some countries (even in some places in the USA)... and yes, we watch Star Trek in other parts of the world too, so it's relevant. Lol

Sure, it might just be that the episode felt rather personal for me, but I found this one to be an Enterprise winner. I particularly liked that it was obvious they were talking about the stigma against HIV/AIDS and homosexuals. I loved that the dialogue was blunt, to the point and unambiguous rather than overly covert. The juxtaposition with Danobulan sexuality created a good contrast by which to examine how relationships and intimacy may differ culturally. This is the kind of Star Trek I prefer, rather than the purposeless hypersexualised nonsense and weak writing I've seen of Enterpise thus far.

Well done.

The closing credits to this should have read:

in memory of the anonymous settlement which was later destroyed from orbit by a Klingon ship.

I can't believe for a second they got away with it XD

[7.5/10] Seventy-five percent of this episode is pretty darn good, if not great. The first part of “Shockwave” gives us a problem that threatens to not only ground the Enterprise, but to halt human deep space exploration for decades. It offers a solution that the characters don’t expect in a sideways sort of way. And then it presents the crew working as a well-oiled machine, taking the lessons they’ve learned over the past twenty-five episodes to win the day and clear their names.

Is that stretch flawless? By no means. The gaping hole at the center of Enterprise continues to be Scott Bakula as Jonathan Archer. With a full season of adventures and guises under our belts, it’s safe to say that Bakula cannot convincingly play the brooding layabout, or the romantic lead, or the high-minded explorer, or the amiable good old boy at anything above an “eh, it’s fine” level. That means any episode of this show centered around him is going to playing from a deficit, just like Archer’s beloved water polo team, from the getgo.

But the ideas in “Shockwave” are very good, and even some of the nuts and bolts writing and character decisions are strong. While Bakula doesn't necessarily do a great job at selling Archer’s despondence at having potentially grounded Earth’s space flights for years, the magnitude of the loss shines through. Archer’s “mistake” caused 3,600 souls to lose their lives, and led to the diametrically opposite result that this first mission was supposed to achieve.

The Enterprise’s first mission is to make first contact, to “seek out new life and new civilizations,” and instead, our main characters have seemingly destroyed it. The mission is an effort to prove that humanity is ready to join the interstellar community, and instead, this mistake is poised to make the elders of spaceflight confirm their views of terrans as impulsive and not ready. And worst of all, Archer’s mission is supposed to be a vindication of his father, and a thumb in the eye of the Vulcans who’d held human spaceflight back; instead, he appears to have handed the Vulcans the fodder to say that their reluctance toward both Archers was justified.

And yet, this being not only Star Trek, but a season finale at that, the savvy viewers can probably guess that our heroes weren’t responsible for the “oversight” that led to the decimation of the miners, and that the true culprits probably involves the Suliban and some time travel chicanery. Still, “Shockwave Pt. 1” lingers just long enough on the sense of failure, on the crew planning what they’re going to do after Enterprise, to let the weight of the consequences land, even if we can be reasonably sure that those consequences won’t ever actually come (especially considering that there’s 72 more episodes to get through!)

My favorite of these moments comes from T’Pol, who finds herself in a scene that mirrors the one with her and Archer from “Shadows of P’Jem.” This time, it’s her prompting her Captain to fight for his job, to try to show that there were extentuating circumstances, to convince their respective governments that this journey is worthwhile.

There’s a fatalism to Archer’s position, one that reflects human nature but which is no less wrong, to look at the worst of ourselves when things go wrong and be blind to the best of who we are. T’Pol, having been around humans enough to recognize their irrationality, but also to believe in what we’re capable of, encourages Archer to see all the things he did right, all the value he and the Enterprise brought, over the past ten months.

But it takes a visit from Daniels, the time-traveling crewman from the last major scrap with Silik, to fully convince Archer to snap out of his funk and get back to work. In truth, I didn’t necessarily love this portion of the episode, if only because the show spends a lot of time on Archer feelings out the situation of being thrust back in time when it feels perfunctory to longtime Star Trek fans who are used to hops to the past and future. Still, it’s enough to convince Archer than the explosion was the result of Suliban sabotage, and give him the tools to fix it.

What follows next is Enterprise at its team-work and action-y best. Seeing the crew work together to create a device to detect cloaked Suliban ships, keep the comm on the fritz, and stymie their enemies long enough to complete their mission is outstanding. To boot, the sequences where the main trio sneak onto a Suliban ship, stun grenade the baddies, and nab a series of data disks that prove what really happened is as exciting as all hell. It shows the team learning and growing, taking risks, but being good enough at their jobs as Starfleet officers to make sure they work out.

It’s a hell of a thrillride, except for the fact that it basically ends with a giant tease for part two that grinds the episode to a halt. Silik and his ships surround Enterprise and, per the Future Guy’s instructions, Silik demands that Archer turn himself over to them or they’ll blow up Enterprise and everyone on it. So we get this faux goodbye, where Archer peddles some faux wistful nonsense about believing in the impossible, with awful pacing, that culminates in the Captain being transported to a future that is unexpectedly post-apocalyptic. The whole thing feels like a spiritual rip off of “Best of Both Worlds” with half of the charm and execution.

But in the end, the first half of “Shockwave” represents the strengths and weaknesses of the show. It has some good character growth from T’Pol, some well done ensemble work and action sequences to show what the team in front of and behind the camera can do, and it plays with some very interesting ideas about internalizing guilt and the personal weight of expectation and diplomacy. But it also features some questionable acting from its lead character, and a creaky capper to the episode that only serves to remind the viewer of better Star Trek cliffhangers.

If you’d just cut this one off with ten minutes left or so, you’d have one of the standouts of Star Trek’s first season. But forced to not only tell the immediate story, but squeeze in some extra, overdramatized, timey-wimey nonsense, and focus more on Archer, the cracks in Enterprise’s foundation begin to show.

Still, I have enjoyed this first season of the show. Fan sentiment had me fearing the worst, and rest assured, Enterprise has yet to match the heights of its predecessors. But while the show has plenty of stinkers, it also has plenty of shining moments. As the cast continues to gell, and the interesting ideas in the premise continue to be harvested, I have high hopes as we head into the next season, despite the sour taste “Shockwave” leaves in my mouth.

[7.5/10] I recently read an article about Star Trek Discovery, praising the character of Captain Pike. The author argued that Pike was a much-needed masculine role model after the supposed degradation of men in popular culture. He argued that the manly, decisiveness of Pike was a sorely needed corrective to the deconstructions of masculinity that have been en vogue of late.

As you can probably tell from my tone, I don’t necessarily agree with the premise. Discovery’s Pike is great, but one of the important and useful things pop culture has done in the last couple of decades is pry away at the trappings and expectations of masculinity in our modern era and in our past, and examined the unsettling underbelly of those cultural tropes and pressures.

But then I come to an episode of Enterprise like “Desert Passing”, and it reminds me how much Star Trek in particular has long been a purveyor of notions of different sorts of masculinity, beyond just macho manly man nonsense. Sure, Kirk never found a situation he couldn’t punch or sleep his way out of, but Spock was a dignified alternative, Picard was the picture of dignity and unassuming strength, Sisko carried emotional baggage and was warm with his son, and Voyager had...uh...Tuvok I guess? Well they’re not all winners, but the fact is that Star Trek has often put forward these sorts of role models, who modeled different but no less strong ways to be men to scores of impressionable nerds like yours truly.

And while I have my beefs with Archer as a character, I like how he too fills that role here. He is venerated as a warrior, as a tactician, and legendary freedom fighter here, the sort of Rambo-esque figure who drops in, single-handedly fights an army, and then saves the day. But Archer not only brushes off those sorts of comparisons, but show’s a different sort of caring, wit, endurance, and self-sacrifice that are traits less associated with the sort of image that article’s author wanted to conjure.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a weird Top Gun-esque space lacrosse scene where Archer and Trip go shirtless and knock over their alien competitors. (Which, I guess, at least helps balance out some of the weird cheesecake the show does with T’Pol?) But the focus of the episode is not on Archer as a manly man; it’s on him as a survivor, someone who is giving and kind.

The meat of the episode sees him and Trip tracking their way across an alien desert while they wait for help to arrive. That challenge means you never see Archer throw a punch. You see him give his water to Trip, who’s suffering from heat exhaustion. You see him being smart enough to remember seeing shelter when they arrived, in case they needed it. You see him being resourceful enough to jerry-rig a way to boil some contaminated water to make it potable. And you see him coming up with all sorts of ways to keep Trip awake and engaged so as not to lose his good friend in the throes of a fever.

In short, Archer is someone unbelievably sharp and giving here. He spends none of his time plotting against attackers or showing anger at a semi-betrayal or frustration with his circumstance. He spends all of it figuring out the situation, helping his dear friend, using his wits and his kindness rather than anything more traditionally masculine.

The same goes for the episode’s interesting take on Starfleet and the Enterprise’s role in the interstellar community. I love the fact that Archer and company’s exploits have been bent and twisted out of proportion, to where random freedom fighters on other planets see the Enterprise as powerful allies to the downtrodden who will save and fight for them with the push of a button. That is very much a Captain Kirk mentality: show up some place, decide that you don’t like the way things are run, and so blow the whole society up and remake it the way you’d like it to be.

But “Desert Passing” engages with the way things are more complicated than that. The humanoid who befriends our heroes seems nice and gregarious (and Clancy Brown hamming it up in the role, Harry Mudd-style, is tons of fun). He offers a believable story that tracks with American history, of minority groups being officially and technically granted equality, but facing softer and realer obstacles when hearts and minds and public institutions have to put that into practice. But we also get a countervailing story from the official government of the planet, that Archer’s friend is actually a terrorist, whose allies are attacking cities and peoples. And then we see that same government be curt with T’Pol and harsh with Archer and Trip.

It’s an idea you don’t always see much of in Star Trek. We’re used to planets being essentially unified nation states, where making contact with one group means that they represent the whole. As Hoshi points out, first contact is likely to be trickier than that in most instances, with situations like the one in “Shadows of P’Jem” that suggest our main characters are trifling with complicated internecine struggles that it’s hard to comprehend, let alone interfere with, after an afternoon of getting to know someone or a single distress signal.

While the show once again lays it on thick with a “directive” reference, at the end of the day, Archer decides that discretion is important, that deferring to governments rather than individual starship captains is the right way to go, and that forbearance is the right choice, no matter how uneasy he feels about it. It’s the exact opposite of a “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality that you might expect in a more traditionally manly leader, but Archer represents that Star Trek ethos of not just ethical righteousness, but calm deliberation, making hard choices that sometimes lead to a queasy stomach rather than an exciting firefight.

At the end of the day, Archer is worried about the health and well-being of his chief engineer and best friend. He’s worried about the complexities of using the Enterprise’s arsenal to take sides in a war that may be just, but which probably has more nuance to it than can be gleaned from one partisan in a high dudgeon. He is not the innocent-saving, evil-basting cowboy rocking through the galaxy. He is an occasionally supercilious, sometimes cavalier, but ultimately well-intentioned, altruistic, and thoughtful leader. It’s a flavor of masculinity that might not please the anti-feminist sceeders out there, but which is part and parcel with Star Trek’s more nuanced take on what being a man is and can be.

(As an aside, I really liked the production design and directing here. The desert landscapes were beautifully composed, and there were tons of creative shots like Archer and Trip emerging from their sandy hiding place. Certainly the most visually appealing the show’s looked so far!)

We've seen this story concept before in DS9 episode "Shadowplay" (S2:E16) - planet of holograms with a malfunctioning core matrix, and all they want is to go on living. Only DS9 did it WAY better, this story is mediocre at best with most of the reveal rushed at the end. I will say I liked the acting and it's always good to see Rene immortalised on the screen...

[5.1/10] One of my most frequent complaints about The Original Series is that it would have about twenty minutes worth of plot stretched out to a full episode length. The pacing of T.V. shows was different in the 1960s, but even so, you can only try to ruminate on some small amount of incident for so long before the whole thing just becomes boring. With “Rogue Planet”, Enterprise seems to be imitating its primogenitor on that account.

If you’ve watched any amount of Star Trek, you could probably predict the plot of this one in about ten minutes. Archer and company run into a group of alien hunters who are on the titular rogue planet for a sporting excursion. There’s some tension between the groups given T’Pol’s Vulcan vegetarianism that hunting has apparently fallen out of fashion on Earth a century prior, but the whole cultural relativism thing keeps everyone getting along. Then, in a private moment, Archer sees a random beautiful woman who knows his name and who rings a bell in the back of his mind, who’s treated like an apparition or a delusion by both his crewmates and the new alien friends who are sharing their campground with the Starfleet officers.

It doesn't take long to guess that the woman is some manifestation of the planet, asking Archer to help save her from the hunters. This is Star Trek, so despite the headfake of Enterprise’s hallucinogenic spore episode earlier in the season, we can reasonably suspect the woman is more than just a random hallucination from Archer. The episode spends way too long with Archer wrestling with that fact, until the hunters finally admit that she is a “wraith”, a sort of space slug that’s native to the planet and which tries to defend itself by “getting into the head” of the humanoids hunting it.

That’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s a neat enough concept to build the episode around. The problem is, Enterprise doesn't reveal that until about 75% of the way through the episode, and doesn't really develop anything beyond that point. There’s the slightest of slight interesting clash between Starfleet’s impulse not to interfere with other cultures’ beliefs and practices and its impulse to protect all sentient life. But we never hit any really pressure points with that. Archer (with the help of Phlox), just treknobabbles his way to having his cake and eating it too, giving the space slugs a treatment that allows them to avoid detection by the hunters.

And that’s it! There’s a predictable mystery as to what the nature of the mysterious woman is. There’s a predictable reveal as to what the conflict between her and the hunters is. And there’s a predictable, all-too-easy solution to the issue that doesn't require any real challenge or sacrifice from our heroes. Enterprise labors over those basic plot points for forty minutes without much, if anything, to show for it.

This is also an Archer-heavy episode, which weakens things in my book. The show once again seems to want to place him in the Kirk role, lusting after vaguely-sketched women from his past on a strange planet (see: “Shore Leave”) with whom he has some faux-meaningful exchange before she disappears forever. “Archer falls in love with a space slug” is an idea just weird enough to work, but this is about the dullest possible execution of that idea.

“Rogue Planet” tries to elevate that interspecies infatuation to the idea of “reaching for the unobtainable.” Archer eventually connects that the woman is the image his mind conjured as a child when his mom used to read him a poem by Yeats. The poem was about a man who caught a fish that turned into a beautiful woman and disappeared, that he then chased for the rest of his life. It’s a thin connection, but there’s a solid enough idea there about continuing to search for meaning and beauty in the universe even when it seems vast and impossible. But the delivery of that message is trite, and stapled to a flat, almost procedurally generated episode.

So what’s good about “Rogue Planet”? Well, while it looks a little silly at times, there’s something kind of cool looking about seeing both the hunters and the away team rolling around with their little laser tag outfits. As usual, T’Pol is a beneficial presence here, with her barely-restrained disdain and cuttingly-worded retorts for the hunters being both amusing and potent, and her skepticism about Archer’s visions being well-founded despite the inevitability of there being more to them than meets the eye. And again, it’s bold, to say the least, to center an episode around the reveal that Archer is trying to romance an alien snail who’s taken the form of his childhood fantasy.

The execution of that premise should just be way more interesting than this is. Archer’s concern for sentient life is admirable, but “Rogue Planet” quickly sheds the intriguing thought of whether Archer would be so apt to help if the slug had taken on the form of a scantily clad man. There’s intriguing notions of adaptation, how both predators and prey evolve to attack or defend themselves through unique methods, that have some juice, and would be seen very differently by the hunters and the hunted, but the episode mainly elides them in favor of Archer going all moony-eyed over his ghost lady.

Lord knows that Star Trek has made a home for any number of unusual romance over the past fifty years, from various men and women falling in love with various forms of artificial intelligence, to women falling for dreamy psychic aliens, to Zephram Cochrane himself learning to love a wild energy being. But those stories all leaned into the strangeness of those setups, exploring them beyond some vague metaphor for continuing to go after the impossible. This is, by contrast, an episode that feels made of spare parts, hardly able to capture your attention with its telegraphed reveals and boring, overstretched escapades.

Despite what she's been through, Danielle seemed pretty...chipper there at the end.

On one episode of "Band of Brothers" I once wrote that no show or documentary can ever relate what it means to be in battle. But this episode was tense, it was frantic and you can get an idea what these men went through. And you really have to be amazed that they did it again and again.
The airbattle scenes in this show are through the roof. It's not all about the action, though. We are reaching a point now where losses are becoming more meaningful for the viewer.

Oh my! Captain Kathryn Janeway!

This is a slog and a half.

Weakest season so far. Of course the finale is exciting, but the storytelling is so, so manipulative it takes away my enjoyment. And as for the season as a whole, there were so many loose threads, plot points that just vanished – I think the show may have jumped the shark.

The adventure story was weak but the character development was strong. Pecan pie!

[7.6/10] I like this episode because it’s basically a hangout, more of a chance to get to know everyone better than a spate of high drama. Sure, there’s a bit of action here. Reed and Mayweather have a ticking clock to finish their work before the sun comes up on the comet, and their shuttle falls through the ice, and there’s a daring (if doomed) claw machine rescue attempt. But none of that really comes into play until the last ten minutes of the episode, and it’s fairly low stakes by Star Trek standards. Instead, this is a low-key episode, as devoted to helping to scaffold the relationships between our characters and their erstwhile allies as it is to any game-changing plot machinations or high intensity conflicts.

That comes down to four scenes in particular, some of which are connected, but many are almost just little vignettes, nominally related to one another, but mostly just small sketches to give us character details.

The most effective, if not the most artful, of these scenes was the one where Archer and the rest of the bridge crew responded to the questions of an Irish elementary school class. It’s a good narrative device for providing exposition, answering queries about food, feces, and fraternization that fans may have been wondering about as well, like the impudent little schoolchildren that we are. But it also gives each of the bridge crew a moment to shine. Archer tries to project statesman-like certainty and assurance, but worries about how it went. Hoshi explicates the challenges of using the universal translator but expressing budding self-confidence. Proud but insecure Trip doesn't want the moppets to think he’s an intergalactic toilet-cleaner. And Dr. Phlox shows himself off as a delightfully nerdy blowhard.

It’s not much, and it’s a little cheesy at times, but again, it does what it sets out to do in a genial fashion. It explains some of the sundry details of Enterprise in a didactic way that’s swallowable given the context, and it gives several members of the cast to have those little character moments that are both fun and endearing.

But my favorite scene in the episode is the one between T’Pol and Trip where the Vulcan seeks her crewmate’s advice on what to do about her wedding. On the one hand, it’s a superb interaction from a character perspective. We see a different side of T’Pol, one who’s worried about her personal life to the point of insomnia and headaches, who’s taking Dr. Phlox’s advice to talk about her problems, and who is trying to balance her responsibilities to her people and her responsibilities to her crew. We also see a different side of Trip, one who is still blustery in his way, but who’s also apologetic and rueful about violating T’Pol’s privacy and who seems genuinely interested in connecting with her as a friend. (Methinks the Captain’s discussion about dating is not a coincidence.

Still, it’s also a great representation of the differences between Western and Eastern views of individualism. Trip represents the Western view of self-determination, being able to direct one’s own life and pursue life, liberty, and happiness. T’Pol represents the Eastern view of community, where one’s responsibility to a greater whole, one’s culture and family, comes before individual pursuits. Enterprise isn’t exactly even-handed in the debate, but it acknowledges both sides of it, which makes T’Pol’s inner turmoil, and eventual choice at the end of the episode to choose the Enterprise over her marriage, a much more meaningful one.

As much as this is, at heart, a T’Pol episode, about her being stuck between those two impulses, it’s also another human/Vulcan diplomatic kerfuffle episode. Archer feels like the Vulcans have had a contingent “looking over his shoulder” at least since the Andorian Incident. But he’s trying to kill them with kindness, hailing and greeting the Vulcan captain, trying to include them in the Enterprise’s expedition, and even inviting him to dinner.

That dining scene is impressively awkward, calling to mind a similarly touch-and-go effort at dinner table detente between humans and Klingons in Star Trek VI. Archer is bending over backwards to try to connect with Captain Vanik, who is begrudgingly polite but as curt and rude as any Vulcan you might expect. The sense of Vulcan arrogance, of seeing humans like the children Archer was just reaching out to, comes through loud and clear, with him not appreciating the good will behind each of these gestures if not the gestures themselves. The scene does a great deal of work to help justify the resentment that Archer and others feel for the Vulcans, showing him trying very hard to accommodate his green-blooded counterpart and getting nothing but dismissals and thinly-veiled insults in return.

That’s what makes the final major scene of the episode so impactful, and the culmination of Archer’s attempt to connect with Vanik and T’Pol’s efforts to connect (in her own distinctly Vulcan way) with Trip. When Archer tries to rescue Reed and Mayweather on his own, rebuffing Vanik’s offers, the echoes of that dinner scene are present. He wants to buck Vanik’s impression of humans as bunglers who need the Vulcans to save their bacon on routine missions. But T’Pol interjects that Vanik expects Archer to reject his help, that they see humans as prideful, but that Archer, being human, can choose to put his crewmen’s lives over his pride. It’s not the most elegant threading of the needle you’ve ever seen, but it’s sound and significant.

So is the closer, where T’Pol sends (through official channels) what’s implied to be her message that she’s staying on the ship, allowing her wedding to be canceled, and getting to know these humans, and their different but potentially liberating customs, a little better. It’s not exactly subtle, but her trying Trip’s pecan pie at the end of the episode is a superb way to symbolize that. And “Breaking the Ice” is a great way for the audience to get to know all of these characters, T’Pol in particular, better in between the galaxy-shaping misadventures which will no doubt provide plenty of fireworks in the episodes to come. Taking this time to let us understand the people in those interstellar firefights, taking a breather where we can just spend time with them as people, makes the biggest blasts and dramatic twists worth caring about.

Enter: The Andorians! Featuring Star Trek guest star veteran: Jeffrey Combs (Brunt (FCA), Weyoun, Shran, etc)!

[7.3/10] This is a tough episode to grade, because it essentially has three parts: a bit of cultural exchange, a zany male pregnancy story, and a diplomatic kerfuffle. I loved the first part, liked the third part, and absolutely abhorred the second part. That speaks to a certain disjointedness in the episode, where it occasionally felt like events sort of careening into one another rather than progressing organically, but enough of the constituent parts were good enough that I still enjoyed the ride.

Let’s talk about the part that I loved: Trip’s contact with the Xyrillians. One of the best things about Star Trek has a franchise is how it looks at the human side of these sort of encounters. On the one hand, this is the Enterprise rendering aid and making connections out in the frontier, but on the other, this is as much, if not more, a story of one individual adjusting to the experience of another culture and way of life, initially hating it and wanting to come home, but eventually feeling comfortable and welcomed in a place, to where he appreciates the experience and how it’s expanded his horizons.

Honestly, you could cut off “Unexpected” at the halfway mark (after Trip first return to the Enterprise), and you’d have a tidy but effective little story to that effect. The show does Trip’s “kid away at summer camp who has a tough first day and wants to come home” routine really well and relatable. I also love the production design and use of effects both practical and technical to convey the alien-ness of Trip’s experience.

The smoke rises in the decompression chamber and he clambors about, complaining about how his lungs are burning. The slowed down, echoey way he experiences speech and the passage of time on the Xyrillian ship is a nicely impressionistic way of convey his “it’s like a fever” transition. And the interiors of the ship itself, wonderfully realizes with oval designs, a back-to-nature aesthetic, and details that seem familiar enough to not require a crazy effects budget, but foreign enough to rattle Trip are nigh-perfect (at least on a network television setting).

Things get even better with Trip’s interactions with Ah'Len. It seems clear in this episode that Trip is meant to fill the Kirk/Riker slot of finding the affections of alien admirers in these journeys. But what I like about his interactions here is that they don’t carry the same womanizing baggage. Sure, Ah’Len falls for Trip a little quickly, but there is, again, that summer camp sense of flirtation and fascination with something outside your experience that makes them both a little more apt to explore and bat eyes at one another.

I think my favorite exchange in the episode comes when Ah’Len and Trip have their hands in the “pebbles”, which grant each some sort of rudimentary telepathy. Trip says, with some surprise, “you find me attractive” and has the hint of a sly smile, and Ah’Len retorts that he likes that she finds him attractive. The romance is necessarily a little quick, but there’s chemistry their, and there interactions are cute and even chastely sensual enough to be endearing in a short amount of time. That first half of the episode is a delightful little journey through Trip’s adjustment from an uncomfortable acclimation to a new environment to joys like the humans’ first interactions with a holodeck and a connection with another soul.

But then, the episode takes a turn, and starts being more about Trip having been accidentally impregnated by those otherwise sweet interactions, and the episode veers into a heap of sub-sitcom-level humor about being pregnant. Trip is suddenly exaggeratedly hormonal, to the point that he’s ludicrously insecure, constantly eating, and freaking out about the safety measures for children in engineering. It’s facepalm-worthy crud, and particularly dispiriting after a fairly decent comic scene of Dr. Phlox, Archer, and T’Pol gently tsk tsking Trip for what they imagine to have been getting a little too close to the Xyrillians amid his brief bit of shore leave.

The best you can say for this part of the episode is that it’s at least a flip of the script from the seemingly innumerable “Counselor Troi is pregnant again!” episodes that The Next Generation would do, even if it devolves into Junior-level comedy. (And Angel would follow in those ignominious footsteps with Cordellia, incidentally). I also suspect, true to my frequent reverse-epiphany experiences watching The Original Series, that this episode was the inspiration for Futurama’s “Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch”, right down to the incidental touch-based pregnancy and romantic row boat ride in the holodeck.

Thankfully, after that bit of unpleasant mishegoss, the show reverts to a meat-and-potatoes Trek conflict -- namely a confrontation with the Klingons. When the effort to track down the Xyrillians in order to figure out what to do with Trip’s pregnancy leads the Enterprise to discover the alien ship’s hitched a secret ride with the Klingons, Archer and T’Pol end up having to talk the characteristically combative Klingons into not blowing them, or the Xyrillians up before they can get an answer.

The banter and negotiation with the Klingon commander are fun, and it’s a nice wrinkle to the first contact story. The fact that Archer tries appealing to general decency, mercy, and harmlessness, to no avail given the Klingon’s pugilistic appetites, is a nice exemplar of how Starfleet is still learning how to get along in this strange new world. And I particularly appreciate how T’Pol proves her usefulness here, exaggerating (which Vulcans are allowed to do, per Spock) in order to retell Archer’s adventures from the premiere in a way that the Klingon commander would be forced to appreciate. Trip appealing to their sense of intrigue and excitement at new technology (right down to an amusing “I can see my house from here” line) is a good finishing touch, showing the essential trio of the show working together to make it work.

It’s hard to know how to weigh each of those parts out. The first half of the episode should almost be its own thing, a neat little representation of acclimating to the ups and downs of first contract. The subsequent pregnancy interlude nearly grinds the episode to a halt with its hackneyed, retrograde humor. But the third part rights the ship, both figuratively and nigh-literally, with some classic Trek diplomacy. All-in-all, “Unexpected” is more of mishmash, but the good parts are worth sticking around through decompression for.

[7.0/10] I often come to Star Trek for the joy of problem solving. In all incarnations, much of the fun of the “strange new worlds and new civilizations” is each new crew facing an array of their own, strange rubik's cubes to figure out how to solve. Using the combination of their wits, their insight, and their technology to leap over whatever the universe is throwing at them is a venerable and above all else, fun mode for the franchise.

And “Strange New World” is part-horror story and part-problem solving. While I like the latter much more than the former, it’s at least something both familiar but novel enough in execution to spice up Enterprise a bit in the early going here. The first half of the episode is about uncovering the mystery of what exactly the threat on this heretofore unknown M-class planet is, and the second half is about how to address it. The show goes a little overboard on the whole haunted mystery and potential sabotage angle at first, but once it becomes a question of how to save everyone from the identified risk, the show becomes much more clever and even humane.

In some ways, the episode feels like a mishmash of different Original Series installments. You have the Vulcan vs. Human jousting while stranded on an alien world of “The Galileo Seven.” You have the ghost story motif of “Catspaw”, and you have the cave-based panic of “The Devil in the Dark” (which gets a subtle nod from Captain Archer). Moreso than other sequel series, Enterprise seems to be borrowing from its 1960s predecessor, and if that’s the tack, the mixing things together is a sound approach to keep it fresh rather than repetitive.

The problem, though, is one I often encountered when watching The Original Series -- namely that I’m apt to side with the Vulcan stick in the mud rather than the ornery human questioning their detached and/or utilitarian judgment. Enterprise recreates the same dynamic that Dr. McCoy and Spock often had with Trip and T’Pol, right down to the southern drawl and recriminations of heartlessness.

I don’t know how to feel about it. To be fair to Enterprise, I think the show wants to bring the audience over the Trip and the rest of the redshirts’ point of view of T’Pol in the first half just so it can flip the script in the second half. You literally see the other crewmen’s hallucinations so that it seems like T’Pol is lying. But it’s also playing on the bias the humans have against the Vulcans, even as T’Pol is explaining why everyone must be mistaken and that their suspicions are motivated by preexisting frustrations between the species.

That’s a bit of a cheat in the first place, but it also makes it hard for the show to win you over to Trip and company’s side when you’re pretty skeptical of their motivations in the first place. Enterprise wants you to buy into the “Vulcans have held things back and may not be able to be trusted” thing, but for longtime viewers (at least Spock-appreciating ones like me), it’s hard to buy into that long enough for the episode to pull off its twist.

It also doesn't help that this episode is full of pretty hammy acting. Trip’s mental breakdown is downright Shatner-esque in its over the top lunacy mode. The rest of the crewmembers aren’t necessarily super convincing in their panic and paranoia either, though Jolene Blalock does a pretty damn solid job of conveying slipping Vulcan stoicism in a difficult situation.

What I do like about the episode is its effort to create that scary mood, and Archer’s solution to the problem. The former is pretty hit or miss. But Mayweather’s ghost story is a lively one, and while frequently overblown, the show’s effort to go full horror movie with unknown creatures moving around in the shadows of the cave is a commendable one. Spookiness is a rarer look for Star Trek, but it works in this context, particularly in one of the first, unexamined worlds that Starfleet encounters.

Archer’s solution to the problem is even better though. Once he realizes, via Dr. Phlox, that there’s a toxin in the local flora that’s creating the hallucination, and the weather prevents them from shuttling down or beaming anyone up, he starts trying to talk Trip out of his psychosis long enough to let T’Pol apply an antidote.

What I like best about this problem-solving is that it has stages. At first, Archer tries to get Trip to realizes that he’s not at his mental best, to just talk some sense into him, with a touching story from their shared history to try to drive it home. It’s a little too much (and frankly, part of what turned me off to the solution used in the last episode), but it doesn't work! Instead, Archer goes to Plan B, which requires leaning into Trip’s paranoid delusions, but coming up with a plausible enough story to convince him to stand down long enough to let T’Pol do her work. The cover story, the use of Vulcan by Hoshi, and the chance to stun him long enough to make it all come together is a smart and tense solution to the problem, in the best Trek tradition.

Granted, the path to get there is a mixed bag at best. But it ultimately plays like an Aesop’s fable in that same Original Series-esque way. On the one hand, you have Trip getting an object lesson in not letting his preconceived notions about Vulcans get in the way of assessing a situation. And on the other, you have an event that lays the groundwork for General Order 1 and the Prime Directive, or at the very least some protocols to help ensure that the Federation doesn't go waltzing into a patch of hallucinogenic poison ivy.

At the end of the day, that’s a big part of what I ask for from episodic Star Trek. What is the problem? How did they solve it? How did it impact the characters? And what did we and they learn? “Strange New World” isn’t the boldest or best rendition of that form, but it’s a solid version of it, and after a shaky intro to the series, I’m glad for it.

I've read terrible reviews about this show, but I was such a great fan of David Suchet's series that I just had to watch this and thus get myself a new fix of Poirot.

After watching this episode, I can only conclude that those terrible reviews came from people who've read Agatha Christie's books and found significant discrepancy, in an unwanted way, between the books and this show. I haven't read them, so I cannot compare, I can only be influenced by what I just watched. I really liked the acting and the whole ambience. There's this weirdly comfortable dark setting throughout the whole episode. I also enjoyed watching an older Poirot, someone who's been forgotten by pretty much everyone, someone who's not respected, anymore. So, he's more of a loner, poking around stuff all by himself. I think that John Malkovich does a convincing job portraying such an older, forgotten, almost disgraced Poirot, but then again, I always liked Malkovich on screen.

Though it still seems to suffer a bit from "style over substance", I thought this first episode was good enough to keep me curious about the other two. So, off I go, two more to watch!

[7.3/10] I don’t mind the spiritual elements of Deep Space Nine, but the truth is that we’ve dealt with a lot of them already. Sisko’s uncomfortable with his role as the Emissary? Now he embraces it and wants to make his home on Bajor. Kira is a true believer in the way few others in the main cast are? Now she’s reckoned with her faith and her connection to the Starfleet officers in a pretty thorough fashion. Kai Winn is mercenary in her attitude toward Benjamin? Now (or at least, in her last appearance), she seemed to accept him as an instrument of the Prophets. Are those Prophets honest to goodness gods who prophesize and punish, or are they mere “wormhole aliens” whose effects have rational explanations? Well, whatever you want to term them, they know the future and, as we saw at the end of the Dominion occupation arc, will actively intervene in major events when it suits them.

There’s a few dangling threads out there. The Prophets promised Sisko that they’d extract some penance from him for destroying the Dominion fleet. How their prophecies will play out is an open question. Not every circle has been square. But many of the spiritual mysteries the show started with have been sorted, and the personal issues that fell out of them have been resolved.

In that, “The Reckoning” is something of a relaunch of that part of the show, providing supernatural fodder for the show to chew on between here and the end of the series. There is a new prophecy! And the Prophets, not just the Pah-wraiths, possess people now. And each side has champions locked in a battle to determine the fate of Bajor!

And the truth is I don’t love it. Some of that is the pure aesthetics of it. I’m always inclined to forgive Star Trek for the effects of its eras, but something about a possessed Kira absorbing lightning, a red-eyed Jake speaking in an echo-y voice, mysterious wind blowing at each of them, and the duo shooting orange and blue energy beams at one another comes off as downright silly. I can appreciate the show’s production team trying to represent the larger-than-life epicness of this battle using the tools at their disposal, but it’s hard not to roll your eyes a bit at the cheesiness of it all.

More than that, though, I’m not a fan of the form this new religious element of the show takes. Contrary to popular belief, Star Trek has long had a penchant for the spiritual and the supernatural. (Other writers used to joke about how many of Gene Roddenberry’s stories ended with some kind of god.) But there tends to be something unknowable, inscrutable, even downright weird about the more metaphysical entities Starfleet officers interact with. Their role is often to remind us of how much lies beyond human comprehension, to make us reflect on human existence and ethics, and deepen our appreciation for the countless mysteries of the universe.

The titular reckoning between the uber-Prophet possessing Kira and the demonic Kosst Amojan possessing Jake, is a bog standard good guy vs. bad guy conflict. Star Trek has rarely gone in for that sort of Manichean, good vs. evil-type deal. To the point, with its outsized heroes and villains doing battle with positive and negative energies, “The Reckoning” feels more like Star Wars than Star Trek. And I love Star Wars! But its brand of superpowered battles between light and dark doesn’t necessarily fit well within Star Trek’s general framework, let alone Deep Space Nine’s tendency toward gray areas and more committed moral complexities.

And yet, strangely, I like what comes before the supernatural showdown and what comes after it.

The before is a chance to take stock, and something of a referendum, on all the spiritual elements of the show that have sunk in so far. Dax gets to joke about whether, in Ben’s next vision, he should ask for a dictionary. Quark gets to talk about how the religious fervor is hurting business (and institutes a constant happy hour in response). Julian gets to play the skeptic about the doom and gloom prophecy, while others debate whether the wormhole instability and natural disasters on Bajor are some version of a biblical plague.

Most importantly, Jake gets to talk about how hard it’s been to see his dad incapacitated by such “visions” not once but twice over the last year. There’s a story-related reason for giving him and Benjamin a scene to ahs that out, but even if there weren’t, I’m glad that Deep Space Nine is delving into what all of this must be like for Jake. Whether you believe or not, seeing your last living parent put through the wringer, and almost lose him on multiple occasions because he seems to care about his spiritual duties more than you now and then, would be tough to take. Exploring that, and having Benjamin affirm his connection to his son, is good stuff.

I’m more mixed on what the episode does with Kai Winn. I don’t mind her being a villain, but in her last appearance, she’d seemed to not only accept Sisko’s role as the Emissary in earnest for the first time, but was contrite about the resistance she’d put up in the past. We even got to hear her explain why she thought her form of resistance and suffering was no less meaningful than Kira’s in a way that deepened and softened the character.

Now she’s back to being the stubborn, passive aggressive social-climber she was before. She gripes at Sisko for taking the Bajoran artifact du jour. (And her motives may be impure, but she’s not wrong that he probably should have consulted the Bajoran government before absconding with a recently-discovered archeological relic!) She seems to want to undermine him and supplant him at every turn. This reversion to her velvet-gloved jerk characterization feels like the show back-tracking.

Yet, she may also be the most interesting character in the piece. I think the show means to damn her with her choices and disposition here. But when none other than Kira speculates that after striving her whole life to become the spiritual leader of Bajor, it must be hard for Kai Winn to have to share that role with the Emissary, and an outsider to the faith no less, you sympathize with her. When Kai Winn kneels before the uber-Prophet inhabiting Kira and practically begs to be her servant, and the uber-Prophet just ignores her, it’s quietly devastating.

Imagine living your whole life as a true believer, who could only dream of speaking with your god, only to go unregarded and unheeded when you’re finally face to face with them. Kai Winn is in the running for Star Trek’s greatest villain. (Her only disadvantage is sitting side-by-side with Dukat.) But Heaven help me, I felt for her in that moment. Something like that would be shattering.

That feeling leads to the most clever part of the episode. The turn in the story comes when Jake walks onto the promenade, imbued with the spirit of a Pah-Wraith. Suddenly, Benjamin’s calculus changes. Over the warnings of his officers, he wanted to let this reckoning play out. He’ll evacuate the station to protect civilians and officers alike, but he believes in the Prophets’ plan now, and he won’t stand in their way. Until, suddenly, it’s his son standing there. Especially after their tender scene earlier, you might reasonably expect that he’ll damn Bajor to protect Jake.

Except he doesn’t. “The Reckoning” flips your (or at least my) expectations on their head. You’d expect that it’d be Captain Sisko who’d flood the promenade with chroniton radiation to stop the showdown and save his son. You’d expect the erstwhile Pope of Bajor to let the will of the Prophets play out, and damn the consequences.

And yet, it’s Sisko who trusts that the Prophets would protect his son, that Kira would want to be their vessel, and that this is what’s intended to happen, it’s not his place to stand in their way. He has gone from the man uncomfortable with his role in these outsiders’ religion, to a man embracing their precepts and spirituality. And it’s Kai Winn who deploys the chroniton radiation, prematurely ending the divine battle, regardless of what the prophecy says. Whatever she believes, she cares about her position in this biblical drama more.

The script says as much through Kira, who accuses Kai Winn of not being able to stand that their gods would choose Sisko and disregard her. But I’m also compelled by Winn’s statement that if the Prophets defeat the Pah-wraiths, and indeed usher in a new “golden age” for Bajor, there’d be no need for Kais or Vedeks. Regardless of Benjamin, she’s scratched and clawed and schemed to get where she is. To postpone the arrival of paradise, or even scuttle it entirely, because if it came you’d have to serve rather than lead, is as damning and compelling a motivation for Kai Winn as there could be.

At the same time, there’s something truly wholesome that emerges from this situation between Kira and Odo. Having finally coupled up, they’re adorable together, flirting after a wardroom meeting and nuzzling one another, with Kira acknowledging Odo’s softer side that he keeps from the world. All’s not perfect in paradise though. This prophecy allows Odo to politely cluck his tongue a bit, at why the Prophets are so cryptic, about how if this is so important, they really ought to be more clear. He has a point!

But he tells her that he does believe in something -- her, and it’s one of the sweetest little moments on the show. Odo doesn’t just talk the talk. When push comes to shove, and Kira is being inhabited and put at risk by the Prophet possessing her, he acknowledges it’s what she’d want. She accepted it willingly, and even if Odo loves her, even if he doesn’t buy into the cryptic nature of the Prophets, even though he doesn’t share her beliefs, he respects her and gets her. That’s enough.

Choices like that are why Odo/Kira make so much more sense than Worf/Dax ever have. There are different people in many ways, but there’s a respect and appreciation for where the other is coming from, that seems all but absent from Worf in DS9. There’s lots of series arc-heavy stuff going on in “The Reckoning”, but the part I like best may be how these monumental events also serve to reinforce the bond within a new relationship.

Despite that, “The Reckoning” is, as the Prophets riddle us once more, as much of a beginning as an ending. These two supernatural forces have been unleashed in the world, with little suggestion that they’ve been vanquished or defended for good. Kira the believer is prompted to contemplate the fact that she was chosen by her gods, and had an experience as up close and personal with them as one’s likely to have. And the closing lines of dialogue suggest that we’re officially in uncharted territory, even for gods, to where for all their wisdom, the Prophets don’t know what’s coming next. Who knows when or if the tears of the Prophets will drown the gateway to the temple.

Some of that’s probably necessary. Considering the last major event featured a deus ex machina solution (albeit an earned one), checking in with the Wormhole Aliens, factoring them into the proceedings of the ongoing Dominion war, changing Captain Sisko and Kai Winn’s connections to them leaves the board open for more to come in the show’s final season. But it also flattens and simplifies the inscrutable demigods who affected our heroes’ lives to this point.

Nevertheless, I’m still compelled by those lives, and the impact that the spiritual aspects of the show have on them. More so than arguably any other Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine is concerned with religion, and prophecy, and the divine. But it remains a show focused on its characters, as invested in the people reacting to these supernatural events, as it is in the beings who make them their playthings.

[1.0/10] Some Star Trek episodes feature comedy that falls completely flat. Some Star Trek episodes feature messages or depictions that have aged like milk. “Profit and Lace” is the rare Star Trek episode that does both, and it may be the worst of the lot because of it.

Thanks to Ishka’s shining influence, Grand Nagus Zek has essentially added a clause to the Ferengi constitution that allows women to wear clothes and make profit. As a result, Ferengi society has been thrown into chaos; Brunt has ascended to the role of acting Nagus; and Zek, Ishka, and the Ferengi braintrust aboard the station must work together to restore Zek and ensure that this progress isn’t lost.

There are worse premises for an episode of Deep Space Nine. Ferengi politics have walked the line between loony and serious, but one of the more consistent threads has been the gradual case for women’s rights upon the misogynistic planet. Forcing our Ferengi heroes to band together to cement those rights, in the face of Quark’s recurring foe from the homeworld, has merit to it.

But that’s about where the good times end in “Profit and Lace”. The episode is widely considered one of the all-time worst of the franchise, and it’s not hard to see why. The comedy is broad and atrocious. The sitcom-like realization of the premise is abominable. And the way the episode tries to draw humor from sexual harassment, attempted sexual assault, and gender fluidity lies somewhere between backwards and reprehensible.

The most charitable read of the episode is that it’s a story about Quark fully accepting not just his mother, but feminism, after having to walk a mile in her shoes. When Quark’s ranting effectively gives his mother a heart attack, he’s forced to temporarily become a woman, replete with body modifications and hormones, in order to secure the support of an influential legislator to put Zek back on the throne.

That idea is problematic as hell, but the best version of it would be one that takes the transition seriously, with Quark having epiphanies and bursts of empathy about what it’s like to be on the other side of the double standard. Instead, it’s a loony farce, with the most stock and hacky gags about what women are like, that just makes you want to put your head in your hands.

Part of the problem is that the humor is hackneyed writ large. Even if you could somehow separate out the problematic elements in “Profit and Lace”, the comedy would still be downright bad. The running gag of someone describing Brunt as Grand Nagus only for someone to correct with “acting Grand Nagus” quickly becomes exhausting. Tepid soft drink-based humor about Nilva slinging “sluggo cola” is embarrassing. If last season’s “Ferengi Love Songs” taught us nothing else, it’s that going for broad sitcom energy with the Ferengi is a recipe for disaster.

And yet, I’d tolerate all of that if it could avoid the backward, retrograde humor that “Profit and Lace” deploys in the rest of the hour. Good lord, the gags about the female Quark, dubbed “Lumba” (in another pitiful play on words) are disastrous and ugly. This is the most unfortunate, “estrogen makes you weak and weepy”-style sexist humor to ever make it into Star Trek. Quark frets about walking correctly, about the size of his hips, about wanting a hug from Odo after being emotionally overwhelmed. It’s the worst kind of “Men are from Mars/Women are from Venus” nonsense.

It’s also a wrongheaded betrayal of the trans community. Despite some progressive treatment of Dax and her identity not changing even as her gender does, “Profit and Lace” sets that back fifty years. Between the way Quark’s transition is treated as a source of ridicule and ridiculousness, and Rom harboring some kind of identification with the traditional elements of femininity being treated as an oddity and source of humor, this episode feels downright bigoted in a way that thankfully few episodes of Star Trek do. I’m sympathetic to the idea that norms change, and you have to accept film and television as products of their time, but this kind of depiction was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.

That’s before you get to the laughs the episode tries to wring from sexual harassment and assault. Watching Quark try to use his position as boss to lean on one of the dabo girls to sleep with him is contemptible, but not out of character for Quark. His insinuations are disgusting, but they give him somewhere to go later in the episode, post-transformation. In that light, it could be forgivable. Characters have to start somewhere lacking if you want to watch them grow.

What isn’t forgivable is the humor the show attempts to squeeze from Nilva chasing “Lumba” around the room and trying to have his way with her, despite her obvious protests. What the show plays for yuks is quietly horrifying, and something the show normalizes by treating it as light farce. The fact that the solution to Brunt’s accusations that Lumba is a man is her flashing the assembled is downright embarrassing, And even at the end, when Quark is supposedly more enlightened from his experience and doing right by the dabo girl he harassed earlier, they pivot into a “She actually likes it and Quark hasn’t actually changed” kicker, which undermines and good intentions you could possibly draw from this garbage fire of an episode.

I don’t want to say there’s no way you could draw humor from these scenarios. Unfortunately, they’re regular occurrences in our society, and anything that people can relate to can be a source of humor and catharsis. But it would take a delicate hand, not a sledgehammer covered in clown makeup. The broad, regressive comedy at play here would be bad for any show, but it’s especially damning in a franchise that aspires to be progressive like Star Trek.

What’s extra maddening about this whole catastrophe is that it undermines the good work Deep Space Nine has done to this point. The show’s Ferengi episodes have been a mixed bag to be sure, but along the way, there’s been a quiet but palpable arc of Quark gradually becoming more open-minded in his view of women and gender in general.

From his revulsion-turned-respect for the cross-dressing Pel, to his appreciation for the call of duty felt by his Cardassian paramour/freedom fighter Natima, to the programmatic partnership and eventual affection he develops with the Klingon Grilka, to the deeper understanding and appreciation he develops for his own mother and the good she could do for herself and her people as a woman of business, Quark has steadily become, if not a feminist, then certainly someone who sees the potential and capabilities of his distaff counterparts in a way he didn’t before.

“Profit and Lace” throws all of that out the window for cheap comedy, retrograde sexual politics, and an attempt at another step of “evolution” for Quark that inadvertently erases the progress he’s made and sets him back even further. The arrival of women’s rights on Ferenginar should be an opportunity for the culmination of Quark’s journey; instead it’s a rank embarrassment that practically counts as character assassination, undoing the good work the show has done to date.

This isn’t the first time Star Trek has bungled comedy episodes or gender politics, but few thank sink so low or have so few excuses as “Profit and Lace”.

One of Ira Steven Behr’s first writing credits in Star Trek, TNG’s “Captain’s Holiday” aims for light escapades, only to crash and burn in the process, but the results are harmless. “Elaan of Troyius” from The Original Series is a franchise low, where Kirk slaps a bratty princess into “behaving” and falling in love with him, but you can, at least, semi-write it off as a product of the 1960s. The TOS finale, “Turnabout Intruder”, is infamous for its sexist take on women and has rightfully been ignored in the franchise ever since, but can at least boast an interesting concept and a conclusion for the show’s original run that is fitting, if not exactly great. And “Angel One”, one of The Next Generation’s attempts to comment on current societal norms by flipping them, is a mixed bag at best, but has its heart in the right place.

There’s no such excuse for “Profit and Lace.” It botches its comedy. It butchers its gender politics. It destroys any efforts to do better on topics of sexual harassment and assault, which Star Trek doesn’t have a great record on to begin with.

At best, I think the writers, including showrunner Behr, are trying to do Deep Space Nine’s version of Some Like It Hot, a hilarious cross-dressing comedy that doesn’t fully jive with modern sensibilities, but which has a surprisingly progressive and transgressive streak for a classic film. But it’s not 1959 anymore, and 1998 wasn’t so long ago that these kinds of blindspots can be excused nearly four decades later. “Profit and Lace” earns its place as one of Star Trek’s lowest of low lights, with a unique blend of terrible humor, terrible character work, and terrible messaging that mean it ought to be obliterated from the memories of fans and friends.

Deep Space Nine remains a transcendent show, including its treatment of some topics where the rest of the franchise falters. With episodes like this one, though, well...nobody’s perfect.

[8.8/10] Star Trek has tons of big affecting moments. Spock’s sacrifice, Picard’s torture, Sisko’s loss of his wife, all rend the heart in ways these stories earn. But they’re also massive, critical moments, of extreme duress, life or death, rife with grand gestures. That is its own kind of difficult--to go big and make it convincing--but it’s also easier to modulate big emotions to big moments.

What’s so powerful about “Time’s Orphan” is that it is one of Deep Space Nine’s most affecting episodes, at least in my book, and it does so with moments that are so much smaller. A feral young woman tosses a ball back to her father after much encouragement and much trial and error. A long lost daughter not only allows her mother to brush her hair the way she did when her kiddo was eight years old, but seeks it out. The curmudgeonly, justice-minded constables doesn’t throw the book at the beleaguered parents breaking the law to protect their child, but instead encourages them to finish their task without a moment’s thought.

Maybe these moments did move you. Maybe you were (not unreasonably) distracted by the prehistoric time portal or the convenience of the situation that forces the O’Briens’ hand. But they moved me. The notion of losing the ability to guide your child for a decade of development, only to see her start to regain a measure of it, is heartening. The sense of losing that connection between mother and daughter through a terrible accident, only to find that bit of intimacy anew is touching. And the least outwardly sentimental character on Deep Space Nine showing compassion, and breaking his own rules to help two people in need, is powerful.

These are not grand moments. They are, instead, tiny gestures. Yet, they’re no less potent, no less full of earned emotion, and no less meaningful.

The trick to it all is in the approach that “Time’s Orphan” takes to its plot. Make no mistake, this is one of the more out there high concept premises Deep Space Nine has attempted in a while. On an O’Brien family picnic, Molly falls into a time gateway. By the time they’re able to retrieve her, due to the temporal relativism, the girl they bring back has not only aged ten years, but had to fend for herself, alone in the wilderness, for all that time.

Despite the wildness of that premise, I like the story on two fronts. First and foremost, because the episode takes an outlandish setup seriously. To have your kid come back feral, need to adapt to her old existence again, and the toll it would take on a family, is a lot to process. “Time’s Orphan” doesn’t shy away from the impact it has on Miles and Keiko, the challenges for Molly to adjust after so long away, the steady but arduous progress made in habituating her to the basics. Much like Miles’ own recovery from an outsized sci-fi struggle in “Hard Time”, the episode gains strength from exploring what the readjustment would be like for both a child and their parents in this situation with commitment and conviction.

Second, I like this because it’s a family story, something we don’t get enough of on Deep Space Nine. Considering that three main characters are parents, the writers typically find ways to sideline their kids (and in Miles' case, their spouse), since it doesn't fit in with either traditional Trek or the dark edges of the series. So it’s nice to have an episode that acknowledges that part of Miles’ character, that recognizes the hardship of being apart from his wife, that sees him put his duties as a member of Starfleet behind his duties as a father.

To the same end, I like the B-story here, which is simple but sweet. With the O’Briens dealing with Molly, the Worf/Dax family agrees to look after Yoshi while they’re occupied, and it becomes an opportunity for Worf to prove himself as a good father in Dax’s eyes. Now, you just have to go with this one, even more than the wild sci-fi plot in the A-story, because surely several years parenting Alexander outweighs a brief time babysitting someone else's kid. But if you can set that aside, Worf trying to prove himself with a baby is a winning setup.

There’s something inherently endearing about the station’s gruffest resident (give or take Odo) looking after its tiniest tyke. Worf struggling with a crying infant while Dax goes “Are you sure about this?” is sitcom-y stuff, but it’s cute. Him feeling like a failure when Yoshi ends up with a bump on the noggin is sympathetic. And his sense of surprise and pride when the little fella has internalized the Klingon technique Worf used on him, is downright adorable. What can I say? I’m a sucker for the “grumpy dude becomes a good dad” trope. I liked it on TNG, and I like it here.

But Worf’s is the much simpler story. Rehabilitating a child who’s been unintentionally abandoned for years is much trickier, and none of it would work without a stellar performance from Michelle Krusiec as the older Molly. It would be so easy for someone playing a feral child, unable to fully vocalize and more wild and stunted in her development, to devolve into something that seems ridiculous. Instead, Krusiec fully commits to the role, creating a version of Molly who is believable in her animalistic movements, convincing in her fear and distress, and heart-rending in the moments where she reestablishes a connection to her parents. It would be a challenging performance under any circumstances, and that doesn’t stop the actress from nailing it.

The performance is also tricky because, like The Babadook, the story in “Time’s Orphan” also works as a sci-fi abstraction of the challenges involved in raising a child with special needs. The stirring moments of progress, the dispiriting setbacks, the challenging outbursts, and the pitfalls of a system that isn’t built to handle those who fall outside the norm, all give this story a little extra impact in how Miles and Keiko try to look out for their daughter’s interests, despite all the bumps along the way.

Some of those bumps are pretty big. If I have a significant complaint, it’s that at about the two-thirds mark, a plot that’s moved at a very measured pace suddenly kicks into overdrive. Molly lashes out and wounds a patron of Quark’s; the Federation wants to evaluate her at a facility she may never return from; Keiko and Miles steal her away and aim to send her back to the time and environment she knows. It’s all very sudden, and unlike the painstaking and open-hearted parenting we get to see as the O’Briens slowly bring Molly along, you can practically feel the creative team realize they’re running out of time and need to get this one to the finish line.

But I like what it comes down to. While I wish the choice had more time to breathe, Keiko and Miles deciding that they’d rather parted from their daughter forever than be with her and see her suffer in a cage of one kind or another is the kind of self-sacrificing parental act that moves the heart and stirs the soul. Sure, it’s a little convenient that when they do, older Molly sends her younger self back to the present, restoring the status quo. But I still feel the power of the O’Briens losing someone they love most in order to protect her, and poetically, regaining them through their putting her needs before theirs.

Seeing Miles and Keiko reunited with the Molly they know in the end is reassuring, and the little one’s drawing that matches her older counterpart’s is a nice touch to show that the young woman they came to know over the past week lives on. But the emotional high point of the episode comes when that young woman says three simple words: “Molly loves you.”

It may not have the energy of Kirk yelling into the ether when his son is killed, or the punch of Lal telling Data “Thank you for my life” before she shuts down forever. The moment is simpler, shorter, more understated. Sometimes, though, it’s the small, down-to-earth nature of those moments, that makes them hit as harder, or harder, as any more grandiose wallop in the Star Trek pantheon.

[5.8/10] I can’t say it’s impossible to craft a character who becomes vitally important to your main players in forty-four minutes. It is, after all, the lifeblood of Star Trek. Some guest character arrives, forges connections with our heroes, only to inevitably have to depart for some reason, imparting some key meaning or lesson before they do. It’s hard to imagine the franchise without that particular story shape.

But it’s also hard! Characters need time to develop, to form connections, to see their relationships evolve. That takes time, and even in the more serialized later seasons of Deep Space Nine, time is a luxury that isn’t always available.

So I admire all-star writer Ronald D. Moore swinging for the fences with “The Sound of Her Voice”, an episode about Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien each forging a deep, personal connection with Lisa Cusak, a Starfleet captain stranded on a faraway planet whom the Defiant crew must race against time to rescue. The wrinkle is that they bond with Captain Cusak entirely “over the phone”, without being able to see or interact with her otherwise.

It’s a cool concept. Particularly in an age where many people have strong friendships with individuals they mainly (or exclusively) know online, there’s something prescient about trying to depict those types of connections forming without people being able to meet face to face. The choice never to show Cusak conversing on screen necessarily brings the writing to the fore and puts the audience and the regular characters behind the same veil with respect to Lisa. This is a challenge, and a unique high-concept sort of story, both the sorts of things I like to see this series tackle.

The problem is that the conversations we here are never convincing enough to make up for the fact that, between a B-story and final act with a race-to-the-finish and a series of eulogies, we only get maybe half an episode’s worth of back-and-forths between Captain Cusak and our heroes. The dialogue would have to be downright extraordinary to make up for that fact, and it gives me no pleasure to say that it’s middling at best.

Lisa talks to Sisko about his relationship with Kassidy Yates. She talks to Bashir about his haughtiness and ignoring others when consumed with his work. She talks to O’Brien about his sense of distance from his friends due to the constant precariousness of war.

These are all worthy topics! Benjamin’s relationship with Kassidy has, frankly, been underserved since they got back together, so examining what it means to him could be really rewarding. How Julian relates to his colleagues now that his out as a genetically enhanced augment has likewise received scant exploration outside of a couple of episodes, so it’s nice to see that brought to the fore as well. And working through what a return to war means to a veteran like O’Brien could be poignant and revealing.

What all these topics have in common, however, is that they have too much depth to try to explore in seven minutes or so a piece.

Even then, the rush job might work if it felt like Captain Cusak had some unique insight or real rapport with this trio of officers. Instead, she mostly offers trite truisms and banal cliches. Some of her answers were so stock, so hollow, that I thought she might have just been manipulating Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien with empty bromides that told them what they wanted to hear.

You knew there was going to be some twist when they found her, and I was 50/50 on whether it would turn out that she was dead by the time they could reach her (tragic!) or that she would turn out to be a Founder who staged this whole thing to manipulate/capture the Defiant crew (devious!). I suppose they already pulled off the latter trick with Odo and “Kira” in the cave, but the fact that these supposed deep conversations that result in fast-forming bonds could plausibly double as a secret agent deceiving our heroes with cheap platitudes doesn’t speak well of the conversations.

Speaking of cliches, the B-story sees Quark wrapped up in a hacky, sitcom-level plot involving Odo. The Constable is still persnickety with his enforcement of Quark’s minor infractions, so the resident bartender hatches a plan to distract Odo with considerations of his one month anniversary with Kira in order to be able to conduct his “business” undisturbed.

It is the most tepid comic setup, with Quark’s protestations about Odo needing to recognize the milestone, and the inevitable conflict when Odo moves his date night to a different day than the one Quark was planning to make his criminal exchange, both coming off broad and hackneyed. Jake is a useless appendage in the story, becoming little more than a prop for Quark to deliver exposition to. This could have been a real waste in an episode already pressed for time.

But somehow, against all odds, its ending becomes the best thing in the whole episode. Quark’s lament that he supported Odo through his rough patch when pining for Kira, and still gets the business from the local security chief, is sympathetic. Quark really was there for Odo during the worst of things with Kira, and he’s not wrong to resent the way he’s treated like a criminal rather than an ally.

And the fact that Odo surreptitiously hears Quark’s complaints while hiding in preparation to bust him, and takes it to heart, is even better. The script signposts his thought process a bit too much, but it’s still downright sweet that Odo chooses to reschedule his date to not only keep Quark away from his own prying eyes, but give the Ferengi the sense of having finally gotten one over on the Changeling. My read on the pair is that Odo and Quark are, unbeknownst to themselves, the best of friends, and Odo making an active choice to support his friend, against his duties and his most deeply held law and order principles, reveals the depth of their friendship in a touching way.

If only the A-story ended up that touching! They try. Moore and company have the good sense to at least feature Benjamin, Julian, and Miles having vulnerable, personal conversations with Cusak, to communicate that the three of them have let their guard down. The actual dialogue isn’t great, and sometimes they even seem out of character, but the intentions are good.

I’m particularly a fan of her conversation with Chief O’Brien. His confession about thinking war wouldn’t be so bad this time, only to still feel the precariousness of his situation, in a way that leads him to isolate from those closest to him, is heartbreaking. I don’t love his discussion of not wanting to talk to ship’s counselors and thinking you should be able to just talk to friends, but it (a.) reflects real life feelings from folks like Miles, so his sentiments have the ring of truth and (b.) Cusak validates his feelings but wraps him back around to counselors being his best option if he’s going to close himself off for others.

And I’ll say this much -- if there’s one thing that almost makes this all-but-doomed endeavor work, it’s the vocal performance from guest star Debra Wilson as Captain Cusak. She knows how to bring the character to life through performance alone -- teasing Julian, nudging Miles, relating to Sisko -- in a way that helps balance out the inevitable shorthand that comes from trying to tell such an expansive character story in such a compressed time frame.

The twist is that when they actually find her, she’s already been dead for three years, and their conversation was only able to happen due to some time dilation from the latest funky energy field. The reveal is pretty weak. There’s only a slight difference between her dying from regular old hypoxia in real time, so it feels like a pointless attempt to add a sci-fi element that doesn’t strongly affect the thrust of the story. In theory, there’s some poetry in the fact that not only was the Defiant too late, but it was always destined to be too late, which doesn’t diminish Lisa’s connection with the crew. But it’s pretty thin gruel.

Still, it’s better than the elaborate toasts the main trio of people she spoke with gives at their post facto funeral for her. Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien all give loving tributes to Cusak, that fail on two fronts. For one, the speeches are on-the-nose with the character-specific epiphanies and takeaways to the point of artlessness, which saps them of their emotional power. For another, the fleeting interactions the audience has seen don’t support the glowing, loving terms in which the three men eulogize their fallen comrade. Try as it might, “The Sound of Her Voice” simply doesn’t earn that.

It’s a hard thing to earn in less than an hour! Building a single deep bond among a pair of characters in the usual Star Trek runtime is a challenge. Building three in the same stretch is a herculean task, if not something outright impossible. The notion of a stranger who becomes a close confidante through conversation alone is a compelling one, but despite a noble attempt, “The Sound of Her Voice” ultimately falls on deaf ears.

"It's funny, the day you lose someone isn't the worst. At least you've got something to do. It's all the days they stay dead."

Azbantium plot hole aside, this is very well acted. A lot of the Capaldi-era episodes have been lackluster on the writing front, the acting front, or both—but this one is a masterful performance. If I have only one major question about "How?!", that's a massive improvement.

I, for one, really appreciated the "Oh, snap!" moment when I realized that my suspicions had been right: the whole "cycle" premise had been foreshadowed at the very beginning.

(The "plot hole" is the azbantium room not resetting, when all the other rooms in the entire castle reset to their original state after some time. Why should that one not reset? Obviously because the Doctor would never be able to escape if it did.)

Clearly one of the best Doctor Who episodes so far!
Capaldi is a great actor and I'll always remember his performance as the Doctor.
It was outstanding.