Best episode of the season so far. Good action and a fast pace.
Hopefully, the final episode will be the ultimate solution. :thumbsup_tone1:
[6.4/10] There is character in Star Trek: Discovery; it just gets squeezed out by action, exposition, more action, the obligatory table-setting, and then for a change of pace, a little more action.
I don’t mind a little high octane excitement in my Star Trek. Even the measured dignity of The Next Generation got into fisticuffs and firefights on multiple occasions. It’s a part of the franchise that goes all the way back to Kirk’s double ax handles on unsuspecting baddies.
But in Discovery’s penultimate episode, it feels like the point, rather than a side dish. As we head into the series finale, I care far more about whether everyone’s connections to one another stand than whether our heroes will inevitably overcome the challenge du jour, let alone the season’s overall arc. But there’s just not as much time for it when the show has to move all the pieces around the board so that they’re ready for next week’s installment, and try to keep the audience’s attention amid explosions and rampant random danger, as its number one priority.
I want to see Stamets and Dr. Culbert feel uneasy about Adira going on their first potentially deadly mission, and for Adira to rise to the occasion. But we can't! We have to spend time escaping from a black hole! I want to see Tilly convince Rayner it’s okay to sit in the captain’s chair, but there’s no time to develop that idea because the away team has to get stuck in a fiery exhaust port. God help me, I even want to see Burnham and Book express their regrets to one another, but we can only have a minute of it because they need to get into a fistfight with some random Breen soldiers.
The one story thread in “Lagrange Point” that gets any room to breathe is Saru and T’Rina’s parting. While the charge between the two of them has diminished somewhat since the show finally pulled the trigger on their relationship, there remains something cute about the quaint little couple. And even as the dialogue sounds stilted, the notion that both understand a devotion to service, since it’s part of their mutual admiration society, to T’Rina would only encourage Saru to seek a diplomatic solution in a dangerous situation, is a heartening one.
Even there, though, the time spent with the couple bouncing off one another is limited because we have to spend so much time with Federation potentates laying out the details of the byzantine situation with Discovery, the Progenitor tech, and two Breen factions so that they don’t have to bother explaining it next week. It is nice to see President Rillak again, and I appreciate that amid so many explosions and deadly situations, we do see some true-to-form attempts at a diplomatic solution. But whether it's in the Federation HQ boardroom, or the bridge of Discovery, or even the Breen warship, there’s so much robotic talk that only exists to get the audience up to speed on what’s happening, and it quickly becomes exhausting.
I get that, especially before a finale, you want to make sure everyone at home and on screen is on the same page. But it contributes to the lack of felt humanity that has, frankly, suffused Discovery since the beginning.
What kills me is that we get pieces of it! Or at least attempts at it! I am quietly over the moon for Adira coming into their own with smarts and courage to help save the day. You can see how much the attaboys mean to them, and Blu del Barrio sells it well. Rayner and Tilly’s grumpy/sunshine dynamic really clicks here, and as extra as Tilly’s dialogue is sometimes, her stumbling line-delivery makes her feel like a real person and not just an exposition-delivery mechanism like so many characters here. As corny as it is, I even like the playfulness we get between Book and Burnham once they’ve rushed through their personal issues and are instantly back to flirting for whatever reason.
Little of this is perfect. The same sterile approach to the aesthetic and lines and sometimes the performances, that's become Discovery’s house style, still weighs the show down. But by god, they’re trying! You catch glimpses of looser, more authentically personal interactions that would help make these characters feel real. (It’s part of what elevates Strange New Worlds despite that show spinning off of Discovery.) Instead, it’s crowded out by all the explosions and narrative heavy-machinery that “Lagrange Point” seems more interested in.
At least we get a good old fashioned wacky infiltration mission. The humor here is a bit zany for my tastes, and considering that this is supposedly a perilous mission the good guys might not return from, there’s rarely any sense of real danger. Burnham and company bluff through most situations with ease, and even when they don’t, the overacting Moll doesn’t kill them or otherwise fully neutralize them the way you’d expect. This is, as T’Pring might say, mainly a dose of hijinks. I like hijinks! But it detracts from the seriousness of what you’re pitching to the audience.
So does going to the well of dust-ups and destruction ten times an episode. Everything comes too easy for our heroes anyway in “Lagrange Point”. But even if it hadn't, even if you don’t just know that everything’s going to work out because the plot requires it to, the grand finale of ramming Discovery into the Breen shuttle bay and beaming the crew and the MacGuffin lands with minimal force. We’ve already seen scads of action and explosions in the first half of the episode, and again, the imagery is sterile and unreal, which makes it harder to emotionally invest. Your big honking set pieces won’t have the same impact if you’ve done something similar in scope and peril every ten minutes or so for no particular reason.
“Lagrange Point” still has some charms. Even though it’s inevitable, Michael and Moll being stuck in some liminal space offers an intriguing endgame. Rayner finding the self-assurance to sit in the big chair again exudes a rousing level of confidence to the crew and the audience. His chance to face his Breen tormentor has just as much promise. Him, Saru, Adira, and more having their minor moments of triumph is all a good thing.
Unfortunately, these gems have to be carefully pried out of a dull firmament full of rote descriptions of events seemingly meant to untangle the convoluted narrative knot Discovery has tied for itself and unavailing action meant to nudge a half-asleep audience awake. It’s all largely watchable, but easy to zone out in explosive set pieces and boardroom scenes alike in between those precious moments of character. All I can hope for is that this is a necessary evil to clear the decks for the series’ swan song, and that once this detritus is out of the way, there will be better things to come.
[7.4/10] The Augments arc has had a pretty clear litmus test. It’s fun and enjoyable when it’s the Arik Soong show, and either dull or hammy (or both) when it’s the Malik show. It’s somewhere in between, as usual, when it’s the Archer show. “The Augments” tries to split that difference, giving us a fair amount of Soong and Malik, and a fair amount of Soong and Archer, and comes out pretty muddled, but occasionally enjoyable, as a result.
The episode flags when Enterprise tries to turn this story into a faux-Shakespearean family tragedy with Soong, Malik, and Persis. The whole father-and-son angle never landed as well as it should, and all the monologues and colloquies about the importance of not killing people or about who should be in charge fall flat with cheesy writing and an especially cheesy performance from Malik.
He’s the biggest weak link here, at least in terms of performance-to-screentime ratio. Malik quickly ascends into cartoon supervillainy with his plan to inflict a devastating pathogen on the Klingons with the idea that they’ll blame Earth, go to war, and keep both sides out of their hair. He also murders Persis when she sets Soong free in something that’s supposed to be big and important but mostly just comes off as melodramatic and inevitable.
There’s not much of a point to any of this, but to give the Enterprise something to do and underscore once and for all that Malik is a bad guy. There’s a not so subtle message in this story arc, about how even when nurtured by well-meaning people, anyone with superior abilities starts to think themselves dangerously superior to anyone not of their ken. You can feel the writers groping around for a message in this pretty generic space adventurism, and the closest they can come is the not exactly daring “ubermensches are bad, or at least bad for humans.”
I don’t know what important or daring life lesson that’s supposed to convey (beyond a “hey, think twice before getting your kid laser eye surgery, they might turn into space Hitler!” warning), but it’s mostly set dressing for the more meat and potatoes Star Trek conflict. Malik is racing to a Klingon colony to let loose the aforementioned pathogen, and the Enterprise has to race to get there and thwart him before Khan Jr. can let it loose on an unsuspecting populace.
There’s some legitimate drama and excitement there, but it’s thrown off by the pacing of the episode. Even with a three episode stretch, Enterprise packs too much into the proceedings here. The episode leaps from plot point to plot point, requiring Archer’s starlogs to be the spackle connecting everything, or otherwise not allowing time for particular story threads to unspool naturally.
Oddly enough, the most engrossing parts of “The Augments” are...the parts that don’t actually involve the Augments. It’s more interesting seeing the Enterprise try to rope-a-dope their way through Klingon space without getting detected or destroyed. Archer using the Universal Translator to pose as a Klingon captain and bluff his way through an encounter with another was some nice amusing but high-stakes quick thinking. And when the Enterprise is legitimately detected by a Klingon ship, the Enterprise’s nifty little grappler/nacelle maneuver made for a nice dogfighting set piece.
But the actual confrontations and Augment-based plot stuff can’t help but feel anticlimactic by comparison. Malik launches his pathogen torpedo, and Archer launches a volley of follow-up torpedos that, wouldn’t you know it, manage to destroy Malik’s missile, apparently without any harm to the people down below. It’s a fair enough action sequence, but nothing to write home about.
The same goes for Malik’s last maneuvers, when he chooses to destroy his own ship and siblings rather than be drawn back to jail. There’s some minor emotional quotient to Soong having to cope with all of his “children” dying at once, but the episode doesn't really dwell on it, and Soong himself seems to take it as a mere failed experiment than any great loss when he reacts to it, which weakens its impact. It doesn't help that the rushed pacing makes Malik’s surprise reappearance and killing by Archer lacks the oomph it might otherwise have if the episode actually let the dust settle for a moment.
There’s supposed to be some sort of epiphany here, where Soong looks on his creations with horror and realizes the error of his ways. But “The Augments” gives that tale the short shrift in favor of an unavailing effort to do a miniaturized version of The Wrath of Khan. Say what you will about Khan, but in both his televised and cinematic outings, he had more interesting motivations than Malik’s “I have greater ability and therefore I’m evil” mentality that Enterprise hopes to carry the day with. The fact that Malik never really seems like a person, just a mustache-twirling supervillain, weakens Soong’s change of heart and face turn and sense of loss over his kids.
Honestly, outside of the first episode in the arc, this is something of a waste of Brent Spiner’s talents. It’s tons of fun to see him playing a bad guy, and he’s shown elsewhere that he has the dramatic chops to pull off bigger, more serious moments. But pairing him up so often with the over-the-top theatrical evilness of Malik or the continued “generic leader guy” routine that is the Archer show for those bits of drama dampens things considerably.
Don’t get me started on the cheesy outro, where Enterprise all but constructs a flashing neon sign that says “Soong’s descendents will build Data someday!” It’s a George Lucas-level bit of prequelitis dialogue, and Enterprise has enough of its own prequel problems without needing to borrow the type from Star Wars.
On the whole, the Augments arc was still enjoyable, and as is usually the case for Enterprise, toyed with some interesting ideas and a talented guest star. But also as usual, it couldn’t quite nail down those themes, or parcel out its story well enough to mix the heady thought-provoking flavor of Star Trek with the raucous space-adventuring side of the franchise. Still, it was nice to see Spiner back in the fold, and to see the show drafting off of Star Trek’s continuity a little, rather than flouting it.
[8.3/10] Holy cow -- continuity nod overload! Continuity nod overload! We’ve got a connection to Data’s creator’s ancestor, to Khan, to the Orions, to the Klingons, to the Eugenics wars, to the Augments, and my DS9 is a little rusty, but I think also to Julian Bashir. This is, to be sure, a massive dose of fan service, but I am embarrassed to admit that I am 100% here for it.
It’s just too much fun. This episode still tries to be a little grave and severe like season 3 of the show was at times, but for the most part, the tone is lighter, the situations are more over the top, even silly, in a way that’s enjoyable. There’s moments when it becomes too much for me, like the Orion slaver who totters over when Archer and Soong blast him. But other bits, like a green-skinned Big Show lifting and shaking a totally deadpan T’Pol, are the kind of outsized irreverence that had me in stitches. (I didn’t realize that Big Show followed in The Rock’s footsteps by making the jump from WWE to Star Trek)
Much of that comes from Brent Spiner himself, who is just so much fun playing a Hannibal Lecter-esque bad guy. There’s something very tongue-in-cheek, and more than a little meta, when Spiner’s Soong tells Archer that his crew needs a better sense of humor. Spiner is a delight in that department here, with cutting, oft-sarcastic asides to Archer and others that just make him a joy to watch. It’s easy to default to The Next Generation with comparisons, but in a lot of ways Soong feels like a similar presence to Q here, obviously less in terms of power, but much more in terms of taking the stuffing out of this collection of stuffed shirts.
What’s neat is that Soong isn’t just comic relief here. He is a mad scientist, a sharp-minded escape artist, and in a weird way, an idealist. The show doesn't get into it too deeply, but Soong makes for a solid devil’s advocate on the genetic engineering front. His pitch to Archer that the techniques he pioneered could help enhance humanity and reduce suffering in the world is a superficially compelling one. And when Archer notes that the augments and the Eugenics Wars caused untold suffering (and as Star Trek fans know, would cause more trouble in the future), Soong responds, not unreasonably, that splitting the atom lead to untold death at first, but also powered man’s journeys into space.
His idea that early stumbles shouldn’t keep scientists from pushing for progress makes for an interesting contrast with Archer, who famously has had his own clashes with the Vulcans limiting humanity’s to advance. Soong brings that home to Archer by noting that his controversial techniques could possibly have cured the disease that killed Archer’s dad. In all honesty, most of these discussions are window dressing rather than seriously-addressed topics, but the ideas and arguments, and Spiner’s delivery of them, are all interesting enough to carry the day and feel part and parcel with the sort of ethical debates that are the bread and butter of Star Trek.
That ethical debate becomes a little more relevant when the results of Soong’s experiments have grown up and are out causing a ruckus. Much of the episode focuses on a power struggle among the augments who’ve taken over a Klingon ship. It turns out to be the weakest part of the episode, as none of the augments really know how to act, and the whole Lady MacBeth routine with Persis pitting Malik and Raakin against one another feels pretty cheesy, albeit more like a true Original Series throwback than almost anything else in the series so far.
Still, their schtick is enjoyable enough on its own terms. While the augment crew doing parkour and kung fu to take down Klingons comes off a little hokey, it’s buoyed by the excitement over the fact that they basically look like a troupe of mini-Khans. At the same time, there’s some genuine pathos and even heart to them wanting to rescue and reunite with their “father.” Granted, the show tries to use them to gesture toward how Soong’s line of thinking can easily lead to pernicious ubermensch philosophy, which is particularly dangerous in the hands of genetic supermen, but it’s all too bombastic to take seriously.
What’s kind of odd is that despite the presence of Soong, the misadventures of the augments, and the political implications of the Klingon entanglement, “Borderland” isn’t really about any of those things. At most, it kind of introduces those notions which are likely to take flight later. Instead, it’s mostly focused on the Enterprise going to the titular no-man’s-land between intergalactic territories, and having to rescue the nine members of the crew who get kidnapped by the Orions.
Despite that, sending the unlikely team of Archer and Soong to go rescue them makes for a really fun setpiece. Major kudos owe to the show’s production and costuming team, as the Orion auction house is the sort of grimy, visually diverse milieu we haven’t gotten enough of when exploring “strange new worlds and new civilizations.” The Orions themselves have particularly neat costuming (save the gratuitous but sadly canonical barely-dressed slave girl). There’s an otherness to the Orions, achieved both by casting large guys like Big Show to play them, but also through coming up with unique, almost bondage-themed costumes that are eye-catching and visually signify that we’re not dealing with business as usual here.
The jailbreak and chase that results is also a hell of a fun setpiece. Beyond the raw chaos of these bumpy-headed aliens running around in a panic, you have Soong making a run for it, Archer cleverly thwarting him, and the sort of spills and subterfuge that make this sort of rescue mission a thrill. Add in the fact that the Enterprise is about to be roasted by the Orion ships only to have the augments save the day, and you have another dose of the rolicking, lighter side of action-y Trek I like more than its bland action movie equivalent.
Of course, the end result is a reunion between Soong and his creations, and an escape with more adventures surely in the offing. Spiner is so much fun to watch as Soong because he gets to be the bad guy, and flexes those more colorful acting impulses we almost exclusively got to see in Lore on The Next Generation. But Spiner also imbues him with some truer humanity: his affection for his “children,” his unwillingness to destroy the Enterprise, his seemingly genuine commitment to his perceived altruism in his ideas.
Mixing all of that with a grab bag of continuity connections and species from the franchise’s past makes for an absolute blast of an episode. There’s a certain amount of pandering to all of this, but I’d be lying if I said it did anything than reel me in hook line and sinker.
[7.1/10] “Image in the Sand” is not one of *Deep Space Nine”’s better season premieres. Which is a shame! This is the last one it’ll have! And they’re normally reliably good episodes, as the writers try to start the new season off with a bang.
“Image in the Sand” is more of a hangover. And I like that, in principle. A ton of major things (no pun intended, given Kira’s promotion) happened in “Tears of the Prophets” last season. Spending time to show us the fallout from that, rather than just racing on to the next adventure, is a worthwhile approach, one befitting Deep Space Nine’s character-focused tack and increasing serialization.
But the season 7 premiere gives us three story threads to follow from last season’s dramatics: the first is engrossing and well-done, the second is promising if a little cheesy, and the third is necessary, but frankly kind of bad in a way that surprised me for Deep Space Nine.
Let’s start with the good. Kira is a colonel now! In the three months since Sisko’s departure, she’s firmly stepped into the leadership role for the station. She has the big chair, she interfaces with Starfleet and the Romulans and, of course, her uncharacteristically effusive head of security. And in many ways, this episode is her coming out party. The story establishes her as a force to be reckoned with, not just as a one-time rebel turned officer, but as a capable leader and operator within these various spheres of influences.
I like that a lot! It never struck me when I was watching Deep Space Nine live, but over the course of the series, Kira arguably grows and changes more than any other character on the show. Seeing her go from a recalcitrant and rebellious liaison, to committed member of a mixed-nationality crew, to deserving leader of the whole shebang is one of DS9’s best character arcs.
We see that through her dealings with the always prickly and yet slippery Romulans. The Federation (via a returning Admiral Ross) tells her, rather than asking her, that there will be a Romulan military presence on the station. You can understand both why that would be a reasonable request, given that the Romulans are part of the anti-Dominion alliance now, but also why it would make Kira uneasy given the Romulans’ treacherous history, and why she’d especially bristle at being ordered to accept them by Starfleet.
Except, the Romulan representative, Cretak, seems like a reasonable person. She and Kira have a certain rapport, born of an immediate mutual respect and courteous steeliness. Cretak acknowledges her people’s reputation for arrogance, and doesn't abuse her privileges aboard DS9. She respects Kira’s authority; asks permission for key activities, and even tries a jumja stick! Maybe this will turn out to be one of those trademark Star Trek “Don’t judge a book by its cover” stories!
Sike! No, it turns out the courteous request to set up a Romulan hospital on an uninhabited Bajoran moon is, at best, a side dish, and at worst, an excuse, for Cretak’s allies to put a heap of weapons in place. Here’s Kira (with an assist from Odo), calling Cretak to account, and not taking any shit from Admiral Ross, and generally marking her territory as both the commander of this station and Bajor’s representative.
I suspect we haven't seen the end of this conflict. But between the political interplay, which has long been a highlight of the show, and the chance to see Kira coming into her own in Sisko’s absence, you just love to see it.
What’s slightly less fun is Worf mourning the death of his wife. Or at least, it should be.
That's the odd thing about the second storyline in “Image in the Sand”. I love the idea of taking time to show Worf processing his grief. I was never a huge supporter of the Worf/Fax pairing, but one of the more moving part of their relationship was their tender goodbye and Worf’s characteristic mourning howl. Leaning into that, what this loss means to him, could be fruitful.
Instead, Deep Space Nine...kind of plays it for laughs. Worf wrecks Vic Fontaine’s club after the crooner sings Jadzia’s favorite song, and it leads to jokes about the holographic band threatening to quit and Quark sheepishly handing him a lampshade. Chief O’Brien tries to cheer him up with a bottle of bloodwine with a sitcom-y effort to avoid being instantly shooed away, replete with recollections of Lt. Barclay’s misadventures. The braintrust of Quark, Miles, and Julian trade quips about the situation over a couple of ales.
In principle, I like this storyline. There’s something heartwarming about the idea that Worf’s friends, even Quark, are worried about his mental well-being. The fact that they take his religious beliefs seriously -- that he must win a glorious battle dedicated to Jadzia to get her into Klingon Heaven -- because real or not, they affect him, is touching. And their not only enlisting Martok, but agreeing to go along on a dangerous mission to help Worf and honor Dax is noble. On paper, the story is a solid, even strong one.
The only issue is that for whatever reason, Deep Space Nine plays it for laughs, or at least a sitcom-y “gee whiz” tack, that detracts from the gravity of what Worf is grappling with. The result is an odd dissonance, and I’m not sure why.
Maybe it’s because they’re going for the “committed grief” vibe in the third, Sisko-focused section of the episode, and they didn’t want to overload the audience with mourning.
Here too, I appreciate what Deep Space Nine is trying to do. Ben Sisko lost a lot in the season 6 finale. He lost his best friend. He lost his connection to the Prophets. He felt bound to step away from the station that had been his home and sanctuary for six years. Benjamin is in a state of recovery, a grief-ridden haze that's apparently consumed him for the past three months. As with Worf’s story, taking time to let that settle, to make the audience sit with how that must feel, is a good choice. And Avery Brooks sells the hell out of it in his early scenes.
But then, for some strange reason, we get a mystical fetch quest and some overblown melodrama.
I don’t mind the mystical fetch quest so much. Lord knows DS9 has resorted to magic more often of late, but that it’s been there since the beginning. And hey, while to modern eyes, the Cult of the Pah-wraiths is a little too much like the random Sith cultists from The Rise of Skywalker, the notion that a group of violent Bajoran extremists are worshiping the bad guys now that the Celestial Temple is cut off is an interesting concept.
That said, while I want to give room for the show to pay off my trust, I don’t love the idea that reopening the wormhole is more an Indiana Jones-style artifact hunt than a spiritual journey. The idea that Benjamin just has to put together the right clues and find the right trinket to right what went wrong makes this seem a bit too Zelda-esque for my tastes, even if I hope and imagine there will be more to it than that.
(This is where I admit that my memory of DS9’s final season is super fuzzy! I’m looking forward to being surprised all over again.)
The bigger problem, though, is the Sisko family melodrama. Much of it seems pointless. So Benjamin’s mom wasn’t his mom. So what? The dialogue suggests they’re trending toward an answer of “People can make mistakes but still be good and do good, so forgive yourself and keep going, Ben!”, using Joseph Sisko as an example. Again, I want to give the show time to provide answers, but it’s not clear at this juncture why any of this is significant.
Even so, some of it might be forgivable if the acting weren’t so bad. I don’t know what the deal is. Avery Brooks and Brock Peters have both done extraordinary work, including on this very show! Here though, their family revelations play like unconvincing, Twin Peaks-style over-emotiing across the board. The overwrought score doesn’t help, but the whole tone of these moments veer toward the overblown instead of the raw and intimate, and I don’t know why the veteran performers or director chose to go that direction.
Still, the saving grace of Deep Space Nine setting up its final season, and aiming for a more serialized format, is that there’s a chance for the show to provide answers to some of those big questions, and to course correct a little on where Benjamin, Worf, and to a lesser extent Kira are going for here. I can't pretend this is anything but a bit of a bumpy start, but I still trust our own powers that be on the creative team to get us to the right destination.
[8.1/10] Hitting one-hundred episodes is a big deal. The Original Series fell well short. The Animated Series didn’t come close. Enterprise couldn’t quite make it. And four modern Star Trek series ended without even being within spitting distance. So crossing that threshold is a legitimate milestone for Star Trek: Voyager.
What I appreciate about “Timeless” is that it feels sufficiently momentous in light of that achievement. Plenty of episodes of Star Trek, even ones where nominally major things happen, feel a little ho-hum, even when they’re well done. Big catastrophes are pretty much the order of the day in Star Trek, so even a ship- or galaxy-threatening crisis can seem like just another day at the office for our heroes.
But “Timeless” feels like a story worthy of the occasion. For one thing, there’s a celebratory atmosphere to this one. The scene where B’Elanna comes to christen the new quantum slipstream drive, draped in slow motion confetti, with a suitable benediction from Captain Janeway herself, plays like a tribute not only to Voyager’s ostensibly impending journey home, but to the accomplishments of this cast and crew in reaching a point not every television show, let alone Star Trek series, can say they’ve crossed.
For another, the writers (including Trek impresario and reputed shitbag Rick Berman), bust out two of Star Trek’s favorite spicy chestnuts for the occasion: time travel and alternate timelines.
That's part of what makes this one seem like a big deal. You can practically feel the show busting out special things. We open on Voyager buried under a sheet of ice! We see Janeway herself as a frozen corpse in the decaying remains of the ship! We get alternate versions of Chakotay and Harry (with franchise trademark unconvincing old age makeup to boot)! We have a daring mission to save the future by rectifying the past! We get a cameo from Geordi! We jump between one period and another as the tension ratchets up! Sure, those things usually mean a big reset button is hit, but sometimes, that's the price of fun.
And most importantly, this feels big because it’s a chance to go home. Sure, Voyager’s had some of those in the past. But this time, it isn’t a trick or a fleeting wormhole or some other aliens’ tech that they’re asking to borrow. It’s built on the strength of their own ingenuity, the product of all that they've learned while in the Delta Quadrant. Savvy viewers can probably guess that they’re not going to make it to the Alpha Quadrant halfway through the series, but in a landmark episode like this one, it’s not outside the realm of possibility, which adds excitement.
True to form, there is a thrilling technical problem to solve here. When we meet them, fifteen years in the future, Harry and Chakotay (and some rando named Tessa, because why not), have already stolen the Delta Flyer, purloined a Borg temporal node from Starfleet Intelligence, and from there they have to revive The Doctor, dissect the part of Seven’s skull with her ocular transceiver, and send the exact right “phase corrections” at the exact right moment in the past to avert a decade and a half-year-old disaster from happening. Oh, and Captain LaForge is bearing down on them in the process.
Solving technical problems with creativity and dering-do is at the heart of Star Trek. So using the occasion to have our heroes (or the ones who’ve survived fifteen years later at least) deploy all their fancy tech and know-how to save the future, while the rest of them are doing the same to get home in the past, pays suitable tribute to the kinds of adventures that have fueled the series and the franchise.
True-to-form, it’s also a personal story. As much as this is about finding the right frequency to realign the antimatter coagulators through the main deflector dish or what have you, it’s also a story about Harry Kim’s struggles with his choices. Harry’s often seemed like the character most interested in getting home, and so there’s weight in him taking a big risk in order to try to complete their mission that goes horribly awry but leaves him as one of the few still breathing.
The only problem is that poor overmatched Garrett Wang does not have the chops to play the grizzled, regretful rogue who’s older and more haunted by his actions. Honestly, I was impressed with Wang’s acting in the regular timeline. He’s not always the show’s most dynamic performer, but when Tom identifies a problem with the slipstream drive, and he gives a rousing speech about how they can still do this, you believe his enthusiasm and determination, in a way that's almost stirring.
Unfortunately, he’s just not up to the other half of the equation, He can't quite muster the up-to-eleven emoting required to sell someone haunted by survivor’s guilt and frustrated to the point of madness at his inability to fix the past. (The Doctor is, though, so thank heaven for Robert Picardo!) It’s one of the big weaknesses in an otherwise well-conceived episode.
The other problem is to put the focus on Chakotay and his lifeless, disposable love interest. I get what the show’s going for here. There’s an interesting story to be told about Chakotay having made a real connection in the fifteen years since Voyager’s demise and having to reckon with that all being erased if he succeeds. (The Orville, which “Timeless” writer Brannon Braga is involved with, touches on a similar idea.)
But Tessa is such a nothing character. Despite some good outings this season, Robert Beltran is too wooden here to sell the romance. His guest star paramour isn’t much better. And neither of them can quite convey the graveness of the decision or the preciousness of what they’re losing in the process. And that's before you get to a certain ickiness from the implication that Chakotay might be dating a younger Voyager fangirl.
(And hey, as with Picard and Dr. Crusher on TNG, this is more of a tease than anything substantive, but it doesn’t help the Chakotay/Tessa relationship when the show is clearly stoking fans interest in a Janeway/Chakotay romance in the same episode. The suggestion that there might be room for the relationship if they can make it back to the Alpha Quadrant and not have a whole crew depending on them is intriguing. More immediately though, the Captain and her first officer have infinitely more chemistry than Chakotay and Tessa do. That's partly the point, I think. You get the impression that Chakotay is still moved to hear Janeway’s voice on the ship’s last log, which is why he’s willing to throw his current relationship away. But Tessa is such a nothing character that it never feels like a fair fight.)
Still, despite those weaknesses, there’s a sense of importance, novelty, and urgency that carries the day for an exciting installment like “Timeless”. Part of that comes from the clever scripting. The deftest move the writing team (which also includes Trek stalwart Joe Menosky) makes here is to expertly cut between the past and the present.
That helps in the early part of the episode, where the audience is thrown for a loop by what misfortune could have occurred to leave Voyager in such a state, before cutting to a flashback that shows us the build-up to how it happened. The hope and anticipation in the past, matched with the grim resignation of the present, makes for a striking juxtaposition. And even in the middle, the dramatic irony of comparing young Harry’s grand plans to get them home, with older Harry’s grand plans to fix what he broke as a young man, has an impact.
The smart editing also keeps the excitement up in the episode’s final third act. The writers add the usual Star Trek threats in the future, with a destabilizing ship and not enough power to run the various gadgets and a galaxy class starship there to stop our heroes from changing history. So you get the sense of urgency in the future, as this is the good guys’ one big chance to set things right. But theoretically, the past has already happened, so it should be harder to wring tension from it.
Thankfully, the episode smartly cuts between Harry and Doc’s trials and travails in the future, with Janeway and the crew’s attempt to use the sli-pstream drive in the past, making it seem like the events are happening simultaneously. You can't think too hard about it, or as Harry himself suggests, the whole thing might fall apart in a sea of temporal mechanics and predestination paradoxes. But it’s a nice way to present the material in a way that keeps the audience energized and invested. And the smart structure allows the show to give viewers hints at serious events before letting us witness them firsthand.
The alternate timeline idea also lets us see big things the show can't do as a going concern. The ship can crash into the interstellar equivalent of an iceberg and the crew can die. We can hear snippets of what a return to Earth would look like. We can...see the inside of Seven’s skull, I guess.
Alongside the novelty, there’s a poetic twist, in that Harry’s phase corrections sent to the past through Seven are what turn out to send Voyager crashing down in the first place. There is a bitter irony in the fact that the best future Harry can do is not bring Voyager back home, but restore the status quo. The ticking clock feels a little contrived, but it’s a nice way to solve the immediate problem without solving the series’ big problem, and the Doctor giving the one time ensign a pep talk that spurs him to success is a true fist-pump moment.
Despite falling well short of expectations, and the notion that this was their one big chance for the slipstream project to succeed (presumably to avoid Comic Book Guy-style fans like yours truly from asking why they don’t just keep trying), there’s a sense of optimism at the end of “Timeless”. In an act with a certain amount of sacrifice, Harry and Chakotay become Voyager’s guardian angels. The ship is ten years closer to home. And as Janeway herself puts it, the idea of returning to the Alpha Quadrant is starting to feel like a “when” not an “if”.
Voyager’s writers reportedly included the Caretaker’s mate as an out, in case the whole “stranded in the Delta Quadrant” thing didn’t work and they had to retool the show. At a landmark like one-hundred episodes, you could be forgiven for suspecting the show, which has already switched out castmembers and given the ship a Borg makeover, might do something big. Whether that's killing off another character, or letting Harry and Chakotay exit the show, or even bringing everyone home and starting a new adventure, the heightened aura of a round number gives this one an “anything can happen” quality.
Of course, they stay in the Delta Quadrant; the ship and her crew remain intact, and despite all of that, Harry is back to being an ensign. There is a certain entropy to network television in the 1990s -- a fear of changing or bending the premise too much lest it break. But in heightened moments -- season premieres, season finales, and milestones like this one, shows like Voyager still pull out all the stops, and in outings like “Timeless”, deliver something worthy of the billing.
(As a personal aside, the cameo from director LeVar Burton threw me for a loop because I swear I remember a scene where Geordi is on the bridge of Voyager! I wonder if it was just from a featurette on the production or something like that, and I’m mixing things up. Just goes to show how your memories of the shows you watched growing up can be unreliable!)
Great episode. A party with an intoxicated Seven. A great frosted ship. A dead captain. A dead Seven. Time jumps. A glimpse into a hypothetical future. Timeline jumps. Geordie. A dramatic crush. Glad to see that Kim for once got a serious episode. A romantic dinner (which works till we don't know what happened between him and her). Survivors' guilt. Most of that is great.
[8.5/10] I’ve always appreciated that Star Trek is not afraid to ask hard questions. “Nothing Human” is a referendum on the use of Nazi scientific research extracted through horrific experiments on “undesirables”. There are no easy answers to whether it’s ethically right to use knowledge gathered through cruel means to help physicians and patients who had nothing to do with those trespasses. The moral balance of profiting, even intellectually, from past cruelty versus serving the greater good in the here and now is an uneasy one at best. “Nothing Human” doesn’t shy away from the difficulty of those questions; instead, it embraces them.
Showrunner/writer Jeri Taylor contrives a strong situation in which to test their fault lines. B’Elanna’s life is threatened when a giant alien bug attaches itself to her, and the Doctor must resort to recreating a famed exobiologist in holographic form to help solve the medical mystery of how to remove it. Now of course, you have to turn off your brain for some of this. The script offers some fig leaves for why Janeway would bring the bug aboard, and how safety protocols fail, and why none of their usual equipment works on the bug, and why the crew would create a second medical hologram rather than just having the Doctor ingest the info. But in truth, much of the setup feels like a bit of a stretch.
The story we get, though, is worth stretching for. Because the famed exobiologist the Doctor and company summon via holodeck magic turns out to be a Cardassian named Crell Moset, and his mere presence causes a stir on the ship. Dr. Moset is affable, knowledgeable, resourceful, and decorated. (Guest star David Clennon plays him to likable, subtly pernicious perfection.) He is also a member of the species the former Maquis aboard Voyager were fighting to the death, and a participant in the Bajoran Occupation.
That alone would be enough to sustain an episode. B’Elanna doesn’t want the holo-Crell’s help, given who and what he represents. For his part, Crell offers insights along the way that allow The Doctor to make breakthroughs in the case. And Doc not only works perfectly in sync with his new holographic colleague, but gets along with him in a way he hasn’t with anybody since Kes.
Their synchronicity, both personally and professionally, is one of the most interesting aspects of the early part of the episode. The opening comic relief of the episode sees Doc boring everyone with his visual essays. Earlier in the season, even Naomi is exhausted by spending time with him. As much by personality as by his photonic nature, Doc is a man apart.
So imagine the joy of finding a kindred spirit! Doc and Crell bond over being resourceful improvisers who have to make due without the usual implements or support. They finish each other’s medical diagnoses. They bond over breakthroughs made by necessity from situations that forced them to think creatively. They even hum the same arias. After four years of feeling like few people aboard Voyager don’t understand him, let alone befriend him, he finds someone who truly gets him -- who understands what his situation is like and can relate -- in a way he never has before.
That puts a thumb on the scale. If you’re the Doctor, it’s easy to handwave away B’Elanna’s skepticism of a Cardassian doctor as racism that has no place in medicine. (It has shades of Worf’s refusal to donate blood to a Romulan in “The Enemy”.) It’s easy to excuse divergence in the two physicians’ typical approaches as a part of standard cultural differences. It’s easy to write off any questions about his methods on Bajor as the product of a type of field medicine necessity that Doc himself understands all too well, with a cure that saved countless lives no less! If the question is whether this man is a noble healer or a Cardassian butcher, your answer will be biased by whether you like the guy and whether you can relate to him.
Here’s where I pull back the curtain a bit. I’ve been watching Voyager interspersed with episodes of Deep Space Nine that aired around the same time. (Shout out to the Star Trek Chronology Project! Thanks for adding in the animated shows!) And I think it adds a lot to episodes like these.
I’ve seen suggestions that folks not bother interspersing DS9 and Voyager because they don’t really crossover. “Not even the little stuff,” one website warned. And it’s true, to some extent. Janeway and Sisko are in two different quadrants. So things are different than between The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, where you can have Dr. Bashir show up on the Enterprise or Riker calls in a favor from Quark or Captain Picard stroll the bulkheads of Sisko’s station without too much logistical trouble.
The connections between Voyager and Deep Space NIne are more oblique. Tuvok pops up in one of Sisko’s jaunts to the Mirror Universe. The EMH’s creator, Dr. Zimmerman, shows up on DS9 to use Julian as the basis for a new model. Aside from Quark nearly swindling Harry back in “Caretaker”, there’s little in the way of direct interactions between the main characters of the two shows.
But I think weaving the shows together pays dividends in at least two ways. The first is the Maquis. While Voyager always underachieved on this front, seeing Chakotay and B’Elanna’s feelings about the rebel group helps inform the audience’s understanding of them when Sisko has to deal with other members. The two Voyager officers learning about what happened to their brethren in the Alpha Quadrant has a big impact on their mental state and what they have to return to. And it helps explain why, in an episode like “Nothing Human”, B’Elanna is so hard-nosed in her resistance to accepting any help from a Cardassian doctor, even a holographic one.
The second is that the experiences of Deep Space Nine’s Kira Nerys in particular reveals that Cardassians are not a monolith. One of DS9’s favorite hobby horses is Kira harboring great (and justified) resentment against the Cardassians, only to realize they’re as diverse and multifaceted a people as Bajorans are. Yes, they have butchers like Gul Dukat, but also scientists who look down on the oppressive regime, activists who want to reform it, and even aged potentates who become penitents and father figures.
So when an episode like “Nothing Human” comes along, we have context for the atrocities committed during Cardassia’s occupation of Bajor. We understand why Voyager’s Bajoran officer, Ensign Tabor, has such a virulent reaction to Dr. Macet. (I wonder how he felt about Seska!) But at the same time, we have a basis to share The Doctor’s suspicion that Crell may not be so bad just because he’s a Cardassian, and that reflexive rejection of someone’s work and ability to help because of the people they hail from stands in opposition to Federation values.
And then the grisly facts start piling up.
My biggest qualm with “Nothing Human” is that it seems to inadvertently back into a “that racism was right” lesson. But revisiting this one, knowing the twist, I’m especially impressed at how Taylor and company thread in little hints that something’s amiss with Dr. Moset. They build and build, to where a sympathetic EMH can dismiss them in isolation, but as they pile up, he can't deny the horrible picture they begin to paint of his erstwhile genial colleague.
He wants to use “crude” Cardassian instruments rather than laser scalpels, with a plausible story about how the tactile nature of the implement keeps physicians connected to their patients. He doesn’t flinch at the pained cries of the bug he’s dissecting, but reassures The Doctor that it’s only because their test subject is a mere holographic recreation. He proposes a treatment that would save B’Elanna and kill the bug, with fair reasoning that in a life-or-death situation, they have to prioritize the health and wellbeing of Doc’s crewmate.
I love how these little moments pile up throughout the episode. They work as reasons for The Doctor to excuse somebody he’s already inclined to like and agree with. And in hindsight, they also function as Crell’s self-justifications for his cruelty, hinting at a mentality of callousness and cravenness that bears out when the truth is revealed.
That truth is that Crell is the Cardassian equivalent of Joseph Mengele. He experimented on Bajorans because he saw them as subhuman. He forced them into brutal tests that resulted in needless suffering and death. And even if he had a breakthrough, it came at a great ethical and human cost. The path of the Doctor initially denying this, then waffling when there’s conflicting evidence, only to accept the reality, much to his horror, when the facts roll in, is one of the best parts of the episode.
And a lesser show might have stopped there. The Doctor might acknowledge the evil he’s been a party to, delete the hologram, and find another way. Hell, a lesser show might have kept the tug of war simple: do you allow yourself to profit from inhuman experiments for the health of a colleague, or do you stand on moral principle and put that colleague’s life at risk? That alone would be plenty to sustain an episode.
Instead, “Nothing Human” adds wrinkle after wrinkle that makes this situation endlessly complex. What if you’re not dealing with the bastard themself, but a holographic recreation of them who has no memory of the cruel experiments? What if your patient nonetheless refuses any treatment that involves that hologram? What if the patient’s loved one is begging you to do it anyway if it provides you with the best chance to save them? What if a good crewman might resign his commission over it? What if the patient is your chief engineer, and the Captain can't spare them on an already dicey mission lightyears from home? (On that latter point, Enterprise would dig into similar issues in “Similitude”.)
In short, nothing this episode does makes The Doctor’s choice easy. How do you balance all of those issues? How do you decide what to weigh, what to credit, and what to dismiss? What’s the right thing to do when the purely practical and the purely ethical seem to be in conflict, and everything’s gray?
Despite that (commendable!) morass of a thought experiment, I like where Voyager lands, and how it doesn’t skimp on the moral ambiguity at play in all of this.
The Doctor utilizes Crell’s help to save B’Elanna, but puts a check on him. He accepts his counterpart’s expertise, but forcefully steps in to save the alien bug’s life, even if it’s less “efficient” than Crell’s method. And when it’s all over, when there’s no longer an emergency, he deletes Crell’s program and the research that went with it. The Doctor can stomach doing what must be done to save his patient in an unusual situation, but he can't stomach continuing to eat the fruit of this poisoned tree.
In all candor, I don’t necessarily agree with every part of his approach. In my book, at least, it’s better to save the living than to honor the dead. But truth be told, I don’t think that matters. What I appreciate is that this is a tough call, given all the facets and tendrils of the crisis facing The Doctor here, and I believe that he would take this path. That's all that really matters -- acknowledging the complexity, and having a character make a believable choice. (That goes for Janeway too, who’s become far more pragmatic herself since the days of, “Oh no! We can't give the Kazon a hypospray!”)
The final scene leans into those complications as well. Dr. Crell is full of flimsy rationalizations. But he’s also not wrong when he points to the fact that human medical history is far from spotless, and where we draw the line about what research is worthy and what might be tainted is, if not arbitrary, then certainly selective in many cases. What we choose to tolerate and what we refuse to countenance speaks as much to our own personal experiences and needs as any grand moral principles, even if you’re a four-year-old Emergency Medical Hologram.
The Doctor deletes Crell anyway. And you understand it. Maybe it’s meant as an act of moral principle. Maybe he’s become immune to Dr. Moset’s rationalizations and manipulations. Or maybe it’s the EMH’s acceptance of the idea that, right or wrong, he just can't be a party to this anymore. His erstwhile new friend has turned out to be a butcher -- he can't put up with that, even if it would help people.
That is, to my mind, where the best of Star Trek lies -- at the intersection of the moral, the practical, and the personal. I don’t expect our humble writers to have all the answers, especially when real life ethicists and philosophers struggle with them. But in great episodes like “Nothing Human”, I’m glad they’re still asking the tough questions.
(A couple asides here: (1.) When The Doctor started showing his slideshow, I mistakenly thought this was “Latent Image” from later in the season, and was bracing for a very different episode! (2.) As convenient as the EMH’s tricorders and such not working on the bug is, I appreciate our heroes getting to meet an alien that's truly alien once more. The differences in language and physiology from humanoid lifeforms are the kind of thing I could do with more of in Star Trek. And kudos to the effects team for the design of the bug, particularly its internals, which are eerie and gross in a darned impressive way.)
I don't think that's very credible. Yes, she's a hothead, a Klingon and the duty aboard an isolated ship can cause serious issues, but I don't understand why she's suddenly developing such behavior. Are these really symptoms of a depression? They tried the same with Paris (in that body swap episode where he worked on this 20th century holo car) but that also came totally unexpected. They don't tell these stories well. Her engineering skills are impressive though (but I'm also impressed that they were able to build such a ship in their cargo bay. Who needs a shipyard anyway?)
The B-plot (or is that the A-plot?) with the probe is very mediocre. The guy in their Jules Verne/steampunk diving suits are awful. The flyer is nice, though. I hope that's a vessel that we see more often in future episodes: if we're lucky that vessel could be what the Defiant or at least the runabouts were for DS9.
[6.8/10] I don’t know how to give points for effort. Star Trek: Voyager’s heart is in the right place with an episode like ”Extreme Risk”. Trying to tackle depression and suppressing difficult emotions and survivor’s guilt is admirable. The way they try to personalize the story, through a character whose temperament doesn’t lead viewers to expect depression, is a nice way to dramatize a challenging mental health issue that was stigmatized then and in certain corners, remains stigmatized today. I admire what the creative team is going for here, beyond the usual “neat idea for a story” pat on the back.
But the way they realize that concept is problematic to say the least. Depression is not something that gets fixed in forty-five minutes, and it’s certainly not the kind of thing you can (or should!) just harangue someone into getting over. So my desire to give the show credit for its noble aims is tempered by reservations over how the episode actually treats depression.
Let’s start with the good though. I appreciate the way “Extreme Risk” depicts depression not as someone being very sad, but rather as a sort of emotional numbness. I said that B’Elanna’s disposition doesn’t lend itself to an expectation of depression, but in some ways, she’s the perfect character to explore it with, because her reactions, her frustrations, the things that get a reaction out of her, are well-defined. So when they’re shut down and shut off, it’s easy to notice.
Torres has no qualms about putting Seven in charge of a project. She responds with a simple “no” to a boardroom question rather than trying to come up with a creative solution. She doesn’t snipe with Tom or offer a smart remark about Neelix’s cooking. She doesn’t care about the dream engineering job du jour. She’s meeting expectations but she doesn’t care; she’s just listing through life.
Sometimes the episode underlines that fact a little too hard. (Tom’s speech lays it on a bit thick for my tastes.) But the bigger point is that it’s clear something’s wrong. B’Elanna’s lost interest in the things that used to get her going, from resentments of Borg interlopers to thorny technical problems to the fiery personality that occasionally got her in trouble. In a weird way, it’s the opposite of one of The Original Series’ favorite moves. Just like it always made an impression when the typically stoic Spock was suddenly emotional, it makes an impression when the typically emotional B’Elanna is suddenly stoic.
A great deal of credit belongs to Roxann Dawson. It’s not easy to play someone in a state of emotional inertness and make it compelling. But there are subtleties and layers to her performance, where you can see the numbness wear on her, the disinterest wash over her, the evasions that turn into excuses that turn into self-destruction. Her scene with Neelix in particular is raw and sad in a way little on Voyager is. This is arguably the most challenging script the show’s ever delivered for Dawson, and it puts a lot on her shoulders, but it also results in the actor's best performance to date.
My only big problem with the depiction in the early part of the episode comes in the form of the titular extreme risk. Don’t get me wrong, the orbital skydiving sequence is exciting, and there’s still something novel about seeing Cardassians on Voyager (which turns out to be a clue). But this behavior from B’Elanna -- running dangerous holodeck programs and overriding safety protocols -- is a clear metaphor for self-harm, and I have qualms about the outsized depiction of it.
There’s something to be said for the idea of depicting one of the rationales behind self-harm, of wanting control over something, of wanting to feel something through the morass of depression. But representing it through extreme recreational activities feels off, like the show has to make it action-y and exciting because the alternative might be too real or too mundane for a sci-fi adventure series. There’s something cheap about that.
What isn’t cheap is the Delta Flyer. Okay, maybe it’s a little cheap. But still! I don’t know why, but the Flyer is one of the coolest parts of Voyager. As much as I roll my eyes at Tom Paris’ 24th century hotrod-loving sensibility that seems like a hobby transposed from one of the producers, the notion of Voyager having a signature shuttlecraft, one attuned to the environment and distinctive in its design, is one of those neat little features of the show.
The “space race” against the Malon doesn’t do a whole lot for me, though. At least in “Night”, there was some larger moral point to the species' dickishness. But here, they’re just Saturday morning cartoon bad guys, snarling and throwing waste at our heroes in a race to see who can recover a probe first. They serve no purpose but to impose a standard Star Trek ticking clock, and don’t have much going for them beyond that.
That said, as with the storycrafting from Tuvok’s holoprogram last season, it is nice to see the crew going back and forth about what the Flyer should look and otherwise be like. Tom wanting form and Tuvok wanting function is basic, but it’s a nice excuse for the characters to bounce off of one another, including a disinterested B’Elanna.
Unfortunately, the scene where Chakotay finds her passed out after a risky holodeck test of the Flyer is where the real problems start.
Let’s start with the obvious. If someone is in a state of depression, literally dragging them off from their home and otherwise physically imposing yourself on them in the name of treatment is pretty awful. It’s even worse when you are their supervisor. The scenes where Chakotay forces B’Elanna from her quarters and all but pushes her into the holodeck are uncomfortable.
Likewise, if somebody is depressed because they’re reacting poorly to some kind of trauma, forcing them to relive that trauma is absolutely not the answer! Holy hell! Why is this something we have to explain! Chakotay making B’Elanna confront the dead bodies of the Maquis comrades they lost is horrible, even if it’s B’Elanna’s own program.
I get what Voyager is going for here. The idea, and it’s a laudable one, is that Torres is smarting from the enormity of the Maquis being wiped out in the Dominion conflict, but won’t let herself face those feelings. It’s the latest in a long line of losses she’s suffered over the course of her life, and you can understand how that would leave a mark on her. She’s closing herself off from pain and has, in the process, accidentally closed herself off from all emotion. There’s something to that idea, even if our understanding of whether and how to confront grief and loss has evolved since 1998.
But as with the risky holodeck programs, it’s not just enough for B’Elanna and Chakotay to have a charged but empathetic conversation about this. No, we need overblown drama and fireworks because this is an action-adventure show. Everything is so extreme, and it makes Chakotay look downright cruel in how he tries to get B’Elanna over her issues, in a way that seems more likely to make them worse.
Nevermind the fact that Chakotay isn’t any kind of doctor, let alone a therapist, no matter how many of the usual bromides about found families he spouts. And there’s not one scene of anyone suggesting or insisting that B’Elanna speak to the EMH as a legitimate counselor. And the whole episode, even the better-intentioned parts, have the tone of an after school special, which detracts from the commendable project “Extreme Risk” is aiming for here.
The biggest problem of all, though, is the suggestion that this frankly galling attempt at exposure therapy works on B’Elanna. Suddenly, she's awakened enough to join her colleagues on the Delta Flyer mission to retrieve the probe. Now look, as pure action and problem-solving goes, B’Elanna stepping up and jury-rigging a solution to the disintegrating panel is pretty darn cool. But it feels superfluous, at best, to the real issues she’s facing, and it’s mildly insulting to suggest that Chakotay’s hectoring bullshit gave her the kick in the pants she needed.
I appreciate that the episode at least has the decency to suggest that not everything is fixed immediately, and that it will take some time for B’Elanna to recover emotionally, even if it’s unlikely we’ll actually see that. Star Trek trends toward single-serving stories that restore the status quo. So we don’t really deal with Neelix’s hopelessness, or Chief O’Brien’s suicidal ideation, or Geordi’s Manchurian Candidate experience, or Kirk’s pregnant wife dying ever again. That is the nature of the beast, and you have to accept it if you’re going to appreciate this form of storytelling for what it is.
But it’s outrageous to present the idea that one arguably abusive pep talk from Chakotay is all that B’Elanna needs to get her on the right track. Dealing with depression and other mental illnesses is hard work. As the voice of none other than George Takei would later tell the title character of BoJack Horseman, “Every day it gets a little easier… But you gotta do it every day — that's the hard part. But it does get easier.”
Voyager can't or won’t do it everyday. I doubt the show will do it past this episode. I doubt any future outings will see B’Elanna taking advantage of therapy or otherwise dealing with her grief beyond this likely re-traumatizing experience. As noble as “Extreme Risk”’s aims are, the end result leaves me queasy.
And yet, I can't deny that seeing B’Elanna get a bit of relief in the end is heartening. Her desire to eat some banana pancakes, to extract a little of the joy she used to feel as a child, is a familiar one. Depression, and the emotional detachment, is the kind of thing that makes you reach for old comforts and old pleasures, in the hope that they too can jumpstart your happiness -- old comforts like, say, rewatching the Star Trek series you grew up with.
There is catharsis in B’Elanna’s second try at the pancakes, and the smile that washes over her face when she can once again feel the joy she used to get from them. There is nobility in trying to tell a lived-in and committed story of depression. There is hope in seeing one of the most trauma-backstoried characters in Star Trek history seeing a flicker of light at the end of the tunnel. I just wish the show did a better job of trying to get her there.
Let's hope that in the future they discover a treatment to cure depression as easily as McCoy cured a patients need for dialysis with a pill.
I get what they were trying to do with B'Elanna's depression, but the episode comes across as disingenuous because there was no lead up to this. B'Elanna's MacGyver moment at the end of the episode was chuckle-worthy bad.
[7.8/10] When I saw in the trailer that Tales of the Empire was going to focus on Morgan Elsbeth, I sighed a little. The character, who debuted on-screen in The Mandalorian and came to prominence in the Ahsoka show. She was something of a big nothing in those shows, coming with that sort of flat blandness that, sadly, pervaded a lot of Dave Filoni’s follow up to Star Wars: Rebels. So to be frank, I was less than enthused at the idea that this rare treat, a Clone Wars-esque follow-up in the format of Tales of the Jedi, was going to focus on a character I didn’t really care about.
Well, kudos to Filoni and company, because this installment made me care about her. Some of that is just the visuals. It’s hard not to see a veritable child, running scared across the arid landscape of Dathomir, her and her mother fleeing from an incarnation of General Grievous who is the most frightening he’s been since Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars, and not feel for them.
The terror of the Separatist attack on the Ngihtsisters’ home base, the trauma of watching your mother cut down by their chief butcher, the panic of running and hiding while killers are on your trail, all give us a strong sense, both in terms of imagery and emotion, of the crucible that Morgan was forged in.
But I also like her brief refuge with the Mountain Clan. I’ll be frank -- I don’t remember much about the mountain clan. I think Savage Opress trained there before he was juiced up by the Nightsisters? But I don't remember exactly, or whether we know the matron and her children from before.
Either way, it works on its own, and that's what matters. After the glimpses we saw in The Clone Wars, and the visit to Dathomir in Jedi: Fallen Order, it’s nice to not only see the planet on screen once more, but to get another peek into its culture. The idea that there are people of this place who are not like the Nightsisters, not like Maul or Savage, who are nonetheless drawn into the depths of this war, add both dimension and tragedy to the fate of the planet and the communities who reside there.
I also appreciate the introduction of Nali, a young member of the Mountain Clan who is presented as a fulcrum between the path of war and vengeance stoked from within Morgan, to the path of peace and patience, preached by the matron. So much of Star Wars comes down to meaningful choices, about whether to give into anger and hatred and seek violent retribution, or whether to center oneself on calmness and redemption and no more than defense. Framing that as not just a choice for the Lukes of the world, but for the ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events like Nali, helps drive the momentousness and universality of these decisions home.
And you see both sides. You understand why Morgan is the way she is and wants to be prepared for the droids to come attacking once more. After what she’s been through, what she’s seen, being prepared for battle is natural. Wanting revenge is natural. The way she tries to prepare her fellow young women with weapons and fighting is understandable, given what she’s lost.
ANd in truth, the matron seems pretty naive. When she tells her daughter not to give into that strain of belligerence, and to trust that they’ll be okay, it sounds like a leader putting their head in the sand. So when the droids do show up, and she destroys them all with a mystical ball of light, it’s a hell of a turn. Her moral, that just because someone doesn’t seek out the fight doesn’t mean they’re unable, is a strong one, in the moral and spiritual tradition of the franchise.
It also sets Morgan on a path of tragedy. This being Star Wars, it’s framed in prophecy and vision into the future. But more in keeping with that ethical and spiritual bent, it says that Morgan has chosen the path to darkness, or more accurately, that it’s been thrust upon her by these devastating circumstances, and the road she walks will be a bleak one from now on. Poor Nali walked that path and was killed for it. We know from other shows that Morgan survives for some time yet, but we also know, from the fates of those who’ve walked a similar path, that it rarely ends well for them. Either way, I didn’t care about her path before, but I do now.
[8.4/10] I give Enterprise a fair amount of crap about its efforts to tell a post-9/11 story within the confines of the Star Trek universe. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I still don’t feel like this series is generally equipped to capture the moral nuances and complex emotions that stem from an act which irrevocably changed the psyche of our nation. It’s a noble impulse, but darker and edgier isn’t a look this show can really pull off, and the ethical calculations and te psychology of fear and anger of a nation attacked at home by terrorists would be tough topics for any show to tackle, not just one that had trouble telling the usual Trek-y explorer stories.
But credit where credit is due. “The Forgotten” grazes some of the broader implications of the Xindi attack on who and what Starfleet is, but its focus is more about the personal aftermath of such a tragedy. It is about Trip mourning his sister, about him mourning his crewman, about him accepting and confronting the fact that people he cared deeply about are not here anymore because of a senseless act. It’s about a drive to remember those lost, no matter how painful it may be, rather than to simply try to move on and let their names and faces be lost in a sea of images and statistics.
There is power in that. Enterprise is rarely a show I find heartrending, but when Trip breaks down to T’Pol and admits that he cannot escape or elide the unmooring realization that however much he may not want to prioritize his pain over anyone else’s, his sister is gone, and he’ll never see her again, and that hurts deeply.
Trip is not exactly stoic. He is colorful and expressive and amusing as a character. But he’s usually one to take things in stride, offer a quip or vent to whoever’s nearest, and move on. To see him break down like that, to admit his pain and his bitterness and the irrevocability of his loss, has the force of seeing a normally self-assured officer come undone.
It’s one of the strongest moments in the series, and certainly the strongest of this arc. It brings this attempt to capture one of the most fraught times in American history through bombastic space opera back town to Earth, in the thorny efforts of one person to cope with the way an unspeakable and far reaching tragedy has twisted him up personally. It even dovetails nicely with this regrettable T’Pol emotion-through-addiction storyline, where she envies humans for being able to feel such powerful emotions without being overwhelmed by them.
Trip’s reaction isn’t just one of sadness or loss, though, it’s one of anger. Degra is on the ship, trying to probe and potentially cement an alliance with the humans on behalf of the Xindi humanoids and primates. But Trip is, understandably, barely able to restrain himself from confronting the builder of the weapon that killed 7 million people on Earth with the amount of blood on his hands. It would be unthinkable for someone who’s lost what Trip’s lost to have to work with, let alone team with, the people responsible for the death of his sister, no matter how practical it might be.
But I actually appreciate the practicality of this situation. I complained a bit in my last write-up about how easily swayed by Archer’s story and medal the good guy Xindi were. The B-story in “The Forgotten” is devoted to Degra and his primate pal plumbing the depths of Archer’s story, seeing the Reptilian Xindi that Archer caught in the past, the bioweapon, the internal sphere data, and more. It’s not incontrovertible proof or anything, but it’s at least Degra putting Archer’s incredible story through it’s paces, with the primate friend questioning whether there’s any greater basis to believe Archer vs. the Sphere-Builder Woman we met in the last episode.
Sure, some of this is lip-service, and there’s plenty of holes or at least things that are impossible to prove about Archer’s pitch to Degra, but it shows at least some substantiation, which helps set up the choice for Degra to turn on the Reptilians and try to get Archer an audience in front of the council.
Of course, before that can happen, we need another intergalactic dogfight. The episode does well at upping the tension in a more cerebral episode when a Reptilian Xindi ship shows up to cause trouble. “The Forgotten” plays coy about whether this has all been enough to allay Degra’s fears, but the resulting doublecross of the Reptilians makes for a dramatic space battle and a fragile alliance that’s earned, or at least earned enough, by the doublechecking and corroboration that takes place in the B-story.
The A-story needs some heightened tension too, so we see Trip and Malcolm in EV suits on the hull of the ship repairing a plasma leak while the temperature rises. The set piece is nicely paced, with the hitches in that effort coming along nicely, and editing that makes the simple act of opening a panel and turning a lever feel like one of the most dramatic things in the world.
Still, much of that drama comes from the fact that, as another unavailing speech at the top of the episode reveals, eighteen members of the Enterprise crew died in the most recent Xindi attack. There’s a keen awareness of people having given their lives for this mission, and the struggle everyone has to both keep that in mind as a reason for recommitting themselves to the cause these people sacrificed themselves for, and to not let it overtake them or keep them from grieving for the loss.
For Trip, that comes out when Archer orders him to write a bereavement letter to the parents of a young engineer who died in the attack. Trip struggles with for almost all of the episode, dealing with his survivor’s guilt, the blame he wants to place on himself for bringing her onto the crew, and the way that she reminds him of his sister, and forces him to face his grief over her death as well.
It’s a nice device for getting at that pain, even if it ends up in the awkward position of having Trip make someone else’s death about his own, separate loss. Still, the episode generally threads the needle, showing Trip slowly but surely processing his anger and sense of loss, until he ultimately accepts and expresses it, both to T’Pol and to the parents of his fallen crewmate.
It’s the sort of personal story that Enterprise has shown itself more than capable of when it’s firing on all cylinders. It’s a performance from Connor Trineer that we’ve seen shades of before, but which surpasses even his best work from earlier in the series. And it’s an episode about the type of grief and anger that emerged over those who’d been lost in the September 11th attacks that manages to translate those emotions and the complex mourning process into a narrative space, that makes them relatable, recognizable, and eighteen years later, helps us remember.
[7.6/10] I complain a decent amount about Captain Archer and Scott Bakula on this show. I don’t think that Archer is a particularly good character, and I don’t think Bakula is a particularly good performer on Enterprise. But part of my frustration with both is that the show nevertheless seems to want to frame him as the bestest, most important, and most noble captain that Starfleet has ever or will ever see, despite the fact that he makes dumb decisions and weak speeches on a near-weekly basis.
Imagine my surprise then, watching “Hatchery”, an episode that uses that fact as part of its central mystery and reveal. The episode features the crew coming across a titular hatchery of Xindi Insectoid eggs, which Archer goes to great lengths to protect, eventually beyond any point of reason. It reaches a level where the senior staff starts to question Archer’s behavior, and even considers trying to relieve him of duty over it.
I’ll cop to the fact that I pretty much guessed the cause and effect here by midway through the second act. Fairly early in the episode, Archer gets sprayed with a neurotoxin by one of the egg stalks, and once he starts seeming a little erratic and overzealous in wanting to look after the eggs, it’s not too hard to guess that this little spray is messing with his brain and making him overprotective as part of some Xindi insectoid biological defense mechanism. I may not have been able to come up with Dr. Phlox’s “reverse imprinting” idea, but it’s easy enough to piece together the basics.
The trick, though, is that the episode plays nicely coy as to how much this could be the result of some crazy alien chemical messing with Archer’s brain, and how much it may just be Archer’s own stubborn to devotion to high-minded Starfleet principles beyond any and all logic or reason. The latter is a fairly consistent quality in Archer, with him going out of his way not to kill any opponents, or disrupt relations with other species, even when the most pragmatic thing to do would be to make those sorts of sacrifices in the name of protecting his ship and his mission. Sure, it seems crazy to go to such lengths to protect some eggs when you’re days away from finding your enemy’s WMDs, but Archer is consistently that crazy.
“Hatchery” even has him offer pretty convincing excuses for his behavior. When Trip calls him out on the energy and effort they’re expending to keep those eggs alive, Archer responds with an anecdote from the Eugenics Wars. He tells a story of enemies reaching a brief truce to let schoolchildren escape, and suggests that kind of altruism and kindness helps forge common ground between opposing parties. He’s hoping that this gesture will help signal to the Xindi that, contrary to what they’ve been told, humans are not ruthless, remorseless killing machines set to destroy their civilization.
He even offers a fairly decent reason for why he relieved T’Pol of duty and confined her to quarters. Trip notes that this is far from the first time T’Pol has questioned him, but Archer responds, not unreasonably, that here she violated a direct order in front of other members of the crew, and he can’t let that stand. Is it a little extreme? Yes, but there’s a plausible reason for it, and Archer offers it in a traditionally Archer-like way.
That’s the best trick this episode pulls off. As Phlox says at the end, Archer doesn't even realized he’s being influenced by the alien goop to protect the eggs. That results in the show doing a good job of having that particular urge being filtered by Archer’s usual principles and predictions, just stretched into a funhouse mirror objective to protect a pack of insect hatchlings.
Of course, eventually the show has to give up the game and push Archer’s behavior in a direction so crazy that there’s not really any ambiguity to it. The fact that he goes without sleep for days and lets himself become downright filthy in the process is a nice pair of signs that he’s losing his grip. And when he relieves Reed of duty for firing back and destroying an Insectoid ship, you can sort of see hidebound Archer doing that in the name of the sanctity of life, but it’s a little too much, and all but confirms that this is not just the captain chasing his morals at the expense of any practicality as usual.
It leads to a mutiny, which becomes one of the episode’s most exciting setpieces. It’s neat seeing the usual senior staff secretly collaborate with one another to retake the bridge and the ship from Archer, Major Hayes, and the MACOs. The tensions there play with the preexisting friction between Reed and Hayes, and the fact that the military men, with their stricter chain of command, would fall in line behind Archer is a nice touch for making the story work.
Of course, apart from the story, there’s just a certain cool factor to seeing Trip, T’Pol, Phlox, and Reed marauding through the bulkheads and taking out MACOs. The resulting stand-off on the bridge even allows Hoshi and Mayweather (who continue to be seriously underused) to have strong moments on the side of the good guys. Apart from the “what’s really going on with Archer?” question that the episode does well with, the creative team crafts a nicely-paced action finale to show the good guys retaking control.
In the end, Trip stuns Archer with a phase pistol after he lets the creepy little insect babies crawl all over him like he’s their caretaker. Archer gets treatment from Dr. Phlox; Reed and Hayes kinda/sorta talk it out, and that’s all she wrote. The episode cements that Archer is back to being his old self when he’s willing to listen to Trip (and by extension, Phlox), rather than push back on them in a self-assured sort of way.
It’s a noteworthy final beat. In any number of episode of The Original Series, Captain Kirk would be replaced or possessed or otherwise affected by some interloper, and the crew could usually tell it wasn’t really him because of some sort of cruelty or cravenness on the double’s part that was out of character. When Enterprise tries the same trick, it does so in the opposite direction, with an infection that makes him all the more moralistics and focused on raw ethics over pragmatism than usual. That choice makes the turn more ambiguous, and plays nicely on the Archer we know, even if we don’t exactly love him.
[8.5/10] One of the keys to any kind of art is layers. Whether it’s a story, a character, a performance, or a world, the idea that there’s more going on under the surface than what we immediately see, which can then be unveiled or communicated to the viewers as they go, is vital to artistic expression regardless of what form it takes. That’s a principle “Proving Ground” takes to heart, giving us layer after layer of the Andorians’ connection to our heroes, and creating an outstanding outing for Enterprise in the process.
The episode starts with the first layer of the Andorians’ intentions when they approach the Enterprise out of the blue (no pun intended): “We want to help.” At first, Archer is understandably skeptical. The humans and the Andorians haven’t exactly seen eye-to-eye in any of their past encounters, even if they’ve reluctantly been on the same side of one conflict or another. T’Pol raises some legitimate (if a bit biased) concerns that the Andorians might be duplicitous, only interested in what suits them.
But Shran (who is back and great as always) makes a good case for why the Andorians would intervene on Earth’s behalf. For one thing, Shran once again owes Archer after he helped prevent a war between Andoria and Vulcan last season, and Shran doesn't like owing debts. For another, it’s plausible that even an Imperialist group like the Andorians would feel for the plight of a people who lose seven million souls in a single attack and be apt to join them in a quest for revenge and glory.
Most of all, he puts forth a self-serving reason why the Androians would be willing to join Enterprise’s crusade -- to help shift the humans to being loyal to them rather than to the Vulcans. Shran deliberately underlines the fact that none of the Vulcans joined the Enterprise’s mission or offered assistance with their mighty fleet, and that T’Pol had to resign her commission to stay with it. This is an opportunity to for the Andorians to supersede their pointy-eared rivals as Earth’s best friend, whether that gets them strategic or resource gains, or just the petty joy of winning the loyalties of the Vulcans’ designated allies out from under them.
The case is plausible enough that when Shran wants to have members of his crew board the Enterprise, help them make repairs, share sensor data between them, and assist in the mission to intercept the Xindi weapons test, it seems fair for Archer to accept, especially when the ship is in rough shape after a particularly serious encounter with an uber-anomaly. The Xindi still just feel like the Evil League of Evil right now, even with the nice touch of Gralik’s sabotage coming to fruition when their prototype is tested, but the test provides a nice excuse for the Enterprise crew and Shran’s crew to pull of a fun, joint operation.
If nothing else, it’s a hoot and a half to see Shran trying to pull of the ruse of being a representative from the “Andorian Mining Consortium” looking for a “rare” mineral called “Archerite.” Jeffrey Coombs nails every part of this episode, but the high point may come when he expertly delivers the layers of that little performance within a performance. Shran needs to come off as affable and harmless, but a harsh reception from the Xindi has him struggling to keep his natural combativeness under wraps while staying in character.
Still, we get glimpses at the Andorians’ character on the Enterprise which suggest there’s yet more to these “wig-heads” than meets the eye. Part of that comes from the B-plot of the episode, which sees Reed and Andorian Lt. Talas working to repair the ship’s tactical systems together, and bonding a bit in the process.
In truth, their trajectory is fairly predictable. They start out not wanting to help one another, find that each is talented at what they do, and eventually develop a professional respect and the beginnings of a personal friendship as they learn they’re more alike than they initially thought. Still, the two characters have good chemistry, and the script strikes the right tone, both of cultural gaps needing to be bridged, and of a common understanding that comes from the hardships of being in a military family and their dedication to their jobs.
Of course, the episode turns that connection on its head when it’s revealed that Talas sabotaged the Enterprise’s sensors so that the Andorians could steal the Xindi weapon for themselves. That adds a whole second layer to everything we’ve seen. Shran’s comments to Archer about wanting to help Earth are all part of a ruse to get in his good graces. Talas’s warming up to Reed was a calculated effort to gain his trust and, more importantly, access to his sensor panel. This uncharacteristic bit of altruism turns into a characteristic bit of opportunism from the Andorians, just like T’Pol predicted.
The show even gives them a good motvation. The Xindi weapon will finally give the Andorians the upper hand in their clashes with the Vulcans, something to motivate their adversaries to lay off the border skirmishes. The episode plays the betrayal for drama nicely, giving us a smart space heist set piece that culminates with Archer being jettisoned in an escape pod. Thankfully (also, conveniently), Archer subscribed to the “trust but verify” mantra, and made similar preparations against Andorian treachery, playing a game of chicken with them over the weapon that ends in it being destroyed, the Andorian ship being hobbled, and the Enterprise able to go on its merry way.
So that’s it, right? Simple story. The Andorians pretended to be good to get something they wanted, but it turns out they’re bad, and our heroes were prepared for it. There’s nothing wrong with that type of story, especially in genre fiction. But good art takes things a layer further, a layer more complicated, a layer more interesting, and that’s exactly what “Proving Ground” does.
Because even though Shran “graciously” refuses Archer’s help, the implication is that he secretly transmits the Andorian ship’s sensor data on the Xindi weapon to the Enterprise. When in contact with his commanding officer, Shran asks if there’s another way and preemptively rejects a commendation. Hell, for all we know Talas genuinely made a connection with Reed, but just did her job the same way Shran did. We learn that the most prominent Andorian on Enterprise is someone who pretended to have good intentions, when he truly had bad intentions (or at least, self-serving intentions), but was following orders and, left to his own devices, would have made good (or at least, better) on those original good intentions.
It adds complexity to the relationship between humans and Andorians and on the relationship between Archer and Shran. One of the best scenes in the episode, and maybe the series, sees Trip asking Shran for the Andorian’s antimatter converters. Shran demures, but expresses sympathy for the loss of Trip’s sister in the attack and empathizes with the quest for vengeance. Trip rebuffs the suggestion, saying that it’s not about revenge; it’s about keeping others from having to suffer the same fate. Shran confides a story of losing his own sibling in battle, and with that shared sort of loss between them, agrees to give Trip the technology.
Maybe it’s all an act. Maybe the tech was fairly pedestrian and it was another part of the scheme to gain the Enterprise’s trust to where the Andorians could complete their mission. But I’d like to think it was genuine, another sign that Shran continues to see potential in these “pink-skins”, enough for him to give them the smallest bits of help along the way. As Archer puts it earlier, he and Shran keep finding themselves doing favors for one another, and Shran replies that it’s how alliance are born. Alliances are never that simple, but built on layers of trust and false starts and personal relationships. Great art, in Star Trek or elsewhere, is built on the same.
If last week's penultimate episode was the show's dramatic peak, this finale is an elegiac send-off, with Mariko's loss really felt by all (and which Jarvis beautifully conveys that throughout). Sanada and (especially) Asano are really in top form throughout, especially during that cliff's climatic conversation. Great series.
One of the most captivating shows of the decade ended with this episode. I can’t sing Shogun enough praise. What an absolute masterpiece.
Maybe they’ll continue it, maybe they won’t. I know I’ll be following the crew to see what they do next.
I won't lie, I actually liked the previous episode more. It was a good ending, but it could have ended a bit further into the future, leaving the rest to our imagination isn't too much of a problem. I could listen to Lady Ochiba's speech for hours, she is magnificent. The conversation between Toranaga and Yabushige was really good too. Thank you for one of the best series of recent times. Here's hoping to see more productions that portray Japanese culture and history in such a high-quality manner...
I secretly wanted Fuji and Anjin to be together, I'm sorry Mariko-sama. (˘・_・˘)
"Why tell a deadman the future?"
I couldn't have asked for a more fitting finale for this "piece of an art" mini-series. The bar was set high. It could've been either like the GoT finale or Breaking Bad finale. So glad they stayed consistent from start to finish. Undoubtedly, this ranks among the greatest miniseries ever produced.
Many people may be dissatisfied with the finale if they expected to watch an all-out war, which contradicts the entire idea of the show.
Another brilliant episode. Doing something right for season 5.
[5.4/10] Sometimes you have to find your Star Trek-related joys around the margins. Having Scott Bakula portray the steely, determined commander has never been Enterprise’s strong suit. Having him become romantically entangled with the latest love interest of the week, or any romance at all for him, has not been its strong suit. This episode is full of both, which means that the good parts come in those blessed few scenes when neither Archer, nor the titular Rajiin, are on screen.
This episode is basically a watered down version of “Dear Mrs. Reynolds” from Firefly. Archer and company go down to a local market to buy the formula for Trillium-B, and in the process, come across a bewitching sex worker. Archer goes all Pretty Woman, taking her on the ship as a refugee when she wants to get away so that he can save her. She wanders around, using her super-seduction powers to subdue everyone she runs into, until the crew catches on that she’s a double agent for the Xindi, albeit one who may be coerced.
The upshot of all of this is that much of the episode focuses on Archer’s interactions with Rajiin. That’s most annoying when she plays coy, because Archer is clearly enamored of her, but trying to maintain the dignity of his station, leading to lots of awkward looks and indicating from Bakula. At the same time, actress Nikita Ager does a pretty pitiful Betty Boop/Marilyn Monroe routine through most of this, playing shy and coquettish in a broad, cheesy way.
But then the charms come on, and we’re subjected to scene after scene of Rajiin plying her wiles on anyone and everyone she comes across. Naturally, this is an excuse for the show to put her in any number of barely-there costumes and up the steam factor wherever possible. I’m no prude, and can enjoy a bit of televised passion as much as anyone, but this feels like a transparently exploitative stunt. It’s particularly galling when it leads to what amounts to another unfortunate bit of sexual assault being visited upon T’Pol. (Seriously, why is this show so interested in going back to that well over and over again?)
Contrast that with the opening scene between T’Pol and Trip. The show goes nowhere near as gratuitous with it, but there’s a familiarity and intimacy between the two of them that makes the simple act of a neck massage sexier than all the candle-lit rooms and cavorting astro babes that Enterprise can muster. I also love the fact that Trip is a little anxious about people gossiping and getting the wrong idea about their sessions, but T’Pol basically saying that it’s none of the crew’s business and the two of them shouldn’t care. There’s a maturity to T’Pol that’s always been admirable, and it’s endearing seeing Trip be reassured by it.
I also like the continuing subplot of the Enterprise, chiefly Trip and T’Pol, aiming to make Trillium-B so that they can insulate the ship from the various anomalies in the Delphic Expanse. I have to admit, the Delphic Expanse has been surprisingly tame so far given how it was hyped up, but I appreciate that our heroes still have to at least take steps to protect themselves within it. And again, as good romantic chemistry as Trip and T’Pol have, they also just have good on-screen chemistry generally, making their working out a problem together engaging independent of the other business going on.
The other strong points that “Rajiin” can boast are its little bit of worldbuilding before we lurch into the plot, and an actual confrontation with the Xindi. As to the former, it’s neat to see Archer, Trip, and Reed rumbling around an alien marketplace. There’s a bit of exoticism going on that’s mildly uncomfortable, but for the most part, it’s just interesting to see them roaming around somewhere they’re clearly out of place and having to adjust and barter and deal with aliens who aren’t sporting the usual familiar forehead prosthesis. It adds little to the plot, but the alien chemist going gaga for black pepper helps add a sense of place to this region of space, and is, frankly, just plain fun.
The same is true for the Xindi assault on Enterprise. As I mentioned in my write-up in the last episode, while this show still doesn't feel equipped to do “dark post-9/11 allegory”, it is pretty good at action sequences this season. While Archer’s fight with the alien pimp in the first act is laughable, the final act’s skirmishes with the Xindi boarding party is much more exciting. There’s a borg-like quality to the Reptilian Xinidi, with the way they make an essentially unstoppable march through the ship to retrieve Rajiin giving them some legitimate menace and proving that humans aren’t the only species with space marines. Some of their schtick is cheesy -- like the animated dark throwing goop -- but on the whole, they’re scary enough to pass muster.
Unfortunately, before their arrival we just get more tedious Archer/Rajiin banter, and after we get more of the council of ridiculous looking aliens discussing their evil plan. Archer’s attempts at hard-nosed interrogation always come off more comic than dramatic, and the show’s efforts to cast Rajiin as a victim of circumstance in her own right are equally floundering given the similar limitations of the performer.
Eventually, however, we learn that Rajiin’s purpose was to scan the humans, so that the alliance of Reptilian/Bug-like Xindi can work on a biological weapon, which the primate/human Xindi oppose and want to stick with their original plan to use some other crazy sort of weapon. And the porpoise Xindi are, halfway in between, I guess? The show is trying to go for a continuing threat, and mostly comes off as ridiculous with the usual villain sneers and declarations, but it at least adds some information and complexity to their plot, which is something.
Sometimes, that’s all you get with Enterprise. When the main course is nothing to write home about, you have to sate yourself on the side dishes, and at least those, or their T.V. equivalents in “Raijin”, are worth digging into.
[7.6/10] “Talk less, fight more,” to paraphrase Aaron Burr (or his fictionalized equivalent), is not a bad mantra for Star Trek: Enterprise. Dialogue has never been the show’s strong suit. So as odd as it seems to have a Star Trek show more focused on fisticuffs and fireworks than high-minded meditations on diplomacy and philosophy, it may be playing to *Enterprise*s strengths.
Because the truth is that when you have the crew of Enterprise fighting off a pirate invasion, or trawling through an alien storehouse, or getting into a firefight with an alien ship, Enterprise is pretty enjoyable! I still contend it doesn't especially feel like Star Trek (or at least feels closer to the movie version of Trek that was bigger on excitement and less interested in the sort of thoughtful themes the T.V. series had time for), but it’s something that the show’s editors and effects team and camera crew is good at, which is more than you can say for the show’s script.
That said, however much I might bitch about lines here and there, the show does a good job at keeping the proceedings interesting, even apart from the skirmishes with an alien ship in the anomaly cluster of the Alpha Quadrant (I assume?). As I’ve said in prior write-ups, a lot of Star Trek episodes work best when the crew has clear goals. Here, the episode doesn't skimp on that.
Enterprise’s crew’s mission is clear: recover their lost gear before they run out of gas, track down the alien pirates who stole it; download the Xindi database from those same pirates. It helps add a directness to everything going on, where despite some of the “no, you guys, Enterprise is different now!* stuff, you can appreciate the show having a pretty clear throughline of cause and effect from minute one to minute forty-three.
The big problems are two-fold. For one, the show’s effects are just corny to a viewer in 2019. I try not to judge Enterprise too harshly on that front, anymore than I would judge The Original Series for putting a little dog in a cheap halloween costume and calling it an alien in the 1960s.
Still, willing suspension of disbelief is hard to maintain when you have Archer dealing with an obviously computer generated mid-air coffee spill, or a big lump roaming through the decks and tossing crewman flat on their asses. The idea that the laws of physics don’t work the same way in The Expanse is a novel one, especially when it means the usual warp equations don’t work, but the way the show tries to represent that idea is downright laughable in the modern era.
The other problem is that, apart from a reasonably tight story of the Enterprise crew losing their stuff, getting back, and then getting more still from the people who robbed them, “Anomaly” utterly belabors the point that Archer and everyone else is going to have to break some of their moral codes to get along in the expanse. The conversations between Archer and the captured pirate are completely and totally facepalm-worthy.
We get it, Enterprise! The Expanse calls for a more rough and tumble form of diplomacy than was possible in the rest of the Alpha Quadrant! And Archer in particular might be slipping morally and ethically given the demands of this region of space and his own frustrations over his home planet being attacked. There’s something to be said for the show dramatizing American anger circa 2003, and a sense of being wiling to torture prisoners and do other boundary-violating things that the shining city upon a hill would once shudder to countenance, at least publicly.
But as usual, the show makes that point with thunderous directness, making sure the audience understands in no uncertain terms that Archer is losing his moral compass when he suffocates the pirate for information, and having the same pirate pontificate about how mercy is a losing quality in The Expanse. Both the message of these sequences, and the relation to then-current events, are utterly obvious to the point that these scenes really detract from the episode, and the early part of the season, as a whole.
But when the Enterprise crew is just fighting off a pirate attack? Or spelunking their way through a giant metal sphere hidden in a cloaked part of space? Or having to stay close to the pirate vessel despite an ongoing firefight? That’s all pretty thrilling stuff that “Anomaly” does well. Sure, sometimes the overcharged musical stings and the way everyone seems so dang severe now feel over the top, but the nuts and bolts of these sequences are good, and tied to clear goals, which makes them more propulsive than the rest of the episode.
It’s also nice to see Hoshi getting something to do for the first time in what seems like forever. Between her translating the pirate inventory so that the crew can find their stuff in the sphere, to her recognizing the Xindi markings within it, to the way she’s able to download most of the Xindi database from their pirate pursuers, it’s nice to see a member of what has become the B-team getting a little of the spotlight.
Otherwise, Enterprise still does some very Enterprise things, like gratuitously focusing on a young female corporal while the gang is changing into their evac suits, or putting too fine a point on Trip and T’Pol’s “Vulcan neural pressure treatment” creating sexual tension, or having Scott Bakula play a laughable combination of anger and seriousness that he doesn't really have the gravitas for.
Still, when Enterprise focuses on the mission, and the dogfights and intraship skirmishes that go with it, it’s a better show. That’s not necessarily what I want from Star Trek. A well done interrogation of how proto-Federation morality holds up in a lawless frontier is more my speed (and something that Discovery attempted more than a decade later). But if Enterprise isn’t capable of that, or at least not capable of doing it well, then the least it can do is keep us entertained with more of this nonstop, reasonably tense action.
Interesting choice Michael has made for her Number 1.
Will Saru be back? :thinking:
Arguably better than the season pilot, but still a soup of questionable personalities. Watchable - especially while you’re waiting on other shows.
[7.2/10] Star Trek: Discovery does a better job of telling the audience that a relationship is important than spurring us to feel that importance. Your mileage may vary, of course, but across the series, characters have these soulful conversations about how much they mean to one another, and it’s rare, if not unprecedented, for the show to have earned that emotion through lived-in dynamics and experiences that believably bring two characters closer together.
But Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Saru (Doug Jones) are one of the big exceptions. They’re the two characters on the show who’ve arguably changed the most over the course of the series. Michael went from disgraced mutineer to respected captain. Saru went from a timid, by-the-book stiff to a more open and adventurous officer. And,as is Star Trek tradition, along the way, through hardship and heroism, they went from being mutual skeptics of one another to trusted friends.
Where so many of the friendships in Discovery fall flat, Michael and Saru are among the few who play with the ease and care of genuine confidantes. So an episode like “Under the Twin Moons” comes with the power of (supposedly) being Saru’s last hurrah as a Starfleet officer and, more importantly, his final mission alongside Michael Burnham.
In truth, the mission itself is no great shakes. The latest break in the Progenitor case sees the duo beaming down to the planet of the week, a lost world protected by one of those ancient technological security systems that Captain Kirk and company seemed to run into every third episode. The art direction work is laudable, with some neat designs of the weathered statues and other remnants of the fallen civilization, and a cluttered jungle locale that comes off more real and tactile than most of Discovery’s more sterile environments.
But this largely comes off as video game plotting, even before the show reveals that the Progenitor mission is essentially one massive fetch quest. The sense of skulking around old ruins, avoiding weathered booby traps, and using special abilities to avoid obstacles and find clues will be familiar to anyone who’s played Jedi: Fallen Order from the other half of the marquee sci-fi franchise dichotomy, or even precursors like the Zelda series of games. The challenges the away team faces feel more like perfunctory obstacles than meaningful threats to be overcome.
Still, these obstacles accomplish two things, however conspicuously. For one, they show Saru’s value to Starfleet in his alleged last mission. He shoots down ancient security bots with his quills. He attracts and evades their fire with his superspeed. He detects the hidden code with his ability to detect bioluminescence. And he’s able to use his strength to move a large obelisk back and forth to find the last piece of the puzzle. On a physical basis, it’s not bad having a Kelpian on your side.
More to the point, he also looks out for Michael. There’s a nice low-simmering conflict between them, where Michael wants to save Saru so he can enjoy the bliss of his civilian life with T’Rina, and Saru wants to fulfill his duty as any other officer would and protect his friend. In an episode themed around frayed connections between people, it’s nice to see that tension play out in an organic, selfless way between these two longtime comrades. Their ability to work together to solve problems, figure out puzzles, and most importantly, put their necks out for one another (in some cases literally), does more to honor Saru’s place in the series than all the Kelpien superpowers in the galaxy.
For another, they give Tilly (Mary Wiseman), Adira (Blu del Barrio), and eventually Captain Rayner the chance to do something science-y to help Michael and Saru down on the planet. Granted, their “Why don’t we use an ancient electrio-magnetic pulse?” solution strains credulity a bit, and Rayner’s advice boiling down to “You need to think like an ancient civilization” isn’t that insightful. But it gives a couple of the show’s players something to do, and reveals, however ham handedly, not only Rayner’s facility in the field, but his willingness to help out even when he doesn’t have to.
That's a good thing, since he’s joining the cast as the new first officer (something portended by Callum Keith Rennie’s addition to the opening credits. The dialogue to get him there is clunky, with thudding comments from Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) and Burnham about Rayner being a good man despite some poor choices born of tougher times. But after only a couple of episodes, Rayner is a welcome addition -- a fly in the ointment for a now-cozy crew, bolstered by Rennie’s vividly irascible performance.
While the signposting is a little much, the idea that Burnham does not just want a first officer who’s capable, but one who’ll have the guts to challenge her and her perspective is a good one. That approach puts her in the good company of Captain Picard, among others, and shows a humility and an openness in Michael that's commendable. Her willingness to give someone else a second chance, given what the one she received allowed her to accomplish, speaks well of the still-new Captain, and adds some poetry with Discovery’s first season in its unexpected final one.
On a meta level, this is also an interesting thematic tack for the series. Rayner is coded as conservative, battle-hardened, even sclerotic in a way that clashes with traditional Starfleet principles. The idea that he has a place on the bridge, that his viewpoint is worthwhile, and most notably, that he can be brought into the light of Starfleet’s new dawn, fits with the aspirational tone of Star Trek. It’s worth watching how the character arc, and the ideas and subtext in tow, play out from here.
The same can't be said for Book’s (David Ajala) interactions with Moll (Eve Harlow) and L'ak (Elias Toufexis). The show wants to make some trite yet strained point about bonds between individuals in the already-tortured estrangement between him and Michael. The tired pop psychology from Dr. Culber (Wilson Cruz) doesn’t help on that front. But worse yet is the acknowledged unlikely coincidence that Moll is the daughter of Book’s mentor and surrogate father, a contrived familial connection that attempts to gin up through genealogy what the show can't from character-building alone.
Except when it can. The mission may be stock, and the surrounding plot threads may be underbaked, but the goodbye between Michael and Saru is legitimately touching. From Michael nursing Saru through his harrowing transformation, to Saru counseling Michael through good times and bad in her ascent up the ranks, the pair have blossomed into genuine confidantes over the course of the last four seasons. It did not always come easily, but that's what makes their connection now, and the parting poised to strain it, such a poignant, bittersweet moment between two friends.
Who knows if it will stick. Dr. Culbert came back from the dead. Tilly’s back in the fold despite leaving for Starfleet Academy. Saru himself returned to the ship despite ostensibly leaving to become a “great elder” on Kaminar. Discovery doesn’t have a great track record of sticking to major character exits.
For now, at least, Saru gets a swan song not only worthy of what the character, and Doug Jones’ impeccable performance, has meant to the series over the past seven years, but also of what, unassumingly, became one of the series’ strongest relationships. Michael will keep flying. Saru will hopefully enjoy some wedded bliss. But as “Under the Twin Moons” reminds us, they’ve both left a mark on the other that will stay with both of them, wherever they finally end up.
[6.8/10] Enterprise is back and it is dark and edgy, man! We’re in The Delphic Expanse where everything is harsh and weird! The alien species are duplicitous! The ship has a new complement of military guys! Captain Archer is angry and determined!Trip is violent and troubled! T’Pol has a new haircut and costume! The theme song is now jaunty and jazzier! This ain't your father’s Enterprise, pal!
If you can’t tell from my sarcastic italics, I am more than a little skeptical of Enterprise’s efforts at rebranding at the start of its third season. The show wants to turn a corner here, and after 50+ episodes using the original premise, maybe it’s the right time to pivot. Still, as Discovery would learn a decade and a half later, trying to mesh the vision of Star Trek with grimdark prestige brutality isn’t always an easy mix, whether you’re at the start of the Sopranos boom or the end of it.
The season premiere sees the crew at six weeks in the Expanse, and there’s the whiff of the show trying to pull off what Voyager was meant to be. Here are our otherwise high-minded heroes, deposited into a strange region of space they don’t know, without the benefit of being able to call for help whenever they run into trouble. That means new, unknown aliens, more rough-and-tumble encounters, and the way the dynamic of the ship changes when the mission du jour is seek and destroy rather than explore and befriend.
Enterprise just doesn't feel much like Star Trek in the process. Archer and Trip’s crawl through an alien sewer feels like something out of the original Star Wars trilogy. The council of cryptic-speaking, poorly CGI’d bad guys plays like something out of the Star Wars prequels. And the Enterprise deploying a compliment of space marines comes off feeling more like something out of Aliens or even Starship Troopers. Whatever problems I had with Enterprise’s first two seasons, there was something comforting about them because they felt of a piece with the franchise, its rhythms and its bearing, in a way that “The Xindi” just doesn't.
But maybe that’s a good thing. Lord knows that Enterprise didn’t work perfectly in its first couple of seasons. Franchises and art of all stripes need to evolve or risk growing stale. I’d be lying if I said the view of Starfleet or the weekly adventures promised if this is prologue really wowed me or drew me in, but it’s good for the things we like to make us uncomfortable now and then. It’s a sign that a show is taking risks, trying new things, letting the series develop into new directions that force the creators, and the audience, to adapt.
The problem is that Enterprise isn’t very convincing in its new darker and edgier vibe, at least not yet. I don’t want to eliminate the possibility. The show is still early in this new experiment, and as hokey as the Delphic Legion of Doom seems, there’s promise in the notion of a vengeance-seeking Starfleet ship having to cope in a rougher section of space. I don’t want to belabor the point, but the reimagined Battlestar Galactica was basically “darker Star Trek” and totally made it work. The catch is that on early 2000s network television, Enterprise can’t help but feel like a kid putting on his older brother’s clothes and pretending he’s a tough punk. It’s just not convincing yet.
Still, however discordant this opening salvo into the show’s brave new world is, there’s still plenty to like here. However cheesy some of the interactions are, I like Archer and Trip getting trapped in an alien mine and having to sneak and fight their way out. There’s some neat setpieces of them crawling through crap or scaling a plasma shaft, and there was a scenery-chewing charm to their interactions with the proto-Immortan Joe who runs the place.
That foreman/warden of the facility, naturally, doublecrosses our heroes and tries to make them his slaves, necessitating the tactical deployment of Major Hayes and his space marines. As much as the fight that follows doesn't feel like Trek, it’s still cool to see their hand-to-hand combat efficiency, or watching one of their sharpshooters snipe a firing alien from down below. You can still feel the show straining to let you know things are grim and serious know in a way that comes off a bit cornball, but the actual nuts and bolts of the standoff is well-done and exciting from a framing and blocking standpoint.
The episode also does a nice job of expanding the world of the bad guys a little bit. While the council of villains comes off poorly, the Xindi prisoner that Archer interrogates opens up some interesting avenues. We’re so used to planets and peoples being unified in Star Trek to the point that it’s genuinely surprising to learn the Xindi are not just another villainous alien race, but a collection and alliance of different species who jockey for power and have their own internal squabbles.
It feels like a nice fictionalization and figurativization of the United States having to deal with the different tribal alliances and rival groups during the War in Afghanistan, rather than the unified nation state we tend to think of in international conflicts. The notion that Archer and company have a lot to learn in this unfamiliar place, not just a lot of fighting to do, does feel very Trek-y.
Fortunately or unfortunately, not everything has changed on Enterprise. The series has still found new, not especially creative ways to have its female cast disrobe and moan and otherwise endeavor to titillate the nerdlingers in the audience. It’s more bargain basement exploitation when the show gins up reasons for Trip to massage a half-naked T’Pol here.
On the other hand, the scene is a testament to the benefits of genuine chemistry. The show has tried similar (if not entirely as crass) moments between Archer and T’Pol, and the complete lack of chemistry between Bakula and Blalock separately and independently doomed them. Blalock and Trineer have a much better dynamic, and it means that even when you’re facepalming because of the script, the proceedings are at least a little endearing because you can dig the vibe between the two characters on screen.
That’s what we have to hope for in the back half of Enterprise. This cast has settled in over two seasons. The creative team has settled in over two seasons. And the fans have (maybe) settled in over two seasons. As the series charts a new course, we have to hope that the seemingly misaimed efforts to inject the show with post-9/11 darkness can find fertile ground in a show and a crew that know how to do what they do at this point, or at least, what they used to do.
Great start to the season. Good they didn’t hide what IT is and some nice call backs to previous events.
Hopefully it will be a great ride ending this amazing show. :vulcan_salute:
Wow, could be the best season yet!