One of the criticisms of “The Next Generation” in its first season was the tendency to retread plots originally used in episodes of the original Star Trek series. It didn’t necessarily matter if the episode in question was well written and produced, because in the end, it was nothing new. Considering that we now have four series and several films worth of material, encompassing more than 600 hours, the challenge for “Enterprise” is even more difficult to overcome.
Had this series jumped forward in the timeline, well after the timeframe of the last three series, then it would have been an even more daunting task. So much of the usual technology and established circumstances would have been a burden. By setting “Enterprise” 100 years before the original series, that burden is largely eliminated. The timeframe actually takes away plot conveniences and the false security of an established universe. At times, the writers have almost gone out of their way to allow these elements to be introduced, and in those cases, the strain shows. But for the most part, the premise of the series is exploration and the thrill of the new, all the while building towards a well-known future.
All of this makes it all the more annoying when an oft-used plot device appears in an episode of this series. In this case, it is the tired old “using holograms to create an idyllic world” plot device. It showed up in one form or another during in “The Next Generation”, and the iterations just kept spilling over through “DS9” and “Voyager”. By now, frankly, the use of holography is astoundingly overdone and unoriginal, and one might have hoped that setting “Enterprise” long before holography was used might force the writers to abandon their over-reliance on the plot device.
The episode starts off very well. After several months of misadventures, the Enterprise is actually worse for wear. In a nice touch of realism, Captain Archer negotiates with a trader for the materials they need to repair the damaged and overused systems. The trader leads them to an apparently abandoned yet haunted ship on a nearby planet, and the Enterprise promptly stops to take what they need from the wreck.
What they soon discover, after a stretch of tense exploration, is that the ship is not exactly haunted. Instead, there is an entire population of survivors from the crashed vessel hiding within a section of the ship protected from scans by a dampening field. Archer offers to help them repair the ship, but they seem more concerned with repairing damage that might have been done to the computer core. Trip gets to work, and along the way, starts a relationship with the daughter of one of the more important survivors.
Before long, it becomes clear that the survivors are hiding something, and their story about an apparent attack doesn’t check out. When an escape pod from the crashed vessel is discovered in orbit, carrying the remains of one of the survivors met by the crew (yet dead for over 20 years), the episode reaches a turning point. The tension is played for all its worth, and even though holograms are the obvious answer, one hopes that this is not the payoff for the tension. It’s simply too cliché at this point. By the end of the third act, it is very clear that everyone but Trip’s love interest and her father is a hologram, and the rest of the episode is spent trying to fish for an original explanation for something we’ve seen about a dozen times over the past 15 years.
To say that this ruins the episode might be overstating the effect of this “plot twist”, but not by much. Certainly the acting is well done, and the final decision by the survivors to leave the ship behind and return to their world is somewhat different from the usual resolution. It’s just not enough to make up for the huge disappointment of seeing yet another episode of this series mired in the excesses of the franchise. “Enterprise” is about leaving such things behind to get to the core of the Star Trek concept, and this kind of cribbing from earlier efforts doesn’t allow that to happen.
There are elements of this episode that make up for some of this disappointment, mostly in the first two acts. The use of interstellar traders continues the notion that the Enterprise is truly on its own, without the convenience of starbases or friendly ports. I couldn’t help thinking through the teaser that this might be a good way to bring the Orions into the series without turning them into stock villains…sometimes they could be a godsend, other times a curse.
Another nice touch was the discussion between Trip and T’Pol regarding his experiences in “Unexpected”. I had my doubts that the writers would ever make reference to that again, considering how often little bits of continuity are left out of Star Trek episodes, and so it was a pleasure to see the crew still harping on Trip’s little indiscretion. At least in a thematic sense, these two episodes mesh together in terms of Trip’s character development. It might have been seen as fitting, then, to use holography again here, as a further reinforcement of theme, but in the end that is a stretch.
What this episode really needed was a different and totally unexpected explanation for the size of the surviving crew. By now, holographs are so overdone that one expects them to be used in certain situations, and that makes use of holography predictable and uninteresting. I only hope that this is the last time this is used on the series…even if I know that’s unlikely.
Some other thoughts:
- It’s about time that someone wrote an effective teaser for an “Enterprise” episode. I was beginning to think they were unable to break out of the four-act structure…
- It took three people to develop this story? I know Berman and Braga rarely write alone, but why would they need a third person to help write this? (I know, I know, it’s a minor thing, but multiple writers on television episodes tends to be a bad sign…)
- Did they make Mayweather a part of the script just so they could make reference to his penchant for ghost stories and tall tales? Because the less they have Tony Montgomery act, the better…
- The first act was very impressive, in terms of creating tension. It was hard to tell exactly what they were going to find, as the evidence that they were not alone mounted.
- It was good to see Rene Auberjonois again, especially out of his makeup. Still, all of the guest-starring is beginning to feel a little excessive.
- The insight into Trip’s love life prior to the launch of the Enterprise continues to grow. I like this aspect of his character, as it has a great deal of potential in terms of character exploration over the course of the series.
- For the two seconds we saw her, it was good to see Hoshi again. Is it too much to hope that she might show up more in the upcoming eps?
- It was very good to see Liana struggling with the kind of Earth terms like “dog” and “marshmellow” that tend to get tossed around without comment in Star Trek episodes. They should always remember that a universal translator, no matter how sophisticated, should only be able to translate analogous vocabulary. (Never mind that its utility has never been correctly portrayed.)
- So the energy weapons and solid objects like walls were nothing to the holograms, but they could get involved in a fistfight and still be injured?
- Far too much of the final act was exposition and monologue. It took away all of the tension in the episode and left the viewer impatient for things to just get over with.
Overall, this episode started off very well, and then stalled as soon as it was obvious that the old hologram plots had been re-used. Is this another symptom of Berman and Braga writing too many episodes, and falling back on conveniences? Still, the acting was well done, and the small continuity moments helped make up for much of the disappointment.
