Tom Salinsky

ENT S03E19 Damage (). After 700-odd episodes in which the lead characters of the various Star Trek series showed us what we could be if we listened to the better angels of our nature, someone on the Enterprise writing staff seems to be continually saying “This time, what if our lead characters were all doofuses instead?” No-one has escaped this brush so far, whether it’s no-space-legs Hoshi, waste-of-space-Travis, let-them-die Phlox, I-work-alone-Malcolm, three-genders-I-don’t-think-so Trip or shoot-first-ask-questions-later-or-never Archer. The sole exception has been T’Pol, so now’s the ideal time to have her freeze up on the bridge, the first time she’s given official command of the ship. Great. And yes, I can tell they’re setting up a bigger story arc for her, but I still prefer my Star Trek cast to set goals for me to aspire to, rather than to leave me thinking “Honestly, I could do better on a bad day.”

When the attack is called off, she gives a better account of herself, assessing the damage, triaging the repair works and keeping order, but it’s still a relief to see Archer returned home (and not brought before the council as requested). And honestly, I feel bad about dunking on the characters here, because it’s show-level problem and in this story, when their backs are against the walls, they all a) come through and b) gain some much-needed dimension – even Hoshi (not Travis of course, don’t be ridiculous). The promise of being cut off from Earth and Starfleet really starts to pay off here, and there are more tough choices coming for Archer, and further trials for T’Pol. I don’t like the idea of weakening her in this way, but it couldn’t happen at a worse time, and that’s a lovely complication. She’s essentially getting hooked on emotions, which is a fascinating version of the Vulcan persona.

Archer’s decision to nick an innocent ship’s warp coil in order to save his own sorry skin is a ghastly one, but at least it’s given some moral context by T’Pol and Trip who point out what a huge jerk he’s being. Strong stuff, but as noted I’d still rather have my optimistic science-fiction fables centred on a captain who’s less of a jerk.

ENT S03E20 The Forgotten (). Year of hell indeed. Enterprise is still all kinds of screwed up and it looks like it’s staying that way for now at least. That’s a commitment to consequences and making things matter which is brand new for this show at least. Connor Trinneer is really good here, making Trip’s exhaustion, determination and emotional disengagement believable and effecting. His bitterness towards the Xindi is further evidence of his unsuitability for the role of first officer, but it’s quite understandable. Archer’s sour inspirational speech is stirring stuff too, but the smash into the new jangly guitar-pop version of the theme has almost never been more jarring.

Degra was behind Archer’s return to Enterprise, which does make some kind of sense, but really we should have had the explanation last time. Now, finally, we start to develop the Star Trek version of this story. Intrinsic enemies who learn to understand each other and find common cause. Trying to forge a new alliance, Bakula falls back on his disappointed headmaster style of acting, when something rather more warm and compassionate might have worked better. It’s a false note in an otherwise strong episode.

And this is a very strong episode. It isn’t a headline-grabber, it doesn’t represent a major left turn in the season arc plot, there aren’t any old favourites making return appearances. But pretty much everything works, from T’Pol’s attack of the yips, to Trip’s visitation from his dead comrade, to the Xindi’s understandable skepticism regarding the wild tales told by these crazy humans, and their eventual decision to turn on their own. I doubt this is a true fan-favourite, but as the Xindi arc really starts to pay off properly, I’m delighted to finally be able to dish out five stars, not least because here all of the characters sound and behave like people, instead of plot contrivances. Of course, there’s nothing for Travis or Hoshi to do, but let’s not ask for miracles, eh?

Star Trek celebrity super-fan Seth McFarlane shows up in a tiny role. A dozen or so year’s later, he’d get his own science fiction series The Orville on the air, which many have interpreted as a love letter to the franchise in general and The Next Generation in particular. It takes a while to find a consistent tone, but I really enjoyed it.

Archer wishes he could thank the eighteen crewmen who were lost, but he can’t alas (because he doesn’t know their names). Accordingly, Trip has to write the letters of condolences.

ENT S03E21 E² (). Despite all of the recent episodes starting with “Previously on Enterprise…” the commitment to serialisation is still a bit half-assed. Basically there’s enough arc-plot for a modern ten episode season, but there are twenty-four transmission slots that need filling, so when Degra says to Archer “See you in three days” he means “See you after the next batch of filler episodes.” And the early sight of Jolene Blalock under half a ton of Michael Westmore’s most crinkly latex is an early clue that this time out from the season-spanning narrative will be – oh goody – a time travel story.

In fact, it’s not that long until we see Randy Oglesby again, but all he and the other Xindi gents do is to rehash information from earlier episodes. Once more, the all-powerful aggressors are rendered impotent by their own silly quarrels. But quickly, Archer’s ship is warned off by another Enterprise, which was sent back in time over 100 years. T’Pol, who refused to believe in time travel for years, became the expert, asserting that travel back through the anomaly was not possible, and so the ship became a generational vessel, waiting for the chance to stop the Xindi attack.

Rather than the usual rules, as stressed by Daniels and his ilk, which involve not altering the past, the descendants of the original crew can’t wait to tell everyone on board who married whom, who was horribly killed and when, and how everything turned out. It’s meant to shine a light on their different personalities, but it only comes off as silly. Then the twist is that T’Pol’s creepy son is going to do to Archer what Archer did to the Illyrians in Damage – nick his engine and leave him stranded, but this is rapidly abandoned. It feels like no-one is really sure what this was supposed to be about. Honestly, you could skip this one and you’d lose nothing.

Women only make up a third of the crew on Enterprise. Why?

ENT S03E22 The Council (). Archer thinks he’s found a way into the spheres and Degra is keen to see whatever they can find. Accordingly, Malcolm recruits one of his hated MACOs to accompany him. I wonder why he didn’t ask Travis or Trip? Meanwhile the almost-all-male rapidly-becoming-more-reasonable Xindi council is being pressured by the all-female Guardians who appear to have been taking fashion lessons from the Borg Queen.

So, the big showdown is approaching, and I’ve been tracking the progress of this multi-episode storyline from its initial we-will-enact-our-bloody-revenge beginnings to a more compassionate and, well, Star Trek version in which those who claimed so many lives on Earth will yet become allies. The price we pay for that is a transition from exciting space battles to people in rubber masks talking in rooms. The challenge now is to make us care about who they are and what they’re saying. That would normally come from how well we know the regular characters, but, you know…

The combination of this story arc and Randy Oglesby’s sensitive portrayal actually means that Degra’s character has been pretty well defined, but Archer’s morality has ebbed and flowed according to the demands of the plots of different episodes, T’Pol has become little more than a medical case history, and Trip hasn’t been given anything important to do so far, so this is going to be hard to pull off.

The early going isn’t promising with the Insectoids being relentlessly belligerent with zero nuance, and Hoshi just there to translate (“I’m doing it… I’m repeating the computer…”). The action-adventure quotient meanwhile is up to T’Pol, Malcolm and Lt Deadmeat, who are attempting to penetrate a sphere. (Travis stays behind in the shuttle because of course he does.)

Ultimately, this does the job it is intended to do, all the pieces move one step further down the chessboard, but the grace and detail and feeling for character in The Forgotten has been… well, unremembered.

ENT S03E23 Countdown (). With Archer face-to-face with his enemies, it now just becomes about stopping them from squabbling with each other long enough to get them to listen. Alas for him, and for us, Degra has left us, which means Archer has lost an ally and we’ve lost a character with genuine dimension. Instead the Insectoids have kidnapped Hoshi and expect her to fire the weapon for them. T’Pol seems to be taking this harder than anyone and has to apologise to Commander Tucker – whom she calls “Trip”! – for her outburst, and then ask him for help. That’s the stuff. She almost smiles when he tells her “I’m all ears”.

And now finally the monolithic Xindi Insectoids start to become suspicious of their creepy time-travelling advisors, even as they’re pumping Hoshi full of space sodium pentothal and putting her to work for them. This is getting close to being the kind of vast space opera which Star Trek has occasionally flirted with, but never really landed on. It’s more fun than all the endless recapping of the same information in different rooms which has dogged the last few episodes, but – T’Pol and Trip aside – the character stuff is generally restricted to more of that tedious Malcolm vs the MACOs stuff, about which I really struggle to care, even when Big Chief MACO nobly bites the dust saving Hoshi.

Nobody seems to miss Degra. He’s barely even mentioned.

ENT S03E24 Zero Hour (). As is so often the case, when an aggressive alien race builds a complex interlocking web of deadly devices, it is sufficient to destroy only one and the rest fall like dominoes. Why aggressive alien races build their complex interlocking webs of deadly devices this way isn’t clear, but it sure is convenient that they do. Thus, Archer and company need only knock out one sphere in order to permanently neutralise the Changelings (sorry, Guardians).

Some awkward dialogue papers over various cracks in the plotting regarding how close the Xindi can get to Earth, how fast they can fire the weapon and so on. Recall that the original weapon was deployed almost instantly. It does rather seem as if all of this time was taken to produce a second weapon that isn’t anything like as effective. But, as if protecting his home planet from imminent annihilation wasn’t motivation enough, time travelling Daniels finds it necessary to show Archer the future of the United Federation of Planets in order to make sure that he knows how gosh-darned important he is. This feels like a last desperate attempt to prove that the Temporal Cold War was part of this story all along – but if so it fails, since Archer tells Daniels to get knotted and then does just what he was going to do anyway.

But if the plotting is ropey, those little strands of character work are paying off. There’s a genuine feeling of doom hanging over proceedings, and a lovely scene between Phlox and T’Pol about preparing for the worst. (Her attacks of the vapours seem to be in the past now.) Even Hoshi starts to feel like more of a person and less of a plot function. It’s clear that Linda Park deserved much better than she got in this series. I wish I could say the same for Anthony Montgomery, but it’s impossible to say either way on the basis of the four purely functional lines he gets each episode.

This is basically good solid, four-star stuff, but I have to knock off half a star for that dopey ending, which I fear is going to tie up the early episodes of next season getting it reset.

This was one hell of a bumpy road, making it blatantly obvious that the Xindi threat was being rethought from episode to episode. We did get some sharper character work than we’ve had in a while, and a handful of really excellent instalments, but the attempt to tell one story over 24 episodes was often botched, and might have levelled the ship but it still isn’t soaring. Maybe this uncertain series needs reinventing yet again. Nice hero shot of Archer running away from the ’sploding Xindi weapon.

Season 3 wrap-up

• Everything about this season feels like hard work. Nothing flows, nothing expands naturally to fill story vacuums. The overall arc advances in fits-and-starts and it’s often hard to connect the different strands into a coherent whole. Compare this to DS9 in its pomp, when narrative ideas cascaded from one episode to the next in a completely organic fashion.
• And I’m banging the same drum over and over again but the crew are almost always either useless (Malcolm, Trip), anonymous (Hoshi) or both (Travis). Only Phlox and T’Pol really work as characters, although Scott Bakula often manages to get by on sheer leading man starpower. I say “the crew” but apart from the new intake of cannon-fodder, essentially none of the other people on board the ship gets as much as a single line of dialogue. But then again, often neither does Travis.
• And yet, in the second half of the season, and after some truly execrable episodes early on, we finally got something which felt real, and true, and like it mattered. The little trilogy of Azati Prime, Damage and The Forgotten is absolutely excellent stuff, with the last of those earning the full five stars for the first time since Voyager’s In the Flesh.
• This contributes to a pretty decent season average of 3.37 which is about the same as DS9 Season 3 and better than any season of Voyager except its excellent Season 4. So Enterprise still has some work to do, but it’s not out for the count just yet.
• That is, unless you’re the numbers people at UPN. Voyager’s finale had been watched by 8.8 million viewers, and Broken Bow had pulled in over 12 million, but that was already down to 5.2 million by the end of Season 1 and only 3.9 million for the end of Season 3, of whom only 2.9 million came back for the first episode Season 4. This is a show that’s running on borrowed time.