“The Seventh”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga
Directed by David Livingston
Season 2, Episode 7
Production episode 033
Original air date: November 6, 2002
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. T’Pol is reading a book when she gets a call from Vulcan. She then goes to Archer and informs him that he’s going to get a call from Forrest shortly, during which he will order Archer to divert Enterprise to the Pernaia system and to then let T’Pol take a shuttlepod and a pilot, as well as some weapons, for a classified mission.
Sure enough, Forrest makes that call, but neither he nor T’Pol have any specifics beyond that. Archer gives her a shuttlepod and assigns Mayweather to be her pilot, but he’s obviously cranky about not knowing the mission details.
Later that night, T’Pol goes to Archer’s quarters, interrupting his viewing of a water polo game, to give some more information. The Vulcan Ministry of Security had sent several deep-cover agents to Agaron to help the government take care of criminals who were running rampant on their world. When the mission was over, several of the agents refused to come home, and T’Pol, having recently joined the Ministry of Security, was part of the team sent to retrieve them. She was assigned six agents, and she retrieved five of them.
The sixth is Menos, who is the one they’re after in Pernaia. He’s continuing to live as a Agaron citizen, smuggling biotoxins used in transgenic weapons. T’Pol asks Archer to accompany her on the mission, as she says she needs someone with her she can trust. The captain agrees to go along.
Leaving Tucker in charge, they head out, with Tucker bitching about the fact that Archer won’t read him in on the mission, since apparently he slept through the explanations of what “classified” means during his training and career prior to that day.
The shuttlepod lands on a snowy moon and the trio head to a tavern, where they find Menos. He tries to run, but Mayweather is able to take him down. The Peraian authorities verify their warrant is legit, but they can’t take off yet as the landing area is undergoing maintenance that involves covering the deck in acid. They have to wait a few hours.
So they hang out in the bar. Menos tries to plead his case. He’s not a criminal, he insists—yes, he worked with smugglers as part of his job for the Ministry of Security, but now he just hauls spent warp injector casings to support his family. He lived for years on Agaron and doesn’t wish to have his ears re-pointed and his forehead smoothed out, he just wants to live his life.
Back on Enterprise, Tucker is enjoying being acting captain—including making use of the captain’s mess and having Reed and Phlox over for dinner—right up to the part where he has to make actual decisions that affect people, which he deals with by putting them off. (“I’ll get back to you.”) Then Sato contacts him and says that the Vulcan ship they’re rendezvousing with to collect T’Pol’s prisoner is early and wants to talk to Archer. The captain specifically ordered Tucker not to tell the Vulcans that he went with T’Pol for some stupid reason, so Tucker puts another pip on his collar and pretends to be Archer. Luckily for him, the Vulcan captain was only contacting him to pass on a message from Forrest about water polo scores…
Buy the Book
A Half-Built Garden
On Peraia, T’Pol starts having flashbacks to her pursuit of Menos on Risa—except now she is remembering a second person she was chasing besides Menos, someone named Jossen.
She suddenly attacks Menos, but it’s not to hurt him but to remove some of the straps securing him to his chair and wrapping them around her boots so she can go on the acid-covered deck to check out Menos’ ship. To her frustration, the cargo containers all have only spent warp injector casings in them, just as he said. No biotoxins, no contraband of any kind.
T’Pol is starting to doubt herself, and Archer has to remind her that her only job is to bring him in, not judge him. He’ll be put on trial on Vulcan. Menos is less than thrilled with that because regardless of anything else, he is guilty of refusing the return-home order.
T’Pol then asks to speak to Menos alone. Archer and Mayweather take a powder, and T’Pol points her phase pistol at him who Jossen is and asks what happened on Risa. Menos thinks she’s just being annoying, but he soon realizes that she genuinely doesn’t remember the events on Risa or who Jossen is. She bribed a Tellarite captain to tell her where Menos was. But now she is starting to remember confronting Jossen and him reaching for a weapon and her shooting him.
She walks away from Menos and tells Archer the rest of the story: the act of killing Jossen was traumatizing to her. She went to P’Jem to try to deal with the emotions, and finally underwent fullara, a memory-suppressing ritual. She was actually going after seven fugitives, not six, and Menos and Jossen were the last two.
Menos kicks over a table that leads to a fire starting in the tavern and he escapes. Archer, T’Pol, and Mayweather go to Menos’ ship, but he isn’t there. Mayweather gets life support going, and while doing so he discovers there’s other systems running, even though the ship is theoretically powered down. Shutting it off reveals that there are holographic walls that fall to reveal Menos—and canisters of biotoxins for transgenic weapons. Menos manages to escape, and T’Pol hesitates as she chases him until Archer reminds her that her job is to apprehend, not judge, and she shoots him.
Back on Enterprise, Menos having been turned over to the Vulcans, T’Pol talks with Archer about how humans have an easier time putting trauma behind them because their emotions are closer to the surface.
T’Pol tells Archer that if he ever needs someone he can trust, he knows where to find her.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently transgenic weapons, whatever those are, can be made with certain biotoxins.
The gazelle speech. Archer is cranky about his first mate being sent on a mission he knows nothing about, but he becomes less cranky when he’s read in on it. He also does exactly what T’Pol asks him to do, which is keep her on-point.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol served in the Ministry of Security before joining the Diplomatic Corps. Retrieving seven fugitives was one of her first missions, and it ended badly.
Florida Man. Florida Man Struggles With Responsibilities Of Acting Captain, Lies To Alien Dignitary.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox has detected a lymphatic virus on board and needs to inoculate the crew against it. Because diarrhea is one of the side effects, Tucker is reluctant to authorize the inoculation (because, apparently, Tucker is an eight-year-old boy).
Good boy, Porthos! Porthos is happily watching water polo with Archer when T’Pol comes to visit. The pooch very generously gives up his seat so T’Pol can sit down.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… Vulcan helped Agaron take down criminal elements that were dominating the planet with a very large number of deep-cover agents, nineteen of whom went native, which doesn’t speak particularly well of how they train their agents…
I’ve got faith…
“I had Chef prepare a special lunch—bangers and mash for you and Denobulan sausage for the doctor.”
“Very nice.”
“Are you sure the captain wouldn’t have a problem with you using his dining room?”
“Acting Captain, Captain’s Mess—I don’t see a problem.”
–Tucker taking advantage of his temporary position despite the comments of Phlox and especially Reed.
Welcome aboard. The big guest is the great Bruce Davison, last seen in Voyager’s “Remember,” as Menos. We also get Stephen Mendillo, David Richards, Vincent Hammond, Richard Wharton, and Coleen Maloney in tiny roles.
Trivial matters: The Vulcan Ministry of Security was referred to as the V’Shar in the TNG episode “Gambit, Part II.” Another one of T’Pol’s missions for the Ministry of Security was seen in the novel Kobayashi Maru by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin.
Phlox hypothesizes that the lymphatic virus he discusses with Tucker came on board one of the deuterium canisters. Enterprise obtained a mess of refined deuterium in “Marauders.”
Enterprise visited the monastery at P’Jem in “The Andorian Incident.” T’Pol was very familiar with the place at the time, and this episode reveals a bit of why.
The title refers to both Jossen, who is the seventh fugitive T’Pol was assigned to apprehend, whom she had deliberately forgotten, and also to the fact that this is the seventh episode of the season.
It’s been a long road… “He was an innocent man, just like I am.” I was having a serious issue with this episode as I was watching it, because I mistook T’Pol’s flashbacks to getting the fullara on P’Jem for her being sexually assaulted, possibly by Jossen. So I was waiting for that to pay off and was pissed when it didn’t. Then I went back and realized that I completely misread those flashbacks.
Once I got over my dumbass misunderstanding, I really appreciated this episode. One of the things these rewatches have done is make me appreciate certain aspects of the shows that I didn’t really get when watching them the first time through when they initially aired, whether good (a greater appreciation for the characters of Riker and Chakotay) or bad (liking the character of La Forge a lot less, frustrated by several choices made by DS9’s writing staff in the later seasons).
In the case of Enterprise, it’s a much greater appreciation of both the character of T’Pol and the actor playing her. Jolene Blalock does excellent work here, showing T’Pol’s anguish and confusion and anger. I particularly like a more realistic look at the downside of emotional control: when something emotional does happen, most Vulcans aren’t equipped to deal with it. And I appreciate that the act of killing someone—which is so often treated cavalierly by dramatic fiction—is sufficiently traumatic to affect T’Pol this badly, which is as it should be.
Matching Blalock is the always-excellent Bruce Davison, who is just sincere enough to make you think that maybe Menos isn’t the horrible person the Ministry of Security says he is, but just dodgy enough that he might well be bullshitting them. Of course, he’s bullshitting them, and it bites him on the ass, as he gets himself shot and arrested.
Points to Scott Bakula, too, who gives us a supportive ally in Archer, who keeps T’Pol in bounds, as it were, and gives her room to work out her issues without compromising the mission.
Points off for the stuff back on Enterprise. This isn’t the first time Tucker’s been in charge of the ship and to see him flail like this is just silly. Plus, his bitching and moaning about not knowing what the mission is comes across as petulant and idiotic. Classified missions are a thing, after all. I can accept Archer being annoyed at his first mate being sent off on a mission he’s not allowed to know about, what with being her superior officer and all, but Tucker has no call to complain at all. Between that, his pathetic impersonation of Archer, and especially his unwillingness to allow a necessary inoculation because of the potential of diarrhea as a side effect, Tucker comes across (again) as a total jackass.
Also, someone needs to edit the scripts. T’Pol refers to the fullara as an “obsolete” ritual, which is, um, not the right adjective to use to describe a ritual that was performed only seventeen years earlier. I mean, if it’s obsolete, it had to have been replaced with something, so why wasn’t T’Pol given that treatment? And if it hasn’t been replaced, it can’t really be obsolete…
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges everyone to support the Kickstarter for Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2022, an anthology of pulp stories edited by former Trek comics editor and longtime Trek prose stylist Robert Greenberger. The anthology has been funded, so if you support it now, you’re guaranteed to get what you pledge for. Keith will have a story in it called “Ticonderoga Beck and the Stalwart Squad.” Among the other contributors are Keith’s fellow Trek word-slingers David Gerrold, Peter David, Greg Cox, Michael Jan Friedman, Geoffrey Thorne, Aaron Rosenberg, Paul Kupperberg, Glenn Hauman, and, if a stretch goal is reached, Diane Duane. There’s also a new story by Lester Dent, the creator of Doc Savage, plus tales by Raymond Benson, Jody Lynn Nye, Mark Verheiden, Will Murray, and tons more! Check it out and please consider supporting it!
I’ve actually seen this so apparently I did see some episodes after season 1.
Though I only remember Tucker not doing a good job at acting Captain. Which is too bad for an apparently excellent T’Pol episode.
No-Prize Explanation: The fullara ritual was declared obsolete because it almost certainly involves the sort of psychic shenanigans/intrusion/manipulation that makes mind-melding verboten in this era of Vulcan, but is actually more potent (though not necessarily more helpful) than it’s official replacement; T’Pol being in a particular bad way and the monks at P’Jem being fairly old-school, somebody decided to dust off this particular treatment.
So T’Pol is giving Archer et al the Party Line, rather than an objective truth.
I completely forgot about this episode when thinking about Season 2, so this was a very nice surprise. I really enjoyed most of the performances, especially from Blalock and Davison. Archer goes back to being a relatively competent captain, which is always nice to see. As noted, Tucker’s foray in command is pretty much a disaster, which I imagine was meant to be comic relief, but just makes him look like an ass.
Now I’m wondering what other solid episodes from the second season I might have forgotten about.
My only major quibble with this episode is that I think that the reveal of those vials ought to have occurred only if T’Pol had elected to let Menos get away (effectively setting the character up as a recurring villain/antagonist); with the villain in hand, it just seems a little bit too reassuring for Our Heroes to have incontrovertible proof, in addition to strong circumstantial evidence (A man with a smuggler’s hold has to be smuggling something, after all).
Otherwise this is a rather good episode – and I found it especially amusing that, in a roomfull of rough-looking, tough-looking customers (the set-up reminded me more than a little of a Deep Space equivalent to THE HATEFUL EIGHT) it’s Our Heroes that are the violent hooligans, with the rest of the clientele no more violent than visitors to the average chalet!
One of the better episodes in season 2, continuing the depiction of 22nd-century Vulcan as very much like 20th-century America, a paternalistic, culturally imperialist power that did a lot of heavy-handed meddling in other cultures’ politics despite their hands-off rules toward pre-warp societies.
I can buy undercover Vulcans going native — they have to embrace their emotions to pull off the impersonation, and they might not want to go back. Although having nineteen of them do it on one mission is a bit much.
I wonder if Menos ended up in the same rehabilitation center where T’Pring works in Strange New Worlds.
There was an ENT novel by J.M. Dillard called Surak’s Soul, released just a few months after “The Seventh” aired, which dealt with a somewhat similar premise of T’Pol dealing with her guilt at killing someone on a mission. Dillard and her editor had just enough lead time that they were made aware of the events of “The Seventh” and were able to work in some references to it. It was still kind of a coincidence, though not the only one in those days when books and episodes were both coming out frequently.
When I was in the service, and acting for my bosses, my first instict was always to impersonate them when dealing with higher authority…
I think you’re giving Tucker a bad rap regarding the vaccinations. Yes, they may be necessary, especially in a tight environment like a starship, but the side effects sound very much as if the captain should get more detailed explanations from the ship’s doctor. Especially if the doctor doesn’t say “every minute counts.” Too bad that there are too few physicians to get a second opinion.
But I briefly wondered about what both the episode and the review glanced over. Apparently the proprietor of the Peraian trading post — talking about a government authority sounds excessive — has a way to authenticate T’Pol’s arrest warrant. This is pre-Federation. Why do they even have interstellar arrest warrants. Would Earth respect a Klingon court order? An Andorian request to extract some Vulcans they call war criminals?
The one-and-a-quarter seasons so far seem to constantly flip-flop between every meeting a first contact, and vague rumors about the next system over, and this kind of communicating, interacting galactic commons. Remember how Enterprise found that deuterium?
@7/o.m.: “This is pre-Federation. Why do they even have interstellar arrest warrants.”
I would assume the planet in question has an extradition treaty or whatever with Vulcan, the same way it works between independent countries on Earth.
My big issue is with Archer’s level-headed “You’re here to apprehend him, not to judge him.” This provides such a contrast to his reckless behaviour that we’ve seen elsewhere. This isn’t a weakness in this episode as much as an issue with internal consistency in the series as a whole. Sometimes the writers seem to want us to see a human captain as inexperienced and not ready, then here we get to see why he’s actually captain.
As we continue watching, I’ll be looking for this to represent some forward momentum in Archer’s character development.
@7. o.m. It’s also possible that Mr Tucker is reluctant to unleash a wave of vaccination side effects while waiting for the Captain & First Officer to come back from an operation so covert even HE doesn’t know what’s actually going on – if there’s a strong possibility that Our Heroes will be “coming in hot” with hostiles close behind, it’s far from unreasonable to prefer that the insides of NX-01’s crew not be dancing a hoedown, virus or no virus.
ED: by that logic, he should agree to the inoculations because of the possibility of an epidemic on board, which is way worse than a bunch of crew stuck on the potty…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“When you don’t have the ability to repress emotions, you have to deal with them and move on.”
Archer and T’Pol’s relationship is in the spotlight again. Archer’s still being childish when it comes to Vulcans telling him what to do and T’Pol keeping secrets from him, although he does seem to be at least trying to be professional in front of the rest of the senior staff, even if the way he says things doesn’t quite match what he says. Ironically, once T’Pol takes him into her confidence, he’s then doing to Trip what he objected to being done to him, and continuing to do so at the end of the episode. That confidence-taking scene is interesting in terms of the power play involved. Archer starts off making snide remarks but quickly backs off when T’Pol points out his orders came from his own chain of command. He makes a point of continuing to watch the water polo while she talks, until she stands in front of it, at which point he pauses for a moment before turning it off. And he never directly agrees to help her, just starts saying he’s going with her.
Once we get into the main plot, we’re into full-on role reversal territory with Archer being the coldly rational one and T’Pol making emotional decisions. The viewer might be inclined to follow T’Pol’s reasoning where Menos is concerned and wonder if letting him go is the right thing to do. It’s a bit of a shock when Archer reminds us that Menos will get a trial and it’s not their decision whether to set him free or not. He shows a surprising amount of faith in the Vulcan justice system, given they’re not his favourite people, and the episode doesn’t quick manage to make us trust them: T’Pol says the elders had no choice but to suppress her memories, but what we see of it doesn’t look consensual. So it’s a shame that the episode feels the need to remove some of the ambiguity with a neat ending that reveals Menos is a smuggler after all. (And a smuggler who helps weapons manufacturers, just so we know it’s a bad thing.) Contrary to the summary, neither we nor T’Pol find that out until after she stuns him, so that’s still a tense moment even though it’s immediately undercut.
The vaguely Silence of the Lambs-esque A-plot is counterpointed by some humorous scenes on Enterprise as Tucker revels in having his own captain’s table only to get snowed under with the admin of being in charge, then has to impersonate Archer to receive an important message that turns out to be the water polo results. (He puts a fourth pip on his uniform but stays in engineering colours.) I take the point about the inoculations, but I like to think he just didn’t want his dinner interrupted with shop talk and agreed afterwards. To be fair, I’m not sure if Tucker’s been left in charge long-term before, so this may be his first time dealing with day-to-day running rather than just giving orders in a crisis. I think it’s made reasonably clear that the Vulcans wouldn’t be happy about T’Pol telling Archer about her mission, much less bringing him along, hence Tucker impersonating him. This is slightly undercut by the fact Archer apparently goes with T’Pol to deliver Menos to the Vulcan ship, but maybe he stayed on the shuttle or something.
Mayweather gets a bit more of the action than usual, although he’s mainly a line feed for Archer and T’Pol. (He does get to capture Menos first time round though!)
Admiral Forrest is mentioned but not seen. Tucker serves Reed bangers and mash: Can’t beat a good cultural stereotype! T’Pol claims she’s not old enough to have gone undercover on Agaron thirty years ago, which seems like something of a fudge given what we later learn about how old she is.
Reads list of authors. Fine, you got me.
I agree Davison plays the grifter role perfectly in this. His story is just plausible enough without being so airtight as to draw suspicion (too good a story is just as bad as too bad a story in the game Menos is playing).
The whole side-effects bit was eyeroll enough to cause injury. Okay, so one of the side-effects is diarrhea. They don’t have anti-diarrhetics? The word “prophylactic” has just been erased from the dictionary? What, we’re just throwing hundreds of years of medicine out the airlock for a laugh? This actually pisses me off more these 20 years later for what are possibly easily guessable reasons. And if you can’t even ask the right questions to make that kind of call (like, oh, I dunno, “hey doc, is there anything we can do to minimize those effects?” you really shouldn’t be anywhere near a position of authority.
A-plot good. B-plot closer to a D-minus.
@ChristopherLBennett in 8, the plausibility of that depends on what the moon actually represents.
I realize that the TV series format enforces some limitations, and that leaders of entire civilizations routinely answer video calls from until-then-unknown species. But if what we can see is actually all there is to the site (a landing field, a cantina, some buildings of unknown purpose), then this is a penny-ante operation on a marginally habitable moon-or-whatever.
Now imagine Vulcan has a (bilateral? unilateral?) extradition treaty with them. Obviously no embassy or consulate. With how many other podunk planets do they have extradition treaties?
Bruce Davison’s performance was so good that I really wanted to believe that his character was being persecuted unjustly. It truly made the final reveal that much more poignant. So poignant, that I was genuinely disappointed that he turned out to be a scumbag. Great writing and great acting in this one. The title is deliciously clever too.
@14/o.m.: “But if what we can see is actually all there is to the site (a landing field, a cantina, some buildings of unknown purpose), then this is a penny-ante operation on a marginally habitable moon-or-whatever.”
All the more reason to assume it’s within the jurisdiction of some larger government, like an offshore oil rig run by a US company. It’s too small to be a sovereign state of its own.
A couple thoughts.
We tend to assume that all Vulcans are the same, coldly logical, thus any other behavior we consider unusual. If T’Pol is so upset by a single though admittedly traumatic incident, what of the undercover agents. They must behave as criminals to gain the confidence of “true criminals” with the express purpose of betraying them. This would include committing crimes themselves. I would imagine they are undercover for several months, so perhaps it is not unusual that some refuse to come back. Likely the type of person who would accept and do well at an undercover assignment is not one who would thrive in a civilization that prizes suppressed emotions. Add to that the “cure” for not being able to control whatever trauma is left over is a memory wipe.
Also warrant or not, if I were in any way involved in law enforcement and someone came in to remove a suspected criminal, I believe I’d say yes and let them deal with guilt or innocence. There is a good possibility that whatever passes for the government in that area supplied the initial intel on where Menos was and what he was up to in the first place.
@7. krad: In the long term, yes – it’s possible that Commander Tucker assumed that whatever the Captain and his XO were up to would be over & done with in a hurry and was full prepared to pass the buck until then (Either worried that The Boss would be angry if he changed too much or, more charitably, quite aware of his own limits*).
*Well heck, there had to be some reason he picked Ops over Command!
GAH! “… and was fully prepared to pass the buck until then.”
@20 Sorry to disappoint you but since you apparently never watched it, Star Trek has always been “woke”. It always opposed sexism and racism, sometimes more successfully than others. The cashless post-scarcity economy of Earth is pure Socialism. Roddenberry was a person who deeply believed we could make a better tomorrow.
Star Trek, in every version, is part and parcel of how he worked to try to help create that tomorrow that is better than today.
Comment 20 removed. As always, if you want to participate in the conversation, please be aware of our commenting guidelines, and keep the discussion civil and constructive in tone.
Tucker’s reluctance to let Phlox administer the vaccine seems for be a fear of poop. Consider how he reacted when Archer gave him the question from the Students in Season 1, where he was reluctant to answer and only did so by turning the question into one of general recycling in a relatively closed environment.
T’Pol is the most realistic First Officer of a naval ship in the Star Trek universe and it’s not particularly close. I said it.
Source: me, a career naval officer.
Given how underwhelming this season was, it’s a good reminder that the episodic approach could still produce the occasional superlative episode, even with more mediocre outings around it.
You could say this episode had little that could go wrong to begin with. Usually, when a story comes with this much potential, it’s hard to get it wrong. But David Livingston knocks it out of the park behind the camera anyway. Presentation-wise, this episode is a raw portrait of Vulcans and their struggle with their innermost animal emotions. An acting tour-de-force for both Blalock and Davison.
Filmed with an insane amount of atmosphere and intensity, I think it’s safe to say at this point on Enterprise, they were finally beginning to break away from a lot of the aesthetic limitations that defined much of the Rick Berman era. Not just the music score, but everything else: cinematography, costume design, acting choices. The dynamic between Menos and T’Pol is so explosive, so charged with danger that I’m pretty sure this would have been edited down if it were done in an earlier season of Voyager, TNG or DS9 – Berman wouldn’t have allowed it.
I thought it was good and was glad to have a T’Pol episode. She is a great character. But I didn’t like the episode as much as most commenters here. I think the pacing was a little off as I nodded for a few seconds here and there in the middle. I’d rate it as solid rather than outstanding.
@28 / Iunnunis – definitely not perfect from all perspective, but better than average in the ENT series…