“Anomaly”
Written by Mike Sussman
Directed by David Straiton
Season 3, Episode 2
Production episode 054
Original air date: September 17, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Porthos is upset for some reason, and no amount of petting helps. Then the ship starts acting weird, with bits of deck and bulkhead rippling like liquid waves, with gravity going out in selected and unconvincingly focused bits, and so on. Eventually, main power fails and they drop out of warp. Reed manages to get emergency power up, but Tucker reports that the laws of physics apparently are on strike in this region of the Expanse and he can’t get the warp drive back online.
Sensors detect another ship nearby. Mayweather heads there at one-quarter impulse—which is their top speed at present—and Archer, Reed, and a trio of MACOs go over on a shuttlepod to find a whole lot of dead bodies. Some were killed by particle weapons, others died when life support failed.
Another ship shows up and sends over a boarding party via transporter. They loot the ship, and the mix of Archer, Reed and his security detail, and the MACOs all utterly fail to stop any of the pirates. It’s left to Tucker—armed only with a stick—to knock out one of the pirates, and he keeps the rest at bay with the arcing electricity that shows up every time he turns the warp engines on. One crewmember, an engineer named Fuller, is killed.
The pirates bugger off, and Phlox recognizes their prisoner as an Osaarian, a species known to both Denobulans and Vulcans. However, they don’t know that much. Archer puts the pirate—named Orgoth—into his shiny new brig and questions him. Orgoth says that his people were simple traders who came to the Expanse only to be trapped there. They couldn’t get out past the thermobaric clouds—one of their ships was destroyed—and they had to figure out a way to survive the anomalies. Once they did that—with trellium-D—they started looting other ships. They didn’t kill people at first, but that changed before long.
Orgoth refuses to provide Archer with the means to track the pirate ship. Tucker and Reed continue to make repairs, eventually getting weapons and hull plating working again. At one point, Tucker and Reed sit in the mess hall discussing Fuller’s death, with Tucker gloomily saying that he’s likely the first of many casualties.
The Osaarians have masked their ion trail, so Enterprise can’t follow them. T’Pol, however, determines that the other ship that was looted did figure out a way to penetrate the masking, but their life support died before they could use it.
Enterprise uses that method to track the ion trail, but there’s an odd gap in the middle of it. They fly into the gap, which turns out to be a cloaking barrier that hides a gigunda sphere. Sensors can’t penetrate the sphere, but there’s a hatch that a shuttlepod might fit through. Archer takes Mayweather, Reed, and three MACOs to investigate. They manage to break in and find a ton of stuff, including most of the items stolen from Enterprise. The Osaarians are obviously using this sphere as a storage unit. They retrieve most of what was stolen (some of it isn’t there, probably immediately put to use on the Osaarian ship, like antimatter), and also the sphere’s manifest.
T’Pol reports that the sphere is over a thousand years old and giving out massive gravimetric disturbances, which may be responsible for the anomalies. While translating the manifest, Sato discovers that the Osaarians attacked a Xindi vessel.
Archer goes into the brig, pulls out his nine-millimeter and says, “WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR?”—no, wait, that’s Jack Bauer. Sorry, he instead takes Orgoth to the airlock and threatens to open it. Once Archer starts to decompress the airlock, Orgoth agrees to cooperate, admitting that they downloaded a database from the Xindi ship.
The Osaarian ship comes through the cloaking field, likely pissed that Archer went through their things. They could run, but Archer really wants that database, so they get into a firefight long enough for Sato to hack into the Osaarian ship and download the database. Once that’s done, they leg it.
Buy the Book
Dead Country
Archer gives Orgoth back to the Osaarians, just like he promised he would. Orgoth says he’s still too compassionate to survive in the Expanse, which is a ballsy thing for him to say to a guy who got what he wanted.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? One component of warp drive is the Cochrane equation, presumably pioneered by Zefram Cochrane, which is supposed to be constant. However, it isn’t in this region of space, which means Tucker has to rewrite warp theory on the fly.
The gazelle speech. Archer shows that he’s a real man who doesn’t take any crap by shoving Orgoth in an airlock, because screw the rules, he’s the kind of guy who gets shit done.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol expresses caution regarding tracking the Osaarians, as they’re very dangerous, but Archer counters that, if they don’t get their stuff back, they’re screwed, especially since the Osaarians took all their spare antimatter.
Florida Man. Florida Man Defends Engine Room With Stick.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox encourages Tucker to continue his neuro-pressure sessions with T’Pol, as pharmaceutical solutions could result in dependency. When Tucker insists that he can’t justify spending an hour in T’Pol’s quarters every night, Phlox proposes a third alternative, involving placing leeches on his chest and abdomen. Because Tucker is, at heart, an eight-year-old, he says, “Icky poo poo” and decides to go see T’Pol.
Good boy, Porthos! The first sign that something’s wrong is Porthos being all squirrelly. Always pay attention to the dog…
Better get MACO. Three MACOs join the boarding party for the looted ship and the sphere, and the MACOs aid in the defense of Enterprise when its boarded, though they add nothing to either mission, not doing anything that Reed’s security detail couldn’t have handled. Indeed, the whole point of having the space Marines is to help them with things like repelling boarding parties, so you’d think they’d be better at it…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. We see the boarding party changing into their EVA suits in a locker room, thus getting a good look at Scott Bakula, Dominic Keating, Nathan Anderson, Sean McGowan, and Julia Rose in their underwear. And yes, it’s an all-gender changing room, which the optimistic can see as progressive and the cynical can see as an attempt to riff on Starship Troopers.
I’ve got faith…
“Creating a stable warp field isn’t easy when the laws of physics won’t cooperate.”
–Tucker mirroring one of Scotty’s most famous lines.
Welcome aboard. Robert Rusler plays Orgoth, while Kenneth A. White, Ryan Honey, and Ken Lally play various Enterprise crew. Lally will return in “Rajiin.”
On the MACO side of things, this is the last of two appearances by Nathan Anderson as Kemper, and the first of four appearances by Sean McGowan as Hawkins. Plus we have Julia Rose in her one and only appearance as McKenzie. Though not seen again, both Kemper and McKenzie will be mentioned in future episodes as still being around.
Trivial matters: This episode introduces three important parts of the season’s storyline: the spheres, trellium-D (which Microsoft Word keeps autocorrecting to “trillium”), and the Xindi database, all of which we’ll be seeing a lot of going forward….
This episode marks the first time a member of Enterprise’s crew has been killed.
It’s established that Enterprise now has a brig—presumably one of the things they got in the refit during “The Expanse.”
Writer Mike Sussman’s original notion was to have the pirates be Orions, thus introducing humanity to the pirates who have been part of Trek lore since “The Cage.” It was changed during the rewriting process to the Osaarians, who are never seen again.
Finally, for something really really trivial: This is one of two Trek episodes with the title “Anomaly,” the other being a fourth-season Discovery episode. It’s the only time a title has been duplicated precisely. There are several instances where the difference is an article (e.g., TNG’s “The Emissary” and DS9’s “Emissary”) or pluralizing (e.g., TNG’s “Brothers” and Discovery’s “Brother,” Enterprise’s “Strange New World” and SNW’s “Strange New Worlds”) and two movies have had subtitles that match TV episode titles (TNG’s “First Contact” and the 1996 movie, Voyager’s “Nemesis” and the 2002 movie).
It’s been a long road… “Mercy is not a quality that will serve you well in the Expanse, Captain.” This would’ve made a better season premiere than “The Xindi.” For one thing, there’s actual plot movement, with the discovery of the spheres, the downloading of the database, and the revelation about the use of trellium-D. True, we got a bit of plot movement last week, but that was really just finding out that there are five Xindi species instead of one. “Anomaly’s” revelations are also wrapped around a much more exciting storyline.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t make this episode good, only better than last week, and the biggest problem with it is the same one I had with “The Expanse” and with Tucker’s behavior in “The Xindi”: the macho idiocy that suffuses this episode, with Scott Bakula setting his jaw and getting that distant look in his eyes and throwing Orgoth into the airlock to show that he’s tough on terrorists, and he’s gonna get the job no matter what it takes and what morality and rulebooks we have to throw out the window.
The worst thing about this episode is one that has often been endemic to television and movies, and which was more like epidemic in the years between 2002 and 2005 in particular (yes, 24, I’m looking at you), to wit, that torture actually works as a means of getting information. It doesn’t. Torture is only good for terrorizing your victims, it’s useless as an interrogation tool. But this episode was written at a time when the United States was engaging in government-sanctioned torture against suspected terrorists during the “war on terror,” the theoretical objective of which was to gain intelligence about Osama bin Laden. (Tellingly, we didn’t actually get any useful intel about bin Laden until after we stopped using torture and instead used standard proven interrogation techniques.) Because we were also in a wave of hyper-patriotism at the time in the wake of the terrorist attacks in September 2001, questioning the use of torture was muted by the appearance of a lack of patriotism.
Trek has even been aware of the fallacy of torture for questioning in the past, as the last time torture was used as a plot point, it was in TNG’s “Chain of Command, Part II,” which also has Rick Berman’s name in the executive producer credit, and for which Brannon Braga was a staff writer on the show. That episode understood that torture wasn’t at all useful as an interrogation tool—indeed, Gul Madred got all the actionable intel he needed before the credits rolled—but is instead the tool of sadists who want to demoralize their enemies.
And here’s Archer, our main protagonist, using it. Happy joy.
A much more realistic use of torture here would’ve been to have Orgoth lie to Archer, give him some answer that sounds convincing. This is what often happens, as people being tortured will literally say anything to make the torture stop.
At the very least, Archer stands by his word at the end and lets Orgoth go, which results in Orgoth sneering at him.
Worse, Archer’s channeling of Jack Bauer puts T’Pol back in the position of killjoy hall monitor who has to propose caution in order for Archer to shout her down. It’s a thankless role in these types of stories—almost always given to a female characters, too—and one who has to be made to look like an idiot in order to beef up the main character’s tough-guy cred. T’Pol and the Archer-T’Pol relationship, the deepening of which was one of the best parts about the mostly dreary second season, deserve better.
Also, it would’ve been really cool if they’d gone with Mike Sussman’s original idea of the pirates being Orions and this storyline providing the origin for their piratical lifestyle. Instead, they’re generic Star Trek Prosthetics-On-The-Face Aliens who are never seen again. What a waste.
The episode’s not a total disaster. The action sequences are well done, though I gotta wonder what the MACOs are for exactly, if they can’t manage to make any headway against people boarding the ship. And the effects of the ship going wonky and of the sphere are pretty good for 2003-era CGI….
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest Star Trek work includes co-authoring the Klingon-focused Star Trek Adventures gaming module Incident at Kraav III (with Fred Love) and writing the DS9 short story “You Can’t Buy Fate,” which will be appearing in issue #7 of Star Trek Explorer this spring.
