“Rajiin”
Written by Paul Brown and Brent V. Friedman and Chris Black
Directed by Mike Vejar
Season 3, Episode 4
Production episode 056
Original air date: October 1, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. We look in on the Xindi Council. Degra has suffered setbacks in creating his world-destroying weapon, and Dolim wants to revisit the notion of a bio-weapon that will target the human race instead of their homeworld. The others continue their opposition to it (except for the Xindi-Insectoids), but Kiaphet Amman’sor warns that they’ll have to consider it if Degra doesn’t show progress soon.
Enterprise’s search for trellium-D—which will protect them from the Delphic Expanse’s anomalies—leads them to a planet with a large bazaar. Archer—who is still recovering from the Loque’eque virus—goes down with Reed and Tucker to meet with a chemist named B’Rat Ud. B’Rat provides them with a recipe to make their own trellium-D, and he also has information about the Xindi. Apparently some Xindi-Reptilians visited the bazaar, specifically Zjod, who is a space pimp, specializing in selling women as slaves. While Tucker negotiates price with B’Rat, Archer approaches Zjod, who tries to convince Archer to purchase one of the women he has for sale. As far as the Xindi are concerned, all he knows is that they came and went two days earlier.
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Tucker gets the recipe for making trellium-D in exchange for exotic spices: mustard seed, pepper, paprika, and cayenne.
One of the women, Rajiin, runs away from Zjod and begs Archer for asylum, which he grants after fisticuffs ensue with Zjod.
Tucker and T’Pol start working on putting trellium-D together in a space on E deck, with emergency bulkheads down, as the stuff is unstable.
Archer provides Rajiin with a meal, and also finds her homeworld in the Xindi database they downloaded, and he offers to take her home. She says she knows very little about the Xindi, thought she confirms that the ones who came to see Zjod were reptilian. Archer says she can move freely about the ship, though some sensitive sections will be off-limits.
Tucker and T’Pol’s first attempt to create trellium-D is a rather explosive failure, and they have to go back to the proverbial drawing board.
Rajiin shows up at Archer’s quarters, saying that she wishes to thank him for his help. Archer demurs, and what appears to be the Standard Hot Babe Sedcues The Captain scene takes a quick left turn as Rajiin runs her hands over Archer’s body in a manner that makes him glow—as if she’s performing a medical scan of him. When she’s done, he has no memory of what just happened, and Rajiin politely excuses herself.
Rajiin bumps into Sato in the corridor, and she does the same seduction setup on her that she did on Archer.
When she tries it on T’Pol, however, the Vulcan is able to resist. Rajiin pushes, and T’Pol winds up lapsed into a coma. Tucker shows up for his neuropressure session only to find T’Pol unconscious and Rajiin in her cabin. Rajiin throws things at Tucker and runs away; Tucker calls security.
Rajiin manages to seduce one of Reed’s security people and get his phase pistol. She also communicates with someone off-ship and says she’s going to use the transporter. But when she arrives in the transporter room, Archer is waiting with a security detail, who take her to the brig.
Rajiin refuses to talk at first, but eventually she reveals that she works for Xindi-Reptilians who want medical information on humans in order to create a bio-weapon.
Two Xindi-Reptilian ships attack Enterprise, knocking it out of warp. They board the ship and have a tiresomely easy time getting past Reed’s security force and the MACOs. They free Rajiin and bugger off through a subspace vortex through which Enterprise cannot follow.
The rest of the council is pissed off that Dolim went ahead and sanctioned this mission without approval from the rest of them. But now, thanks to Rajiin, they have all the biological data they need to make a weapon that will wipe out humanity.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, to synthesize trellium-D, you need to infuse with delta radiation and theta radiation in such a way that the pressure doesn’t increase. If you fail to do that, it goes boom.
The gazelle speech. Archer has itchy rashes on his skin, a byproduct of the Loque’eque virus, and it’s making it hard for him to sleep. When he does sleep, he dreams about the Lorque’eque’s underground city of Urquat.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol talks Tucker out of cancelling the neuropressure sessions. Tucker’s argument is that the ship’s gossip machine is on overdrive wondering why Tucker’s going to T’Pol’s quarters all the time. T’Pol’s counterargument is that the neuropressure sessions are working and the ship’s gossip machine is a silly goose.
Florida Man. Florida Man Belatedly Worries About What The Neighbors Will Think.
Good boy, Porthos! Archer’s inability to sleep is keeping Porthos up at night. Poor puppy!
Better get MACO. The MACOs, working with Reed’s security detail, utterly fail to repel or contain the Xindi-Reptilian boarding party or keep them from taking Rajiin. What are these guys bringing to the table, exactly?
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Rajiin wears cleavage-y and/or form-fitting outfits and uses her sex appeal to fulfill her mission, being all flirty and seductive with Archer, T’Pol, Sato, and a security guard.
I’ve got faith…
“On our planet, wars were fought over these—careful!”
[sneezes] “What’s this one called?”
“Black pepper. There’s paprika, mustard seed—I’m partial to the cayenne, myself. I’m sure you’ll find these all very exotic.”
–Tucker overselling some condiments to B’Rat Ud.
Welcome aboard. Nikita Ager plays the title role, while Steve Larson plays her pimp. The other merchants are played by Dell Yount (B’Rat Ud) and BK Kennelly (the marmot merchant). Yount previously played a Boslic in DS9’s “Sons of Mogh.”
Plus, the Xindi Council officially becomes recurring in this episode, as Tucker Smallwood (Xindi-Primate councilor), Randy Oglesby (Degra), Rick Worthy (Jannar), and Scott MacDonald (Dolim) are all back from “The Xindi.” Oglesby will next appear in “The Shipment,” while the other three will next be seen in “Proving Ground.”
Trivial matters: Though Kelly Waymire doesn’t appear, Cutler is mentioned as having suffered a broken arm when Enterprise passed through one of the Expanse’s anomalies. This is the last time she’ll be referenced, as Waymire died a month after this episode aired, and the producers decided not to make use of the character even in dialogue after that.
Archer is still recovering from having his DNA rewritten in “Extinction.”
It’s been a long road… “Some of our calculations may have been slightly off.” We’re now four episodes into the third season, and I’m starting to understand why it didn’t do what it was supposed to do.
The whole point of the alleged radical change in direction in season three was to goose ratings, to try a different tack, to move away from blandly going where no one has gone before without rhyme or reason to a proper story arc that would give our heroes a goal and stuff.
The problem is the same problem with seasons one and two: they’re half-assing it. The Delphic Expanse was sold in “The Expanse” as this incredibly dangerous and very strange and totally incomprehensible region of space that the Vulcans and Klingons didn’t make it out alive from. And since then it’s turned out to be—um, just another region of space. And what we’ve gotten plotwise has been pretty standard stuff from The Prison Episode at the top of the season to The Fun With DNA™ Episode last week The Slave Woman From Outer Space Episode this time.
What’s maddening is knowing what they could have done, but they keep defaulting to the easiest possible storyline or plot point without giving any thought to it beyond the obvious. So on the Xindi Council, the reasonable ones are the ones that look like humans or like humans’ pets, while the ones that look like icky animals or vermin are the more intransigent and nasty ones. So the one female slave being sold who looks most like a traditionally pretty Western white woman is the one who infiltrates the ship.
They even half-ass the episode-to-episode continuity. Archer starts the episode being all itchy and scratchy and talking about dreams, which is a nice callback to the previous episode—except that’s all there is. We don’t see how it’s affected Sato or Reed, we don’t see Archer scratching his arms or talking about his dreams or anything else after his visit to Phlox in Act 1.
And we’re back to redshirting the extras. It’s pretty clear that several security guards and MACOs were killed by the boarding party, but they’re not even mentioned or mourned or cared about. And, to repeat myself for what already seems like the millionth time, why are the MACOs even here if they can’t repel a boarding party or keep the prisoner from being freed from the brig?
The Xindi plan continues to confuse. If it’s so difficult to create a planet-destroying weapon, why did they send their teeny tiny prototype to Earth in the first place? And the bio-weapon doesn’t make that much sense, either, given that humanity isn’t on just one planet anymore, so a genetically targeted weapon is way less useful.
I will give them credit for using the “exotic” spices that you can find in most any kitchen cabinet on Earth as currency. But it’s sad when the novel use of condiments is the cleverest thing about a script…
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.
