“The Shipment”
Written by Chris Black & Brent V. Friedman
Directed by David Straiton
Season 3, Episode 7
Production episode 059
Original air date: October 29, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise makes for the coordinates provided by Tarquin in the previous episode. A scan of the planet reveals that it’s a sparsely populated colony, which has no planetary defenses, but there are energy readings concentrated in one area.
Degra reports to a couple of Xindi-Reptilian soldiers that the prototype weapon will be ready for testing as soon as they get an additional hundred kilograms of kemocite. If the test is successful, the weapon can be deployed in a matter of weeks. Why there’s another prototype to be tested when the thing that attacked Earth was a prototype that passed with flying colors is left as an exercise for the viewer.
With Enterprise staying hidden on the far side of the planet’s moon, Archer, Reed, and Hayes fly down in a shuttlepod to investigate. They see Xindi-Arboreals moving in and out of the building that the energy readings are coming from. The trio sneak into the facility and overhear Gralik Durr and his staff complaining about Degra’s demands. Archer recognizes that name.
Archer steals a canister of what they’re working on for Degra and beams it to Enterprise for T’Pol and Tucker to examine. Hayes outlines a plan to blow up the facility, but Archer is more interested in finding out where this stuff is being shipped. They follow Gralik to his home and hold him at gunpoint. Archer demands to know what the kemocite is being used for, and Gralik evasively says that kemocite has lots of uses. Archer specifically asks about Degra, saying that he’s building a weapon to be used against Archer’s homeworld. Gralik has no idea what Archer is talking about.
Tucker and T’Pol discover that the kemocite is also what was used in the probe that attacked Earth. Not only that, but Tucker on a whim ran a scan of the Xindi rifle they got their hands on, and it also has that same imprint. Now Tucker wants to take the rifle apart, and Archer gives the okay for him to do that. He also has Tucker beam down a portion of the Xindi probe.
Archer shows Gralik the probe fragment and explains what it is and what it’s done. And what is planned for the kemocite Gralik is refining for Degra. While Gralik is initially confused and upset, he comes around to realizing why Degra needed such heavily refined kemocite. It could be used as a weapon.
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Reed is all gung-ho to blow up the facility, but Archer doesn’t want to start a war, he wants to stop one. Reed reminds Archer that the Xindi killed seven million people, but Archer counters that they did so because they thought that Earth would be responsible for attacking them. They thought they were acting in self-defense, too.
Gralik gives Archer some more Xindi backstory. Their homeworld was destroyed by a civil war, and there used to be six Xindi species. The Xindi-Avians were all wiped out when the homeworld was destroyed. The war lasted for a century, with different species switching sides constantly, and nobody remembered what started it. What ended it were the Insectoids and Reptilians blowing up the planet. Now the Xindi are scattered throughout the Expanse, and most of them are peaceful.
Hayes reports increased activity around the facility at the same time that T’Pol reports that a Xindi-Reptilian ship is entering orbit.
Tucker recruits Phlox to examine the rifles, as they have a biological component: a worm-like creature that helps power the weapon. Phlox determines that the creatures are immune to pretty much every virus and pathogen he could throw at them, ditto most radiation, but they are vulnerable to delta radiation. (However, they thrive on omicron radiation.)
When Tucker tries to test the rifle, it won’t fire—and then it overloads. Tucker is barely able to beam it off the ship before it goes boom.
The Reptilian ship is carrying Degra, who is several days early for his shipment. Gralik’s staff have no idea where Gralik is, and the Reptilians start a search with drones. Archer destroys the drones before they can detect the three humans.
Gralik agrees to help Archer when the captain makes it clear he won’t blow up the facility and put them all out of work. Instead, T’Pol will put a tracker in the canister they stole and then Archer will put it in with Gralik’s shipment. Gralik himself goes back to work and says he’s almost ready, but Degra’s early. Degra talks urgently about a grave threat to the Xindi that they need this weapon to combat.
Reed is apprehensive about letting Gralik go, but Archer thinks they can trust him not to reveal anything about Enterprise to Degra or the Reptilian soldiers. Meanwhile, Gralik tells the Reptilians that he was out hunting and accidentally shot the drones.
After Degra leaves, Archer and Gralik share a final drink. Gralik hopes he hasn’t betrayed his people to a violent alien species. Archer hopes Gralik doesn’t get in trouble to letting that tracking signal get put in the shipment. Unfortunately, Enterprise lost the signal when the ship went through an energy portal. But they will keep searching. Gralik’s final words to Archer are to remember that not all Xindi are the enemy.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Xindi rifles have a biological component, which is actually kind of gross. They also have good security on those rifles…
The gazelle speech. Archer refuses to blow up a manufacturing facility run by innocent people just doing a job. It’s nice to see that he isn’t just indiscriminately blowing up anything that looks vaguely like a target…
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol is reluctant to let Tucker test the rifle on board, but decides to let him do so. She should’ve gone with her first instinct and remembered that she’s the brains of the outfit…
Florida Man. Florida Man Performs Weapons Test Inside Ship To Bad End.
Optimism, Captain! I honestly think that the rifles had those worms inside them in order to justify giving John Billingsley something to do this week…
Better get MACO. Hayes goes down on the landing party and proceeds to do absolutely nothing that one of Reed’s security guards couldn’t have done just as well.
I’ve got faith…
“You burst into my home, show me some twisted piece of metal, and tell me it proves I’m a mass murderer? I’ve never seen your species before, I’ve never heard of a planet called Earth, and whether you believe me or not, I had nothing to do with killing millions of its inhabitants!”
–Gralik expressing understandable annoyance with being held at gunpoint in his own house.
Welcome aboard. Recurring regulars Steven Culp (last seen in “The Xindi”) and Randy Oglesby (last seen in “Rajiin”) are back as Hayes and Degra, respectively. Oglesby will be back in “Proving Ground,” while Culp will return in “Harbinger.”
John Cothran Jr. plays Gralik, his third TV role on Trek, and his first non-Klingon, having played Nu’Daq in TNG’s “The Chase” and Telok in DS9’s “Crossover.” He also played Counselor Biraka in the videogame Star Trek: Borg. Also a bit of a Robert Knepper moment: one of the Xindi-Arboreals is played by Sam Witwer, who’s probably best known these days as the voice of Darth Maul on various Star Wars projects (The Clone Wars, Rebels, and Solo: A Star Wars Story).
Trivial matters: This episode picks up immediately from “Exile,” with Enterprise making immediate use of the intelligence provided by Tarquin.
Reed says that they’ve been in the Expanse for three months, which is the first time we’ve had any sense of time in a while, as the show has been avoiding specific date references. (The captain’s star logs have all said, “supplemental.”)
Kemocite was first established in DS9’s “Little Green Men.” The Enterprise crew got their hands on a Xindi rifle in “Rajiin.”
Though Sean McGowan does not appear, Hawkins is mentioned as standing by with a MACO assault team.
It’s been a long road… “I thought we were here to try to stop a war, not start one.” One of the things that has always been one of Star Trek’s hallmarks is that the solution to the problem of the week is one based on compassion and understanding and talking rather than having the bigger gun or the better fighter or whatever. It’s utopian fiction with occasional action sequences, not an action show.
My biggest concern about the direction the show was taking after “The Expanse” teaser was that the producers’ desperate attempt to goose the show’s anemic ratings was to turn it into an action show. No more tiptoeing around, as Tucker manfully proclaimed, they’re gonna do whatever it takes!
I’m very grateful to see that that was at least partly a stress response to a horrific act. With time passing, the crew is coming back to themselves, and Archer isn’t doing “whatever it takes.” Indeed, he’s thinking rationally. Reed and Hayes really really want to blow up the facility, because that’ll set back the construction of the weapon. But as Archer rightly points out, what does that get them? It’ll just allow the notion the Xindi have in their heads that humans are horrible people to grow roots.
Instead of violence, Archer goes for talking and compassion and also learning. He learns on purpose by putting a tracker in the kemocite so they can find out where it’s going, and he learns by accident when Gralik tells him the Xindi’s recent history of a century-long war. The contentiousness among the members of the Xindi Council makes more sense now, as they all fought each other in the big war that made the planet go boom.
The best thing about this episode, though, is that Archer rejects the notion of blowing up the facility. This is just a sub-contractor, civilian technicians doing their jobs. Blowing this facility up would be just as bad in its own way as the probe attack on Earth was in “The Expanse.”
Big points to John Cothran Jr., who makes Gralik a three-dimensional character, a working stiff. He’s initially (and justifiably) pissed at Archer breaking into his house and pulling a gun on him, but he comes around once he realizes what he’s actually doing. It also makes the Xindi a bit more complex, and the story of their century-long war puts a lot of their actions into focus.
The entire Xindi arc becomes much more interesting in this episode, and it improves things tremendously. Best of all, though, is that the episode reaffirms that this is still Star Trek, dangit…
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s sixth novel in his “Precinct” series of epic fantasy police procedurals, Phoenix Precinct, has been published by eSpec Books and is available in trade paperback or eBook form. Ordering links can be found on this blog post.
Yes, “The Shipment” is the first really strong episode in season 3 and a significant advance in the arc. It was a satisfying episode because it affirmed that the season wasn’t just going to degenerate into “revenge porn” but was dedicated to questioning the aggressive response that had begun the mission, and continuing the classic Trekkian theme that there are alternatives to war if one is committed enough to find them. Also, John Cothran, Jr. was terrific as Gralik Durr.
I agree that making the Xindi more than just cardboard stock villains was a good thing for the series, but for me the lovefest was too sudden. One moment, they think they’re sneaking into a WMD production facilitiy (how many regular working stiffs in Natanz, or for that matter in Los Alamos?), the next moment it is all “can’t we all get along together” happiness. It would have been better to let this change of heart mature for a few episodes. Both Gralik’s willingness to trust armed alien intruders, and Archer’s willingness to trust him …
Regarding your question about the need for a second prototype, the first prototype cut a swath through Florida and killed 7 million. That’s what? One tenth of one percent of Earth’s population, or thereabouts? They could easily have wanted another intermediate test before the full-scale planetbuster.
Honestly, the Xindi’s stardrive that lets them open portals right in Earth orbital space is all the superweapon they need. Just accelerate an asteroid to a fair clip and send it through a portal whose terminus is just about as close to Earth as that of the prototype, and it’ll hit the Earth and cause a dinosaur-level extinction event before they have time to react. (Doesn’t have to be a large asteroid. Kinetic energy is mass times velocity squared, so if it’s 100 times faster than the dinosaur-killer, it can be 10,000 times less massive and have the same kick.)
This is why I’m not a fan of the whole trope of advanced superweapons. You don’t need to invent elaborate new technologies to cause mass destruction. Destruction is easy. It’s the crudest thing there is. You can destroy a planet just by throwing a big rock at it. What takes skill and ingenuity is creating things, not breaking them.
@3 One of the things I enjoyed from Mass Effect was the Citadel Conventions on weapons of mass destruction listing dropping rocks down gravity wells, deploying ‘grey goo’ nanotechnology, and introducing invasive species into a biome.
o.m.: But it isn’t a WMD production facility, and once they find that out, Archer’s backing off the blowing-it-up notion is the only choice a character who is supposed to be a hero can possibly make. And Gralik has obviously never been asked to make a WMD before, so he’s understandably appalled. I didn’t see any problem with the “lovefest,” as you put it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This episode was a surprisingly good thriller (It managed to keep Gralik relatable while leaving at least a little room to doubt his actual trustworthiness, which is a good place to start): others have summed up what makes it an unusually strong dramatic episode, so I’d like to include an honourable mention of the weird little grace notes (like the ‘Bug guns’ and The resident villains being genuinely reasonable whilst going about their business at the facility) that help boost the episode.
If nothing else this episode makes me wonder how the various elements within Xindi space would have handled the rise of the Federation and what the Xindi council’s response to uncovering Gralik’s collaboration with Captain Archer et al might have been.
Also, are we sure that the Xindi prototype which attacked Earth was able to broadcast the details of its successful deployment all the way back to home base? (It seems not unreasonable to suspect that the attack would have been conducted under strict ‘radio silence’ so the Xindi may only be generally aware that the device worked, without being able to gauge the specifics of that success).
@6/ED: ” If nothing else this episode makes me wonder how the various elements within Xindi space would have handled the rise of the Federation”
As I’ve mentioned before, ENT made it very clear that Xindi space is very, very far from Earth, and thus probably a good distance away from the Federation, to explain why they weren’t a presence in TOS or TNG.
“Also, are we sure that the Xindi prototype which attacked Earth was able to broadcast the details of its successful deployment all the way back to home base? (It seems not unreasonable to suspect that the attack would have been conducted under strict ‘radio silence’ so the Xindi may only be generally aware that the device worked, without being able to gauge the specifics of that success).”
What could possibly be the point of conducting a test if you couldn’t get the results of said test?
Sam Witwer went on to a recurring role on BSG, a main cast role as Davis Bloome in Season 8 of Smallville and Ben Lockwood on Supergirl besides he roles in Star Wars.
@4/CLB
It gets particularly silly in a few episodes, where we see the effects of Gralik’s sabotage and find that the Xindi council is, for some reason, upset that it only managed to devastate the crust and upper mantle of a planetoid, rather than blowing into chunks. No kill like overkill, I suppose.
@9/jaimebabb: Yeah, I hate the trope of physically destroying an entire planet to exterminate its population. They only live on the surface (and maybe a few kilometers down if they’re miners or submarine crew or whatever), so that’s the only part you have to destroy. It’s immensely easier.
Not to mention the extreme physical difficulty of blowing apart an Earth-sized planet, as discussed at the excellent “How to destroy the Earth” website.
I mean, I can sort of buy it in Star Wars. The Death Star was meant to be a weapon of terror, to quell rebellion by showing that it would be met with overwhelming destructive force. So the sheer excess of it is the point, to show that the Empire has both the immense power to disintegrate entire planets just for the hell of it and the ruthlessness to use it. (Plus, of course, it’s fantasy, so the physics is irrelevant.) But the Xindi believed they were trying to protect themselves from a destroyer. So there’s no propaganda value to blowing up the Earth; it would be more efficient to focus on destroying the population.
“The people in this colony had nothing to do with the attack on my planet. I’ll be damned if I’m going to make them pay for it.”
It’s pretty clear throughout this episode that whatever bloodlust Archer was feeling at the end of the previous season has gone, or at the very least become more focused. Even before he decides to trust Gralik, he’s quick to point out that the Xindi attacked Earth because they’ve been convinced humanity was a threat, and that convincing them they’re wrong is a better outcome than just wiping them off the face of the galaxy. By the end of the episode, he’s struck up a decent rapport with his new Xindi ally and accepted that not all Xindi were involved in, or even aware of, the attack on Earth. Gralik is a very appealing character, gruff and sarcastic but clearly deeply affected by the discovery of what his work has been used for, and it’s a real shame that we never see him again and only get a few throwaway mentions of him: He seemed poised to be a useful ongoing ally for Enterprise.
Interesting that Enterprise seem to have already decided the Reptillians are the main threat among the Xindi. I guess their experiences in ‘Rajiin’ and the probe pilot being a Reptillian have had them leaning in that direction. Archer again makes quite a few leaps of logic on very little evidence, concluding Degra is involved in the weapon when all he’s heard is his name in relation to a kemosite shipment. (Did Tarquin provide him with more information than it appeared?)
Well, not for the first time, something I’ve been loudly insisting on turns out to be completely wrong. I thought the term Xindi-Primate was something invented after the fact, but Gralik refers to Degra by that term here. Curiously though, the Xindi-Arboreals are referred to as “Sloths” in the end credits! Archer recalls seeing them in the database, as seen in ‘Extinction’. He also mentions meeting a Xindi-Primate before, presumably Kessick in ‘The Xindi’.
We get a lot of new information about the Xindi here with the reveal of the deceased sixth Avian species (in my rewrite, I made a point of asking Gralik about the fifth species, since Enterprise haven’t been explictly shown as knowing about the Aquatics.), the hundred year war between at least two alliances of Xindi species and the Reptillians and Insectoids setting off explosives at seismic fissures that (possibly accidentally) caused the planet’s destruction. (Archer recalls seeing the debris field in ‘The Xindi’.) According to Gralik, the surviving Xindi and their descendants are scattered throughout the Expanse. This does raise the question of just how much of their race the Xindi Council have authority over: Certainly, Gralik treats Degra like just another customer rather than a senior government official. Degra’s certainty over the rightness of his actions here is interesting given his later characterisation.
The B-plot of Tucker, Phlox and T’Pol testing the Xindi weapon acquired in ‘Rajiin’ feels like more important world-building but I’m not sure if anything we learn here ever comes up again.
Second appearance of Major Hayes and we learn Hawkins is a corporal. Travis gets one line and Hoshi doesn’t fare much better. I agree that the first prototype could hardly be considered to have “passed with flying colours” when “all” it did was take out a tiny percentage of the Americas and then crash. Not going to destroy any planets with that!
@11/cap-mjb: “I agree that the first prototype could hardly be considered to have “passed with flying colours” when “all” it did was take out a tiny percentage of the Americas and then crash. Not going to destroy any planets with that!”
What a bizarre thing to say, which misses the entire point of prototyping. You need to test something on a small scale to confirm that the basic principle works before you put in the effort and resources to build the full-scale version. It took decades of testing with small, short-range rockets before we refined the technology to the point that we could build ones large enough to carry people to the Moon. Zefram Cochrane had to start with the Phoenix and its short-range intrasystem hop before he could move on to bigger ships capable of interstellar travel — and he probably tested numerous smaller warp-engine prototypes on Earth in order to prove the principle would work on the Phoenix. If the physics and design work on a smaller scale, then that proves they’ll work on a bigger, more powerful scale.
This was a good episode. Unravelling the complicated mess of the multi-species Xindi was the best part of this season.
I like it. It also strongly reminded me of the original The Planet of the Apes. The Xindi arboreals are basically stand-ins for the talking, intellectual chimps and they come to have a sympathetic understanding of the humans, while also navigating the different factions within their own larger community, like the Xindi reptillians being the aggressive ones just as the talking gorillas were more war-like.
@14/garreth: Although, of course, our modern understanding of ape behavior shows that Planet of the Apes got it totally backward. Chimpanzees are the aggressive ones who wage war on their own kind, and gorillas are the placid herbivores that only get violent in self-defense. Whereas orangutans, the political and social leaders in PotA, are the least social and most solitary of the great apes.
The Xindi psychologies might also be based in some outdated assumptions (leaving aside the implausibility of alien life recapitulating Earthly categories at all). Conventional wisdom is that reptiles lack the emotional development to be capable of empathy or love or social bonding, that they’re just cold and ruthless predators. But modern science suggests they’re more mentally complex than we’ve assumed, showing evidence of maternal care, social cooperation, and even playfulness. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/not-bad-science/looking-past-the-scales-the-truth-about-reptilian-behavior/
As for insect behavior, it’s harder to draw a comparison to sapient aliens. It’s possible a hive society might care only about its own hive and be ruthless toward entities outside of it, but I suppose it’s just as possible that such a highly social intelligence would be able to extend that social thinking and sense of interdependency to other species and care for them as much as for their own hive.
@12/CLB: Okay, possibly I phrased it wrong, but the point is that just because that prototype worked to a point, that doesn’t mean that, as krad suggests, the viewer should be confused by the fact that the Xindi need to now construct a larger prototype and test that rather than skipping straight to the final step. The probe that attacked Earth was several steps away from the final product.
@16/cap-mjb: Okay, fair enough. But in that case, it makes it even sillier that they used their first prototype to attack Earth and thereby tip us off to the threat so far in advance.
I remember being relieved when I watched this one, because it’s where the Xindi plot began to shift from a revenge story to something more Star Trek. Up till this point I hadn’t enjoyed the Xindi plot at all, but this one felt right.
@krad in 5, in hindsight, we have a dual-use production facility that has been asked to produce “weapons grade” kemocite when civilian applications needed lesser grades. And they took it as an intellectual/engineering challenge. As it turned out, Gralik was not the heartless technocrat who would ignore that revelation and carry on with the business.
But Captain Archer took a terrible risk. Why did he assume that Xindi-Arboreals were more sympathetic to his cause than Xindi-Reptilians? I think that was a gut reaction, not logic.
o.m.: I think it was someone looking for an alternative to blowing up a civilian facility.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As hot as Nikita Ager was, and as much as I have become a Tri’Pol shipper, this is the episode that had the most impact by this point in the season. This is where things got good. Gralik was a great character, and the fleshing out of the Xindi was a joy. I don’t really have any complaints about this episode. They kinda knocked it out of the park,
@3:” This is why I’m not a fan of the whole trope of advanced superweapons. You don’t need to invent elaborate new technologies to cause mass destruction. Destruction is easy. It’s the crudest thing there is. You can destroy a planet just by throwing a big rock at it. What takes skill and ingenuity is creating things, not breaking them.”
Indeed. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so fond of WRATH OF KHAN’s “ultimate weapon”. The purpose of the Genesis Device is creation; destruction is merely a side effect.
@22/Rachel Garrett: Except the Genesis Device is too absurdly powerful to be believed. If they had that kind of magical technology to transform a whole planet in minutes, why don’t they have anything remotely near as advanced a century later? I mean, even if they abandoned using Genesis in some sort of interstellar arms treaty, no technology exists in isolation; it’s built on the potentials that already exist. So if something that absurdly powerful had the potential to exist, other comparably godlike technologies should also exist.
Not to mention the absurdity that a torpedo programmed to transform the surface of an existing lifeless planet was somehow capable of creating a brand new planet out of nebular gas, even though that’s a completely different starting condition that it presumably was not programmed to cope with. Not to mention that it somehow apparently created a sun in the process.
Back in the ’80s when my father saw TWOK, the Genesis Device was the one thing in Trek that broke his suspension of disbelief, more than anything else he’d seen in the series. Well, up to that point, anyway.
The Shipment manages to employ all the conventions and tropes of standard TV cop investigation shows and make a pretty compelling episode out of it. This wouldn’t feel out of place on DS9 and its Odo investigation episodes.
And it serves as a pretty good example of balancing serialized storytelling with the traditional episodic approach. For what’s essentially a transitional episode, it manages to stand out on its own. Even DS9 could occasionally stumble on that arena (Favor the Bold is one such example – it leads from point A to point B, but it’s essentially a setup for Sacrifice of Angels; you wouldn’t even think much of the episode other than Kira’s ‘we’re way past sorry‘ speech to Odo’.
In 45 minutes, Chris Black and Brent Friedman manage to make Gralik Durr a very sympathetic, three-dimensional compelling Xindi character, superbly played by John Cothran Jr.. It goes a long way towards developing the Xindi aspect of the show, and it gives Archer his own overdue morality arc, as he manages to see the person rather than just the mission – someone who’s just living his daily life, struggling to make ends meet. This is the point where the show starts reiterating its core Trekkian values.
Plus, we get more insight into why the Xindi is so split between the various factions. The good thing about this arc is that since we’re forced to spend so much time across multiple episodes with these same characters, they get the kind of development we’d only get on a show like DS9 – through the time spent with Bajorans and Cardassians on their side. Yet again a good influence across shows.
@23:”Except the Genesis Device is too absurdly powerful to be believed”
A lotta STAR TREK is too absurd to be believed. I once had a friend who tried to chart every absurdity/scientific impossibility in just the first season of NEXT GENERATION. After the first few eps, he gave up. The task was simply too enormous.
Probably the strongest part of this episode is the character Gralik. Dude really worked as a character, particularly in that scene where he has to bluff those Degra and that Reptillian dude about where he was and what happened to their probe and he’s just like “Look assholes. You’re several days early, and I don’t work 24/7. There’s not much to do on this planet besides hunting, and your probe surprised me so I shot it because, to reiterate, I was hunting. Now either let me do the job you pay me for, or take your chances with the material as is and leave. Either way, fuck off.”
Dude was a G :)
@26/Rachel Garrett: “A lotta STAR TREK is too absurd to be believed.”
Yes, that’s exactly the point — that my father was able to shrug off the rest of the absurdities, but Genesis was just too much.
Also, a large part of what made Star Trek stand out from its contemporaries and become such a hugely successful franchise in the first place is because it was just about the only science fiction screen franchise of its era that made any effort at all not to be absurd. Roddenberry strove to ground it in naturalism and believability, to the extent that the first three pages of the second-season writers’ bible are a lecture about avoiding unbelievable characterization. ST was just about the only show in its day that used scientific consultants, even if it often took poetic license. At least it tried to keep some grounding in reality, unlike just about everything else in SFTV. And that’s part of what made it special and made the audience care about it as much as we did. So when Trek falls short of that aspiration and settles for fanciful nonsense, that is a failure. It makes me sad when people dismiss Trek as just another bit of sci-fi absurdity that isn’t expected to make sense. If it had never been anything more than that, then it never would have been so special, never would have won such a loyal fan following in the first place. It hooked us in a way nothing else did because it felt more real, and because it didn’t insult our intelligence.
@@@@@ 28:”Yes, that’s exactly the point — that my father was able to shrug off the rest of the absurdities, but Genesis was just too much.”
My friend couldn’t shrug off the transporter/replicator tech. His constant complaint: That stuff is integral to STAR TREK (it’s in every episode), but the writers/producers/showrunners have never understood just how radically that kind kind of technology would alter things.
@29/Rachel Garrett: Yes, more than one thing in Trek is implausible, that’s not the point. The point is that there are degrees of implausibility. Ideally, a work of fiction manages to keep its implausibilities limited enough that the audience is willing to suspend disbelief and play along with the story, or at least to accept that the implausibility is a necessary conceit for the narrative to work (e.g. transporters are needed because it’s cheaper than filming shuttle landings and a quicker way to get characters into or out of a story, humanoid aliens are needed because it would be too expensive to create non-humanoid animatronics all the time, and magic universal translators are needed so the characters can communicate and get on with the story).
But it’s called willing suspension of disbelief for a reason. It has to be earned. And a story can include an implausibility that just pushes the viewer or reader too far, something that they aren’t willing to suspend disbelief about. For my father, that was Genesis. It was just too godlike a power, too magical, too far out of proportion to every other technology the Federation had been shown to have. And though he didn’t know it at the time, it would be compounded by the fact that the Federation still doesn’t have anything close to that level of power eight decades later in the TNG era.
Just so folks know, the rewatch of “Twilight” will go up tomorrow, on the 14th, rather than today.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido