“Similtude”
Written by Manny Coto
Directed by LeVar Burton
Season 3, Episode 10
Production episode 062
Original air date: November 19, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. We open with a funeral for Tucker, then after the credits, we flash back to two weeks earlier. Tucker has a notion to enable the ship to travel at high warp for longer without any ill effects. They test it, and it seems to go swimmingly right up to the part where it doesn’t.
The warp drive sparks and burns and Tucker barely shuts it down in time. Unfortunately, Tucker is badly injured in the process of shutting it down. Some nucleonic particles from a particle field they flew through got into the injectors, messing things up. It will take weeks to fix and Archer has to put T’Pol in charge of repairs because Tucker is in a coma. (Why Archer doesn’t put the deputy chief engineer in charge is left as an exercise for the viewer, as is why we don’t know who the deputy chief engineer even is.)
Phlox has no idea how long Tucker will be comatose, due to extensive neural damage. He needs a transplant of neural tissue, but there are no compatible donors on board. However, Phlox has a bizarre solution: one of the creatures in his menagerie, the Lyssarian Desert Larvae—which he keeps around for its secretions that make for a dandy salve—can also be injected with DNA. Doing so turns the larva into a clone of the being whose DNA its injected with, and it will go through that being’s entire lifespan in an accelerated timeframe. It will also have all that being’s memories and personality, but only at the equivalent “age” that the original had them.
Phlox can inject Tucker’s DNA into a larva, and we’ll have an adult Tucker in a few days. Phlox can then extract the neural tissue and cure Tucker. Meanwhile, the clone will be dead in two weeks.
It’s an ethically dodgy situation, to say the least. For one thing, the Lyssians themselves have banned the practice, but Archer decides to go ahead with it, because Tucker is just that indispensable.
The larva alters into a newborn human baby, and he grows quickly. Phlox decides to name him “Sim,” short for “simulacrum,” I guess, having rejected the crew’s suggestions of Enrique, Dennis, and Steven. Once he reaches the preteen era, Archer tells him the truth about who and what he is, and what his fate will be after only being alive for a fortnight.
Meantime, Enterprise still can’t go anywhere, is still stuck in the particle field, and is covered in magnetic particles that are sticking to the hull. At first it’s just a nuisance, but the cumulative effect of all the particles is causing systems damage.
Sim comes up with a solution: use the phase cannons to blast the particles around the shuttlepod launch bay, then launch the shuttles and have them tow Enterprise enough to overcome inertia, and then it’ll drift out of the field. Sim also asks to pilot one of the shuttles, but Archer assigns it to Mayweather and (for some reason) Reed. The shuttles almost shut down from the strain, but it works, and Enterprise starts drifting forward, eventually to leave the field.
Sim also confesses to having strong feelings for T’Pol, and he honestly doesn’t know if they’re his feelings or Tucker’s. For her part, T’Pol insists on keeping her relationship with Sim professional.
Phlox informs Archer that his tests have shown that, contrary to his previous theory, Sim will not survive the transplant. Sim also comes to Archer with some research: there’s a procedure that could extend his life beyond the expected fifteen days. The problem is that it’s experimental, and by the time they synthesize the enzyme needed to start the procedure, Sim’s neural tissue will no longer be compatible with Tucker’s.
Sim and Archer argue about his fate, with Archer saying that Sim should know that Archer is determined to complete their mission to find the Xindi. Sim counters that he knows that Archer isn’t a murderer, to which Archer replies with a plea that Sim not make him one.
Sim almost steals a shuttlepod, but when Reed detects someone tampering with the launch bay, Archer goes down to find Sim just sitting there. He changed his mind about trying to escape for two reasons. One, where would he go, exactly? Two, he thought about his sister—or, rather, Tucker’s sister. Tucker is as dedicated to their mission as Archer because of what happened to his sister, and he’s willing to sacrifice himself for that mission.
His last day before the operation is spent working on some engineering tasks for T’Pol. T’Pol also, in a move that seems driven more by fan service than by good characterization, decides to give Sim a kiss before he dies.
The operation is a success, and Sim dies and Tucker is saved. The funeral we saw at the top of the episode was actually for Sim.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Compressing the antimatter stream through the injectors will apparently make warp travel smoother and allow your warp-five engine to actually travel at warp five for an extended period without shaking apart.
The gazelle speech. Archer doesn’t hesitate to authorize the creation of Sim, but hesitates lots of other times throughout the episode.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol , not Phlox, is the one who tells Archer that creating clones violates Lyssarian law. Archer’s reply is that they don’t answer to the Lyssarians.
Florida Man. Florida Man Cloned By Alien Doctor!
Optimism, Captain! Phlox creates a moral dilemma by suggesting the larva be turned into a Tucker clone. He also waxes rhapsodic about getting to hold a newborn for the first time in a long time when the clone is first created.
Good boy, Porthos! Sim spends a lot of time with Porthos, and the last thing he does before the operation that will kill him is cuddle the pooch.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. The Vulcan Neuropressure sessions between T’Pol and Tucker have now evolved to the point where Tucker is giving T’Pol foot massages. Sim later tells T’Pol that he/Tucker has feelings for her, and then later still T’Pol kisses Sim, and it’s all just totally ridiculous.
I’ve got faith…
“Can he do any tricks?”
“I haven’t taught him any. Mostly what he does is eat, sleep, and, uh, not fetch.”
–Sim and Archer discussing Porthos.
Welcome aboard. The only guests are the young actors who play Sim as a child: Maximillian Orion Kesmodel when he’s a wee tot, Adam Taylor Gordon when he’s a preteen, and Shane Sweet when he’s a teenager. Gordon previously played a young version of Tucker in a dream sequence in “The Xindi.”
Trivial matters: Manny Coto had come onto the show as a co-executive producer four episodes earlier in “Exile.” This is his first writing credit for Trek. He will go on to become the show-runner in season four.
Archer and the preteen Sim play with the same remote-control ship that we saw Archer playing with as a boy in “Broken Bow.”
When Sim contemplates dying on board a shuttlepod, he says the only worse thing he could imagine is being stuck with Reed on the shuttle, a reference to the events of “Shuttlepod One.”
In 2004, composer Velton Ray Bunch won an Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series (Dramatic Underscore) for his work on this episode.
It’s been a long road… “Tell him to watch his ass.” This is one of the more well-regarded episodes of Enterprise’s run, so I really was expecting to like it more.
On the face of it, the episode presents a potentially fascinating moral dilemma. But there are two problems.
The first problem is that it doesn’t really address the moral dilemma in any meaningful manner, because Archer agrees to the procedure without a second thought. It’s not even clear he gave it a first thought. T’Pol—as usual—tries to remind him that there are consequences and ethical considerations, but Archer just fobs them off. This is some serious stuff, creating a sentient life form for the express purpose of harvesting its organs. That’s, well, gross.
And Archer’s rationale for it is specious to say the least. I made a facetious remark in the plot summary wondering where Tucker’s deputy chief engineer is, and it raises a much bigger question: why is Tucker so indispensable? He can’t possibly be the only engineer of any skill on board the ship, and Starfleet can’t possibly have sent a ship out on a mission as important as Enterprise’s mission to the Delphic Expanse without a full ship’s complement. That would include backup for all the important positions. I mean, what if Tucker suffers a sudden aneurysm or contracts a deadly disease that can’t be cured by a deus ex Phlox’s animal or gets shot and killed by one of the many aliens that have invaded Enterprise despite their having a military contingent on board? Would Archer just throw up his hands and turn back because he doesn’t have Charles Tucker III on board anymore?
Buy the Book
Dead Country
It’s the Voyager problem all over again: somehow, on this ship full of people, the same tiny bunch of people in the opening credits do all the work, even though they’re all alone in the middle of nowhere and everyone would need to do their part. It was an issue again mid-episode when the two people tapped to fly the shuttles are Mayweather—which makes sense—and Reed—which totally doesn’t. Reed has never been shown to be anything more than a competent pilot, and Enterprise must have at least two more qualified pilots on board, given that Mayweather has to sleep some time, and given that they’re likely on a three-shift rotation. But Reed has a speaking part, soooo….
The second problem with the moral dilemma is that it’s so completely artificial. Trek is at its worst when it creates problems with one bit of made-up science and then solves it with another bit of made-up science. All the science in this episode is not just made up but so obviously constructed in such a way as to maximize the pathos and also make the solutions blindingly obvious and easy to restore to the status quo when it’s all over.
Having said all this, the episode is very well acted, a tribute to the actors and to director LeVar Burton. Scott Bakula does some really good work here, as he does start to realize the consequence to his unhesitating decision when he realizes he has to tell Sim the truth. Jolene Blalock plays T’Pol’s reserve beautifully, with her discomfort with Sim’s similarity (ahem) to Tucker just under the surface.
And Connor Trinneer and the three kids who play Sim’s younger selves do a very nice job with Sim, with a good mix of Tucker and not-Tucker to be convincing.
I will also give the episode credit for looking fabulous. The visual of Enterprise covered in metallic particles in the midst of a pinkish particle field is just spectacular.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s first Trek fiction in thirteen years will be a DS9 story called “You Can’t Buy Fate” in Star Trek Explorer #7, which will be on sale on his fifty-fourth birthday, 18 April 2023. It’s available for preorder from Titan.
Given that Trip is not only really, really good at his job but Jonathan Archer’s Best Friend it’s not exactly a surprise that the Captain regards him as indispensable: I also admit to being genuinely moved by this little tragedy in a way that serialised drama only very rarely manages (Don’t start me thinking about how Porthos will react when he realises that Trip isn’t Sim, just DON’T, I need these eyes to see clearly!).
Hopefully Sim Tucker was added to the Tucker family tree with honours just as soon as Trip was able to get the word out.
…
Also, Doc Phlox remains as charming as he is creepy, that old Mad Anatomist (how the heck did he find out about those larvae anyway?).
P.S. The historiography of NX-01 must be fascinating, given the sort of decisions Captain Archer makes in ‘North Star’ and ‘Similitude’ (23rd century Starfleet could probably roll with some of these choices but 24th century Starfleet scholarship probably contains at least some elements willing to start the Temporal Cold War just so they can dope-slap Captain Jonathan), not to mention his general tendency to be Starfleet Captain 1.0 (“He’s a work in progress – we can fix him!”).
I wonder if the Federation historians growling over various Archer-derived controversies ever trade notes with Klingon historians trying to survive their interest in T’Kuvma and Chancellor L’Rell?
I’m a bit torn about this episode, but I’m surprised that you rated it this high. The mutual neuropressure session seemed considerably more fan-service-ish to me than the kiss. (If there is one lesson for Trip, it is “don’t plan engine modifications while you are oogling T’Pol.”)
The reason why I am torn is that Enterprise is sort-of on a combat mission. A combat commander has to sacrifice troops when the situation calls for it. Usually those troops were enlisted or got drafted as adults, but draftees don’t get all that much choice. What is the moral and practical difference between an actual suicide mission and a de-facto suicide mission?
And the “genetic memory” of a human is the sort of McGuffin that appears one week, and gets forgotten by the next episode.
A little detail, shouldn’t sim have been eating a custom diet around the clock? In less than a week, he would have gained better than a hundred pounds. How many calories, how many minerals and trace elements?
Krad said: “The first problem is that it doesn’t really address the moral dilemma in any meaningful manner, because Archer agrees to the procedure without a second thought. It’s not even clear he gave it a first thought. T’Pol—as usual—tries to remind him that there are consequences and ethical considerations, but Archer just fobs them off. This is some serious stuff, creating a sentient life form for the express purpose of harvesting its organs. That’s, well, gross.”
I see it a little differently. I think the moral dilemma is all the stronger because Archer doesn’t see the minefield he’s wading into until it is too late. He’s desperate not to have his engineer back (though that is important) but to have his friend returned to him. Given that chance, he reacts initially without considering no the consequences and then winds up having to confront the fact that he may have to order this being to die. This is far superior to the dilemma in “Tuvix,” in which Janeway simply decided to kill a creature created by a random accident. Here, Archer has agency on both sides of the equation, which makes the hurt all the more palpable.
Frankly, that’s what makes it easier for me to overlook the fact that they’ve had the ability to clone people to fix injuries this whole time ..
The science is insanely bad, and it’s one more Trek episode that introduces an amazingly powerful technology that’s never heard from again, but it’s still a compelling enough dramatic story that I’m able to forgive that, even if it is a bit of a rehash of “Tuvix.” It’s a sign that the season had finally found its feet (only to stumble badly again come “Carpenter Street”).
The problem with the science fiction trope of cloning a whole person to harvest for parts (featured in movies such as Parts: The Clonus Horror and its copyright-infringing-but-settled-out-of-court knockoff The Island, and no doubt in other works I can’t recall) is that there’s no need to clone the whole body. Just clone a culture of the specific tissue cells you need and transplant them. It’s far less wasteful.
@5. twels: I want to disagree with you about Tuvix, but would rather not open up that can of worms.
Agree to disagree?
Also, it bears pointing out that they’ve had the VERY limited capacity to clone individuals: the only reason they’re able to do so is through that larvae (of which Doctor Phlox has exactly one and I’m not sure it’s a good idea to speculate on how the Good Doctor acquired that treasure: I have a horrible suspicion he was trusted to NOT exploit it in exactly the way he uses it in this episode … either that or he acquired it under “mysterious circumstances”*).
*The mystery being “how has Doctor Phlox avoided being arrested after so much Medical Mad Science?!?”
It’s a mixture of both Voyager’s “Tuvix” and DS9’s “Children of Time”, to an extent. I don’t have much of problem with the science on this one. Phlox has long been established by this point as by far the most unorthodox doctor when it comes to treatments and very weird procedures (aside from Bashir’s borderline Frankenstein attempts at keeping Bareil alive).
Manny Coto’s first Trek script seems to mirror real-life situations where parents deliberately give birth to children whose primary purpose is to donate bone marrow to their siblings. An ethical minefield, if there ever was one. ER did an episode about such a case a few years before “Similitude”.
For the most part, I really appreciate this one. It’s a pivotal step in the Tucker/T’Pol relationship, it was a very well done teaser funeral twist, and you really feel for Sim’s situation. And Tucker-issues aside, Connor Trineer really shines when he gets this kind of spotlight, plus plenty of juicy material for both Bakula and Blalock. You can see why Coto won the trust of the staff and Berman/Braga so fast. An outsider who knew how Trek worked, and who knew what he was doing (questionable politics aside).
And kudos to LeVar Burton for really bringing out the best of the story and the performances. Between this and last season’s “Cogenitor”, he really has a handle on extracting the emotions out of each scene (one wonders why he hasn’t directed any of the current Trek shows like Frakes has).
Yet another pretty good one-off episode unrelated to the main Xindi arc. Truth be told, Season 3 of Enterprise really had a near perfect balance of episodic and serialized.
@8/Eduardo: “Manny Coto’s first Trek script seems to mirror real-life situations where parents deliberately give birth to children whose primary purpose is to donate bone marrow to their siblings. An ethical minefield, if there ever was one.”
A minefield which, as I mentioned, would probably be rendered obsolete well before the 22nd century, once we gain the ability to clone individual organs, or bioprint them from cultured cell stocks. That technology will probably be achieved well before the end of this century, perhaps even within the next decade or two. It annoys me that so many works of science fiction miss that possibility, or deliberately ignore it for the sake of manufacturing ethical dilemmas that should be avoidable.
” (one wonders why [Burton] hasn’t directed any of the current Trek shows like Frakes has)”
According to IMDb, the only things Burton has directed since 2017 have been a dozen NCIS franchise episodes. Maybe he’s got some kind of exclusive contract?
I rather liked this one, Trineer really gets to show off just how likeable he can be, and the younger actors were very endearing. Also the callback when T’Pol and Trip actually start their relationship leads to romantic comedy gold. The face he makes when he says, “I’m jealous, of myself??!” always cracks me up.
Aside from the greater ethical questions surrounding cloning, I’m fascinated by this larvae’s life cycle. Shouldn’t Sim have at some point laid or otherwise produced Desert Larvae eggs?
I appreciate that Archer is largely consistent about his decision making under stress. He leads with his emotions and his heart and then has to reflect on it. He’s very leap before look.
And I mark with joy the beginning of the Manny Coto era.
According to IMDb, the only things Burton has directed since 2017 have been a dozen NCIS franchise episodes. Maybe he’s got some kind of exclusive contract?
@9/Christopher: If it were an exclusivity contract, he would most likely have a producer credit and be directing a lot more than just a dozen episodes across five years. Livingston could direct almost as many episodes in a single combined season of VOY/DS9.
No, I think it’s a combination of factors: Burton’s own pro-reading endeavors keeping him busy enough, plus a conscious choice by Kurtzman and Secret Hideout to bring some fresh blood when it comes to directors. Besides Frakes and David Barrett, everyone who’s directed Trek over the past six years has had no prior Trek experience. A stark contrast to the Berman era’s practice of using mostly the same people across all four shows.
@9. ChristopherLBennett: When faced with a choice between making life easier and making life harder for your characters, isn’t it a writer’s job to make sure Our Heroes have their work cut out for them?
Nice recap and review. I guess I’d misremembered this episode, because for some reason I thought I remembered the script wimping out and having Sim die anyway or something, thus freeing up those delicious organs. (I mean, Phlox has to be feeding his bizarre menagerie something.)
@6/CLB – if you haven’t read it, I’d recommend Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. It similarly deals with a world where clones are grown to be organ donors, but not specifically for the people they’re cloned from. (It doesn’t really spell this out, but I’d assumed that there were probably only 10-20 DNA donors who were considered an ideal organ match for most of the population.) Because the clones are indoctrinated into the idea that their purpose is to eventually donate their organs, it’s an interesting examination of the concept, compared to the presumed bombast of The Island.
–Andy
ED said: “@5. twels: I want to disagree with you about Tuvix, but would rather not open up that can of worms.
Agree to disagree?”
Well now I am curious. I have always been fond of “Similitude” and rather disliked “Tuvix,” despite the similarities. To me, “Tuvix” is more morally reprehensible in the sense of essentially having its title character be killed off to resurrect two people who were – for all intents and purposes – dead. At least with “Similitude” we have a live patient and – at least in the end – give Sim some agency in his decision to give his life to save Trip. I guess one could argue that having him do so lets Archer off the hook a little bit but I didn’t end this episode hating Archer the way I despised Janeway at the end of Tuvix
The notion that Archer is doing this, not to save his chief engineer, as he says, but his friend, makes it worse. Committing an unethical act to save a vital crewmember is, at least, defensible. Doing so to save your drinking buddy is reprehensible, and is yet more evidence that Jonathan Archer is unfit for the job.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@12/ED: “When faced with a choice between making life easier and making life harder for your characters, isn’t it a writer’s job to make sure Our Heroes have their work cut out for them?”
Yes, but ideally in a way that’s credible, that doesn’t harm the audience’s suspension of disbelief, and that doesn’t require the characters to be blind to solutions the audience can see. The difficulty needs to feel genuine, not the result of an artificial limit arbitrarily created to make things harder. That just makes the writer’s manipulation too obvious.
@7 ED: Regarding Phlox having obtained the larva under “mysterious circumstances”, I can just imagine him assuring Archer that it fell off the back of a shuttlecraft.
Krad said: “The notion that Archer is doing this, not to save his chief engineer, as he says, but his friend, makes it worse. Committing an unethical act to save a vital crewmember is, at least, defensible. Doing so to save your drinking buddy is reprehensible, and is yet more evidence that Jonathan Archer is unfit for the job.”
The problem with this line of thinking is that it ignores the fact that Trip is both of those things. He’s the indispensable chief engineer AND Archer’s friend. Archer’s decision to create Sim can be justified by the fact that it is important to save Trip because no one else knows the engines the way he does. But his friendship with Trip impacts how he comes to that decision – and how he reacts when the morality becomes progressively more difficult
twels: but that brings us back to the problem I mentioned in the rewatch article we’re all commenting on, to wit, that it makes absolutely no sense that Tucker is the only one who can possibly run the engine room. It’s malpractice and incompetence of the highest order if Enterprise went on this dangerous faraway mission without backup at every position.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Can the other people run the engines? Probably. Can others provide the same level of guidance, innovation and expertise? Likely not – or they’d be chief engineers elsewhere. Also, let’s not forget that this Starship Enterprise isn’t teeming with officers the way Kirk’s was. There are only 84 Starfleet crew aboard, split between all divisions,if memory serves. Also, it seems like having T’Pol manage things rather than have Kelby (or whoever the junior engineer chief is at this point) might be a way to keep a semblance of “normalcy” in engineering. And yeah, that is a lot of handwaving on my part …
“Earth needs Enterprise. Enterprise needs Trip. It’s as simple as that.”
Back during the Voyager Rewatch, I commented that this episode is what ‘Tuvix’ would be if it had bottled the ending and had Tuvix happily shuffle off to his death in order to get the main characters back. And here we are. I had this horrible feeling I was going to be the guy criticising a beloved episode again: It earned Manny Coto a place as showrunner, it’s frequently cited as one of the best episodes of the show’s run. Yet it’s hard for me not to feel like it’s part of a bit of a mid-season slump, where they’re killing time before the important stuff and ticking off the sort of generic plots that blighted much of season two. And as it turns out, reaction here is decidedly mixed, especially from our esteemed rewatcher.
So what we have here is a moral dilemma ripped from headlines about the ethics of creating clones to be used as dispensable donors. The problem is, it provides an easy answer. And worse, it asks an easy question. The other key difference from ‘Tuvix’ is that while Tuvix could have lived for decades if Janeway hadn’t chosen to sacrifice him, here Sim would have been dead in a week anyway. There’s a belated attempt to inject some ambiguity by suggesting he could live out a normal lifespan, but it just comes across as Sim clutching at straws rather than a serious option. Honestly, Sliders handled the same ethical debate a lot better four and a half years earlier.
The actors are putting in their best: They were apparently all fans of the script. The boy that plays Young Sim does a good job of capturing Connor Trineer’s accent and vocal mannerisms. (The teen version is less convincing, but fortunately only appears briefly.) Scott Bakula does a good job in the first half of the episode, with Archer’s discomfort around Sim as he’s forced to face the reality of ordering a sentient being created just to die in a week or two. He’s less successful when Archer starts channelling, well, Janeway and during the fatalistic final scenes. I guess one way this scores over ‘Tuvix’ is that viewers are perhaps more ready to believe that the show might kill off Trip and have Connor Trineer go on playing Sim for the rest of the series.
But…nope. After briefly threatening to go to a dark place with Archer making it clear he’ll murder Sim if he has to, it turns out it’s okay because he doesn’t have to. Or rather, he does, but Sim’s fine with it. I struggled not to laugh throughout the last three scenes as first we have T’Pol giving Sim a last snog out of nowhere. (Are we really meant to believe she fell in love with him in a couple of days, or is she just being nice?) And then Sim making a big speech about how this is what he was born to do, as he goes off to do a far far better thing, while sentimental and uplifting music plays in the background to try and convince the audience what they should be feeling. And then we catch up with the opening scene where they’ve dressed Sim’s corpse in an engineer’s uniform he never actually wore while he was alive to make him look more like Trip and fool everyone with the cold open, and the camera pulls around to show the real Trip standing there, probably thinking “So…who was he again?” About the only thing that resonated for me was Sim stressing that Lizzie was as much his sister as Trip’s. (Not that I’m a clone with someone else’s memories or anything. Not all the time, anyway.) Could have been so much better.
As for the apparent paucity of engineering staff, leaving T’Pol to take charge of engineering, I seem to remember a Lieutenant Hess was mentioned as running Engineering in Trip’s absence once, but goodness knows if she’s still on board. Rostov is apparently still around, although despite getting the most screentime, he seems to be fairly junior in the hierarchy.
A couple ideas here:
In response to the “Archer being too quick to give the order for Sim’s creation.”
Did Archer make the call too quickly? Probably. Thing is, he is in an situation of unknowns where his ship is dead in the water, his Chief Engineer (probably the best engineer in the fleet and his friend) comatose, tasked with the “Fate of the World” mission where a delay of several days could be cataclysmic (silly Western sojurns aside.) Phlox offers him a solution, he immediately accepts, biased because Trip is his friend or not, a solution to run Engineering as efficiently as possible is a solution. It’s only after interacting and raising Sim does he fully comprehend what he got himself into. Not saying that things are perfect or well-written here; the discovery that the nebula would destroy Enterprise would have been much better placed before he made the call to create Sim. Putting the revelation of said “nebular doom” after the decision was made feels a bit… cheap.
On “Engineering not having anyone capable of replacing Trip.” and T’Pol being put in charge of it.
There is a difference between having an engineer in charge who is exceedingly competent at their job and having that era’s Montgomery Scott in charge; an example seen later during Season 4’s Affliction is Trip’s replacement on Enterprise not being able to Engineering Wizard the ship as hard as he did. As for T’Pol being put in charge of it, @20. Twels’s suggestion about her keeping a semblance of “normalcy” is as good of anything I can come up with, with the addition of her experience and close working relationship with Trip in general. I’m just wondering how the heck she managed to successfully juggle her normal duties as Chief Science Officer and XO on top of managing Engineering…
On T’Pol giving Sim a goodbye smooch:
Yeah, I’ve got just about nothing. Trellium-D enhancing feelings already there?
@6 Christopher
Eh, I’d say that “The Hatchery” was also another low for this season. Less of a stumble and more of a faceplant onto the pavement in my book on that episode; worked about as well as TNG’s “Naked Now.”
@21 cab-mjb
“it just comes across as Sim clutching at straws rather than a serious option”
I’d always thought that was the case; Sim obviously doesn’t want to die, so he’s trying to convince Phlox and Archer to try an experimental treatment that is impractical.
“Or rather, he does, but Sim’s fine with it”
It seems to me that it’s not so much that Sim is fine with it, but that after attempting to escape, Sim realizes the futility of his efforts to fight even if Archer wasn’t going to murder him. He has nowhere to go, has a week of life left at best, and has a perfect copy of all of Trip’s memories and emotions to the point where he can’t tell what is his and what is Trip’s as he admitted to T’Pol in her quarters. After that, the rest of the episode is him making peace with the fact that one way or another, he’ll be dead soon, and he’s going to make sure his death mattered.
“And then we catch up with the opening scene where they’ve dressed Sim’s corpse in an engineer’s uniform he never actually wore while he was alive to make him look more like Trip and fool everyone with the cold open, and the camera pulls around to show the real Trip standing there, probably thinking ‘So…who was he again?’ “
Burying someone with full honors is an old custom from many militaries across the globe. We don’t know how long after Trip’s revival that this sequence takes place, but Archer and the crew definitely told Trip exactly who this guy identical to him that saved his life was.
@20 – “Likely not – or they’d be chief engineers elsewhere.”
Where? At this point, NX-01 Enterprise is the sole Warp-5 ship in the Earth fleet. NX-02 Columbia won’t be introduced until next season. The engineer involved in that construction (assuming it’s taking place at this point), who’d likely be as adept as Tucker, is back on Earth.
@22/FRT: “Burying someone with full honors is an old custom from many militaries across the globe. We don’t know how long after Trip’s revival that this sequence takes place, but Archer and the crew definitely told Trip exactly who this guy identical to him that saved his life was.”
That doesn’t really explain the uniform. Did they swear Sim into Starfleet posthumously or something? On a meta level, the whole thing’s definitely little more than a cheat for the benefit of the audience. (I can understand them holding a funeral for him, but you’d expect them to dress him in the coverall he wore throughout the rest of the episode.) And yes, I’m sure they did explain what had happened to Trip, and I imagine he’d feel at least some sorrow about this “brother” sacrificed to save him, but he’s still attending the funeral of a guy he never met because he was in a coma the whole time the guy was alive.
markvolund: Columbia was established as being under construction in “The Expanse” — Forrest and Archer did a flyby of it. In fact, the timeframe Forrest gave for when she’d be completed and underway more or less matches the time between that episode and when we see Columbia in season four.
Season four will also establish that Starfleet is understaffed, which retroactively makes this episode a bit easier to take, but it still stretches credulity that the humanity of the 22nd century has a paucity of qualified engineers (especially since I know of several engineering schools just in this country that have had steadily increased enrollment over the last several decades).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m with Keith — it makes no sense for a starship to have only one fully qualified person in any given job. I mean, there are shifts, right? People have to sleep. Assuming a three-shift system, there should be at least three equally capable people for each position. It’s also just common sense for a starship out on its own in deep space to have complete redundancy for every component, whether technology or personnel.
The problem, of course, is that TV shows have finite casting budgets and are expected to give their main casts the bulk of the screen time. So any open post will generally end up getting filled by a regular or semiregular character even if it doesn’t make sense, like having Odo, Nog, and Garak on the bridge crew of the Defiant.
Christopher: exactly. And given the complexity of Enterprise‘s engines, there’s no way one person would be doing most of the work anyhow.
And this didn’t have to be a budget thing. Just as an example, when Worf was off gallivanting with Picard and Crusher in “Chain of Command,” there were several mentions of McDowell having taken over security (that character having been established in “The Next Phase”). McDowell was never seen in that two-parter, but he didn’t need to be. Tucker’s second-in-command of engineering didn’t need to be seen to be established as a character…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@27/krad: Heck, you don’t even have to leave Enterprise for an example. “Chef” was often spoken of but never seen.
Christopher: [pedantic mode] Technically, we did see Chef, albeit only from the waist down, in “The Catwalk.” [pedantic mode cancel]
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Some thoughts regarding the indispensability of the Chief Engineer:
84 crew. With an even division, that could be two watches of 42 crew each or three watches of 28. A two-watch schedule for months at a time sounds insane. So call it three watches, each with what would be called an Engineering Officer of the Watch in modern terms and a junior officer prepared to take over on short notice when the EOOW takes a bathroom break or so. Trip would be one of those six, the most senior.
If five people need to do the shift of six, that’s 96 minutes per day extra, and awkward schedules. And that’s not counting the time Trip had been awake outside the engine room — for a senior officer, dinner with the captain is part of the day’s work, not leisure time.
Alternatively, they could promote one junior EOOW to senior EOOW, one senior tech to junior EOOW, one junior tech to senior tech, and so on. On average, every crewmember has another 6 minutes of work every day. That doesn’t sound like much, but it will add up. No more movie nights? Cold sandwiches in the galley? Bad for morale …
And then there is the fact that they’re obviously still “writing the book” as far as the NX-01 goes. Doing that started the accident. Can the second engineer or the thrid engineer do that as well as the chief engineer?
But I doubt that the writers reasoned it out that way.
@14. twels: Given that the episode has stirred up quite a few arguments over the years (a fair measure of it’s success as a study in ethical dilemma) and that I’m keen to avoid starting yet another, suffice it to say that I don’t agree with the contention that Mr Tuvok and Mr Neelix were dead (either literally or for all practical purposes), given Starfleet’s record of such accidental transformations (and their frequently being reversed).
Hence my disagreement with your original opinion (which I disagree with on the understand that it’s a valid interpretation, just one that I do not share).
@17. Nina: This being Doc Phlox, I’d bet on him either giving the whole truth in embarrassing detail or cheerfully deflecting – he’s quite good at getting away with things, is Doctor Phlox.
@24. cap-mjb: I think that giving Sim the rank of crewman as a posthumous honour makes perfect sense, both dramatically and in-universe – this is NX-01’s way of showing gratitude to the man who helped save them with that shuttlepod plan, Archer’s way of honouring someone who was far more than just an organ donor and Trip’s way to honour someone whom he never knew, but who saved his life twice over (by recognising him as a fellow engineering crewman, as opposed to science or medical): most of all it’s a way of showing that Sim was friend, fellow crew and family, not just a morally-dubious medical experiment/expedient.
It’s a way of recognising him as an integral part of Enterprise, rather than just a passenger or supercargo (the sort of person who wears a featureless grey jumpsuit): it occurs to me that T’Pol presenting that jumpsuit to Sim before his last medical appointment could have potentially been a more powerfully emotive gesture than any kiss.
Honestly, it would be interesting to see a novelisation of this episode told exclusively from Sim’s perspective – since this might be the only way to substantially improve on an already strong piece of drama (though that would rob us of a pre-credits sequence which is a genuinely successful teaser, a rare blessing from ENTERPRISE).
@31: Thanks for the explanation, re: your interpretation of “Tuvix.” I still question the validity of killing one person to save the two that were blended in his creation, but that is an argument that would likely circle some familiar ground many times.
In watching Enterprise again, one thing that definitely has struck me is the quality of Connor Trinneer’s acting. It’s somewhat surprising to me that he hasn’t had a more successful post-Trek career. L
Who doesn’t love an ethical-dilemma Trek episode and this is one of the shining examples of its kind and one of my favorites of Enterprise. Just well acted and directed even if the dilemma itself is so deliberately constructed as to come across as contrived.
&33: This episode is definitely one that ends way better than it begins. When Phlox explains how he plans to repaid Trip’s injury, the whole thing seems so preposterous that it feels like there’s no rescuing the episode. But sure enough, as it goes on, the drama and the portrayals by Trinneer and the child actors really do pul you into Sim’s story
@24 cap-mjb
“That doesn’t really explain the uniform. Did they swear Sim into Starfleet posthumously or something?”
Membership in a specific service is not a requirement to be buried with full honor; heck, I recall one story of a Soviet tank crew being buried with full honors by their German foes after the former held off their assault alone and unsupported for tens of hours. It’s not that much of a stretch for the same to be done for someone who makes the greatest sacrifice in the line of duty, member of that service or not. @31 ED makes an excellent point of this being a show of respect for Sim.
If I had a nickel for every time Connor Trinneer played an alien creature who thought he was a human being… At least Starfleet treated this guy better than the Stargate Atlantis people treated Michael.
@36/Gareth: So… you’d have ten cents?
@32. twels: I feel that the same logic underpinning my attitude to Mr Tuvok and Mr Neelix also applies to Tuvix – if he were dead, then the two from whom he was composited would be dead and not restored to their former selves – while they live, he lives, though much changed.
@19 – I’m reminded of Journey to Babel. The ship is carrying all these various alien ambassadors and their aides and what seems to be the only medical officer is totally unfamiliar when called upon for a medical emergency. It’s possible that McCoy might have expertise in some other alien species but to have all these races onboard with no medical personnel for them borders on criminally negligent.
“Committing an unethical act to save a vital crewmember is, at least, defensible. Doing so to save your drinking buddy is reprehensible, and is yet more evidence that Jonathan Archer is unfit for the job.”
Maybe. But doesn’t Star Trek have a sort of pattern of that going, such as Kirk’s willingness to steal the Enterprise and violate the Federation mandate blockading anyone from visiting the Genesis Planet all to try to rescue (resurrect) his best friend, Spock (“the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many”). And again when Admiral Janeway was willing to go back in time and completely rewrite the timeline to get the ship and her crew back years sooner so that Seven wouldn’t have died? (Not to mention her decision in the “Tuvix” episode to get her two original crew members back, including her good friend Tuvok, at the sacrifice of the newly created sentient Tuvix.)
There is quite a bit of precedent for important decisions like these being made based largely on emotions and feelings of loyalty and friendship over cold hard facts, rules, and intangible moral debates.
@40/David Young: “There is quite a bit of precedent for important decisions like these being made based largely on emotions and feelings of loyalty and friendship over cold hard facts, rules, and intangible moral debates.”
Also based largely on the fact that the regular cast is under contract, so any “death” has to be temporary.
Although that wasn’t really the case with Spock’s resurrection, since his death was initially intended to be permanent.
@41/Christopher Bennett: And in the case of Admiral Janeway going back in time to avert Seven’s death, that was all in the final episode of Voyager. So all contracts were up, so to speak. They *could* have killed off anyone they wanted to at that point. (Of course, that’s not really Star Trek’s style to do so. Or, rather, it wasn’t up to that point. “Enterprise” kind of changes that with its finale, doesn’t it?)
Trip is probably by far the most knowledgeable engineer aboard. The more junior watchstanders (I would be shocked if the CHENG stood engine room watches) will be a definite step down but hopefully learning and gaining experience. But that is hard to show onscreen.
None of that is an excuse for Archer giving the go-ahead.
@42/David Young: ““Enterprise” kind of changes that with its finale, doesn’t it?”
Not really. Even in the holo-simulation Riker was watching, we never actually saw the moment of Trip’s death; we just saw him before his death and then cut to the characters talking about it afterward. TV Writing 101: If you don’t see the body, they’re not necessarily dead. The writers blatantly left themselves an out for bringing Trip back if they somehow got to do more ENT stories.
Janeway’s choice in “Endgame” was just as reprehensible, as I said in my rewatch of that episode……
https://www.tor.com/2021/10/21/star-trek-voyager-rewatch-endgame/
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@44/CLB: They might have left themselves a loophole just in case (although not much of one if he’s still believed to have died 200 years later!), but the intention was clearly for him to be dead, in the same way that Data was in Nemesis and Spock was in TWOK. (And, in terms of unfired guns, perhaps the way that the DS9 finale carefully avoids saying Dukat’s dead.) That’s pretty much the whole point of the episode, that he had a strong enough bond with his captain that he’d unquestionably sacrifice himself to protect him.
@45/krad: And yet when Jake Sisko does something just as reprehensible in “The Visitor”, the episode gets hailed as a classic…
@47/cap-mjb: The quality of a story has nothing to do with whether the characters’ actions are morally right. There are many great stories about people doing the objectively wrong thing. The point is not whether we approve of their actions, the point is whether we relate to the emotions driving them, and whether the stories are told well. “The Visitor” is told brilliantly, while “Endgame” is a total mess.
I mean, at least Jake has a consistent throughline driving him throughout “The Visitor.” Captain Janeway in “Endgame” is written contradictorily at the convenience of the plot — she denounces her future self’s actions as selfish and wrong and agrees with her crew to reject the admiral’s plan in favor of doing the right thing, and then in the final act she does an arbitrary about-face and does it anyway just to force the desired ending. “The Visitor” is a superb use of plot to explore character, while “Endgame” is a lazy sacrifice of character consistency for the sake of plot. There’s just no comparison.
@48/CLB: It’s certainly true that a story that features characters doing things of questionable morality can have artistic merit. But I’ve always been bothered that “The Visitor” completely ignores the moral implications of Jake’s actions and portrays something wrong and selfish as somehow laudable, expecting the audience to be glad that he erased decades of history in order to free Sisko from limbo and give his younger self his dad back. And most people seem to be happy to ignore it: You don’t get debates about the ethics of that episode in the same way you do with something like “Tuvix” or “Similitude” or “Endgame”, instead everyone just seems happy to judge it by a different set of rules and go along for the ride. If by that set of rules, people consider it a classic, well, I guess that’s an opinion they’re entitled to, but it’s something I’ve never been comfortable doing.
@49 Thank you! I made that point in my comments to The Visitor and I have always dislike that episode primarily for that reason. DS9 did a lot of this sort of thing. Sisko’s actions in In the Pale Moonlight essentially make him an accessory to murder. And he says he’s okay with it, as were most viewers apparently because he’s the star of the show and after all he’s doing bad things for a good reason, or so I’m told. In another episode, Odo erased the existence of thousands of people because he had the hots for Kira. And in yet another, Kira is acting as the O’Brians’ surrogate with an unborn child in her womb, yet goes on a completely reckless revenge kick to try commit her own act of vigilante murder, and the only reason she isn’t killed herself is because of some plot twist about herbs counteracting sedatives.
I like DS9 because there was some moral ambiguity to the characters, but when you really look at them all, they are a pathologically self-centered bunch.
@50/fullyfunctional: “Sisko’s actions in In the Pale Moonlight essentially make him an accessory to murder. And he says he’s okay with it, as were most viewers apparently because he’s the star of the show and after all he’s doing bad things for a good reason, or so I’m told.”
Wow, that is a complete misreading. Sisko repeated “I can live with it” to himself because he couldn’t live with it, or at least he struggled with it. If it were easy for him to live with it, he wouldn’t have had to repeat it to try to convince himself of it, and he wouldn’t have deleted the whole log entry afterward. That last scene is an expression of Sisko’s guilt and self-doubt, and it astonishes me that so many people mistake it for the exact opposite.
Sorry CLB, not buying that. Struggling with it doesn’t mean he’s not talking himself into rationalizing it, which is exactly how I interpret the repetition of the phrase. He took some foolish risks in that episode, and the worst happened. Self-doubt is something he should have examined before he allowed events to unfold the way they did. I never said Sisko didn’t feel guilty about what he did. But it’s easy to feel guilty to make yourself feel better after you did something you knew you shouldn’t have in the first place… He confesses to himself, deletes the log, and wipes his hands of the whole thing. That’s just compartmentalizing. JMO
@52/fullyfunctional: Sure, people can disagree on whether they’re willing to forgive Sisko, but that’s the whole point — that the ending was meant to be ambiguous and leave us wondering. It’s a profound misreading of the intentions of the people who wrote and filmed the episode to think that they intended to say that Sisko was simply, unambiguously correct. As with “Tuvix,” the whole point is to leave us with questions, not to hand us a single pat answer. The fact that individual viewers can disagree on the rightness of Sisko’s or Janeway’s actions is exactly what the creators intended.
@45/krad “Janeway’s choice in “Endgame” was just as reprehensible, as I said in my rewatch of that episode……”
Sure, but does that mean you also consider Janeway to be an unfit captain because of it?
It comes across (or seems to, to me, at least) that you just don’t like these characters, Archer and Trip. It comes across again in your statement about it being even more reprehensible if Archer did all of this just to save his “drinking buddy” (when if we were talking about Kirk and Spock or Janeway and Tuvok I think you would say “close longtime friend” or something else not so intentionally trivializing).
@50/fullyfunctional: But could you yourself commit murder or be an accessory to murder if it meant it would save billions of lives? :op
I hated every second of this.
Not that the episode wasn’t well-acted, but just…what the hell? I feel like I’m supposed to feel for Archer for making this “difficult decision”, but it wasn’t difficult at all.
T’Pol: We’ll be creating a sentient life form, a person that, you know, breathes and thinks and feels and stuff.
Archer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know all that jibber-jabber.
T’Pol: We’re also violating the laws of an alien culture.
Archer: Culture, shmulture. Just do the damn thing, because Trip.
T’Pol: This is deeply unethical.
Archer: Did I mention Trip?
And then Archer, being a dumbass, realizes after the fact that, oh yeah, we created a sentient life form, a person that, you know, breathes and thinks and feels and stuff. Then says, oh well fuck it, I have to kill you, sentient being I ordered created, because Trip.
I’m not sure I’ve disliked Archer more than I did in this episode.
Oh, and T’Pol kisses Sim for some fucking reason; definitely fan service there.
Terrible episode.
Well-acted, well directed, visually stunning pile of crap.
Edited to add: I will say, Velton Ray Bunch does great work on the score for this episode. At times tense, heartbreaking.
It’s nice to actually notice the music again in the Berman era of Trek.
@55 would? Or could? I’m sure it would be a lot easier to rationalize murder if I could predict the future with absolute certainty. I can’t, though.