“E2”
Written by Mike Sussman
Directed by Roxann Dawson
Season 3, Episode 21
Production episode 073
Original air date: May 5, 2004
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. We open in T’Pol’s quarters, but it’s an elderly T’Pol who is meditating by a candle. An older man with Vulcan ears enters—this is her son, Lorian—and he says they were unable to stop the probe from entering the vortex. T’Pol says they have no choice: now they must find Archer.
Next, we’re in T’Pol’s quarters again, but this time the one we’re familiar with is sitting there. Tucker comes in on the pretense of starting up the neuropressure sessions again due to a renewed bout of insomnia, but he eventually admits that he’s actually sleeping okay, he’s just worried about T’Pol and offers help. T’Pol turns him down, mistaking his friendly concern for trying to start up a post-coital relationship between the two.
As Enterprise approaches the nebula with the subspace corridor, they are disheartened to see that Degra’s intelligence about the hostile lifeforms in the nebula was faulty: there aren’t one or two Kovaalan ships, there are half a dozen. They approach with caution.
Buy the Book
The Jinn Bot of Shantiport
Degra and Jannar meet with the Primate councilor, who is ripshit at the risks they’re taking. They—barely—talk him into protecting Enterprise when they arrive so that Archer can address the council. The councilor mentions the rumors of another Earth ship in the Expanse…
Enterprise detects another NX class ship on an intercept course. Reed guesses that it’s Columbia, but Archer insists that the NX-02 is still under construction. And its markings are the same as Enterprise’s. The captain, Lorian, hails them and explains that they are Enterprise, but a century older.
Lorian comes on board, alongside Karyn Archer. He explains that Enterprise went through the subspace corridor, but damage from Kovaalans attacking them resulted in them going back 117 years in time. Unable to risk polluting the timestream, they stayed in the Expanse, making non-Xindi allies in order to get fuel and food and equipment, and made the decision to become a generation ship. Lorian’s parents are T’Pol and Tucker (though Tucker died when Lorian was only fourteen), while Karyn is the great-granddaughter of Archer and an alien woman he met on their travels. T’Pol is skeptical right up until Phlox confirms from Lorian’s DNA that his parents are T’Pol and Tucker.
Lorian offers enhancement to the plasma injectors that will enable Enterprise to travel at warp 6.9 and therefore make Degra’s rendezvous in time through normal warp travel. However, Old T’Pol informs Archer that her son didn’t give Archer the whole story, and that in fact there’s a 22% chance they’ll fail and blow up. Old T’Pol suggests instead enhancing the impulse manifolds so the corridor will work. Young T’Pol and Tucker both concur.
Archer is furious at Lorian for misleading them, and says they’re going with the corridor and the enhanced manifolds, as two T’Pols and his chief engineer like that plan better.
Lorian berates his Mom, saying that the most important thing is to save Earth. They already blew it by letting the probe go through to kill seven million people, they can’t blow it now and let Earth be destroyed. Old T’Pol suggests that he’s letting his guilt motivate him; Lorian counters that she might feel more urgency if it was Vulcan in danger.
Lorian then meets with Karyn and Greer to enact plan B: steal Enterprise’s plasma injectors and then fly to the rendezvous themselves to meet with Degra, leaving Enterprise temporarily stranded. When Karyn objects, Lorian says that his Dad can totally fabricate new injectors, but at least Earth will be saved.
Once the injectors are stolen (with Tucker shot and stunned by his own kid), Enterprise fires on its counterpart. Archer has Young T’Pol use the transporter to beam bits of equipment off the other Enterprise, leaving them helpless. Karyn convinces Lorian that continuing to do battle against family is a really terrible idea and to surrender.
Archer puts Lorian in the brig, where the latter reveals that his guilt is even stronger than his mother accused him of. He had a chance to ram the probe to destroy it, but that would’ve destroyed Enterprise and everyone on board, and he hesitated. He let his emotions get the better of him, and he won’t let that happen again.
Archer says that he’s going to use the corridor, and it’ll go better with Lorian’s help. To that end, Archer frees him.
Young T’Pol consults with Old T’Pol regarding the impulse upgrades. Old T’Pol provides her younger self with schematics for a piece of Ikaaran tech that will help.
Enterprise enters the nebula and is challenged by Kovaalan ships. However, the other Enterprise is acting like a sensor shadow, but then moves off on its own, catching the Kovaalans off-guard.
After both ships trade weapons fire with the Kovaalans, Archer’s Enterprise enters the subspace corridor, hoping that Lorian’s will follow.
But it doesn’t. T’Pol and Mayweather confirm that they’re in the right place and the right time, but Lorian doesn’t follow. It’s possible they were destroyed or that they were wiped out in a temporal paradox or some other solution.
They rendezvous with Degra, who expresses surprise that they’re early.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? In a nice bit of astronomical verisimilitude, when we flash back to Enterprise’s trip through the corridor that sent them 117 years to the past, Mayweather immediately realizes that something’s wrong because the alignment of the stars is off. He’s a good enough space pilot that a mere hundred years of stellar drift would be enough to set off red flags for him.
The gazelle speech. Archer very cleverly uses the transporter as an offensive weapon, transporting important bits of tech off the other Enterprise to cripple them.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. Young T’Pol is informed by Old T’Pol that she will never completely regain her full emotional control following her trellium-D experimentation. Old T’Pol also credits Tucker with helping her get through the worst of it.
Florida Man. Florida Man Meets His Elderly Son!
Optimism, Captain! There are a large number of part-Denobulans on the other Enterprise, as Phlox and Cole had nine children. Wah-HEY!
Phlox also figures out how to get Vulcans and humans to interbreed. Because he’s just that awesome.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Young T’Pol keeps insisting that her seduction of Tucker in “Harbinger” was just an experiment and he shouldn’t view it as the start of a relationship, despite Tucker never once trying to make it one. And then Old T’Pol informs her that she wouldn’t have gotten through their first years in the past without Tucker.
Sato refuses to learn the identity of the father of her two children on the other Enterprise. Mayweather, though doesn’t object to spoilers, and finds out he paired off with McKenzie, with whom he’s only had one conversation; Sato encourages him to ask her out.
Reed also apparently never paired off with any of the women on board, which I’m sure got a whole mess of slash fanfic going in 2004. (I mean, there was already a ton of Tucker/Reed slashfic anyhow…)
I’ve got faith…
“It’s the strangest thing. I, uh, I look at you and I see my father—right there, around the eyes. Now the ears, those—those are your mother’s…”
–Tucker being somewhat freaked out at meeting his century-old offspring.
More on this later… T’Pol states that humans and Vulcans are, at this stage, unable to reproduce. We know that that will no longer be the case by 2230 (at the latest), as that is when Spock, the most famous human-Vulcan hybrid in the franchise, will be born.
Welcome aboard. Veteran character actor David Andrews plays Lorian, while Tom Schanley plays Greer and Tess Lina plays Karyn. In addition, Jolene Blalock does double duty as T’Pol at two very different stages of her life.
And finally, recurring regulars Randy Oglesby (Degra), Tucker Smallwood (the Primate councilor), and Rick Worthy (Jannar) are back for more. We’ll see them again next time in “The Council.”
Trivial matters: Degra provided Archer with the nebula as a subspace corridor at the end of “The Forgotten.” Archer was questioned by the Xindi in “Azati Prime,” where he was asked how many human ships were in the Expanse. T’Pol’s trellium-D addiction was established in “Damage.”
The teaser of this episode takes place just prior to “The Expanse.” There are also flashbacks to 2037.
Two female MACOs are mentioned as mating partners for male members of the crew: Amanda Cole from “Harbinger” and McKenzie from “Anomaly.”
According to writer Mike Sussman, his original pitch was to have the other ship be Columbia, rushed into service and sent to assist Enterprise, but they were the ones who went back in time, and Archer and the gang encounter their descendants. Columbia, which is established in this episode as being the name to be given to the NX-02 that we saw under construction in “The Expanse,” will be seen several times during the fourth season.
Lorian’s name was a tribute to the elvish forest Lórien from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
And finally for something really trivial, this is, on a technicality, the shortest episode title in Trek history, since the superscripted “2” really isn’t a full character, so “E2” supplants Voyager’s “Q2” as Trek’s shortest. (In case you’re wondering, the longest—despite the efforts of DS9 and Discovery to challenge it—remains the original series’ “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.”)
It’s been a long road… “Attacking your ancestors doesn’t sound very logical to me.” When he was asked to alter his pitch (see Trivial Matters, above), writer Mike Sussman objected to having Enterprise meet their own descendants, as it was too similar to DS9’s “Children of Time.”
In and of itself, that’s not really the problem with this episode. In a franchise as sprawling as Star Trek, there’s bound to be repetition.
The problem is that this episode has nowhere near the pathos, the tragedy, or the moral quandary of the DS9 tale. And that’s mainly due to Sussman’s script having the characters approach this like they’re familiar with the tropes of science fiction in general and Trek in particular. Everyone’s just so completely blasé about the time travel, about learning their future histories, about meeting their descendants. This works for comedy purposes on Lower Decks, but it’s a spectacular failure in a show that’s supposed to be about the early days of space travel. This stuff should all be new and confusing. Instead, Sato and Mayweather are just casually talking about having foreknowledge of their future as if they’re talking about a movie they just saw. T’Pol—who was still a skeptic about the possibility of time travel right up until she went back in time to 2004 Detroit just a few scant weeks earlier—should have a much more complicated reaction to meeting her 182-year-old self.
I will give Jolene Blalock credit for how she plays Old T’Pol, taking her cues from how Leonard Nimoy played the older Spock in the original series movies: still with Vulcan calm but more comfortable with the notion of emotionalism and expressing those feelings. And she acts older, which does a lot more to convince us that she’s 182 years old than the dreadful makeup job, which is the worst old-age rendering Trek has done since TNG’s “Too Short a Season” back in 1988. David Andrews also deserves kudos for giving us a character whom I have no trouble believing as the offspring of Blalock and Connor Trinneer, both in looks and in character.
Perhaps the biggest problem, besides the lack of any kind of sense of wonder, is the lack of high stakes. “Children of Time” was about the very existence of the colony of Defiant descendants. “E2” is just about which driving directions to follow. Yes, the fate of the Earth is secondarily at stake, but that’s been true all season. This storyline doesn’t change that in any meaningful sense.
As I’ve said many times, the idea isn’t the issue, it’s the execution of the idea. That this has the same general plot a “Children of Time” isn’t the flaw here, it’s that they took all the most compelling parts of that plot and either muted them or got rid of them, making for a relentlessly mediocre episode.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest release is Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups, co-edited by him with Jonathan Maberry, and featuring team-ups of classic characters. The contributing authors include Trek scribes David Mack (teaming Prospero and Don Quixote de la Mancha), Greg Cox (Night of the Living Dead and The Brain that Wouldn’t Die), Dayton Ward (Captain Battle and Blackout), Kevin J. Anderson (Captain Nemo and Frankenstein’s monster), Diana Dru Botsford (Lemuel Gulliver and Sacajawea and Ernest Shackleton), Derek Tyler Attico (Dracula and Jekyll & Hyde and John Henry), David A. McIntee (Tripitaka and Emperor Taizong), Rigel Ailur (Annie Oakley and Marian of Locksley), and Keith himself (She Who Must Be Obeyed and Egungun-oya), among many others. Check it out!
