“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!
I usually don’t have a problem with putting a few stand-alone episodes in the middle of a story arc, but this one is an exception to the rule. The previous three episode run of “Azati Prime”, “Damage”, and “The Forgotten” really built-up some good momentum going into the end of the season, and this one just kills it dead in its tracks. Maybe it would have worked if it had been intended as a mood-lightening episode, but as it is, it’s just kind of nowhere. I also think that living for over a century on what is, by this point, little more than a battered hulk is ridiculous, and the crew would have been better served to put down on a planet somewhere and send the ship out again a hundred years later.
I thought this one would’ve been okay if not for the repetition of the “Children of Time” plot. But you make a good point that it’s not just a repetition, it’s an inferior one with far lower stakes.
And it’s an excellent point that the characters at this stage should be a lot less blase about phenomena like time travel. I actually pointed out something similar to David Mack when I was a beta reader for the Destiny trilogy, that the Columbia crew there should be far more freaked out by things like time travel and less familiar with the tropes of the genre than characters in the 24th century.
This episode gave me pause when I developed the Rise of the Federation plot thread about the cumulative damage caused by early transporter technology through extended use. (I knew the producers of ENT didn’t want to have transporters but the network and/or studio insisted, so I wanted to revert to a lack of transporters in my ENT novels, for the most part.) If these alternate-future folks had continued using the same transporter technology for a century or more longer, wouldn’t they have discovered the same problem, and warned Archer about it? But maybe they lost their transporter before the effect manifested. Since they weren’t able to retaliate against Archer’s offensive use of his ship’s transporter, that implies their own transporter was kaput. And if there were any cumulative molecular damage to the crew, they might’ve attributed it to the effects of the Expanse.
I can only agree with you, @krad: this episode is passable, but obviously the weak spot in the run of strong episodes to date (Though in all fairness, T’Pol’s face on learning that not only does she have to deal with Time Travel again, she’s just met her own son BY A HUMAN is almost worth the price of admission).
It’s also interesting to note that, assuming the ‘Prime Timeline’ T’Pol share’s her E2 counterpart’s longevity, she’ll live to see the year 2270 (Which, if memory serves, will bring her into THE MOTION PICTURE territory): I suspect that version of the once and future sub-commander will have a bit less wear-and-tear on her, though (Being able to live as a Hero of the Federation, rather than a Generation Ship on the fringes of history will do that for a body).
…
Well now I really, REALLY want to see what TPol of Vulcan makes of Mr Spock (STRANGE NEW WORLDS, hear our prayers!).
A Few Random Thoughts:-
– My reaction to hearing that Mr Reed left no descendants was less that this was a confirmation of his rumoured sexuality and more than this was the logical consequence of his demonstrated tendency to be a jerk of no small dimensions when not keeping his personality safely buttoned-up (Consider his behaviour on Risa and his rather adolescent behaviour towards the Gallant Major).
– Am I the only one who noted Ms. Archer’s vaguely Asian features and wondered if Ensign Sato might be one of her grandparents or great-grandparents?
– The fact that Doctor Phlox left a multiplicity of descendants does not surprise me: the fact we never see him casually taking this truly bizarre family situation in stride is one of the most tragic omissions from this episode (I’d bet cash money that, given their family trees look like kudzu, the Denobulan who cannot take surprise relations in their stride probably live as hermits … or leave the planet entirely).
Admittedly the sight of Doctor Phlox being a comically doting Grandpa (By video call or in person), weirdness or no weirdness, would have been a bit too broadly humorous for a fairly Serious episode: for much the same reason we must be denied the “You met him? You actually met him? Is he as nice as his videos?” “More nice!” “Was he as cute as the videos?” “He was pretty nice” “Did you … did he let you touch him? Was there heavy petting?” “I got my hands on him!” “No way! You have all the luck” “Awww yeah!” … “Maybe bring me along next time and we can both pet THE Porthos” “Deal!” conversation we all deserve.*
*LOWER DECKS, you’re still in the game: If DEEP SPACE NINE can give us the “I meant Spock” fakeout we all know and love, only you can give us the “Wait, you thought we were fantasising about heavy petting with JONATHAN ARCHER?” moment we never knew we really wanted.
– Of COURSE Doctor Phlox worked out how to cross Humans with Vulcans: the man has been one chorus of “Matchmaker matchmaker …” away from being a Yenta to T’Pol and Trip throughout their non-professional relationship (Unless, of course, he’s working yet another scheme for a threesome with Trip … ).
Also, @ChristopherLBennett, my ongoing reaction to the distinctly gung-ho attitudes towards temporal paradox displayed throughout this episode was “Somehow, somewhere, Department of Temporal Investigations agents are waking up all over history and they are angry.“
@1. jaimebabb: My impression was that the worse-for-wear condition of E2 was mostly the result of that relatively-recent attempt to stop the first Xindi probe, rather than it’s default condition (Given that a lot can happen in a century, it’s likely E2 has been repeatedly battered and rebuilt, but that their latest go-around was much harder to come back from – given how deep they were into Enemy Territory and how Xindi security must have intensified after their attack run, coupled with NX-01 making it’s debut in the Delphic Expanse).
Don’t mix logic and time travel episodes. Just sit back, get some popcorn, and enjoy the show.
So they didn’t want to ‘culturally contaminate’ 21st century Earth, but they were willing to meet up with Enterprise before the event which created them. Couldn’t they look at their own logs, and arrange the rendezvous a dozen episodes earlier? With records of the Andorian betrayal, the Xindi politics, and the Sphere Builder intrigue?
Somewhere around 70 people to form a generation ship, with a strong gender imbalance. And they didn’t insist to get zrozen samples from everyone?
Lorian seemed quite willing to kamikaze this time around. So why not combine the crews and supplies of both ships, and use the E2 with a skeleton crew as an escort?
But doing that would have destroyed the story of the E2 crew, willing to die for a world they had never seen.
Q2: Tor.com’s character count disagrees, Total characters in this post: 81/13000
@6. o.m. Please note that the initial plan of E2 appears to have been to stop the Xindi probe single-handed (Thereby averting any need for Enterprise to enter the Expanse in the first place) and that they took severe damage in the course of their failure, hence their not meeting ‘Our’ NX-01 any earlier in the season (They would have been struggling to catch up, not least because they would have wanted to avoid attracting Xindi attention to either Enterprise).
This meeting with ‘Our’ NX-01 appears to be a ‘Hail Mary’ play (and one over which there would appear to have been fairly serious disagreements, hence T’Pol’s move to outflank her son).
E2: Tor.com’s character count disagrees, Total characters in this post: 81/13000
But nevermind, it switches it to regular script after you post. (now 161/13000)
qbe_64: the inability of many internet platforms to do superscript has been a source of annoyance for me promoting this post…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Thank you; I thought I was the only one who thought elderly T’Pol’s old-age make-up was just awful.
@10/krad: The usual way to denote exponents if you can’t do superscripts is “E^2.”
So when Lorian decided to battle the previous version of their own ship, am I the only one who flashed back to Red Dwarf?
I can understand Mayweather noting the position of the stars being off. IF we’re dealing with stars that have high proper motion, there would be a noticeable displacement in a century. Even if a position discrepancy wouldn’t be visibly noticable, sensors would be able to note the displacement from expected positions. In addition, 117 years in the past, there would be less effects from the Sphere Builders so the Expanse itself would most likely be different.
Exponentiation is x**y, and get off my lawn.
I enjoyed the episode. Is it similar to other Trek episodes? Yup. Do I care? Nope. Why not settle on a planet? you don’t want to become a stationary target for a reptilian or insectoid lucky shot. I prepare to look at the story and not Jolene’s makeup. I enjoyed how conflicted Lorien is. Does he obey the Jonathan Archer in front of him or the Jonathan Archer who was likely his father figure after the death of Trip? The Enterprise vs Enterprise action was fun. Seeing a more advanced but ancient Enterprise take on a newer Enterprise was enjoyable. I wish they would have kept some of past Enterprises crew on our Enterprise to make up for some of the crew losses. Lorien could have sacrificed himself to let Archer continue his mission… Their mission. It also would have been nice to have made references to some advanced tech they got off of old Enterprise that made it more believable that one earth ship could take on all the insectoids, reptilians and sphere builders on it’s own.
“We’re here to make certain that history doesn’t repeat itself.”
This episode basically does for ‘Children of Time’ what ‘Similitude’ does for ‘Tuvix’: Repeats the same plot beat for beat while draining most of the emotional impact from the ending.
Still, judged on its own merits it’s not bad. We get a look at an alternate future for the crew where Enterprise ends up even more beat up and like even more of a “Voyager done right”, trading with other species to stay alive, taking on new crew and surviving in isolation for generations. Given that Lorian’s the child of two people who aren’t always the easiest to like, it’s perhaps no wonder he’s ended up as a bit of a dick, but his last stand, sacrificing himself one way or the other to give his ancestors a fighting chance, does manage some impact. Archer hamstringing him by beaming parts of his ship is one of those things that’s a cool moment but leaves me wondering why they don’t do that every time.
I don’t know if I’m being deliberately difficult but it does feel like Tucker and T’Pol really isn’t being pitched right: I don’t know if it’s aged poorly or if it was always bad. It starts off well with him going to check on her like a supportive friend, but then he loses points by reverting to adolescence and being unable to say “sex”, and his later regaling T’Pol with details of their future selves’ marriage and honeymoon when she’s clearly uncomfortable with the subject is a bit of a jerk move. (The panicked look in her eyes when she learns they have a son speaks volumes.) And yet we have her older self (an almost unrecognisable Jolene Blalock) telling her that he’ll be a great help to her.
Degra’s cameo at the end works, but the scene of him, Jannar and “Depac” talking about nothing at all just feels like contractual obligation. (And it doesn’t even work with the rest of the episode, with Degra saying the reports of other human ships were never confirmed even though we later learn the second Enterprise was right there when the probe was launched.) Despite her insisting it’s impossible here (a running theme with her), T’Pol saw a body with both human and Vulcan ancestors in ‘Future Tense’. Archer marrying an alien woman is a bit of a cop-out to avoid dealing with the idea of him dating one of his crew. I do appreciate Reed’s embarrassment at learning he died a childless bachelor, since I just know I’d end up the same way: Heck, I’ve ended up the same way even without a limited dating pool of only about seventy people, over half of whom are the wrong gender! Of course, Malcolm’s way of dealing with it is to turn on the charm with the first attractive blonde he sees…
I did once casually mention that T’Pol was still around in the mid-23rd century. It’s quite effective to have the characters saying the same things when they come through the corridor for the second time.
A rare episode that hints at the devastating offensive potential of transporters, especially in an era when there don’t appear to be shields that can block them.
Lorian acts like suiciding into the Xindi probe would have been a great idea in hindsight, but I’m not so sure. The Xindi will most likely just build and sent another one, and meanwhile you’ve taken yourself off the battlefield permanently.
Quoth northman: “So when Lorian decided to battle the previous version of their own ship, am I the only one who flashed back to Red Dwarf?”
“Then I say fight!”
“Mr. Rimmer?”
“Better dead than smeg.”
“Yeeees! Cat?”
“Better dead than that oversized butt.”
“Kryten?”
“Better anything than that toupee!”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@4/Ed: As I recall, the character was originally meant to be T’Pau in her youth, but there were legality and royalties issues there, so they made T’Pol a new character. So it’s a good possibility T’Pol is around in the TOS/SNW era.
@20. LynMars: One has to wonder if Amanda Grayson and Ambassador Sarek went to T’Pol for advice when it came to their relationship and their decision to have Spock – I think we can safely agree that if Doc Phlox was still making his rounds in the early 23rd century you can bet your bottom dollar that he’d be the one to ask Ma & Pa Spock if they’d like his help with their science project (The only question is whether Vulcans have some equivalent to the honourable institution of godparent and whether Denobulans are eligible).
I wonder what her answer to the question of how to make a Human-Vulcan relationship work would be?
The only thing I hate more than time travel paradox episodes is time travel paradox episodes that Interrupts an ongoing story arc that is nearing its climax.
I recognized this right off the bat as having a strong resemblance to “Children of Time” which I absolutely love and this episode is definitely an inferior version – it just feels muted and not as epic as it could be. That said, it was always fun and entertaining and the two Enterprise’s trading blows was my favorite part. Old T’Pol‘s make-up reminded me of Yoda.
I’d love to see T’Pol show up at some point on SNW. Does Blalock still act? Maybe if she’s unwilling to do it the role could be recast?
The one misstep of an episode in an otherwise stellar season-ending run. Not only it’s a poor copy of “Children of Time”, but what could have been an interesting loaded moral dilemma loses all steam the minute Lorian and the others take matters into their own hands and steal the injectors. From that point forward, there is no difficult decison for Archer and company to make regarding their descendants. They just have to chase them and get their gear back.
Any moral dilemma is tossed aside. What made “Children of Time” work is that Odo unilaterally made a damning choice that doomed an entire society out of his love for Kira Nerys. In here, the crew are only rightfully defending themselves. A lot less interesting as a story.
But it’s still not that bad of an episode. Some very nice performances across both the main cast and the guest stars. Despite the rather subdued reaction from the crew to the whole unprecedented situation, the episode still finds time and space for some fun interactions. And Roxann Dawson’s direction keeps the whole thing from being forgettable.
Internet can’t do superscripts? E² E<sup>2</sup> E² There we go!
@26/SaraB: What coding did you use to get the superscript to work? I can’t tell, because I can only see the superscript.
It wasn’t just me, thank the powers!
– Looks around nervously, wondering if this invocation of STAR WARS on a TREK thread will trigger some sort of diplomatic incident or Cosmic Crisis –
Ah, thank goodness, I was only making a joke.
Um. Good question, actually: it’s one thing to recast an icon like Spock (Who will go on and on and on, no matter who plays him or how the fans feel about it), but given how much Ms. Blalock put into the role and how little credit she (or indeed most anyone connected with ENTERPRISE) ever seems to get, it would seem rather rude to cast the role out from under her.
I say that T’Pol should only be recast if they’re planning to do a full-fledged reboot!
#21, and now I’m visualizing Dr. Phlox trying to coax Sarek and Amanda into a threesome. The mind boggles…
@29/ED: Oh of course she should be approached first. I just am thinking of a worst case scenario because it looks like she’s essentially retired from acting. I suppose if she didn’t want to do it then the whole idea could be scuttled anyway because it might just amount to a fan-service cameo. But then again, T’Pol would be very old as she was in this episode so whatever actress they use would be slathered in makeup anyway. Or Blalock could just go the voiceover route and let some other poor soul get in the makeup chair like with Alice Krige and the Borg Queen on Picard season 3.
@31/garreth: ” I just am thinking of a worst case scenario because it looks like she’s essentially retired from acting.”
DeForest Kelley effectively retired from acting in the early 1980s, but always came back for McCoy. Exceptions can be made. (And sometimes actors retire for a while, then have career renaissances later in life, like Ke Huy Quan.)
For that matter, Lycia Naff had retired from acting, but she came back to voice Sonya Gomez on Lower Decks….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@32/CLB: Well, I would hope that would be the case with Jolene – Enterprise doesn’t get a lot of love but it was no fault of the cast and it would be nice to see the series recognized in some way other than passing mention in modern streaming Trek.
@31, 32 Well, Ke Huy Quan didn’t exactly exit from acting voluntarily. And while Ms. Blaylock probably isn’t being cast for sexy ingenue roles any more (and would be easily be tired of them), she seems to have showed she had enough acting chops to keep working if she wanted to.
Denobulans could be long-lived too so there’s always the possibility of bringing Phlox back. Or maybe some of the crew did the time travel to the future thing or somehow got stuck in suspended animation. This is Star Trek after all.
@35/gwangung: “Well, Ke Huy Quan didn’t exactly exit from acting voluntarily.”
That’s an overstatement. He chose to move from acting to behind-the-scenes film work because he wasn’t getting good job opportunities. I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that Blalock’s reasons are that different, given how many actresses find themselves getting fewer and narrower job offers as they mature — not to mention how much typecasting young and sexy actresses are subject to. There are many prejudices in the industry, and many reasons to retire from it.
(I’ve often been struck to see behind-the-scenes footage of well-known animation voice actresses like Tara Strong, Jennifer Hale, and Vanessa Marshall and realize they’re stunningly beautiful, more than enough to have had successful on-camera careers if they’d so chosen. I’ve often suspected they went into animation because it was the only way to get offered a wider range of roles than the hero’s hot love interest.)
“she seems to have showed she had enough acting chops to keep working if she wanted to.”
By saying that, you seem to imply that Quan doesn’t have enough acting chops. Let me remind you that he won the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award, Academy Award, and several dozen other awards for his comeback role in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Old T’Pol was fantastic, that’s the stand out of this episode. I do enjoy how they keep getting actresses for “eye candy” purpose putting then in cat suits and then having them be the top shelf actors in the series, that’s hilarious to me. Ms Blalock is retired and a happy Mom now, but oh what I wouldn’t give for her to reprise T’Pol in Strange New Worlds.
They did focus more on the fun of meeting their descendants than they did the general WTF’ery of the moment.
Tactical Transporting is fantastic.
As was the Old Enterprise – Present Enterprise tag team.
I don’t know, I always enjoyed this episode.
@31/garreth: I accept that this episode sets an unfortunate precedent, but given that I believe Leonard Nimoy and Mark Lenard played Spock and Sarek a century further on without old age make-up, and Tim Russ played Tuvok 80 or so years earlier without any attempt to make him look different, I don’t see why a 23rd century T’Pol couldn’t just look like how Jolene Blalock looks now.
@39/cap-mjb: Particularly since Mark Lenard was made up to look older in “Journey to Babel.” He was only six and a half years older than Leonard Nimoy, after all.
It would be easy enough to assume that T’Pol’s appearance here is the result of the harsh conditions she’s been living under, or damage from Expanse anomalies or Trellium-D exposure.
@40. ChristopherLBennett: I most definitely agree with your theory on T’Pol ageing more dramatically than most other Vulcans.
One would also like to point out that Ms. Blalock looking very visibly older as Old T’Pol was almost certainly meant to help emphasise just how much time had passed for ‘E2’, since for obvious reasons we see no other survivors from the original generation of NX-01 crewmen and there would be few other visible reference points for that century or so of wear & tear, other than the ship’s hull.
@27/CLB: I had to resort to the ANSI char insert. On a Windows compy, one holds down the Alt key while typing 0178 on the numeric keypad (with NumLock on) then release Alt key. Character code 178 (decimal, or 0xB2 hex) is superscript-2 in both unicode and Windows-1252 code pages.
Were we ever told that the transporters on the “E2” weren’t working? Because lacking that, I don’t get why E2 didn’t weaponize its own transporters once Archer started doing that.