“Cease Fire”
Written by Chris Black
Directed by David Straiton
Season 2, Episode 15
Production episode 041
Original air date: February 12, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. For a hundred years, Vulcan and Andoria have fought over a world, which the Vulcans have named Paan Mokar, and which the Andorians call Weytahn. The Andorians colonized it and terraformed (Andoria-formed?) it, but then Vulcan annexed it, and they’ve been fighting over it ever since.
Shran has been assigned to claim Weytahn, and fighting has broken out. Shran has taken three Vulcan prisoners, and has specifically requested that Archer mediate negotiations to return the prisoners. Soval is not thrilled with this demand, but asks Forrest to divert Enterprise to Paan Mokar. Archer is stunned to be asked for help by a Vulcan, though it makes more sense to him when he’s told that Shran was the one who actually requested him.
Soval wants Archer to take Sub-commander Muroc, who is in charge of military forces on Paan Mokar, with him. Archer refuses, as it will weaken his negotiating position to be accompanied by a Vulcan military chaperone. However, he is willing to take T’Pol.
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They fly to the surface, but between atmospheric interference and Andorian jamming, they’re flying blind and deaf. They’re met by a military contingent, led by Shran’s lieutenant, Tarah. For her part, Tarah has been bugging Shran all along that they should just fight for the planet, rather than talk, all along pointing out how untrustworthy and horrible Vulcans are.
Tarah puts bags over Archer and T’Pol’s heads—for security, allegedly—and brings them to Shran. The Andorians demand that Vulcan leaves Weytahn alone, as they were there first, and only then will they release the prisoners. (Shran and Tarah are also pissed that Archer refers to them as hostages, as Soval had done.) Archer points out rightly that he didn’t need to drag Enterprise off its mission so Archer could pass on Shran’s demands to Soval. There needs to be some actual negotiating. He convinces Shran to let one of the three prisoners go as a gesture of good faith.
Soval is reluctant to agree to meet with Shran, even with the freeing of a hostage/prisoner, but Archer convinces him (barely) with the same argument that he used on Shran: that each side thinks the other doesn’t want to end this fighting, and that this is an opportunity to prove them wrong.
There’s a ticking clock now, too, as three Andorian ships are approaching the system. They have five hours to hammer out some kind of agreement, or it’s going to be war.
Shran orders Tarah to escort Soval and Archer to him, and emphasizes that they are not to be harmed. So of course, when the shuttlepod descends into the atmosphere, it’s shot down.
Soval, who was an intelligence officer on Paan Mokar a century earlier, recognizes the crash site as being a couple of kilometers from a Vulcan outpost, but Archer refuses to go there. He promised to deliver Soval to Shran, and he’s going to do that, dadgummit. Soval thinks he’s insane, but there was so much firepower zipping back and forth, it’s impossible to say who shot them down, plus there’s never going to be peace if the two of them don’t meet. As they move toward where Archer thinks the Andorian base is (their scanners still don’t work), Soval gets shot, and eventually they’re pinned down by an ambush by two Andorians.
In orbit, Muroc informs Tucker that the shuttle has been shot down. Tucker insists on being involved in search-and-rescue operations, which Muroc snidely declines.
Back on the planet, T’Pol and Soval lay down cover fire while Archer sneaks around behind the Andorians. (Soval objects, saying he hasn’t fired a weapon in fifty years; Archer counters that he doesn’t have to hit anything, just fire randomly to cover the captain’s movements.) Archer knocks out one Andorian and takes his rifle, holding it on Tarah to get her to stop. However, Archer loses his footing as he’s escorting her away, and they get into fisticuffs.
In orbit, the Andorian ships arrive and face off against the Vulcan ships. Tucker orders Mayweather to put Enterprise between the two factions. Muroc and the Andorian commander, Telev, warn Tucker off. Tucker, however, not only stands his ground but orders Reed to fire on any ship that makes a move. Tucker wants everyone to keep their metaphorical guns holstered until they find Archer and Soval.
On the planet, Shran eventually shows up, with Tarah insisting that Archer was the aggressor and that the Vulcans set this all up. Archer reminds Shran that the Vulcans wouldn’t shoot down a shuttle with their own ambassador in it. Eventually, Tarah admits that she disobeyed Shran’s orders, because the commander, in her opinion (and, she says, the opinion of others) is weak for capitulating to the Vulcans.
After Shran has her taken away, he orders his medics to look to Soval. This is communicated to the Vulcans, Andorians, and Enterprise, and everyone stands down.
With Archer mediating, Shran and Soval work out terms of a cease-fire, with talks to continue on Andoria. Shran proposes a toast and pours some Andorian ale. Soval initially says that Vulcans don’t drink, but then allows as how this is a special occasion, so he, Muroc, and T’Pol join Archer and Shran in toasting their efforts. As T’Pol escorts Soval out, the latter pays Archer something resembling a compliment.
The gazelle speech. Archer spends the entire episode doggedly sticking to the notion of getting Soval and Shran talking over a negotiating table, no matter who gets in his way, whether it’s Soval’s stubbornness, Shran’s single-mindedness, or Tarah’s violent insubordination.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. Soval gets to have a private chat with T’Pol, pointing out how her assignment to Enterprise has stalled her career options and that the gratification she says she feels as Enterprise’s first mate is an emotional response, and oh yeah, she’s starting to acquire a human accent, too. He’s a peach, is Soval…
Florida Man. Florida Man Plays Chicken With Warring Factions.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox has to bombard Archer with a type of radiation that will make him resistant to a pathogen in the atmosphere (one that doesn’t affect Vulcans, and presumably doesn’t hurt Andorians, either). This scene is mainly there to (a) justify John Billingsley’s being in the opening credits and (b) have Archer give a clumsy-ass speech about what humans’ mission in space might really mean.
Phlox also warns Archer to be careful, as battlefields are dangerous, which is when we find out that he was a medic in the Denobulan military in his youth.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… The Vulcans are determined to keep Paan Mokar for themselves, as ceding it to the Andorians would give them a position dangerously close to Vulcan space. Their justification for annexing it is so weak as to be nonexistent.
Blue meanies. There is a faction of Andorians—represented by Tarah—that wants all-out war with Vulcan. Luckily, Shran is one of the cooler heads that prevails.
More on this later… Archer makes, as stated above, a clumsy-ass speech about how humans’ mission in space might not just be to explore new worlds and chart new systems, but also to become part of the greater galactic community. This foreshadows the fact that the three species involved in this episode—humans, Andorians, and Vulcans—are among the founders of the Federation.
I’ve got faith…
“I don’t like pushin’ the engines this hard. The injectors are running at a hundred and ten percent.”
“They’re rated for one hundred and twenty.”
“And my underwear is flame-retardant—that doesn’t mean I’m gonna light myself on fire to prove it.”
–Tucker and T’Pol bantering about engine usage.
Welcome aboard. We’ve got three recurring regulars: Jeffrey Combs making his only second-season appearance as Shran, back from “Shadows of P’Jem,” next to be seen in “Proving Ground”; Gary Graham as Soval, back from “Shockwave, Part II,” next up in “The Expanse”; and Vaughn Armstrong as Forrest, also last seen in “Shockwave, Part II,” and who’ll be back in “Future Tense.”
Plus we’ve got two Trek veterans as Andorians. Christopher Shea plays Telev, having played Sajen in “Detained,” as well as Keevan in DS9’s “Rocks and Shoals” and “The Magnificent Ferengi” and Saowin in Voyager’s “Think Tank.” And the great Suzie Plakson, having played Selar in TNG’s “The Schizoid Man,” K’Ehleyr in TNG’s “The Emissary” and “Reunion,” and a Q in Voyager’s “The Q and the Grey,” plays Tarah.
Additionally, John Balma plays Sub-commander Muroc and Zane Cassidy plays another Andorian soldier.
Trivial matters: This episode continues the storyline of the Vulcan-Andorian conflict that was previously seen in “The Andorian Incident” and “Shadows of P’Jem.”
When Muroc assures Tucker that Vulcan High Command has more experience in search-and-rescue operations than Starfleet, Tucker snidely throws the rather violent Vulcan s-and-r in “Shadows of P’Jem” in Muroc’s face.
It’s been a long road… “Join me in a drink to celebrate our mutual dissatisfaction.” One of Enterprise’s best episodes, which is not surprising, given that it continues the Vulcan-Andorian storyline that has been, by far, the best recurring element of the show.
There’s so much to like here, starting with the performances. Standing out in particular is Gary Graham. In far too many of the previous appearances of Soval, Graham has been stiff and unconvincing, but he’s superb in this one, finally finding the “emotional control” button on his acting dashboard instead of regularly pushing the “emotionless” one. In particular, he has absolutely nailed the Vulcan sass. (“Didn’t you hear the captain? The ball is in our court…”)
He’s matched by Jolene Blalock, who provides superlative support throughout. I love how she buries Archer in research material, and Archer gets cranky right up to the part where she explains that she gave him all that stuff because she wants him to prove Soval wrong about his ability to handle this negotiation. And at the end, when Soval pays him a typically backhanded Vulcan compliment (“Captain, your presence here has not been overly meddlesome”), the look on T’Pol’s face is epic, a beautifully restrained Vulcan version of a “holy shit!” expression that she shoots Archer.
Both Graham and Blalock play their one scene alone together very nicely, also, with Soval prodding her and T’Pol giving near-constant pushback on Soval’s attempts to get her to stop fooling around with the humans and come back to work for him like a sensible Vulcan. Chris Black’s script is particularly strong here, with Soval using lots of clever rhetorical tricks to try to manipulate T’Pol, and T’Pol magnificently deflecting all of it. Credit also to Black for having both Soval and Tarah use the same reductive propaganda about each others’ side. (Vulcans always lie and can’t be trusted! Andorians are always violent and can’t be trusted!)
I also really like the way Scott Bakula plays Archer here. The self-consciously-scripted bit where he tells Phlox about how he wants to help found the Federation some day aside, Bakula mostly is just trying to get two stubborn asses to shut up and sit down and talk to each other instead of at each other.
And after prior inept turns in the captain’s chair (I’m looking at you, “The Seventh”), it’s nice to see Tucker comport himself well in his role as acting captain, trying to keep the peace and going so far as to play a very dangerous game of chicken with the six ships that want to blast each other out of the sky.
Then we have two of Trek’s best guest actors in Jeffrey Combs and Suzie Plakson. Combs continues Shran’s combination of snottiness with nobility, as his desire for peace is genuine. Plakson has the more thankless task, as the biggest flaw in the episode is that Tarah’s betrayal is pretty blindingly obvious and played with all the subtlety of a nuclear explosion. The climax where Tarah shoots down the shuttle and chases after the team feels grafted on to up the action quotient, to no real good end. The meat here—as it is in most good Trek stories—is the tension and the characterization. Still, Plakson herself is phenomenal as always. (I was amused to observe that director David Straiton had to use some creative blocking to deal with the fact that Plakson is a good six inches taller than Combs…)
Several things bring the rating on this episode down a couple of notches. One is the obviousness of Tarah’s betrayal. Another is Archer’s clumsy-ass speech to Phlox. Thirdly, as described, the Vulcans are one hundred percent in the wrong here. They basically just barged in and took a planet the Andorians had claimed. It cuts the episode’s tension off at the knees because there’s really no justification for what the Vulcans did a hundred years previous, and no sense—or even expression of the possibility—of regret or remorse or admission of wrongdoing. Nor is there really an accusation of it from Archer, which there really should be. Their claiming of the world—at least as it’s described in the script—is wholly indefensible. The story would be much stronger if both sides had an equally legitimate, or at least equally justifiable, claim to the world.
And, finally, both Shran and Tarah continue to use the racist term “pink-skin” to describe humans. (I hasten to add, the term is a racist one on the part of the writers who coined it and continue to employ it in their scripts, not the characters using it.) Every use of the phrase damages the episode, the series, and the franchise.
Warp factor rating: 8
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