“The Forgotten”
Written by Chris Black & David A. Goodman
Directed by LeVar Burton
Season 3, Episode 20
Production episode 072
Original air date: April 28, 2004
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. While en route to their rendezvous with Degra—which, it becomes clear, is why the Aquatics took Archer back to Enterprise rather than to the council last time—Archer holds a memorial service for the people they’ve lost on this mission.
T’Pol visits Phlox in sickbay, and the doctor reports that there’s only minute traces of trellium-D left in her system. However, she is still having trouble controlling her emotions, and Phlox says that the damage the trellium did to her neural pathways is still an issue, and may be for some time. It may be something she has to live with.
The bodies of the last of the unaccounted-for crew have been found: Jane Taylor, one of Tucker’s engineers, and Kamata. Archer orders Tucker to write a condolence letter to Taylor’s family; when Tucker tries to fob it off on Rostov, Archer refuses to let him do so, saying it’s important for Taylor’s family to know what happened from her CO.
In the shattered remains of the mess hall, Tucker confides his struggles in writing the condolence letter to T’Pol. She notices that he’s exhausted, and tells him to get some sleep. But then there’s an explosion. Tucker rushes to deal with it, though he misses the fact that there’s a hull breach that’s venting both atmosphere and warp plasma.
Enterprise rendezvouses with Degra and Jannar inside the cloaking field of a sphere. Degra explains that they lied to the Reptilians because they wanted proof of Archer’s accusations. First the captain shows them the bodies of the three Reptilians that Archer and T’Pol shot in 2004 Detroit. Degra recognizes one of them as a Reptilian scientist who disappeared shortly after the council rejected the bio-weapon plan. Then Archer shows them the bio-weapon itself. Then he takes them to sickbay, where Phlox shows them the scans of the alien who tried to sabotage the ship before he faded away. Phlox’s theory is that he was, in essence, allergic to this universe. The general theory is that the alien—who’s the same species as the woman Degra and Jannar talked to last time—was being tested to see if the spheres had altered this dimension enough for these aliens to be able to survive it.
Degra and Jannar return to their ship to examine the physical evidence Archer has provided. There is evidence of chronometric distortion on the bodies and the bio-weapon, but Jannar thinks they could be fabricated. He’s skeptical—there’s plenty of evidence of Reptilian deception, yes, but that’s all it is. Degra, though, is concerned.
After Phlox orders him to get some rest lest his rapidly increasing sleep deprivation causes him to blow up the ship or something, Tucker goes to his quarters to take a nap. He has a very vivid dream where he talks to Taylor, and the deceased engineer berates him for not writing a proper condolence letter to her family.
Archer brings Degra to the command center to show him all the data they’ve collected. Tucker takes the opportunity to make many snide comments about his murdering seven million people on Earth (he just says Florida, even though the weapon also took out chunks of Central America, but then again, Tucker’s sister was in Florida).
Buy the Book
The Archive Undying
The crack in the hull grows, and the plasma fire is now huge. Tucker and Reed put on EVA suits to go out onto the hull to shut down the flow regulators. They manage it, but Reed gets very close to the plasma fire, and has to be brought to sickbay to get his temperature down. Degra expresses his regrets for Reed’s life being endangered, and Tucker goes nuclear on him, asking what’s one more dead human? Seven million is okay, but seven million and one makes him sorry?
Archer and Degra talk in private. When Archer says they’ve determined that there are fifty-nine spheres, Degra corrects him: there are seventy-eight. The Xindi have had more time to study them. However, no Xindi has gotten as detailed a scan as what Enterprise got when they found the damaged sphere.
A Reptilian ship closes in on them. The Reptilian captain reprimands Degra, since this meeting was obviously not sanctioned by the council. Degra and Jannar agree to dock with the Reptilian ship, refusing Archer’s request for data on how to fight the Reptilians. Instead, Degra and Jannar’s ship fire on the Reptilians, with Enterprise ceasing fire after the ship is disabled, but Jannar and Degra actually finish the job. Degra ruefully says that they had no choice, as the Reptilians would have reported them to the council.
Degra gives Archer the coordinates for the council chambers, as well as a way to navigate the subspace corridors the Xindi use, which will get them there faster. He can present his evidence to the council there.
Tucker opens up to T’Pol, telling her that the reason why he can’t write a condolence letter to Taylor’s family is because he keeps thinking about his sister. He’d been able to compartmentalize it up until now, but having to write about Taylor just makes him think about Elizabeth.
T’Pol comforts him and eventually he’s able to write the letter, ending it by touching his framed picture of his sister and saying, “Goodbye, Elizabeth.”
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Hull breaches can sometimes lead to plasma fires. So that sucks.
The gazelle speech. Archer is magnificently low-key and determined when showing the evidence to Degra and Jannar. Here’s one piece. That’s not enough? Fine, here’s another piece. Still not enough? Okay, here’s more. And so on.
Archer also reveals to Degra that they erased his memory of the deception on the shuttle.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol has been weaned off trellium-D (which happened really fast, but whatever), but the emotional turbulence is still there. She also reminds Tucker that Vulcans have emotions, they just suppress them, mainly because they’re so turbulent that the most intense of them would overwhelm.
Florida Man. Florida Man Has Nightmares About Dead Engineer, Sister.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox won’t take no for an answer when Tucker insists that he doesn’t need sleep, and his calm, smiling demeanor as he forces the engineer to get some rest is beautifully done.
I’ve got faith…
“And I realize that I’m not thinking about Taylor at all, I’m thinking about Elizabeth. There’s so many people dead—I tried not to see her any differently than the other seven million. So I’ve spent the last nine months trying to pretend she was just another victim. But she’s my sister, T’Pol! My baby sister! I envy you Vulcans…”
“You think the loss of a colleague or friend doesn’t affect us? It does. But if we give in to those emotions, they overwhelm us. You’re the ones to be envied.”
–Tucker and T’Pol both realizing the grass is greener on the other side.
Welcome aboard. The “big” guest is Seth MacFarlane, who makes a gratuitous cameo as an engineer Tucker yells at. At the time best known as the creator and star of Family Guy, and a huge Trek fan, MacFarlane is but the latest in a series of guest appearances by actors who are big Trek fans (see also Mick Fleetwood, Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Alexander, etc.). MacFarlane will return as the same character in “Affliction.”
Kipleigh Brown plays the dream image of Taylor.
In addition, Randy Oglesby and Rick Worthy are back from “Damage” as Degra and Jannar, respectively, while Bob Morrisey plays the Xindi-Reptilian captain. Morrisey previously played Strom in “Stigma.” Oglesby and Worthy will both return next time in “E2.”
Trivial matters: Earth was attacked—and seven million people, including Elizabeth Tucker, were killed—in “The Expanse.” Enterprise encountered a damaged sphere in “Anomaly.” The Reptilians’ time-traveling creation of a bio-weapon was stopped by Archer and T’Pol in “Carpenter Street.” Archer and Degra had lengthy conversations that Degra’s memory of was erased in “Stratagem.” The extra-dimensional alien sabotaged Enterprise and then faded away in “Harbinger.” Most of the people who are mourned at the top of the episode, including Taylor, were killed in the Reptilian attack on Enterprise in “Azati Prime.” T’Pol’s trellium-D addiction was revealed in “Damage,” where it was established that she started the trellium injections following “Impulse.”
While Joseph Will does not appear in the episode (and indeed, will not be seen onscreen again on the show), Rostov is mentioned more than once.
Guest star Seth MacFarlane will go on to create, executive produce, and star in The Orville, a science fiction series that is very obviously inspired by Star Trek, which ran from 2017-2019 on FOX and in 2022 on Hulu. Among the folks on his production staff for that show were Enterprise co-creator and executive producer Brannon Braga, this episode’s co-writer David A. Goodman, and Trek scripters/producers André Bormanis and Joe Menosky. Many Trek actors made appearances on The Orville, among them John Billingsley, plus one—Penny Johnson-Jerald—was a series regular.
It’s been a long road… “Just remember me—is that asking so much?” Star Trek has always had a redshirt problem. Indeed, it’s Trek’s tendency (particularly in the original series, but it’s been all over every aspect of the franchise) to have disposable security guards that led to the coining of “redshirt” to mean “dead-meat character.”
It’s one of the most despicable tendencies in all dramatic fiction, truly, having disposable characters whose deaths are barely acknowledged or paid attention to. To be fair, Enterprise has been generally free of this tendency, mostly by not having anyone die, at least until they buggered into the Delphic Expanse.
However, it should be noted that when Trek manages to avoid the redshirt phenomenon and make the deceased folks someone we care about—TNG’s “The Bonding,” DS9’s “The Ship,” Discovery’s “Project Daedalus” and “The Red Angel”—it really really works well, and “The Forgotten” is a worthy addition to that list.
Connor Trinneer absolutely knocks it out of the park here, as Tucker is in eighteen kinds of pain. His ability to compartmentalize his grief over his sister has been completely blown to pieces by the bodies dropping all around him, plus the ship is being held together with, as he himself puts it, spit and bailing wire and he’s responsible for fixing it. Then, as the rancid cherry on top of this awful sundae, the guy responsible for the weapon that killed his sister is standing there on the ship being all chummy with the captain.
Randy Oglesby hits a back-to-back homer here (he says, abusing the baseball metaphor), as he also is having a great deal of trouble reconciling his need to save his people with everything he’s learning from and about the Enterprise crew. At one point when Tucker is yelling at him as he leaves the room, Degra hesitates, and you expect him to turn around and say something. But instead, he leaves, shoulders slumped, saying nothing—because what can he possibly say? It’s a brilliant choice by writers Chris Black and David A. Goodman, phenomenally executed by Oglesby and director LeVar Burton.
T’Pol’s issues serve as a nice complement to Tucker’s, as both of them are losing their ability to rein in their emotions. In Tucker’s case, it’s due to a combo of grief and sleep deprivation, and in T’Pol’s it’s due to her being a dumbass junkie, but it results in their superlative conversation about grief and emotional control.
Credit also to Scott Bakula, who gives us an Archer who—in direct contrast to his chief engineer—is able to not only keep control but channel that control into a calm directness and persistence. The barrage of evidence he throws at Jannar and Degra is beautifully shown (though I was surprised he didn’t break the lock on Daniels’ quarters by way of proving that time travel is a thing that they’ve done).
Finally, the dream sequence where Tucker is confronted by his memory of Taylor is a masterpiece, with Kipleigh Brown making you feel like Taylor herself is right there, practically begging Tucker to eulogize her to her family, and being very confused and hurt when he says he can’t. In that scene in particular, Taylor serves as a proxy for all eighteen Enterprise crew who died, just as Elizabeth Tucker has been for the seven million who died on Earth.
It’s one of many great scenes in an episode that reminds us all of the brutal consequences of war—because this is a war, one that started when the Xindi weapon cut a swath through Florida and Central America—and the devastation of losing a life. Of losing any life.
Warp factor rating: 10
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!
