“Home”
Written by Mike Sussman
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 4, Episode 3
Production episode 079
Original air date: October 22, 2004
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. The “senior staff” of Enterprise (e.g., everyone in the opening credits) is given a big welcome home in San Francisco. Archer gives a speech that focuses on the twenty-seven people who didn’t make it home.
Archer’s debriefing with Forrest, Williams, and Soval goes poorly, at first. Archer is defensive, particularly toward Soval, given Soval’s attempts to keep Enterprise from even going to the Delphic Expanse. Forrest puts the debrief on hold so Archer can take some time to clear his head.
He goes rock-climbing, where he’s joined, to his surprise, by the newly minted captain of Columbia, NX-02, Captain Hernandez. She reminds him that you should never rock climb alone (a lesson another Enterprise captain will forget a century and a half hence). As they climb, they discuss various things, including Archer’s regret that he’s no longer the gung-ho explorer that he was three years ago—and that Hernandez is now.
T’Pol goes home to Vulcan. Tucker was planning to stay on Enterprise to oversee the refit, but Archer pretty much orders him to take a vacation. But his home was destroyed, and he has nowhere else on Earth he wants to go. T’Pol invites him along.
Upon arrival, the pair of them learn that T’Pol’s mother T’Les has retired from her position at the Science Academy. This surprises T’Pol. Another surprise is when her fiancé Koss comes to visit. While T’Pol had broken their engagement, Koss still wants to marry her. Koss also reveals that T’Les was forced into retirement, but if T’Pol agrees to marry Koss, he can prevail upon his father to use his influence to get her reinstated.
T’Les finally tells the whole truth: she was accused of removing classified documents shortly after the incident on P’Jem. They couldn’t touch T’Pol on Enterprise, but they could mess with her family in punishment for the destruction of the monastery.
T’Les, not being a moron, can see that Tucker and T’Pol love each other. But T’Pol also agrees to marry Koss in order to allow her mother to be reinstated. Tucker isn’t thrilled to have traveled all this way to see her marry someone else, but he declines T’Les’ suggestion that he share his true feelings for her. Tucker’s rationale is that T’Pol has enough pressure on her as it is…
Reed, Mayweather, and Phlox are hanging out in a bar and signing autographs, but things get ugly when one guy objects to Phlox’s presence, telling him he’d be more comfortable in the Vulcan Embassy. This leads eventually to a bar fight.
Later, Phlox is giving Sato a checkup, assuring her that the brain parasites Dolim injected into her are almost entirely out of her system. He then declines to accompany her and Mayweather to Madame Chang’s, even though he had said he was eagerly looking forward to once again having their egg drop soup. Phlox believes it would be better for everyone if he stayed on the ship rather than risk another xenophobic incident. Sato isn’t happy, but does agree to bring him back some takeout.
Archer finishes the debrief, and has a moment with Soval. Tucker attends T’Pol and Koss’ wedding.
The gazelle speech. Archer spends the entire episode in a (completely understandable) PTSD funk, complete with a nightmare where he’s ambushed by Xindi-Reptilians.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol spends the entire episode looking anxious; she’s very obviously still having trouble with her emotions. Finding out her mother was politically railroaded because of T’Pol’s actions doesn’t help matters.
Florida Man. Florida Man Visits Alien Planet!
Optimism, Captain! When threatened, Denobulans can blow out their heads, similar to that of a blowfish. Phlox does this during the bar fight.
Ambassador Pointy. Soval is more than a little confrontational during the debriefing, but when it’s over, he accepts Archer’s apology for the captain’s earlier outburst, and also admits that, despite his initial objections, Archer is the right person for the job of Enterprise captain. Soval then shakes a surprised Archer’s hand.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… Vulcan hospitality tradition includes getting up at 4am to prepare breakfast if you’re a guest in someone’s house. Tucker doesn’t find this out until 4am the first morning he’s there…
Blue meanies. Archer at one point angrily points out to Soval that the Andorians were more help to Enterprise’s mission than the Vulcans were.
Better get MACO. To Hernandez’s surprise, Archer suggests that she assign a MACO to tactical.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Archer and Hernandez used to date, but they ended it because he was her superior officer. They’re equals now, so they rekindle their romance while rock climbing.
I’ve got faith…
“I’ve been told that people are calling us heroes. When it comes to my crew, you won’t get any argument from me. But I think it’s important that we remember the heroes who aren’t with us: the twenty-seven crewmen who didn’t make it back. Without their sacrifice, I wouldn’t be standing here right now—none of us would. But I’m sure I speak on behalf of my entire crew when I say, it’s good to be home.”
–Archer’s words to the crowd welcoming them home.
Welcome aboard. We’ve got existing recurring regulars Vaughn Armstrong as Forrest (back from “The Expanse”), Gary Graham as Soval (back from “Twilight”), and Jim Fitzpatrick as Williams (back from “Regeneration”). Armstrong and Graham will be back in “The Forge,” while this is Fitzpatrick’s final appearance.
We also get four new recurring characters: Ada Maris as Hernandez, Joanna Cassidy as T’Les, Michael Reilly Burke as Koss, and Jack Donner as the priest. Maris will return in “Affliction,” Cassidy will be back in “Awakening,” Burke (who previously played a rogue Borg in TNG’s “Descent, Part II” and a Cardassian dissident in DS9’s “Profit and Loss”) will be back in “The Forge,” and Donner (who previously played Sub-commander Tal in the original series’ “The Enterprise Incident”) will return in “Kir’Shara.”
Trivial matters: Soval cautioned against entering the Expanse in “The Expanse,” which is also when the Xindi prototype attacked Earth destroying, among other places, Tucker’s Florida home. The Andorians aided Enterprise in both “Proving Ground” and “Zero Hour.” Archer points to the sky at the first new world they explored and tells Hernandez what happened there in “Strange New World.” Phlox’s love of egg drop soup was first mentioned in “Broken Bow.” Sato had brain parasites injected into her by Dolim in “Countdown.”
Humans’ xenophobia in the wake of the Xindi attack will be revisited in “Demons” and “Terra Prime.”
Hernandez’s name is never spoken in the script, bizarrely, though that same script refers to her as Erika Hernandez. Her family name will finally be spoken in “Affliction.”
Absurdly, there was a subsection of Trek fandom that objected to Hernandez’s presence, because this takes place prior to the original series’ “Turnabout Intruder,” and Janet Lester said that women weren’t allowed in Kirk’s world of starship captains and so there shouldn’t have been a female starship captain in a story chronologically prior to that story. Luckily, that was a particularly dopey subsection of fandom, and most people didn’t listen to them, especially not the producers of Enterprise…
Archer mentions Captain Jefferies, the head of Enterprise’s design team, also mentioned in “First Flight,” named after Matt Jefferies, who designed the original Enterprise back in 1964.
While this is Koss’ first appearance, he has been mentioned several times, most notably in “Breaking the Ice,” when T’Pol broke off their engagement.
When trying to blow off Koss, T’Pol mentions both her sickness—which could refer either to her Pa’nar Syndrome (contracted in “Fusion” and diagnosed in “Stigma”) or her trellium poisoning (contracted in “Impulse,” seemingly cured, but it was revealed in “Damage” that she continued to use trellium)—and the kal-if-fee, the ritual combat to get out of a marriage, first seen in the original series’ “Amok Time.” In addition, the opening of the wedding ceremony at the end is the same as that heard by T’Pau in “Amok Time.”
It has long been a fan assumption that Vulcan orbits the star 40 Eridani. While this isn’t stated specifically in dialogue here, Tucker does say he traveled sixteen light-years to Vulcan, and 40 Eridani is about sixteen light-years from Earth…
Hernandez tells Archer that her old high school was renamed after Archer. She jokes that more schools are named after him than are named after Zefram Cochrane. It was established in the movie First Contact that La Forge went to one of the high schools named after Cochrane.
It’s been a long road… “I lost something out there—I don’t know how to get it back.” I’ve always been much more invested in the aftermath of a conflict than the conflict itself, so it’s perhaps not a surprise that I adore this episode. In fact, I like this even more than the similarly themed TNG episode “Family,” mostly because the trauma Archer is suffering is more long-term. It goes all the way back to his devastation and anger at the attack on Earth in “The Expanse” through to his questionable moral choices (“Anomaly” and “Damage” in particular), as well as having to deal with the loss of more than a quarter of his crew.
It helps that Scott Bakula has superb chemistry with the wonderful Ada Maris as Hernandez. Maris is wonderfully calm and relaxed and centered, which is exactly what a rudderless Archer needs. Bakula plays Archer as a total mess, as his entire life’s work has turned into this ugly thing that he can’t shake.
The entire episode is about consequences, and doesn’t shy away from any of them. Some are positive: Enterprise’s return to a not-blown-up Earth, the spheres having been destroyed before they could expand to engulf the entire quadrant.
But far too many are negative. There’s the wave of xenophobia on Earth, which would be all too familiar to contemporary viewers who were seeing far too many Americans treating Muslims the way the jerks in the bar treated Phlox. There’s T’Pol’s slow recovery from trellium poisoning, which Jolene Blalock plays beautifully. T’Pol’s entire affect is just a bit off, like she’s barely holding in an explosion of temper, which is a pretty accurate description of what T’Pol’s going through.
And there’s T’Les’ ouster as the political fallout from T’Pol helping Archer expose the illegal listening post on P’Jem, which leads to T’Pol reversing her decision to back out of her arranged marriage, a move that obviously breaks her heart and Tucker’s. But Tucker doesn’t push, because he knows it’s important to T’Pol that her mother not suffer from the consequences of her own actions. Yet that, too, will have consequences…
Just a beautiful examination of the effect that trauma has on people, and which would’ve been a much more effective start to the season than a Space Nazi two-parter. Alas. Not that a large enough number of people were still watching at this point…
Warp factor rating: 10
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges you all to support the Kickstarter for Grandma Got Kidnapped by Aliens (and Other Holiday Disasters), edited by Hildy Silverman for Crazy 8 Press. This anthology of holidays gone horribly wrong will include stories by fellow Trek scribes Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, Paul Kupperberg, Glenn Hauman, Aaron Rosenberg, Geoffrey Thorne, Derek Tyler Attico, and Howard Weinstein. If the book makes a stretch goal, Keith will do a story as well! Please consider supporting.
