“Kir’Shara”
Written by Mike Sussman
Directed by David Livingston
Season 4, Episode 9
Production episode 085
Original air date: December 3, 2004
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. After getting scenes from both “The Forge” and “Awakening,” we see High Command having a meeting about the Andorians. V’Las shows Andorian ships massing at Paan Mokar—a.k.a. Weytahn, which is now an Andorian world. V’Las explains that they’ve used probes to create warp signatures to make the Andorians think the Vulcans are going to attack there.
In truth, they’re gathering at Regulus to invade. When Kuvak questions the invasion, V’Las shows footage of an Andorian ship testing a Xindi weapon. V’Las says that Vulcan needs to get ahead of things before the Andorians use the Xindi weapons on them. Kuvak is skeptical, and also annoyed that this set of troop movements was instigated without the rest of the council knowing about it. V’Las says that there may be Andorian agents in High Command, a notion that Kuvak also views with skepticism.
In the Forge, Archer, T’Pol, and T’Pau are traveling on foot with the Kir’Shara. Archer is determined to get it to the capital to show to the High Command. T’Pau is on board with that notion. T’Pol, not so much—she thinks they should go to the rendezvous point and beam back to Enterprise. (Boy, would she be surprised to find that Enterprise is in Andorian space right now.) But Archer is insistent that the Kir’Shara be revealed to the Vulcan people.
T’Pol and T’Pau argue a lot about what to do next. T’Pol’s concern is that Archer isn’t rational, since he has at least two katras in his head (that of both Surak and Syrran/Arev). T’Pol then apologizes for her emotional outburst, as she’s not dealing well with her mother’s death. T’Pau informs T’Pol that T’Les was a valuable confidant and comrade and T’Pau also misses her. T’Pau has melded with T’Les in the past, and offers to meld with T’Pol in order to share her mother’s thoughts. T’Pol explains that she can’t meld, as she has Pa’nar Syndrome. T’Pau angrily informs T’Pol that the notion that Pa’nar is incurable is bullshit propaganda from High Command. All it takes to cure it is a meld with a properly trained person, which T’Pau is.
Enterprise enters Andorian space. Reed—doing his job both as the head of security for the ship and as acting first officer under Tucker—objects to this course of action, as it’s a betrayal of their allies on Vulcan and against the orders Admiral Gardner gave to return to Earth. Tucker says they are returning to Earth, they’re just taking the long way ’round…
Soval then meets with Tucker, and they agree that their best bet is to contact Shran, since both the Enterprise crew and Soval have working relationships with the general.
High Command has captured eight Syrrannites who survived the bombardment. They have admitted that Syrran is dead, and that there are three more survivors—two Vulcans and a human—who have the Kir’Shara. Kuvak reports this to V’Las, who dismisses the Kir’Shara as a myth. V’Las then orders a sublieutenant to have Major Talok seek out those three survivors and kill them.
Enterprise arrives at a nebula where, it turns out, Shran is hiding with a fleet. Soval and Tucker inform a shocked Shran about the planned invasion. (The false signals at Weythan/Paan Mokar are never brought up for some inexplicable reason.) Shran is not sure he believes them, but returns to his ship to consult with his superiors.
Archer, T’Pol, and T’Pau are ambushed by Talok and some thugs. T’Pau and Archer manage to escape, but T’Pol is captured. She cleverly lies to Talok, saying that she’s a Syrrannite and that Archer and T’Pau were headed to Mount Seleya. Talok believes her, but also sends her to the capital to face High Command’s justice.
Archer refuses to leave T’Pol in Talok’s hands, and forces T’Pau to follow Talok and his thugs. However, by the time they find and subdue them, T’Pol is already gone. Now they have two reasons to get to the capital: to rescue T’Pol and to reveal the Kir’Shara. They need access to a transporter, and Archer has an idea who to ask…
Shran surreptitiously transports Soval off Enterprise then retreats to the nebula. Shran puts the erstwhile ambassador in a specially designed interrogation device, one that disrupts Vulcans’ emotional control, then asks where the Vulcan fleet really is. However, Soval stands by his answer that they’re massing at Regulus—mainly because it’s the truth. Shran doesn’t believe that Soval would betray his people, and Soval angrily says that he’s trying to save his people from a pointless war.
After Tucker does some tinkering, Enterprise is able to find and fire upon Shran’s ship in the nebula. Rather than get into a firefight and make enemies of the humans as well, Shran releases Soval back to Enterprise. Soval could have told Shran what he knew the Andorian wanted to hear, but he stuck to his answer anyhow, even with the torture. So Shran now believes Soval.
The Andorian fleet heads to Regulus, accompanied by Enterprise. Kuvak is not pleased to discover that a) the Andorian fleet has found them and b) the Andorian ships only have standard particle weapons. There’s no indication of any Xindi weaponry. V’Las insists upon continuing with the attack.
Archer and T’Pau then show up with the Kir’Shara. V’Las refuses to believe that it’s real, but Kuvak and the rest of High Command are more open-minded about it. When V’Las tries to destroy the Kir’Shara, Kuvak stuns him and has him arrested. Kuvak then calls off the Vulcan fleet.
Enterprise returns to Vulcan. Soval is reinstated, High Command is disbanded, and a Vulcan priest removes Surak’s (and, presumably, Syrran’s) katra from Archer’s head. Koss—who is the one who provided T’Pau and Archer with transporter access to High Command—releases T’Pol from their marriage, since he knows that she only did it to help her mother, who’s now deceased.
V’Las meets in secret with Talok, er, somehow (wasn’t he arrested?). The latter is revealed to be a Romulan agent, who promises V’Las that the plans for reunification are just delayed.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Andorians were said not to have transporter technology in “The Andorian Incident,” but they not only have it, but are able to use it covertly in this episode. In addition, Tucker is able to work his technobabble magic to allow Enterprise to function well enough in the nebula to find and fire on the Kumari. Because he’s just that awesome.
The gazelle speech. Archer says at one point that he feels more centered than he ever has since acquiring Surak’s katra. He also knows about High Command’s plans to invade Andoria, which Syrran apparently found out about before he died.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol gets cured of her Pa’nar Syndrome by T’Pau and is released from her marriage to Koss. Plus the same High Command that censured her and punished her mother for T’Pol’s actions is disbanded. It’s a good day for her…
Florida Man. Florida Man Commands Ship During Crisis, Doesn’t Screw It Up.
Optimism, Captain! After not appearing at all last week, all we see of Phlox this time ’round is him telling Tucker and Shran that Soval will recover from being tortured.
Ambassador Pointy. Soval tells Shran of the story of Nirak, a Vulcan who did something stupid that got a lot of people killed, and compares him to Shran.
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… High Command is disbanded with the unearthing of the Kir’Shara and the revelation that V’Las ordered the bombing of the Earth embassy and tried to start a war based on false evidence. In addition, Vulcan loosens the reins on Earth, letting humans stand on their own.
Blue meanies. At one point, Kumari takes a hit intended for Enterprise, at which point Shran proclaims to Tucker that now Archer owes him two favors (the first for helping during “Zero Hour”).
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. It’s obvious that Koss loves T’Pol, and T’Pol doesn’t really realize how much until he releases her from their marriage.
More on this later… That Vulcans and Romulans are, basically, the same people won’t be revealed publicly until the original series’ “Balance of Terror” more than a century hence. Spock will undertake a personal mission to try to do peacefully what the Talok and V’Las discuss doing more nastily in TNG’s “Unification” two-parter, a mission that will finally succeed years after his death, as revealed in Discovery’s “Unification III.”
I’ve got faith…
“You think I’ve lost my mind?”
“I’m not certain your mind is the one making these decisions.”
–Archer and T’Pol.
Welcome aboard. Back from “Awakening” are Robert Foxworth as V’Las, John Rubinstein as Kuvak, Kara Zediker as T’Pau, and recurring regular Gary Graham as Soval. Back from “The Forge” is Michael Reilly Burke as Koss. Back from “Home” is Jack Donner as the Vulcan priest. Back from “Zero Hour” is recurring regular Jeffrey Combs as Shran. Combs will next appear in “Babel One,” while Graham will be back as Soval’s Mirror Universe counterpart in “In a Mirror Darkly, Part II.”
And then we have a Trek-related Robert Knepper moment, as I totally forgot that Todd Stashwick—best known these days as Captain Liam Shaw in season three of Picard—played Talok.
Trivial matters: This concludes the second three-part arc in a row on Enterprise, finishing the story begun in “The Forge” and “Awakening.”
Shran got his hands on the Xindi weapon in “Proving Ground.” He and Soval worked out the terms of the treaty between Vulcan and Andor following the events of “Cease Fire.”
T’Pol was diagnosed with Pa’nar Syndrome in “Stigma,” having gotten it from an improper meld in “Fusion.”
This is the final appearance of V’Las, Kuvak, Koss, and Talok. The next chronological appearance of the character of T’Pau is in the original series’ “Amok Time,” which takes place 113 years after this, where she’s played by Celia Lovsky.
It’s been a long road… “Commander Tucker, you have a poor choice of friends.” Parts of this episode are really good. Other parts make me want to throw my shoe at the screen, for many of the same reasons why the closing scenes in Discovery’s “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part II” irritated the hell out of me.
There was a perception in the early 2000s that Enterprise completely rewrote the Vulcans and made them into assholes for no good reason. Except that wasn’t based on anything from the 79 episodes of Star Trek that aired in the 1960s as those complainers insisted (not to mention the episodes of the spinoffs dealing with Vulcans, particularly the entire run of Voyager with Tuvok in the main cast). If you actually look at the way Vulcans have been portrayed onscreen prior to 2001, there is nothing that’s inconsistent with how Enterprise portrayed them. (With one exception, which we’ll get to.)
No, this is the perception created by the years following the cancellation of the original series, when tie-in fiction and fanfiction and articles in magazines both fan and pro were near-hagiographies of the main cast of the show in general and the character of Spock in particular. Nimoy’s brilliant and nuanced portrayal of Spock—and, it must be said, his sex appeal—led to a rose-colored perception of Vulcans as noble space elves.
Meanwhile sitting down and watching “Amok Time” and “Journey to Babel” and just in general the sassy, snotty, sarcastic, sexist Spock reveals a people who are absolutely the types who would high-handedly limit humans in their development of space travel and protect their interests against the Andorians to an extreme degree.
But this entire three-parter is in service of catering to that vocal subset of the fanbase that misread the onscreen portrayal of Vulcans—just as the ending of the “Such Sweet Sorrow” two-parter catered to a similar subset of fans by pretending that the twenty-third century iteration of the U.S.S. Discovery and her crew didn’t exist by classifying their very existence out of proportion to common sense.
And even if you wanted to do a story that showed the Vulcans moving back toward Surak’s teaching after drifting from it over the centuries, that could work, but this one doesn’t entirely. Mainly because V’Las is way too over-the-top an irredeemable bad guy—amazingly, it’s even worse here than it was in “Awakening,” which I wouldn’t have thought possible—and the solution is way too facile.
Indeed, the entire storyline is half-assed, barreling to the foregone conclusion without really doing the work to get there. The very presence of the Kir’Shara has an unconvincingly quick effect on the non-V’Las members of High Command. T’Pau seems to be in a position of authority at the end of the episode that is not at all convincing for a person who was part of a group that was on the outs of mainstream Vulcan society five minutes ago. For that matter, T’Pol is offhandedly cured of her Pa’nar Syndrome by a ten-second mind-meld, which is also how Archer is cured of his overcrowded cranium.
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System Collapse
Which is also a blown opportunity. We don’t even see Surak conversing with Archer again this episode, and at no point does Archer act like someone who has two other consciousnesses in his brain meats. We’ve already seen a good example of a human with an extra katra, and Scott Bakula does none of the things that DeForrest Kelly did in The Search for Spock. Instead he, well, acts just like Jonathan Archer. Snore. We don’t even see evidence that he’s more centered beyond his one line of dialogue saying he does.
It’s fun seeing a younger Todd Stashwick as Talok, but the revelation that he’s a Romulan agent doesn’t quite work as well as it might—mainly because there is no context provided. Sure, if you remember that that’s what a Romulan uniform looks like, then you’ll get it, but it assumes that the viewer will remember that, will remember the Romulan-Vulcan connection, and put the pieces together. But not everyone watching the show is a dedicated fan, and this sort of in-reference without any kind of explanation to the casual (or forgetful) viewer is exactly why the show kept hemorrhaging viewers to the point of cancellation. And the idea is more eye-rolling than the shock the script desperately wanted it to be. See, look, Vulcans were mean because they were being influenced by those bad ol’ Romulans! Again I say, snore.
Where the episode shines is in two ways. One is the removal of the weird downplaying of melding that the producers had been doing since “Fusion” for reasons passing understanding.
And the other is every single scene not on Vulcan. Gary Graham does a superb job of Soval in his rebellious phase, as well as being emotionally tortured. Connor Trinneer shines as acting captain, navigating the minefield that is Vulcan-Andorian relations with aplomb. And Jeffrey Combs remains stellar, giving Shran tremendous nuance underneath the permanently angry façade he always carries.
Having said that, even that section of the storyline has its problems, particularly with Soval’s line, “You must know that torture is rarely effective against Vulcans.” In truth, that sentence should end after the word “effective,” but that would require turn-of-the-millennium American writers to believe that, in defiance of the Bush Administration’s propaganda, perpetuated by the popular culture of the time, that tried very desperately to normalize torture as an interrogation tool.
While this three-parter has its moments, and it’s always good to see Shran, ultimately this is an unnecessary bit of awkward fan service that forgets to tell the story required to get there.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author guest at Capclave 2023 this coming weekend in Rockville, Maryland. He’ll be doing panels and readings and autographings and the like, and also will be spending some time at the eSpec Books table in the dealer room. His schedule is here.
“You may be witnessing the start of a new era. Not only for Vulcan but for Earth as well.”
This trilogy sagged a bit in the middle but I think it’s picked up at the climax. This provides us what the Augment trilogy failed to: Good character work for our leads. Archer finds himself in the amusing position of being the custodian of Vulcan philosophy and struggling to lead a people he’s had severe problems with in the past back into the light: We already saw him show signs of becoming obsessed with the Kir’Shara in the previous episode and his determination to see it through continues here. (It’s also cool that he’s suddenly better at martial arts than Vulcans.) T’Pol is trying her best to extricate herself and Archer from this situation and has no time for his sudden evangelism…until V’Las’ thugs turn up and she realises that, whatever V’Las insists in public, he knows how important the Kir’Shara is. Suddenly, she’s declaring allegiance to the Syrannites.
Back on Enterprise, Tucker is basically doing what he completely failed at back in ‘Cogenitor’ and asking himself “What would Archer do?” The answer, of course, is to team up with Shran and do the right thing despite orders and despite the possibility it could backfire massively. Protecting the Andorians from the Vulcans could have had huge consequences if V’Las had prevailed, but fortunately he ends up on the right side of history. Reed, like Worf and Paris before him (or after, depending on where you’re looking from), finds himself in the awkward position of being acting first officer to an acting captain he doesn’t entirely agree with.
Shran’s obviously not abandoned the tendency for torture he demonstrated back in ‘The Andorian Incident’. At least he’s a bit more uncomfortable with it this time. (I believe he’s also still a commander, not a general as the recap says?)
The whole thing ends very satisfyingly with the slimy V’Las finding him out of allies and out of luck, and Archer emerging as the hero of the hour. And then we get that twist ending, as we find out just who’s really been pulling the strings on Vulcan all this time, and kickstart the closest thing this season has to an arc, especially compelling if you know what’s going to be happening shortly after this season. I can well remember the gut-punch of suddenly realising “Romulans!” on first viewing. (I do accept you need to recognise a Romulan uniform to realise the significance, but this is hardly the only episode to expect viewers to identify a Romilan on sight. I had no idea that was Talok until I read it, and apparently it wasn’t originally meant to be him but they couldn’t afford to hire another actor. With that in mind, I’m quite happy to believe it’s not Talok, whoever’s playing him. I don’t believe there’s any mention of V’Las being arrested, by the way. I think we’re just told he’s been removed from office.)
Shran mentions that the prototype Xindi weapon was destroyed in ‘Proving Ground’. There are several references to ‘Cease Fire’, said to be two years ago. Curiously, T’Pol refers to the events of ‘Fusion’ as “several years ago” when it’s barely three. That scene is probably the weakest thing here, as if someone suddenly remembered they gave T’Pol a terminal illness and decided to close off that storyline by having T’Pau go “Oh yeah, I can cure that between scenes if you want.”
First appearances this season for Shran. Koss manages to withdraw from the series with dignity, showing he is on the side of the angels after all.
I think I was referring to this specific episode when I mentioned Season 4’s predilection for “continuity porn” a few months ago. I remember that, when it first came out, I was excited at the Romulan reveal in the episode’s final minutes, just because I adore Romulans and I liked the idea that we were seeing the build-up to the Earth-Romulus War; but on rewatch, I found it pointless and unnecessary. Not only because we never actually get to see the arc that it teased, but because there’s absolutely no reason for it other than tying into a (massively overrated) TNG episode that aired more than a decade earlier. And I just hate the idea that any Vulcan who doesn’t correspond to the cookie-cutter noble, pure, and true, always-lawful-good stereotype that fans have built up must be a secret Romulan. Already we’re seeing the same argument being applied to T’Lyn on Lower Decks because she…listens to her hunches and shows concern for her friends.
I also disliked the torture plot for all the reasons you mentioned, but also just because it felt like it was only there to pad the episode’s runtime.
My common refrain for the fourth season so far is that I remember it more fondly than the reality of my current rewatch. I had a lot of the same issues with this conclusion. I wonder if the conception of Vulcans as being peaceful, wise mystics is largely a result of the film era. I would agree that the totality of the depiction of Vulcans is far more complex.
I thought this was a decent wrap-up to the 3-parter, though I agree it was a bit too pat in wrapping things up. In Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic, I established that not all Vulcans gave up their pre-Kir’Shara beliefs as easily as the episode implied, and indeed there’s a countermovement that tries to denounce the Kir’Shara as a fake and restore the High Command. I also try to clarify just what V’Las’s plan was here.
I’m no fan of torture scenes, but I do recall thinking that Graham and Combs did fantastic work in their scenes together. Anyway, if Shran admits that people will lie under torture to stop the pain, doesn’t that contradict his willingness in “The Andorian Incident” to use torture in order to gain information? Maybe he’s only come to that realization since then. Anyway, his fondness for torture was something I had him outgrow in ROTF, along with his use of “pink-skin.”
@1/cap: “Curiously, T’Pol refers to the events of ‘Fusion’ as “several years ago” when it’s barely three.”
“Several” means “more than two but fewer than many,” according to the dictionary, so three qualifies.
@3/CriticalMyth: “I wonder if the conception of Vulcans as being peaceful, wise mystics is largely a result of the film era.”
Nope, it evolved in fan fiction before then, and you can see it illustrated in Jean Lorrah’s 1984 novel The Vulcan Academy Murders, which came out a few months after The Search for Spock and was written before it came out. Lorrah’s Vulcans are very much the kindly space elves Keith describes, to the point that even at the time I found them implausibly warm and cuddly for Vulcans.
I was wondering a little: That Romulan uniform at the end, is that a TNG-era uniform or a TOS-era uniform? Answering one continuity question, raising another?
And the Kir’Shara, a digital data storage/projector that still has power after two millenia? They could have made an equally nice scene with Vulcans geeking out over a box of clay tablets instead …
One thing I have to say is I adore the Kir’shara artifact itself, it is a beautiful object and the illumination projecting the words on to the wall is an excellent effect.
Keith I respectfully request you refrain from saying “brain meats”. My cheeks hurt from laughing at it.
I think it’s highly disappointing that we didn’t get more Archer-Surak conversations, or competition, like Surak jumping to the front like Spock did in McCoy’s mind. Or even a full blown out loud conversation. Heck, we didn’t even give T’Pau and T’Pol (Team T-P) the opportunity to converse with Surak. Imagine Jesus jumps into a guy, there are two Christians there, they know Jesus is in this guy, and nobody talks to Jesus. They didn’t ask him why he’s staying in Archer, how he perceives the passage of time, what he thinks of the High Command, what does he think about our new friends the humans, why is he such a good martial artist? “I lived through Vulcan’s last great period of war, I had to have some skills to get by, especially as a pacifist, when those who marched under the raptor’s wing came around.” Highly missed opportunity. I think they didn’t want to put to much context around a legendary figure, but I like when you hear about a mythical guy and you meet him and he’s like, “I honestly don’t like Plomeek soup that much, it’s nutritious, but it needs salt.” I love that story of Kahless just being a farmer in an unjust world who just did what he had to do, but also apparently loved telling tall tales about his real exploits.
I’m glad Tucker got to shine here, he usually comes off looking kind of incompetent at anything non-engineering, but he proved he earned those Commander pips, and really came through for Vulcan-Andorian peace.
I feel like Soval got the best out of that interrogation by far, but if memory serves Shran was ordered to torture him….he didn’t seem to have his heart in it, though maybe I’m conflating elements with Garak’s interrogation and torture of Odo.
At the time I didn’t know that season 4 was going to be the final one, so the Talok reveal filled me with hype as I knew it was a lead in to the Earth-Romulan War. Even without that, the later arcs show a lot as to why the war happened, and why Romulans hate humans so much.
I get why they didn’t put the period after effective in torture, I remember those days. The attitude was “everybody breaks”, but people (the general public and pop culture) really didn’t have a concept of what break meant. They didn’t conceive that breaking someone would also mean you don’t get what you need. Torture was previously something that “the hero would have to endure with his iron will against the unscrupulous villain” and became something “the desperate hero would use in extreme circumstances to save lives because he didn’t have time to play nice“. Strong willed hero beats weak willed villain. Chain of Command nailed it a decade earlier. Madred never got anything out of Picard, he traumatized him and wasted his time.
I never got love from Koss towards T’Pol, if he loved her he never would’ve blackmailed her over her mother to begin with. It always seemed to me that she was something he wanted to possess. Afterwards however he had enough honor in him to annul the marriage
@4/CLB: ““Several” means “more than two but fewer than many,” according to the dictionary, so three qualifies.”
Well, according to the dictionary I’ve got, “several” means “more than a few”, which I accept is extremely vague, but I would say three is more like to qualify as “a few” than “several”.
General point: I meant to say that Shran only uses the term “pinkskin” once here, and it’s specifically addressed as Tucker. It’s…progress, I guess?
@5/o.m.: I did find it implausible that the Kir’Shara put on a flashy light show like that instead of being a more reliable storage medium. I established in Uncertain Logic that the holograms were just to catch the attention of the emotional Vulcans that Surak hoped to persuade, and that there was a hidden seam on the base that let you open up the obelisk to reveal dozens of thin, durable metal sheets etched with the original text. (I had to make it a hidden seam since there is none on the prop.)
@6/mr_d: “Heck, we didn’t even give T’Pau and T’Pol (Team T-P) the opportunity to converse with Surak. Imagine Jesus jumps into a guy, there are two Christians there, they know Jesus is in this guy, and nobody talks to Jesus.”
But remember, Archer got the katra from Syran. Syran found the katra in an ark 17 years earlier, and he’d been sharing it with his fellow Syrannites through mind melds ever since. So T’Pau had undoubtedly already had her chance to commune with Surak’s katra.
Quoth mr_d: “Madred never got anything out of Picard, he traumatized him and wasted his time.”
Actually he got everything his government needed out of Picard at the beginning of the episode. The subsequent torture was never about gaining information, it was about breaking Picard. That’s why the episode was so effective.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Like most three-parters this season, the ending feels a bit rushed. Obviously, Shran and the Andorians were included as an expected plot complication, but I think they came in too late and made this last episode a bit too cluttered.
But overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome. The ENT crew are top professionals throughout this, managing the situation as best they can. And any episode with Shran scenes no matter how superfluous make for compelling viewer. And the scenes were anything but superflous – Shran and Soval working together would have been unthinkable 3 years prior. We also finally get rid of the Vulcan High Command. T’Pol gets rid of the stigma, Soval becomes a far more understanding and cooperative Vulcan, and the Vulcans finally get off Starfleet’s backs. And indirectly it’s also a big step towards the founding of the Federation with the Vulcans as one of the key species. Overall, a lot of progress, even if the episode doesn’t quite deliver it emotionally.
It’s a page-turning moments for Vulcans for sure. And a great turning point for T’Pol as she’s free of her obligations for the first time ever. I wish the episode had spent more time with that particular beat.
@3/CriticalMyth @4/Christopher: I’m surprised people ever got a space elves impression from Vulcans. One of my first Trek viewings as a kid was Search for Spock – specifically the scene on Mount Seleya where Spock and McCoy are taken by the monks to undergo the Katra transfer process. There’s a shot where Kirk is blocked by a stern-looking Vulcan guard. I first looked at that guard and thought: “you do not want to screw around with these guys”. Which is my way of saying I never got the impression that Vulcans were benevolent Gandhi-esque beings (and speaking of space elves, it’s not as if they’re immaculate angel-like beings on Tolkien’s universe either – other than Legolas, that is).
@5 said: I was wondering a little: That Romulan uniform at the end, is that a TNG-era uniform or a TOS-era uniform? Answering one continuity question, raising another?
I believe that it is a Nemesis-era Romulan uniform, if memory serves. I think the movie had come out long enough before this episode that people were wondering whether the “Space Nazi” at the end of last season was a Reman. It makes sense to use a visual cue that people who’d seen the movie would recognize.
I’ve got to disagree a little with our esteemed reviewer abut the reveal at the end. To me, the Vulcans’ air of superiority and their trying to manage human development both feel like logical extensions of what we know of them. What seemed to be incongruous was their martial behaviors – rattling sabers at the Andorians, reporting to a “High Command,” etc. Those all felt out of character enough that when we see it is in fact because of Romulan influence, it makes sense retrospectively. Honestly, the Romulan influence was also the thing that brought Robert Foxworth’s performance into perspective for me, in that a 22nd-century reunification would mean Vulcan becoming more like Romulus, as opposed to the 24th-century variant, which seemed to involve Romulans becoming more Vulcan-like. The thing I liked about this three-parter is that there was the sense that things were at a tipping point and that they could’ve easily gone the other way, with Vulcan choosing to walk hand-in-hand with Romulus, as opposed to Earth
This was also the episode that made me wonder, quite honestly, whether Sela didn’t have an army of Romulan sleeper agents on the ground in “Unification II” to supplement her space borne invasion, but that’s probably not a topic for this thread.
@12/twels: The early-season Vulcans’ militaristic behavior made sense to me, because they were basically the British Empire or post-WWII America — the dominant power in the region, considering themselves benevolent and responsible for taking care of everyone else, which led to behavior that looked imperialist and militant from the less powerful nations’ perspective. In TOS and TNG, it was the Federation that represented America, so I liked how ENT flipped the script and let viewers identify with the other side of the cultural imperialism dynamic. (Although one could just as well draw an analogy with Vulcan as Imperial China, the established ancient power secure in its dominance, and Earth as industrializing Europe, innovating and expanding rapidly as it tries to catch up, and ultimately reversing the power balance to become the dominant culture.)
So I didn’t need an “explanation” for why Vulcans acted that way. It’s just pretty normal that a nation deeming itself responsible for protecting everyone could get kind of aggressive and imperialistic about it, in the belief that it was necessary for the greater good. Once the Federation took over that role, Vulcan no longer needed to. So it would’ve made sense to me without this storyline.
Still, as heavy-handed and continuity-porny as it was, I do at least appreciate that ENT acknowledged that cultures can change and evolve over time and have differing factions within them, which was a nice anodyne to the “Planet of Hats” mentality. And yes, there was a Romulan agent behind it, but a foreign agent couldn’t gain traction unless the will for it was already present among the population.
Talok wore a Nemesis Romulan uniform because they had one lying around the lot and they didn’t have the budget to create a new costume.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Talok was a fashion trendsetter way ahead of his time…
Yet another reason why this trilogy should have been centered around T’Pol rather than Archer is that her Pa’nar Syndrome could have been cured by her carrying the katras rather than in a ten second mind meld. Plus, if Archer had remained on Enterprise, he could have been the one to engage with Shran. After all, it’s Archer who’s Shran’s friend.
For my part, I like the idea that there was more cultural cross-contact between Vulcans and Romulans than either side would care to admit. I like that certain elements of the High Command knew full well who and where the Romulans were, and that knowledge got lost in the shuffle when the High Command collapsed. One of the things I’ve always felt Enterprise really got right is that the Vulcans and Romulans really *are* the same people, and our beloved Vulcans are at best 3 bad days away from becoming them.
I also like that this means that the ultimate cause of the Earth-Romulan War is that the humans have upset the Romulans’ carefully constructed Bismarckian apple cart by settling the longstanding Vulcan-Andorian Cold War by diplomacy. The other part here is a bit of personal headcanon, but I do think that another cause of the war was the NX class ship herself. I think the Romulans refused to believe that anyone would cram that much scientific equipment on a ship of the line and assumed it *had* to be for surveillance purposes (and might be able to pierce their nascent cloaking tech). This ended up touching off something like the pre-WW1 dreadnought race as they tried to catch up to the devious humans.
To me, the Forge three-parter was some of the best Trek ever televised. As a prequel to TOS, it’s nearly perfect – just not as a prequel to TNG.
The Vulcans have always had an air of Superiority. We think of Spock as a logical pacifist only because he’s trying to be the “perfect” Vulcan much as Worf tries to be the “perfect” Klingon.
Honestly, I see Vulcan as being Ancient Greece with Andoria being Persia. Earth at this point in history is the Early Roman Republic (its just starting to move into the Galaxy but in another century will surpass Vulcan as the dominant power in what will become the Federation).
I don’t think that there was ever a total break between Vulcan and Romulus. The Romulans probably maintained covert contacts and were working behind the scenes to manipulate Vulcan policies towards both Andoria and Earth (they see an Earth with Warp drive much like they were after leaving Vulcan). By manipulating Vulcan to keep Earth effectively bottled up, it kept Earth as a non player on the Galactic stage well into the 22nd century.
@16/David Pirtle: “Plus, if Archer had remained on Enterprise, he could have been the one to engage with Shran. After all, it’s Archer who’s Shran’s friend.”
Except we’ve seen plenty of Archer/Shran interactions, while putting Trip up against Shran was more of a novelty.
Even on my original watch, I enjoyed what Trip was up to on the Enterprise vastly more so than the goings-on with Archer. Kuvak and the other members of the High Command definitely turned on V’las too quickly. Though there was an attempt made at showing discontent with his actions, it wasn’t enough. As another note, that was Talok in the final scene? I had always thought that was Valdore.
@2. jaimebabb
I get what you’re saying about there being no reason other than a tie-in to TNG’s Unification, but I think that the buildup to the Earth-Romulan War was the entire reason. I don’t know when the decision to cancel ENT after Season 4 was made, but the best chance for a renewal was to sow the seeds for Season 5.
@6. mr_d
If anything, Soval’s interrogation reinforces what we know about Shran already. Back in “Proving Ground” we saw how much Shran hated backstabbing Archer, but he carried on and obeyed his orders much as does with torturing Soval here.
@12. twels
“To me, the Vulcans’ air of superiority and their trying to manage human development both feel like logical extensions of what we know of them.”
And that is likely how V’Las argued it to the High Command. Knowing how long Vulcans (and Romulans) live, V’Las may have been the one who argued for Earth to be made a Vulcan “protectorate” from the get-go. I’d imagine that discussion went along the lines of “We have a species with a capacity for violence and genocide still picking up the pieces from global nuclear war suddenly having warp drive. We’d better make sure they won’t establish a galaxy-spanning genocidal empire.” Thing is that the High Command began to lean further into thinking and acting like imperialists, subjugating (or attempting to) other species to their will. Take Captain Solok from DS9’s “Take me out to the Holosuite.” He is definitely a believer of Vulcan superiority, but he’s not about to go out and dominate other species to assert that superiority.
@21/FRT: The thing is, a society doesn’t need malevolent intent to become culturally imperialist. On the contrary, good intentions plus superior power have a way of resulting in that, because you assume your actions are justified and there’s nobody else strong enough to counter you. Even the best intentions go astray over time without checks and balances. I’m sure Captain Solok would happily go around dominating the species he considers inferior — for their own good, of course, the ol’ Civilising Mission — but he’s not free to do so because the Federation is stronger and keeps him in check. But the 22nd-century Vulcans had nobody to keep them in check, except the Andorians to an extent.
It was a good wrap-up to the trilogy, made very good by the presence of the always-entertaining Commander Shran.
@6’s reference to the line about “those who marched under the raptor’s wing” reminds me that I always took this to be a subtle suggestion these were the ancestors or relatives of the Romulans, and that the anti-Surak faction was involved in the establishment of Romulas.
Not sure this fits with established Vulcan history, but it’s a neat idea, although a little pat in tying the Romulan/Vulcan split to the Surak era and not to an earlier era (which is the impression I got from the original series and Next Generation, since the connection seemed virtually unknown to the Vulcans themselves).
@24
” I always took this to be a subtle suggestion these were the ancestors or relatives of the Romulans”
That’s the tack Diane Duane took in her novels about the Vulcans and Romulans (“Spock’s World” and “My Enemy,My Ally”), which were some of the best of the 90’s Star Trek novels.
Chalk me up as another who feels that this trilogy of episodes sagged a bit in the middle, but pulled off the landing with some aplomb: It helps that we get a little bit more of V’Las showing one face to the inner circle and another to the public, though perhaps a little less than I would like.
We also get a much clearer image of the Administrator’s hold on power being that of a Vulcan still required to keep many plates spinning, rather than solid as the grip on a dagger: I’d bet money that Kuvak (Who seems to be second only to V’las on the High Council) was Syran’s source regarding the impending operations against Andoria – whether knowingly or unknowingly is an interesting question – and would also suggest that his enthusiasm for the Kir’Shara makes an excellent illustration of the stressors driving V’Las’s drastic actions against enemies foreign & domestic (If a Vulcan with such a willingness to consider, if not actually sympathise with, the teachings of the Syrannites can be found on the High Council how many will be found throughout the rest of Vulcan society?).
I’d also like to point out that, while we meet T’Pau in the wilderness (Metaphorical and literal), we don’t really know anything about her career before she joined the band of Syrannites in The Forge: we know that Syran or one of his followers must have had sources on, or close to, the High Council to have an accurate notion of the movements against Andoria, so could it be that T’Pau held a fairly senior position in the Vulcan bureaucracy before being ousted for nothing more than Syrannite tendencies? (If her case is sufficiently similar to that of T’Pol’s mother, the former members of the High Council might consider it very sensible to restore her to former dignities with an additional promotion, as a show of good faith – i.e. that the New Management would not be the same as the old – and as a way of borrowing some of the prestige attached to those who recovered the Kir’Shara).
I also feel that having a Romulan Fourth Column at work on Vulcan makes perfect sense (There being an Earth/Romulan War in this period and Romulans being noteworthily subtle, it’s entirely logical that they would ‘prime the pump’ in advance of intended conquests), though I entirely agree with those who suggest that they’re fishing in troubled waters, rather than those who muddied the waters in the first place: Vulcans have the vices of their virtues, like any other sapient species, and ENTERPRISE shows them at a turning point that, thankfully, turned in favour of IDIC rather than Imperium.
Also, it’s perfectly possible that (On a Watsonian level) Romulan fashion of the NEMESIS era might be deliberately harkening back to the fashions of the ENTERPRISE era: I think we’ve all seen the Power of Retro at work on humanity often enough for it to make it entirely plausible that Romulans would experience the occasional attack of sartorial nostalgia (Especially after the apparently-dull Fashion Era after the shiny opulence of THE ORIGINAL SERIES yielded to the grey, grey, more grey NEXT GENERATION).
Also, it’s interesting to wonder if the Vulcan prestidigitation being practiced in order to keep the Andorians from spotting the fleet massing at Regulus is part of a longer tradition of technological trickery by the High Command – if the Vulcans have made a point of periodically ‘spoofing’ Andorian sensors as passive-aggressive way of waging their Cold War (Possibly in conjunction with other techniques comparable to classic Russian disinformatsiya), then that would help to further explain Shran’s stubborn disbelief in Ambassador Soval’s warning (Not to mention the Andorian tendency to regard Vulcans as pathological liars).
@krad, one last thought – while it’s a pity that Mr Scott Bakula didn’t do very much to show the oddities of one man carrying three personalities around with him, isn’t it possible that he’s so much more functional than Doctor McCoy because (Unlike Bones) he’s not a mule-headed old country doctor carrying his favourite sparring partner around with an extra helping of PTSD?
Phrased for comedy, the reason Captain Archer isn’t being driven loco is because he only argues with live Vulcans.
Anyway, I’m enjoying Season Four so far (Time-Warping Space Nazis and all!), so let’s hope future episodes keep doing yeoman work.
Quoth FRT: “As another note, that was Talok in the final scene? I had always thought that was Valdore.”
No, it was Talok, and the way you can tell is that Todd Stashwick played him. It was Brian Thompson who would play Valdore.
In fact, the original script called for the Romulan agent to be a different character (possibly Valdore?), but they couldn’t afford another speaking part, so they had it be Talok.
Quoth Jeremy Erman: “I always took this to be a subtle suggestion these were the ancestors or relatives of the Romulans, and that the anti-Surak faction was involved in the establishment of Romulas.”
As wiredog said, that’s the tack Diane Duane took, though the books cited in wiredog’s post aren’t where that was established, but rather in the novel The Romulan Way, which she co-wrote with her husband Peter Morwood.
Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz did an interesting twist on that notion in the Vulcan’s Soul trilogy, which chronicled the journey the future Romulans took from Vulcan to Romulus in greater detail than Duane and Morwood did: the Vulcans who left were actually originally devotees of Surak. They left Vulcan with Surak’s blessing because Surak wasn’t sure that Vulcan was going to survive the wars raging on the world (which we saw bits of in “Awakening”). However, the hardships of the journey to Romulus took their toll, and resulted in the nasty-ass Romulans we all know and hate.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Star Trek Online split the difference on “The Sundering” Surak’s followers won, and those who wouldn’t follow Surak left for the stars with love having basically made peace and mutually agreed to part ways. The Rihansu “The Declared” left in fusion powered generation ships. But the journey was fraught with dangers and misery and over time their bitterness even warped their history of the matter. They felt Surak and his followers had tricked them into leaving and all of their suffering was the fault of those who stayed on Vulcan. They started fighting amongst themselves and became more and more like the Romulans we know until they arrived on Romulus.
@27/krad: Vulcan’s Soul‘s relationship to Duane’s backstory is odd. The first book of the trilogy directly contradicted Duane’s version of Surak’s life and the origins of the Sundered from The Romulan Way and Spock’s World, but the second book faithfully adapted and expanded on the events of the Sundered’s interstellar journey as laid out in The Romulan Way. I think there was a change of editors in between, which might explain the change in approach.
Christopher: There wasn’t a change in editors as such — John Ordover was the editor who bought the trilogy and worked with Jo and Susan on the outline. The manuscripts were then line-edited by me.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I remember enjoying Diane Duane’s “The Romulan Way” and its take on the Romulans a lot better than the TNG take, which always seemed to me to be really uneven. Given that they were initially presented as the more honorable foe in the Original Series, turning them into duplicitous schemers a la the Original Series Klingons always felt like it was a decision that came out of necessity after the Ferengi failed so badly as antagonists.
My own feeling is the break between Vulcan and Romulus being an incomplete one would account for the fact that the war was fought between “Earth and Romulus” rather than “Earth and its allies.”
I’ve always thougt that having the Romulan War occur during the course of Enterprise – after having the war story against the Xindi in season three – would’ve been a difficult proposition. The idea of “primitive nuclear weapons” (given the technology we’ve seen on the show) and no visual contact between opponents would’ve been hard to carry off – especially since we know what the Romulans look like. The idea of empty robot ships (as we see later on) is a somewhat strange workaround that I don’t think would’ve worked on a repeated basis.
Has there been any discussion of what an Enterprise Season Five would have really looked like? I’ve heard the somewhat strange idea that T’Pol’s father might’ve been revealed to be Romulan but other than that, a return trip to the Mirror Universe and the Romulan War heating up, I’m not familiar with any other plans
@31/twels: “Given that they were initially presented as the more honorable foe in the Original Series, turning them into duplicitous schemers a la the Original Series Klingons always felt like it was a decision that came out of necessity after the Ferengi failed so badly as antagonists.”
I blame it more on The Search for Spock. The villains there were originally scripted as Romulans, hence the Bird-of-Prey, cloaking device, and talk of honor, but then they switched them to Klingons without changing anything else in the script. So suddenly Klingons were the honorable ones, inverted from what TOS had established, and that left the Romulans to be the devious, scheming ones.
@31/twels. My thought (which I intend to implement when I get around to running an Earth-Romulan War STA campaign) for getting around the whole “we never saw the Romulans until TOS” thing is that the Romulans exclusively used Remans as ground troops during the war. For long stretches of the war, the Coalition thought the Remans *were* the Romulans, and didn’t figure out they weren’t until some ways in.
@33/PJ: That’s a cool idea, except it doesn’t work given Spock’s line in “Balance of Terror” that “no human, Romulan, or ally has ever seen the other.” So it wasn’t just the Romulans, it was everyone on both sides.
The implication of Spock’s exposition in BoT is that the war was fought entirely in space, “in primitive space vessels which allowed no quarter, no captives. Nor was there even ship-to-ship visual communication.” Evidently Paul Schneider intended that there were no ground troops, that it was purely a naval war, as it were.
@34/ChristopherLBennett I mean, Spock is occasionally given to metaphorical stretching of the truth :P In my head, I interpret the war as something like the Pacific Theater in WW2, mixed in with some aspects of the naval part of WW1; mostly a naval war, but with some small, bloody “asteroid hopping” ground actions involving Coalition troops. This would be consistent with Balance of Terror being a scene-for-scene remake of a WW2 submarine movie. It would also give the MACOs something to do in the conflict, as USMC stand-ins. Even the “no quarter, no captives” thing is consistent with how Romulans operate; actual Romulans on the ground could use the full helmet leather get-ups and melter pills that the Zhat Vash goons from Picard Season 1 and the Romulans being extremely scrupulous about scuttling their ships to prevent capture.
This would also handily solve the “why weren’t the Denobulans founding members of the Federation?” question. Answer: they fell to the Romulans early in the war in a Battle of Singapore-level fiasco. Denobula was, like Earth, a Vulcan client state, but one that allowed its native defense capability atrophy while under the High Command’s security aegis. Miscommunication between the recently-reorganized Vulcan forces and the native Denobulan ones led to a disorganized defense of the planet and rapid capture by Romulan forces. The planet was eventually freed by the Coalition, but it took some time for them to accede to joining a Federation that so prominently involved Vulcans until it was clear that the Earthers were running the show now.
@36/PJ: “This would also handily solve the “why weren’t the Denobulans founding members of the Federation?” question. Answer: they fell to the Romulans early in the war in a Battle of Singapore-level fiasco.”
Not only do I find it extremely distasteful to propose devastating a civilization merely to tidy up a continuity question, but it’s completely unnecessary. Enterprise established that most Denobulans don’t care to leave their homeworld. People like Phlox are exceptions. That perfectly explains why we don’t see them much in the later series.
I also established in my Rise of the Federation novels that part of the reason Denobula resisted joining the UFP is because the UFP adopted Earth’s ban on genetic engineering and the Denobulans, as a genetically engineered people, objected to that. Given what we’ve learned about the Illyrians in Strange New Worlds, though, it might actually have been the other way around — the UFP might not have allowed them to join.
@37/CLB Fair enough, you wrote novels about this and I didn’t. For me, though, I don’t think it’s unnecessary. The war should be a war, it’s a distasteful business, and it should have devastating consequences for all of the participants. This war needs to have been *bad*, something so society-altering that it required rewriting an entire galactic region’s political order such that several powers that were long at odds with one another to give up a substantial measure of their independence and band together in one government for mutual defense.
You could say it’s grimmer than Star Trek usually goes, but is it? Betazed fell in Dominion War, and Florida got Space 9/11’d in Enterprise. This would just be showing what it means for a planet to fall, and this kind of strategic catastrophe might be the kind of thing that gets people to put aside their differences and work together.
@38/PJ: “The war should be a war, it’s a distasteful business, and it should have devastating consequences for all of the participants.”
Okay, but then the decision to tell such a story should be about that, not just be motivated by the desire to patch a continuity hole.
@39/CLB – like I said “Miscommunication between the recently-reorganized Vulcan forces and the native Denobulan ones led to a disorganized defense of the planet and rapid capture by Romulan forces” and “This would just be showing what it means for a planet to fall, and this kind of strategic catastrophe might be the kind of thing that gets people to put aside their differences and work together.”
Tying this back to the episode at hand, it also gives some consequences and follow-through on the hasty collapse of Vulcan High Command under V’Las and its disarmament under T’Pau. While this was on balance a good thing for Vulcan society and the galaxy at large, the fallout from such a momentous thing would not and cannot have been *wholly* positive.
Furthermore, taking a step back and trying to puzzle out what the Romulans were trying to accomplish in this 3-episode arc, I think that they intended for High Command to *lose* the war with the Andorians, and lose it badly. At such a moment where all seems lost for the Vulcans, their long lost cousins would step out of the shadows and save them, conquering them by degrees in the wake of their largesse. So, again, the fall of V’Las’ High Command was a good thing, but it had longer-term consequences worth debating over from a historical perspective.
@34 said: The implication of Spock’s exposition in BoT is that the war was fought entirely in space, “in primitive space vessels which allowed no quarter, no captives. Nor was there even ship-to-ship visual communication.” Evidently Paul Schneider intended that there were no ground troops, that it was purely a naval war, as it were.
That whole premise works a lot better when you’re only telling the follow-up of that war. If you’re limited to those parameters while telling the story of that war, things become really difficult. Based on the three-parter we’re discussing, the Romulans’ motive in this war really is to beat up the new best friend of their former playground pals the Vulcans. If that’s the case, it almost seems counterintuitive to hide their true nature.
Obviously, I’ve not read the post-finale Enterprise novels, as I suspect they offer up some solutions to those problems (the choice to “un-kill” a certain character grated on me, despite the fact that I detest the episode in which this individual dies).
@31/twels: I seem to remember hearing they were planning to make Shran a regular if they’d gone to a fifth season. (It kind of makes me wonder how much of the eventual finale would have happened if the show hadn’t been finishing, and if there was a broad strokes version of it designed to set up Shran’s new role.)
I always liked the idea that merging with Surak is what transformed Archer from a decent captain into the legendary founder of the Federation.
C.T.: your definition of “decent” differs from mine…….
Or, to put it another way, you misspelled “barely competent.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Maybe he’s better at being a politician than he is at being a captain? And yet I can’t see how…