“The Aenar”
Written by Manny Coto and André Bormanis
Directed by Mike Vejar
Season 4, Episode 14
Production episode 090
Original air date: February 11, 2005
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. After getting the highlights of “Babel One” and “United,” we go to Romulus, where Vrax is tearing Valdore a new asshole for his mission achieving the exact opposite of the effect intended. Valdore is hilariously obtuse in this conversation, insisting that it’s just a setback, not a disaster, and all he has to do is have the drone ship destroy Enterprise and everything will be fine, and the alliance will fall apart and Vrax will become First Consul. Vrax thinks it’s far more likely that he’ll be executed…
Gral and his delegation have returned to Tellar Prime, but Shran has elected to stay on Enterprise to help Archer and the gang hunt the drone ship. (The disposition of Shran’s surviving crew is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
T’Pol has examined the readings Tucker and Reed took while on the drone ship, and determined that the drone is controlled via telepresence, and can be done from light-years away. They have a brainscan of the remote pilot, and Phlox doesn’t recognize the species, but says that it’s someone related to the Andorians, though not precisely Andorian. T’Pol and Tucker are tasked with constructing a telepresence device that can interfere with the control of the Romulan ship.
On Romulus, Valdore orders the damage done by Tucker and Reed to be repaired, and to prepare to send a second drone ship out with the first. Nijil expresses concern over the pilot’s well-being, as he’s mentally exhausted from his efforts and it’ll be even worse when he has to control two ships. Valdore ignores those concerns, ordering the stimulants to be increased regardless of the consequences. Given that those consequences include the pilot’s death, Valdore’s lack of concern is pretty short-sighted, but whatever.
Shran has had the brainscan examined by Andoria and they have confirmed that the pattern belongs to an Aenar. They’re a subspecies of Andorians, with pale skin rather than blue, and who are blind and telepathic. They were believed to be mythical until they were encountered fifty years earlier. They’re reclusive and pacifistic, and unlikely to have constructed the drone ship nor used it. However, Archer has Mayweather change course to Andoria.
T’Pol and Tucker are working on constructing the telepresence device, even though Tucker is fatigued as hell—he’s not completely recovered from his ordeal on the drone ship. But his engineering skills are needed. He talks about how he almost died and how it made him feel and tries to get T’Pol to discuss how she felt when she thought she was going to die. Her answer is—of course—clinical, disappointing him.
The Aenar live in an area protected by a dampening field. Archer and Shran beam down to find them. While searching, an ice floor gives out under Shran and he falls, an icicle impaling his leg. Conveniently, an Aenar finds them, and they are brought to a hospital.
Nijil informs Valdore that the pilot is resting and will be ready to pilot both drone ships. Valdore tells Nijil the story of how he used to be a senator—and Vrax was both a friend and colleague—but he was expelled after challenging the policy of unlimited expansion. (How he managed to become a flag officer in the military after being a disgraced politician is not explained.)
T’Pol and Tucker argue over who should test the telepresence device, with T’Pol winning the argument because (a) she’s telepathic and he isn’t and (b) she outranks him. Later, she tries to make up with him, saying she appreciates his concern, and also expressing worry that his concern is interfering with his duties. Tucker insists his concerns are purely professional. Neither T’Pol nor the viewers believe this bullshit for a nanosecond.
The Aenar have a very loose collective, and someone is designated Speaker when a leader is required. A woman named Lissan gets the job and she asks Archer and Shran why they’ve come to the Aenar’s home. Archer allows himself to be telepathically scanned by Lissan. An Aenar named Gareb disappeared a year before—he was assumed to have been killed, but his body was never found. It’s possible that he was kidnapped instead and is being used by the Romulans.
Later, a woman named Jhamel approaches Shran. She’s never seen a blue-skinned Andorian before. They talk, and she reveals that Gareb is her brother. She has been having recurring nightmares involving him.
T’Pol tests the device. She is able to use it for a brief time before it starts to do serious damage to her, at which point Phlox unplugs her from it. Still, it’s an encouraging first try.
Lissan refuses to assist Archer and Shran is any acts of destruction, but Jhamel volunteers to go to Enterprise. Lissan tries to stop her, but Jhamel allows Lissan to read her mind. When she sees that Jhamel is motivated purely by a desire to save her brother, Lissan relents and allows her to beam to Enterprise.
Gareb is plugged back into the telepresence unit on Romulus. Nijil apologizes to the Aenar as he does so. The two drone ships are launched by Gareb and fly out of Romulan space.
Enterprise receives a report that the cargo ship Ticonderoga is missing. As soon as Archer, Shran, and Jhamel are on board, they head there, Archer ordering Reed to upgrade the targeting scanners.
Jhamel tests the telepresence device, and while she lasts longer than T’Pol, she eventually suffers the same issues only worse. Phlox is forced to sedate her.
The Ticonderoga has been destroyed. Archer orders T’Pol to try to trace the drone ship’s warp signature. Phlox advises that Jhamel may not be able to use the telepresence device.
Enterprise finds a Tellarite freighter that refuses to identify itself. They exchange fire with Enterprise, and it soon loses its “skin” and is revealed to be one of the drone ships. Jhamel senses Gareb’s presence and insists on using the device despite the risks.
The beating Enterprise is taking gets worse when an Andorian battle cruiser shows up—which turns out to be the other drone. Jhamel plugs herself in and is able to make contact with Gareb. Gareb is gobsmacked—he was told by the Romulans that he was the last surviving Aenar and was forced to fly the drones. Emboldened by the news that his people still live, Gareb has the two drone ships turn on each other.
Furious, Valdore kills Gareb even as Enterprise finishes the job and blows up both ships.
Returning to Andoria, Shran and Jhamel prepare to beam down. Jhamel is grateful that she was able to be there for Gareb and not leave him to die alone—and also die knowing that his people weren’t wiped out. Shran also says to Archer that their paths may not cross any time soon, as he’s unlikely to be given another ship after losing the last one. Archer offers to help in any way he can.
Tucker requests a transfer, insisting that he’s been distracted. Despite Archer being his best friend, he refuses to spell out his reasons for wanting off the ship, only saying that he needs to transfer. Columbia has tried to poach him twice, and he’s turned them down, but now he’s willing to go over to the new ship. Archer reluctantly agrees only when Tucker asks as a friend to acquiesce.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, Tucker and Reed got enough data from the drone for T’Pol and Tucker to build a telepresence device that will partially interfere with the one on Romulus. Also, while T’Pol is good at theory, she needs Tucker’s mechanical smarts to put it together, which he proves by telling her that one component works better if you strip off the duranite caps. “Don’t ask me why—they just do.”
The gazelle speech. Lissan says that Archer’s mind has many facets and some of them are in conflict. Shran snidely says that that explains a lot, while my first response was a very skeptical, “Really?” Of course, it could be that there are still remnants of Surak and Syrran in there…
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol is purely focused on duty and her job. If she’s got any residual feelings for Tucker, she gives absolutely no indication of it, which annoys the fuck out of Tucker.
Florida Man. Florida Man Can’t Get Alien Lover Off Mind.
Optimism, Captain! Tucker tries to blame Phlox for his issues, since he was the one who suggested neuropressure back in “The Xindi,” which is what got Tucker and T’Pol started on their emotional roller-coaster. Phlox refuses delivery of that blame, as he was just trying to get Tucker aid in sleeping. (Plus, of course, you could argue that it really got started when Tucker talked T’Pol into trying pecan pie way back in “Breaking the Ice.”)
Phlox is also very reluctant to allow Jhamel to use the telepresence device.
Better get MACO. Reed wants Archer and Shran to take a squadron of MACOs with them to find the Aenar, but they decline, as that would be too provocative.
Blue meanies. Andoria is an ice planet and Shran goes on at great length about how fabulous the cold is. Archer is less than impressed.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Sparks fly between Shran and Jhamel, and we’ll find out in “These are the Voyages…” that they become a couple and have a daughter.
Meanwhile, Tucker is sufficiently distracted by his feelings for T’Pol, and her total lack of interest in responding in any way, shape, or form to those feelings, that he asks for a transfer.
I’ve got faith…
“What’s it like, your ship?”
“Warm.”
–Jhamel asking a reasonable question and Archer giving an answer that’s colored by the fact that he’s in minus-28-degree weather.
Welcome aboard. Back from “United” are Jeffrey Combs as Shran, Brian Thompson as Valdore, J. Michael Flynn (who, bizarrely, is uncredited for this appearance, even though he was credited in his prior two appearances) as Nijil, Geno Silva as Vrax, and Scott Allen Rinker as Gareb. We’ve also got Alexandra Lydon as Jhamel and Alicia Adams as Lissan. Combs will return in “These are the Voyages…”
Trivial matters: The is the final part of Enterprise’s final three-parter, continuing from “Babel One” and “United.”
When asked by Tucker about a near-death experience that had a profound impact on T’Pol, she mentions the attack on the control sphere in the Delphic Expanse in “Zero Hour.”
A deleted scene—which can be found on the season 4 DVD of Enterprise—has Valdore and Vrax arrested and being taken into custody by Vrax’s two Reman bodyguards.
This is the first appearance of Andoria (referred to as Andor on DS9) on screen. It is established as being the moon of a gas giant.
While Jhamel won’t be seen onscreen again, her relationship with Shran is developed in the various post-finale Enterprise novels by Michael A. Martin, Andy Mangels, and Christopher L. Bennett.
Both Valdore and Nijil play major roles in the post-finale Enterprise novels The Good that Men Do and Kobayashi Maru by Mangels & Martin and in the Romulan War duology by Martin.
Vrax is established as eventually rising to the praetorship in the twenty-third century, and as the one who ordered the mission in the original series’ “Balance of Terror,” in the Vanguard series by David Mack, Dayton Ward, & Kevin Dilmore, as well as in the novella “The First Peer” by Ward & Dilmore in Seven Deadly Sins.
This episode is the last of thirty-one episodes of Trek directed by Mike Vejar, and the penultimate directorial endeavor of his career, at least according to IMDB. The only credit of his that postdates this one is directing an episode of JAG from April 2005.
The notion of Andoria as an ice planet comes from various Trek role-playing games from both FASA and Last Unicorn. Manny Coto, Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, and André Bormanis in this and the previous episode mined a lot of the RPG material, particularly Last Unicorn’s Among the Clans, for the Andorian world-building.
In 2001, before Enterprise debuted (indeed, the books were planned before Enterprise was even announced), the Star Trek fiction, primarily in the post-finale DS9 novels, started its own world-building of the Andorians, including taking advantage of the line of dialogue in TNG’s “Data’s Day” that Andorians marry in groups of four to establish that the Andorians have four sexes. At the time, Rick Berman had been on the record more than once as saying that they wouldn’t be using the Andorians on Trek because aliens with antennae are silly (a position he obviously eventually reversed). The fiction continued to use a lot of the world-building they’d done even after Enterprise aired, mostly by trying to reconcile the two.
The existence of the Aenar retroactively provides a fix for a coloring mistake in the animated episode “Yesteryear,” as the Andorian Thelin had pale rather than blue skin. The short novel The Chimes at Midnight by Geoff Trowbridge in Myriad Universes: Echoes and Refractions (which told the story of the alternate timeline where Spock died as a seven-year-old) established that Thelin was half-Aenar.
It’s been a long road… “I didn’t see the sun until I was fifteen.” As a general rule, I’m fond of aftermath stories—the big things are cool, but I’m often more compelled by what happens next, about the recovery from the big thing.
But sometimes, the story ends at a certain point for a reason. “United” brought everything to a satisfying conclusion, with Andoria and Tellar Prime allies and with those two, humans, and Vulcans all working together against the Romulans.
This third part doesn’t really add a hell of a lot to the story. And what it does add is certainly some passable world-building. But we’re only just learning about Andorians, and this episode that takes us to Andoria doesn’t tell us hardly anything about mainstream Andorian society, focusing instead on the Aenar for whatever reason.
On top of that, the Romulans come across like total doofuses here. In the teaser, Vrax puts into words what was clear from “United”: the drone ship has had the opposite of the intended effect. Valdore’s imbecilic solution is to send out another drone ship, ’cause that’ll totally work! Then he expresses no concern for the health of the only pilot he has for these two drone ships, which makes even less sense.
For that matter, why is he going around kidnapping Aenar when it was established in Nemesis that Remans are telepathic? They’re slave labor anyhow, and they’re right there on the next planet over…
Putting Scott Bakula and Jeffrey Combs together always is fun, and despite the tiresome insistence of the unthinking morons in the writers room to continue to have him use the racist epithet “pinkskin,” Shran remains a delight, and one of Enterprise’s best contributions to the Trek pantheon. But ultimately, this episode feels like an awkwardly tacked on third part to something that would’ve been better off as a two-parter.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest work is The Four ???? of the Apocalypse, co-edited by him and Wrenn Simms, on sale now from Whysper Wude. It features alternate takes on the end-of-the-world quartet, such as the four PTA Moms of the apocalypse, the four cats of the apocalypse, the four Hollywood executives of the apocalypse, the four lawyers of the apocalypse, and so on. Among the contributors are Star Trek scribes David Gerrold, David Mack, Peter David, Derek Tyler Attico, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, and Aaron Rosenberg, as well as New York Times best-sellers Seanan McGuire, Jonathan Maberry, and Jody Lynn Nye, and tons more.
“We have to deal with the humans. They are the ones that brought the Andorians and Tellarites together.”
I thnk the conclusion works well, even though the grand alliance is largely abandoned in favour of telling a personal tale. In fact, in many ways that works, by giving us something new to focus on instead of just moving the same pieces around. Although the episode ends with Enterprise triumphant and the Romulans suffering a major setback, it’s essentially a tragedy, albeit one tinged with hope. Shran has lost his lover and most of his crew, but has gained a new understanding with Archer (they both describe the other as a friend during the course of the three-parter) and also with Jhamel, who experiences a tragedy of her own in getting her brother back just so she can lose him again. Although Shran tries to convince her otherwise, there’s really no hope of saving Gareb: They don’t even know where he is. All she can achieve is to redeem him and comfort him from a distance in his last moments.
The Andorian world-building actually works quite well despite having to be fitted in among everything else going on: We at least get the intriguing info that their cities are underground. Jhamel is a very appealing character, with a fragile innocence but a determination to do the right thing whatever the cost: It’s a shame there’s so few episodes left, because I suspect she’s someone we’d have seen again if there was a fifth season. And she at least gives Shran a taste of his own medicine by describing him as a “blueskin”.
Unfortunately, the other tragedy on display doesn’t work quite as well. Phlox tries to make a point about the difficulties of having feelings for a work colleague, but Tucker mainly comes across as a lovesick teenager. I’ve heard the last scene criticised for the fact Tucker isn’t willing to open up to Archer, who’s supposed to be his oldest friend. I guess there’s an argument that they’ve drifted apart over the course of the last couple of seasons, but the scene does ultimately feel rather empty. I guess they get credit for actually having Tucker leave the ship, so we’ll see how that’s handled going forward.
Sato has no dialogue in this episode (she isn’t even allowed to answer verbally when Archer asks her a question!), while Mayweather has two lines, one on camera and one over the comline. To a degree, the conversation with Tucker echoes Phlox giving similar advice to Archer in ‘A Night in Sickbay’.
I’ve been wondering about the worldbuilding …
Is Andoria the Andorian homeworld, with a ringed moon, or is it their homemoon, in orbit around a ringed planet? Also, underground cities under the ice work nicely as a single outpost, but how is a pre-technological society supposed to have developed there? It worked much better with the assumption that Andoria has a narrow temperate zone around the equator and large ice caps, but then would they keep their children without even a vacation or field trip for more than a decade? Remember from the last episode that Shran trained from childhood as a soldier. No outdoor survival training?
Well, enough of that peeve. Another interesting thing is how quickly the interstellar squabbles disappeared after the duel. No residual hard feelings? That might show that the Tellarites were actually being argumentative for show, and perfectly willing to behave like adult beings once cooperation made sense. Or is it just that the dramatic focus of this episode was a different one?
PS — the last two weeks, I had been locked out by a malfunctioning captcha. A German text about the country code not being right …
Agree that this one feels unnecessary, and it’s not even clear to me why the drone would need a telepathic pilot; why not just set up a bridge on Romulus and get a crew to operate it by remote control? It doesn’t really need to be super manoeuvrable, it just needs to look like another power’s starship.
Trip’s transfer to the Columbia is an interesting shakeup of the status quo, but it really ends up being too short-lived to be interesting. (I remember joking at the time that they were trying to bypass the series’ cancellation by doing a Star Trek: Columbia spin-off, with a theme song about having “Grace of the Spleen:).
The grey Andorian in “Yesteryear” wasn’t really mystery that needed to be solved (how many different colours do humans come in? Why should aliens be any different?), but I really like the Aenar, and it makes sense that, if the Andorians all live in labyrinthine ice caves, there’d be plenty of subpopulations that get split off and develop in relative isolation, even without the dominant culture knowing about them (I shall assume that this accounts for the variety of different Andorian make-up designs over the years). Plus, it eventually gives us Hemmer!
I can’t answer why they didn’t use Remans, but this episode implicitly confirms that Romulans have somehow lost their Vulcan ancestors’ telepathic gifts, otherwise they wouldn’t need an Aenar pilot.
One thing that bugs me about the Aenar set design is, if they’re all blind and hardly ever have visitors, why do their buildings have interior lights and windows? I handwaved it in TOS: The Higher Frontier by saying that the buildings were constructed by the Andorians in a sort of Peace Corps/Civilising Mission effort shortly after the Aenar were rediscovered 50 years earlier.
Perhaps it speaks to how much Romulans detest Remans that they’d rather go significantly out of their way to abduct other telepathic species for this sort of thing rather than trust a Reman to do the job.
David Pirtie: Maybe, but I think it’s more likely that they just forgot that Remans are telepathic…… *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I can see needing to kidnap the Aenar to run the drone ships for a few reasons. 1) Using you own slaves for military Black Ops where the benefit to them isn’t likely to play well long term. Using another Telepathic Species arguably makes it easier to limit discontent with your own slaves. 2) The Aenar at this point are presented as a marginalized group/culture/subspecies on Andoria. The Romulans might want to exploit this for their own benefit by making promises to the Aenar that they don’t intend to keep. 3) Even with a sophisticated AI, running the Drone Ship from Romulus via computer runs the risk of someone figuring out that it’s a drone due to a predictable response patterm. Think of how MMO developers have tools to detect when a player is running multiple characters via scripts. Having a Telepathic pilot introduces the “Human” factor, making it somewhat more difficult to tell that the ship is an unscrewed drone being operated remotely. You also need to consider the overall Romulans view of AI’s. An adaptive program sophisticated enough to fool other rival species for more than a brief time may give Romulans Leadership the Willie’s.
As far as Tripp requesting a transfer, I think he’s got some legitimate butterflies to deal with. It’s obvious that he loves T’Pol and that she has similar feelings, but he’s considering the implications of a long term relationship between a Human and Vulcan. There are plenty of people on Earth and Vulcan that probably would take a dim view of such a relationship. Stepping back (via the transfer to Columbia) allows Trip and T’Pol to realize that they do need to be together.
One thought that occurred to me while watching this episode was that, if you really do need a telepath to steer your starship, the Aenar are ideally suited to the role – since their psychic abilities are specifically set up for the purposes of navigation (It bears keeping in mind that not all Telepathic species have the same gifts: a Vulcan is not a Betazoid, an Aenar is not a Reman and so forth*).
*In fact this episode makes a point of showing that T’Pol, no slouch, is simply not as suited to steering the drone ships as the much younger and more sheltered Jamel. There’s no guarantee that a Reman would be any more successful.
It has also occurred to me while typing this message that Valdore, a man who has already faced the ruin of one career and presumably been allowed a second only through the machinations of Senator Vrax (Who by sponsoring his ‘Old Friend’ gets the prestige of having converted a former dissenter into a loyal soldier, whilst simultaneously lining up the perfect scapegoat if anything goes so badly wrong someone has to be thrown to the raptors), might simply have decided that he had less to lose than he stood to gain if his “Double or Nothing” gambit failed and decided to risk all.
I’m not quite sure if this would be a deliberate case of sabotage (The failure of this project would almost certainly cost the ‘Unlimited Expansion’ party, in terms of prestige and political assets, as originally invested in the programme & as required by damage control after it’s explosion) or if this simply represents a panicked man’s last roll of the dice, but it’s still worth considering whether this was genuinely a case of desperate folly or if it represents a calculated act of spite under the cloak of desperation.
…
Also, I cannot lie, my old crackpot theory that Doctor Phlox has been covertly angling for a threesome with Trip Tucker and a third party of the latter’s choice ever since Trip turned down Doctor & Mrs Phlox briefly raised it’s horny little head to cackle “So much for that plan!” once Mr Tucker gave Phlox a piece of his mind r.e. the ‘Vulcan Neuropressure’ plan and associated resentment.
P.S. Almost forgot to add – I really, really loved the visuals for the worlds of the Andorian home system (Which strikes me as delightfully old-school Science Fiction) and the Aenar community (Ditto, with an extra helping of Winter Wonderland).
@7/Charles Rosenberg: “1) Using you own slaves for military Black Ops where the benefit to them isn’t likely to play well long term. Using another Telepathic Species arguably makes it easier to limit discontent with your own slaves.”
Except that empires have been using their slaves and subject peoples as the major constituents of their militaries for as long as there have been empires. That’s one reason I like Nemesis — it actually got it right that an empire would use its subjugated peoples as cannon fodder in wars because they’re considered more expendable. It’s canonical that the Remans were used as front line troops in the Dominion War, so why wouldn’t they be used for this as well, given that it’s considerably less dangerous for them?
As for why they’d need a telepathic telepresence operator, I’d assume it’s because subspace radio isn’t instantaneous without relay stations to boost the signal (which would be too likely to give away the existence of the remote control), whereas telepathy has been shown to be instantaneous even across interstellar distances and is presumably untraceable.
While the plot of the formation of the alliance is where the meat is there is the lingering story thread of the pilot that they set up. Visiting Andoria and meeting the Aenar more than make up for the fact that it’s not really overly necessary. I do wish we’d seen a more central slice of Andorian civilization however.
@2, O.M. All of their cities being underground seems feasible. We don’t know if Andoria has constantly been an iceball. It may have been more temperate in the past and when the big freeze came along Andorian civilization was advanced enough to move beneath the ice. Or the iceball could be a byproduct of the primary Andor’s orbit and parts of Andoria melt at different points of the orbit. Actually ancient frozen surface cities would be a great attraction.
One thing Romulans like is their complexity. Kidnapping an Aenar to do their dirty work makes a degree of sense. If anyone discovers the drone ship and the brain patterns it says this is a plot by Andorians, not Romulans. Especially if the Tellarites or Vulcans uncover this information. That works if the controlling signal is intercepted, but not the ship. It’s also possible that the long term plan involved it being discovered that an Aenar pilot was controlling the ship. Again, humans mess everything up.
I also loved Jhamel, excellent serene presence. It’s easy to see how Shran was smitten.
I didn’t really like that Trip took the transfer to duck T’Pol. If it was just a temporary transfer to help Columbia that he’d been putting off it’d be one thing. It just felt weird to me.
Over the course of this arc, I liked Brian Thompson’s somewhat cerebral (for him) take on Valdore, without losing much of his innate Brian Thompsonness. This third part kind of lowballs his character, but overall I was pleasantly surprised.
@11/mr_d: Agreed, I thought Jhamel was quite lovely, both inwardly and and outwardly.
Everything is better with Shran.
Yes, I’m with the people who point out the entire point of this Drone Ship ProjectTM is that it is utterly untraceable to the Romulans who are still in their “absolutely no one can know anything about us or what we’re up to” stage. Which is really just there to protect the reveal later in the timeline since the Romulans never display this tendency again but whatcha gonna do. So, going out of your way to kidnap an Aenar rather than use a Reman (who know all about Romulans) makes sense. If nothing else, they can just lie and say they’re Vulcans.
As for the Aenar, I like creating a subrace or racial subtype to the Andorians because while TWO races of an alien race is still ridiculously small, it at least gives a token nod toward the complexity of real life society. Oddly, it reminds me of a fun line from ALIEN NATION the TV show. The protagonist talks to his neighbor about a religious tradition his partner is involved in and he asks her about it, only for her to say that they follow a different religion.
Protagonist: You have different religions? [beat] Of course you do. Why wouldn’t you?
As for the Romulans losing their psychic powers, Mind Melding was already considered a dirty and nasty trait only practiced by Syrannites so it’s possible that it’s not that the Romulans have lost their psychic powers but that it’s just a skill that needs training and never develops due to disuse. So Romulans never learn to swim, so to speak, while Post-Syrannite Reform Vulcans all get training in it. They may even be the people who developed the prejudice against Mind Melders and introduced it via the Vulcan High Command but that’s a bit too, “All evils originate from Romulus”
“Romulans have somehow lost their Vulcan ancestors’ telepathic gifts”
IIRC, Diane Duane addressed that in one of her books. That it was a skill that needed to be taught, and no one with that skill survived the trip from Vulcan to Romulus.
@16: I am rather a fan of Diane Duane’s Rihannsu books; more specifically, I am a fan of The Romulan Way, the first of them that I read. Duane’s take on Romulus and the Romulans is quite different from their later portrayal on TV and in film, and her books are thus not considered canon, but I could easily see a similar explanation being true of the canonical Romulans as well.
@14/C.T. Phipps: “…the Romulans who are still in their “absolutely no one can know anything about us or what we’re up to” stage. Which is really just there to protect the reveal later in the timeline since the Romulans never display this tendency again but whatcha gonna do.”
Sure they do. The Romulan worldbuilding that Michael Chabon did for Star Trek Picard in its first season was built heavily around the extensive, reflexive secrecy woven into their culture, e.g. the idea that even their homes have hidden entrances, they conceal their true names, etc. With the Qowat Milat being the counterculture reaction to that with their Absolute Candor. And TNG certainly ran with the idea that Romulans (or at least their government) are big on spy games and deception and scheming, e.g. secretly backing the Duras’s coup in the Klingon Empire or planning a sneak invasion of Vulcan. Heck, to an extent it goes back to their debut in “Balance of Terror,” where they were making sneak attacks with an invisible ship. The Romulans’ fondness for secrecy has always been there to one degree or another.
“Oddly, it reminds me of a fun line from ALIEN NATION the TV show. The protagonist talks to his neighbor about a religious tradition his partner is involved in and he asks her about it, only for her to say that they follow a different religion.”
Yup, that was from the pilot movie. The Franciscos were Celinists, Cathy followed a different faith that she described as analogous to Eastern religions on Earth, and we learned a couple of episodes later that the Franciscos’ Uncle Moodri turned out to follow yet another, pre-Celinist religion. Episode 19 revealed a fourth religion, a New-Agey cult called the Luibof.
However, later installments never followed up on Cathy’s distinct faith and sometimes portrayed her as participating in Celinist rituals.
(As it happens, I have an Alien Nation revisit/review series debuting at noon EST today on my Patreon site, covering the entire franchise including the movies, TV series, novels, and comics. I’ve just lowered my prices, so my reviews are available for just $2 a month, although my initial rewatch column today, covering the original 1988 movie, is free for everyone.)
@15 & 16. Sherman & Shwartz also covered it in their Vulcan’s Soul trilogy; in their version, all the telepathically-gifted Vulcans ended up exiled to Remus with the Surak-influenced faction (where exposure to radiation and native bacteria mutated their descendants), while the more militant (and materialist) faction killed off all their telepaths as security risks.
There’s a memorable line from a Vulcan-trained Healer disdaining the “technicians of flesh” that the Romulans use as medics.
@18/Cybersnark: Vulcan’s Soul‘s depiction of the proto-Romulans’ journey from Vulcan to Romulus is basically an expanded retelling of Diane Duane’s version from The Romulan Way — which is odd, because the depiction of the beginnings of the Sundering in the first book of Vulcan’s Soul directly contradicts Duane’s version by making the Sundered allies of Surak instead of adversaries, and changing other specifics about Surak’s life. It’s like somebody changed their mind mid-trilogy about whether they could acknowledge Duane’s work or not.
One more thing I forgot to add – one of the things I liked about this episode was the little glances of sympathy from one of our villains and for the other.
Nothing major, to be sure, but an intriguing hint that they’d more on Romulus than villainy alone (Heck, even Senator Vrax has clearly taken something of a risk to give his old friend a second chance – cruel mercy though that may be).
I find it interesting that Valdore got arrested in that deleted scene, given that there was a warbird presumably named after him in Nemesis. I wonder if this was intended to be a temporary setback from which he would come back if the series had continued. Maybe he would have been the main commander of the Romulan forces in the war against Earth.
@21/jaimebabb: Or the warship in Nemesis could’ve been named after a different member of the Valdore family.
Although the novel continuity went with your idea, that he was rehabilitated and became a major player in events leading up to and including the Earth-Romulan War.
To be fair, dictatorships arresting people and then releasing them later to positions of power isn’t unheard of either. Depending on how unstable the Romulan Empire can be, one faction might be in power one day and arrests all the people involved that support it under trumped up charges or not then it falls out of favor to have the same happen to them.
It could also be a very “Roman” sort of thing as well.
Valdore is offered a chance at honorable suicide for his failure, takes it, and they name ships after him for his past heroism.
@23. C.T. Phipps: Heck, it’s far from impossible that Valdore could be posthumously rehabilitated even in he didn’t enjoy the benefit of a Good Death – a martyr can be as useful as a hero, after all.
@13. AlanBrown: Except, of course, if you value the quiet life! (-;
Given that Trek had already done Romulans and Remans, it makes sense to do an offshoot of another alien species. The Aenar serve the same purpose for the Andorians, and it’s a concept that’s obviously been done to death on sci-fi in general, even though they feel like a retread of two distinct Babylon 5 backstories: the Xon, which grew up on the same planet as the Centauri (different continents) before being wiped out, and the Hyach-Do, who co-existed with the Hyach and were also given the genocide treatment (and then the Hyach found out they doomed themselves to a slow, painful extinction by killing the sister species – their DNA were required for both species’s survival).
The worldbuilding here is welcome, even if the episode feels like a padded afterthought. Almost as if Manny Coto borrowed a page from Michael Piller’s playbook and stretched from a two-parter to a three-parter for budgetary purposes (as I understand, both TNG’s “Birthright” and DS9’s “Past Tense” were originally written as single episodes).
The real surprise here is the Trip/T’Pol situation. I was genuinely shocked to see Tucker actually transferring off the ship because he couldn’t be around her. Serving on another ship for several episodes? This would be like Troi asking Picard to leave because Riker – the Imzadi who dumped her for his career – was brought onboard as first officer, or Bashir doing the same because he couldn’t stand being in the same room as Worf/Dax together. This was a first for Trek – a reminder that humans in general were still young and learning to overcome their own issues. Still, this is one story thread that I’d argue went nowhere and served little purpose as the season went along.
@26/Eduardo: “Given that Trek had already done Romulans and Remans, it makes sense to do an offshoot of another alien species.”
Although some tie-ins have interpreted the Remans as an offshoot of the Romulans, there’s no canonical support for that idea. I think the intent of Nemesis was that they were the indigenous species of Remus, conquered and forced into slavery by the Romulan colonizers. And I much prefer that idea. Not only does it reflect what often happens in colonization, but as I’ve often said, it annoys me that so many Trek “empires” are monospecies nations, when an empire by definition is one nation ruling over others. I found it refreshing that NEM turned the Romulans into an actual, proper empire by giving them a subject people. If they’re just some kind of mutant Romulans, then that goes away. It also makes little sense, because they look very different.
“Still, this is one story thread that I’d argue went nowhere and served little purpose as the season went along.”
I think the purpose of Trip’s transfer was to have a main cast member as the viewpoint character for the Columbia scenes in the next storyline.
The Remans are depicted in Lower Decks as having purple blood, which suggests that they’re products of an entirely different chain of evolution.
Quoth Eduardo: ” (as I understand, both TNG’s “Birthright” and DS9’s “Past Tense” were originally written as single episodes).”
Yes to the first, no to the second. You’re thinking of “Improbable Cause”/”The Die is Cast,” which was originally conceived as a single episode.
Also, Babylon 5 did not invent the notion of two species on a single planet, so I don’t even know why you brought the show up.
Regarding the Remans, I’m with Christopher — there’s no onscreen evidence to support the notion that they’re a Romulan offshoot, and that was an aspect of the Vulcan’s Soul trilogy I disagreed with.
Finally, Tucker’s transfer to Columbia was likely budgetary — they probably couldn’t afford to hire another actor to play a member of Columbia‘s crew for “Affliction”/”Divergence,” so having Tucker there meant that Ada Maris had someone to talk to for the scenes on the NX-02.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Indeed, I mixed up “Past Tense” with the Garak/Odo two parter.
I never said B5 invented the dual species concept – in fact, I pointed out it’s been done to death on sci-fi circles. I merely said the Aenar plotline felt like a retread of the B5 story, which was still fairly fresh in my mind.
And as for Trip’s transfer to the Columbia, it feels pointless on a character basis. It doesn’t change their dynamic in the long run (that’s left for the binary clone baby storyline that’s coming up). It only serves to put him in the right place for the “Affliction”/”Divergence” storyline. A case of plot requirements superseding character logic.
I don’t mind the idea of Trip transferring to another ship for a while; if anything, such transfers are far more common in real life than they are in Trek. And it’s a good way to give us a look at Columbia by following a lead character there for a while. My only problem is that it’s for such a short time, only a single 2-parter.
@31 said: I don’t mind the idea of Trip transferring to another ship for a while; if anything, such transfers are far more common in real life than they are in Trek.
I agree completely. I would think, in fact, that Starfleet would want an experienced hand on Columbia – maybe even to the level of forcing such a transfer. That might have been a more plausible way to split up Trip and T’Pol rather than the melodrama we got ..
@29/krad: “Finally, Tucker’s transfer to Columbia was likely budgetary — they probably couldn’t afford to hire another actor to play a member of Columbia‘s crew for “Affliction”/”Divergence,” so having Tucker there meant that Ada Maris had someone to talk to for the scenes on the NX-02.”
Not so sure about that, since it meant they had to hire an actor to play the temporary chief engineer of Enterprise, although I guess at least there they could spread the cost across the rest of the season.
@33/cap: Not only did they have to hire an actor to play Kelby on NX-01 (though Kelby actually had bigger roles in episodes after Trip returned), but they had to hire one to play Rivers, the Columbia engineer that Trip gave orders to. They only would’ve had to hire one actor to give Hernandez someone to play off of.
As I said, I think it was more about having a familiar lead character for the audience to connect with in the Columbia scenes.
I found it surprising that a species that has clearly been warp-capable for a while (long enough to have beef with the Vulcans) could be basically unaware of a population of thousands on their own planet. It’s hard to believe that the Aenar could have such good tech that they were able to remain hidden (with their “dampening field”)…did they use their telepathy?
@35/Wyatt Rubal: “I found it surprising that a species that has clearly been warp-capable for a while (long enough to have beef with the Vulcans) could be basically unaware of a population of thousands on their own planet.”
We went to the Moon in 1969, but there are isolated populations on Earth that weren’t contacted until the 1970s or after. And there’s still a ton we don’t know about Earth’s oceans. Exploration doesn’t expand uniformly outward in a perfect sphere. Sometimes places on your own planet are harder to reach than space is, or there’s less incentive to go there. The Aenar live underground in the most remote and inhospitable parts of Andoria. Even though the planet is largely glaciated, the Andorians clearly thrive in the same temperature range as humans, so it’s probably difficult for them to function in the coldest parts of the world.
Besides, planets are big. People assume that humans inhabit the entire land surface of the Earth, but the fact is that permanent habitation takes up no more than a few percent of it. There are plenty of empty places left, though they’re diminishing as development and resource exploitation continue. But maybe the Andorians take better care of their environment and leave more of it pristine instead of despoiling it for resources. So there would be more places for uncontacted peoples to remain apart.
@35 / WyattRubal – It’s extremely difficult to explore underground, and even in the Star Trek universe, they don’t seem to have the technology to scan through millions of cubic kilometres of solid rock and ice. Consider that, in real life, there’s a vast network of caves directly beneath the city of Montreal that was only discovered in 2017. This is a modern city with millions of people that’s been been standing for four centuries, and entire generations have lived and died with no idea that this was directly beneath their feet! I have no problem with the idea that the Andorians could go without recognizing caves in the remote extremes of their own planet.
@37/jaime: Good point about caves being hard to scan through. As Beckett Mariner said, “Buncha rocks always beats centuries of technological progress.”
@36/CLB: There were (and still are) uncontacted peoples on Earth, like the Sentinelese—but we know about them. That the Aenar could have existed unknown by the Andorians until recently puts them more in the category of cryptids, like Bigfoot.
Which, well, Star Trek is science fiction, so okay, why not? But I’m not sure how well it holds up as an analogy.
@39/terracinque: Yes, but none of them live in underground caves in the inaccessible polar wastes, where there’s a convenient naturally occurring technobabble field that interferes with sensors. It’s all right there in the episode already.
The ‘pinkskin’ thing doesn’t bother this pinkskin at all. The reviewers distaste for it just shows that he never served in a military branch and heard the Marines refer to ‘dark green’ and ‘light green’, that from one of my best buds who was a my 2nd ship and a very dark green Marine. Military folks just aren’t that sensitive to those sorts of things; No Big Deal.
Yes, but how would you feel about it if you had brown skin? The point is that a very large percentage of humans are not pinkskins, so it’s problematical to use “pinkskin” as a general slur for all humans.