“Canamar”
Written by John Shiban
Directed by Allen Kroeker
Season 2, Episode 17
Production episode 043
Original air date: February 26, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise comes across the shuttlepod that Archer and Tucker took to make first contact with the Enolians. But the pod is empty and drifting, and shows signs of a struggle. T’Pol immediately has Mayweather set a course for Keto-Enol.
As for Archer and Tucker, they’ve been taken prisoner, accused of being smugglers and are on a prison transport to Canamar, an Enolian prison planet. Tucker is stuck sitting next to a tiresomely talkative alien named Zoumas and sitting in front of a snotty Nausicaan who tries to steal his food.
T’Pol speaks to an Enolian authority figure that the script never bothers to name, so I’m just gonna call him “Tom,” because the actor playing him kinda looks like Tom Berenger a little. Anyhow, T’Pol explains the situation, and “Tom” is actually sympathetic and helpful, which makes him unique among authority figures in this type of TV story.
The prison transport gets the message that Archer and Tucker aren’t really smugglers, but before they can be freed, another prisoner named Kuroda stages an uprising with the Nausicaan. Unfortunately for Kuroda, the Nausicaan critically injures the pilot, which leaves them with nobody to fly the ship—
—until Archer volunteers. He plays the part of a smuggler (now saying that he was being freed because he bribed the Enolian officials), and sucks up to Kuroda while quickly teaching himself how to fly the transport. When Enolian officials go after them, Archer manages to cripple the ships by igniting plasma instead of destroying them. His argument to Kuroda is that a murder charge is way worse than a smuggling charge (or a prison break charge), and Kuroda actually agrees with him, making him unique among bad guys in this type of TV story.
“Tom” explains to T’Pol that now that they know that Kuroda hijacked the ship, they’re going to shoot to kill. He recommends that Enterprise find the transport first if they want their captain and chief engineer alive.
Kuroda reads Archer in on his plan: to rendezvous with a ship at Tamaal and then put the transport in a decaying orbit. It’ll blow up, and the Enolians will think they all died in the explosion.
Now realizing he needs to take action, Archer convinces Kuroda to free Tucker so he can repair the docking port, which was damaged in the firefight with the Enolian authorities. This comes to Tucker as something of a relief, as Zoumas will not shut up…
Tucker uses that repair as cover to whack the Nausicaan on the head. However, when he tries to complete the mutiny, Zoumas yells out a warning. Zoumas believes that they will all be freed by Kuroda, which Archer and Tucker know not to be the case, but try telling him that.
Archer convinces Kuroda not to shoot him because the docking port still needs to be repaired. Archer does that repair at gunpoint, and then they dock with Kuroda’s friends—
—except Enterprise found them, took over the criminals’ shuttle, and docked with it. A firefight ensues, and Reed and his security detail are able to get all the prisoners off the transport—which is still in a decaying orbit. Kuroda, however, refuses to leave, and fisticuffs ensue between him and Archer. In the end, Archer lets him stay on board and they all bugger off. The transport explodes in the Tamaal atmosphere.
“Tom” asks for a report, and Archer mouths off at him about their false arrest.
Buy the Book
Wild Massive
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Tucker uses tricks with igniting plasma in order to win a space battle against a foe who is superior on paper. Because he’s just that awesome.
The gazelle speech. Archer dives into the role of smuggler with both feet, and is convincing enough that Kuroda takes him into his confidence.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol does an excellent job of tracking Archer and Tucker down.
Florida Man. Florida Man Stuck Next To Chatty Cathy On Prison Ship.
I’ve got faith…
“Have you ever been to Burala Prime?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“If you ever go, avoid the polar islands! The people are friendly, but the cold is unbearable—nothing but ice and glaciers. I was stranded there for three months when some colleagues of mine decided to leave without me.”
“Imagine that.”
–Zoumas talking and Tucker losing his will to live.
Welcome aboard. Longtime character actor Mark Rolston plays his second of three Trek roles as Kuroda; he previously played the image of Pierce in TNG’s “Eye of the Beholder,” and will be back on Enterprise as a Klingon in “The Augments.” Sean Whelan plays Zoumas (though he’ll always be Tiny Tim in The Hebrew Hammer to me…), Michael McGrady plays the Nausicaan, and Holmes R. Osborne plays “Tom.”
Trivial matters: The original plan was to have Enterprise rescuing Archer from a prison transport at the end of “Judgment,” but the idea grew into its own storyline, which wound up airing two weeks before “Judgment” and not being related at all.
Zoumas at one point mentions tojal, a food that he says has to be eaten while hot, lest it congeal. Quark served tojal to the Cardassian scientists in DS9’s “Destiny.”
This episode was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup for a Series, but it lost to Primetime Glick. (An Enterprise episode was nominated in this category each of the four years the show was on the air, but it never won.)
It’s been a long road… “I’m a smuggler, remember?” One of the more mind-boggling decisions that was made by the production staff led by Rick Berman was the choice in 2001 to not use the prefix “Star Trek” as part of the title of this show, simply calling it Enterprise. It was a remarkably short-sighted decision, as all leaving the name of the most popular science fiction television franchise in the world off your title does is cost you viewers.
Then they do an episode like this, and you start to see why they left those two words off the title, because holy cow, this is the single most generic sci-fi action episode possible.
There are some moments in John Shiban’s script that work nicely. The fact that “Tom” is actually helpful is a nice touch, and Shiban also understands that different levels of criminal are treated differently by law-enforcement. As long as Kuroda is just a guy who stole a ship, he’s a nuisance. If he murders Enolian law-enforcement personnel, he becomes a murderer, and they’re going to expend significantly more effort to find him in that case. And Sean Whelan’s babbling prisoner is hilariously horrible, with Connor Trinneer doing a lovely job as his long-suffering straight man.
But this episode is so ploddingly paint-by-numbers with absolutely nothing to make it interesting. Trek has dipped into the crew-as-prisoners well before, most notably in DS9’s “Hard Time” and Voyager’s “The Chute,” both of which were light-years better than this slog. Mostly because we saw the effects of incarceration on people. Here, we don’t even make it to the titular prison, and it’s really just a hijacking-the-ship episode. And it’s a spectacularly boring example of the breed, with the added lack-of-bonus of a simply endless fist fight between Scott Bakula’s and Mark Rolston’s respective stunt doubles at what passes for the climax.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s next novel is Phoenix Precinct, the sixth novel in his fantasy/police procedure series, which will be officially launched at the PhilCon convention in mid-November in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a convention at which Keith will be the Principal Speaker. More on the book (including excerpts and preorder info) at this link.
