“Chosen Realm”
Written by Manny Coto
Directed by Roxann Dawson
Season 3, Episode 12
Production episode 064
Original air date: January 14, 2004
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise has found a third sphere. Tucker and Mayweather check it out in a shuttlecraft, and it appears to be exactly the same as the other two.
As they return to Enterprise, they are observed by a ship full of aliens.
Later, T’Pol reports to Archer that she now is pretty sure she has a full map of the spheres, and there are fifty-nine of them. They receive a distress call from the same ship that was spying on them earlier. They’ve been badly damaged by an anomaly. Mayweather manages to pilot them safely through the anomaly to the ship, which is from a world called Triannon.
The Triannons refuse any invasive medical scans on religious grounds, but Phlox is able to work with that limitation and treat the injured. D’Jamat, the pri’nam, or leader, explains that they’re on a pilgrimage to all the spheres in the Chosen Realm—their name for the Delphic Expanse. The Triannons revere the Makers who created the spheres, which they believe number in the thousands (T’Pol’s explanation that there are fifty-nine is met with disbelief), and are working their way to all of them. But their ship is much slower than Enterprise. They also refer to the anomalies as “Maker’s Breath,” and wear the scars from the anomalies as badges of honor.
Archer offers hospitality, with D’Jamat dining with Archer and T’Pol. In addition, a Triannon woman named Indava visits Phlox.
D’Jamat meets with two of his people in the mess hall, where it becomes clear that they plan to hijack the ship. D’Jamat implements this plan in short order, explaining that all his people have explosives in their bloodstreams. (That’s the real reason why they avoided invasive medical scans.) To prove himself, D’Jamat orders one of his people to go all suicide bomber, taking out a piece of the hull and a member of Archer’s crew (who is never named).
The Triannons lock most of the crew in their quarters, leaving only a few essential personnel to run things: T’Pol and Mayweather on the bridge, Tucker in engineering. D’Jamat orders T’Pol to scuttle his ship and Mayweather to fly to Triannon. Then, in the command center, D’Jamat is disgusted by Archer collecting data on the spheres, which he finds offensive. He deletes all the data in the computer.
The plan is to take Enterprise to Triannon and use its superior firepower to wipe out all the heretics. Two different sects have been at war for a century, and D’Jamat now has the means to end it once and for all. When Archer expresses disgust, D’Jamat reminds him of how he himself threatened to toss someone out an airlock in order to fulfill his mission. Archer’s retort that he didn’t actually hurt anyone falls on deaf ears.
D’Jamat also says that Enterprise’s actions in examining the sphere are heretical—but the crew also did risk their lives to save D’Jamat’s people. Therefore, D’Jamat is very magnanimously only going to kill one of Archer’s crew and spare the rest—and Archer gets to choose who dies! What a sweetheart!
Archer’s answer is himself—he won’t ask any of his crew to sacrifice themselves, and he himself is ultimately responsible for what happens. He requests only that they kill him using the device they use to dispose of hazardous waste. (It’s the transporter, of course.) T’Pol “disintegrates” Archer, after telling her to leave Porthos in Phlox’s care.
Yarrick expresses concern about what they’re doing, but D’Jamat shuts him down with an if-you’re-not-for-us-you’re-against-us-and-also-a-heretic speech. Yarrick’s wife is Indava, and she went to Phlox because she’s pregnant. They’re both worried about what kind of a world they’re bringing a child into.
Archer contacts Phlox via text message. Phlox has no idea how to neutralize the bio-explosives because he has no internal scans of any Triannons, and he can’t perform one now while he’s under guard. So Archer ambushes a Triannon, renders him unconscious, and performs a medical scan, passing the data on to Phlox, which enables him to create an agent that will render the explosives inert.
Archer convinces Yarrick to help him out. (It doesn’t take that much convincing.) Yarrick has to authorize sickbay to pump something into the environmental systems, which can only be done from the bridge. Yarrick does so sneakily. Yarrick also tells Archer the source of the conflict between them and the heretical sect: the others “falsely” believe that the Chosen Realm was created in ten days rather than the proper nine.
Enterprise has come across several ships operated by the heretic sect. But the Starfleet vessel is way more powerful. T’Pol refuses to fire on them, so a Triannon operates the weapons systems.
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Using his Pyrithian bat to distract his guard long enough for Phlox to sedate him, the doctor then pumps the substance into the environmental systems while Archer starts to sabotage the ship, rerouting command functions away from the bridge. Archer also frees Reed and a bunch of MACOs, and they start to take back the ship. The job is made easier by the Triannons no longer able to use their last-ditch option of blowing themselves up.
Archer manages to convince the heretics that he’s taken his ship back, at which point they stop firing. They continue to Triannon, and Archer lands the two shuttles with the prisoners on a planet that is ravaged. Apparently eight months ago the conflict go so bad that both sides pretty much wiped each other out.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently all the spheres are exactly the same. That will probably be important later.
The gazelle speech. Archer is able to trick D’Jamat into “killing” him with the transporter. Luckily, D’Jamat’s extensive reading of Archer’s logs managed not to include any mention of the transporter…
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol shows absolutely no tolerance for irrational religious beliefs that contradict science. She also does a good job of pretending to be unhappy about Archer’s “death.”
Florida Man. Florida Man Draws Ire of Religious Extremists For Violating Their Sacred Space.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox refuses to report to his quarters until he treats the people wounded during the Triannon takeover.
Good boy, Porthos! Porthos seems very happy to be living in sickbay now—maybe because there are so many other animals around. Also Archer signals who he is in his text messages to Phlox by telling the doctor not to feed the dog any cheese.
Better Get MACO. For the first time all season, the MACOs are actually useful in repelling an incursion onto the ship.
I’ve got faith…
“These people you’re fighting—what makes them heretics?”
“We believe the Makers created the Chosen Realm in nine days. They believe it took ten.”
“For that you’ve been at war for over a century?”
–Archer asking an honest question, Yarrick answering, and Archer wondering what the big deal is about breaking eggs on the big end instead of the little end.
Welcome aboard. We get a couple of past guests in Conor O’Farrell as D’Jamat (he was in “Rogue Planet” as Burzaan and DS9’s “Little Green Men” as Jeff) and Gregory Wagrowski as Ceris (he was Captain Solok in DS9’s “Take Me Out to the Holosuite”). In addition, Vince Grant and Lindsey Stoddart play Yarrick and Indava, respectively, while the other Triannons are played by Tayler Sheridan, David Youse, and Matt Huhn.
Trivial matters: Archer threatened to blow someone out an airlock in “Anomaly.” D’Jamat throws that in his face.
Phlox told Archer not to feed cheese to Porthos in “A Night in Sickbay.”
It’s been a long road… “When you begin to sympathize with the enemy, you risk becoming the enemy.” On the one hand, I can see why they might have thought, just two years after 9/11, that doing a show about a hijacking by religious extremists might have seemed very topical and relevant.
On the other hand, this is Star Trek, where ship du jour is hijacked with alarming regularity: “By Any Other Name,” “Let that Be Your Last Battlefield” (an episode that “Chosen Realm” shares a lot of DNA with), “Rascals,” “One Little Ship,” “Basics, Part II,” “Counterpoint,” “There is a Tide…,” “The Serene Squall,” “Surrender,” etc. etc.
So it’s hard to get too worked up over this story, especially since it’s so by-the-numbers. We don’t get any kind of examination of the Triannon culture, we’re just presented with it. Yes, D’Jamat is an evil motherfucker—that’s made clear from his speech to Yarrick about how he shouldn’t question the Makers who speak through him, not to mention his telling Archer to pick a member of his crew to kill. To Conor O’Farrell’s credit, he plays D’Jamat with a bland, friendly affect, which is perfect for this kind of role. He sounds so reasonable and polite when he’s talking about massacreing tons of people—after all, it’s in the name of peace and harmony!
Worse, the reason for the fight—disagreement over a point of mythological specificity—is the sort of thing that should’ve been examined. Even the gold standard for metaphor-for-how-stupid-these-things-are, the original series’ “Let that Be Your Last Battlefield,” spent some time with the absurdity and showed how important it was to Bele and Lokai in contrast to how irrelevant it was to the Enterprise crew. But here, it’s just mentioned in passing, and Vince Grant can’t bring himself to bring any passion to it when he describes it as Yarrick. He sounds like he thinks it’s just as stupid as Archer does. So why is he with these people? Yarrick and Indava obviously don’t feel that strongly about what they’re doing, yet they’re in with a bunch of seriously fanatical fanatics. How’d they wind up here? Did they become less fanatic over time? We don’t know, because Manny Coto’s dreary script can’t be arsed to actually dig into this culture. It’s just presented as religious-extremism-is-bad-mkay? and that’s it.
Also, after going to the all the trouble of making sure that there’d be no redshirts in seasons one or two, that’s officially been abandoned, as the suicide bomber takes out an unnamed crewmember whom nobody seems to give a crap about except as a vague, quickly forgotten abstraction. Sigh.
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s first Trek fiction in thirteen years will be a DS9 story called “You Can’t Buy Fate” in Star Trek Explorer #7, which will be on sale on his fifty-fourth birthday, 18 April 2023. It’s available for preorder from Titan. He is also scheduled to have stories in issues #8 and 9.
Sometimes it feels like the makeup department doesn’t even try…
When they said only one of the crew would be killed, I expected the line to be that someone already had been killed. But I guess it only matters if one of the named crew dies.
I don’t actually mind how cursory the theological disagreement is. The French Wars of Religion were technically between Catholics and Protestants, but you don’t fight forty years because you disagree about the nature of the Eucharist; religion becomes a proxy for matters of political authority, economic interest, and cultural grievance. Really where I thought that this episode fell down was in presenting a very simplistic “Hurr-hurr, they’re fighting over whose imaginary friend is best!” view of sectarian conflict.
Meanwhile, we’re half-way through the season and almost nothing has actually happened in the Xindi arc. This would have been much better as a ten-episode season.
When I was watching this yesterday, I wondered what they were trying to tell us with this, twenty years ago. And what it tells me now. And also what you would make out of it.
“Don’t trust believers, they’ll turn into homicidal fanatics at the drop of a scripture.”
“For a cult leader, killing unbelievers is OK, but don’t mess with the reproductive choice of a disciple’s wife.”
“If you ever take control of a starship, don’t take half measures. Keep the entire crew confined in the mess.”
I’m trying to put my my mind back twenty years, the time of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the beginning of the never-ending mess. Was this episode trying to tell us to look for individual compassion even among religious warriors? Not very effective, then. I’m surprised you rated it higher than Acquisition.
And why do you believe D’Jamat when he chacaterizes the other Triannon ships as a heretic sect? Just counting heads (or starships), they seem to be the majority. It is D’Jamat and his compatriots who had to flee the planet a year ago. Combine that with his personal hold over his group, and his tactics to keep it, and D’Jamat appears like a cult leader. Soft-spoken and charming at times, able to collect a following, but in the end utterly willing to wreck what he cannot control.
o.m.: I called them heretics for lack of anything better to call them. As is depressingly typical for Enterprise, they didn’t have any kind of group name, so that was the only way I had to refer to them.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Well, that was a very perfunctory presentation of religious extremism. And with the mention of terminating the pregnancy, I thought the abortion question was going to enter the chat, but that fizzled away. I certainly caught the whiff of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” in the absurdity of the conflict, right down to the presumed, but never mentioned, unless I missed it, detail of the 9-Dayers having right-side face tattoos, and the 10-Dayers being on the left.
Yes, the MACOs did get more involved, mainly in retaking the bridge. But were still only spottily effective, That hallway fight that devolved into hand-to-hand when the MACO clearly had the drop on the second guy, and could have stunned him, springs to mind.
And, finally, Big End?! You Barbarian! It makes it impossible to scoop out the little end with your toast fingers. (And, thanks, to EEAAO, I’m now imagining a world of people with toast fingers :-))
I mean let’s be real – the current religious conflicts on our planet are, at their core, equally silly and a bunch of nonsense, including disagreements over which/what type/which interpretation of imaginary being one believes in and falsely thinks is on their side. And also make no mistake about it – for many people fighting in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, it was very much about religion (on multiple sides of the conflict). I don’t mind an “superficial” treatment of religious extremism at all because it is rather prevalent on our planet today.
I thought this was a pretty effective portrait of religious fanaticism. D’Jamat seems so reasonable on the surface, but he takes it for granted that he’s right and anyone who disagrees with him is evil, and there’s just no convincing him otherwise. Just goes to show — when people like him talk about faith, what they really mean is faith in their own rightness. They just can’t conceive that anything they personally believe could be mistaken. It’s more about ego than piety.
@7/Tim: I agree with #3/jaimebabb on this. It’s facile to dismiss religious conflicts as “nonsense,” because if you look at them closely, you see that there are always political, economic, historical, etc. factors that religion is used as a proxy or justification for. For instance, the radicalism of al Qaeda and the Islamic State isn’t just something that randomly happened, but a reaction to centuries of history in which secular, Westernizing Mideast leaders oppressed and brutalized their people in the name of modernization while imperialist Western powers meddled in favor of their own self-interest, so that moderate or modernizing Islam came to be seen as harmful and fundamentalism and traditionalism seemed like an attractive alternative.
In South Asia, Hindus and Muslims coexisted peacefully for centuries, but the British Raj stirred them up against each other to divide and conquer, and then when the Raj ended, they imposed an ill-considered Partition on religious lines between India and the new nation of Pakistan, and the forced relocation of entire populations on the basis of religious identity provoked sectarian strife that killed millions, including neighbors turning on neighbors. The religions were the same, the beliefs were the same, the individuals were the same, but the political and economic context created reasons for religious communities to fear and hate each other when they had previously gotten along for generations.
Usually, intolerance between communities, whether it’s on religious, racial, class, gender, or other lines, is stirred up by political or economic elites who consider it in their own interest to turn others against each other and make them blame each other for their problems so that they don’t blame the elites who are really responsible.
What @CLB^^^^ says.
(And just look how thoroughly the zillionaires have set different subsets of the U.S.’s non-zillionaire class against each other if you don’t believe it).
S
“Doctrines like that make it easy to wipe out everyone that doesn’t agree with you.”
When I saw this one coming up, I felt a bit of trepidation because I remember it having some dodgy bits. But I actually found it quite compelling for the most part. D’Jamat was a scarily accurate portrayal of a dogmatic fanatic. There’s no arguing or reasoning with him: He’s convinced that every action he takes is right and sacred, and if anyone disagrees with him, then they’re automatically evil and must be destroyed. The idea of religious fundamentalists acting like terrorists and suicide bombers was only just seeping into the public consciousness when this episode was made. Nowadays it seems like more of a fact of life.
And just as we’re in danger of getting hit over the head with The Message a bit too many times, we have Archer demonstrate he’s not a fool, manage to use D’Jamat’s fanaticism against him, and go Die Hard in order to take his ship back. The MACOs are actually vaguely competent at dealing with an invasion for once, apart from when one needs rescuing by a pregnant woman. Even Mayweather plays a bigger part in proceedings than usual, although it’s at the expense of Hoshi being turned into a non-speaking character.
Unfortunately, there are two bum notes. The moment when we find out just how small the difference between the two groups beliefs is: We’re probably meant to be aghast at the pettiness of it, but it feels more like a spoof than a serious explanation of religious fanaticism. (In fact, it’s worrying similar to a plot point from Red Dwarf, where they don’t even pretend they’re not playing it for laughs!) And the ending, which feels like someone went “You know the ending of ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield’? Well let’s…do that.” I guess they’re aiming for the same message: That if the cycle of violence can’t be ended, both sides are just going to keep on killing until there’s nothing left. But whereas Kirk tried desperately to convince the survivors to let go of their hate and was left shattered by the fact they couldn’t, here Archer just gives D’Jamat a cold “Serves you right” and then apparently decides to just abandon all the Triannons there, including that nice young couple who helped him and who D’Jamat is probably going to stand up against the wall the moment Enterprise has gone. (Assuming he can find a wall, of course.) There also seems to be a discontinuity over the way that the war has meant to have been going on for a century (or centuries, at one point) and yet Yarrick was brought up in a peaceful religion.
D’Jamat apparently erases all Enterprise’s data on the spheres: Did Archer check the recycle bin? The crewmember who just stands and watch a Triannon blow himself up like it’s a wildlife documentary is officially too dumb to live. Ironically, if you take away the religious framing, much of what D’Jamat says about the spheres and their makers turns out to be pretty accurate! He mentions the Enterprise crew entered one sphere and landed on another, which happened in ‘Anomaly’ and ‘Exile’ respectively.
@krad in 5,
perhaps “the planetary government?” It seems clear that D’Jamat believes that they are in effective control of the planet, and even after the devastation we see at the end, they are still operating starships. But that might be overcompensating in the non-D’Jamat direction. One advantage of novelizations is that they need to tell, not show …
@jamiebabb in 3, @CLB in 8,
a very good point. The combination makes it impossible to resolve the ethnic strife by political compromise, or to resolve the religious strife by ecumenical dialogue.
I’m not going to lie, my favourite part of this episode might even have been the Triumphant Return of that rascally bat (It may be wrong, it may be foolish, but I still genuinely enjoy ‘A night in sickbay’ and it’s nice to see the episode referenced*); having said that I’m also extremely fond of Captain Archer and T’Pol’s transporter gambit (For some reason it made me think of Bre’r Rabbit and that briar patch); T’Pol being just done with these zealots; a pair of those zealots putting family before fanaticism; the revelation of that superbly petty root of all this Religious Strife; one of the most chillingly credible villains in STAR TREK history; and that last scene, which represents a perfect ending to a reasonably strong episode.
I do agree that we could have done with a bit more world building when it comes to the Triannon and their conflict (though for my money it might have been wise to lean on performance and production design, rather than scripting – given that this is an episode, not a miniseries, “Show, don’t tell” is the order of the day); I wonder if a hypothetical sequel to this episode would do better to focus on outliving fanaticism or on what can keep ancient convictions alive, even after the institutions that sustained them fail bloodily?
*You just know that someone, somewhere, got wind of Porthos spending so much time with Doctor Phlox’s bestiary, thought “What if they compared notes?” and promptly started drawing up the most charming kid’s book.
I’ll bet they called it ‘A night in sickbay’ too!
I would, however, like to note that I am genuinely worried by the level of incomprehension applied to religious belief in a number of comments: zealots are a plague and fundamentalists make bad neighbours, but describing God (or a god) as an “imaginary friend” displays a level of arrogant condescension almost the equal of the ‘Elect’.
I’m also uncomfortable with @8. ChristopherLBennett’s description of ‘South Asia’ (One assumes the Mughal Empire? South Asia covers a lot of ground and a great many communities, especially over a period of centuries) as largely peaceful before the British: if you think the region was largely free of sectarian strife before ‘John Company’* showed up, look into the history of the Sikhs.
*AKA ‘The Honourable East India Company’: it is worth pointing out that British India was acquired and initially administered by a corporation, rather than the British Government (though undoubtedly with some support from the latter, especially when the French were on the horizon, whether in the form of King Louis, the Committee of Public Safety or Bonaparte).
If nothing else, the fact that Great Britain was far from the only power at work in (and on) what we now call India should make it clear that the situation was far more complex than Mr Bennett’s remarks suggest: this doesn’t even mention the sheer number of native Power Players at work or give credit to their own agency in pulling down the Great Mughal (as restive vassals can generally be relied upon to do when confronted by a master who grows tired).
@13/ED – My use of the term “imaginary friend” was entirely chosen to evoke such condescension; I was likening the message of the episode to the sort of glib terminology used by a certain type of online atheist. I’m sorry that that wasn’t clear.
@10/cap-mjb: “The idea of religious fundamentalists acting like terrorists and suicide bombers was only just seeping into the public consciousness when this episode was made.”
It’s very strange to me that people today think that. Religious extremism and terrorism had been around for a long time before 9/11. The media stereotype of Middle Eastern terrorists existed decades before 2001, at least since the Palestinian terror attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics. There were plenty of Christian terrorist groups known to exist as well, like the Ku Klux Klan for most of the 20th century and the Branch Davidians in the ’90s.
Certainly 9/11 made Americans more preoccupied with and frightened by religious terrorism than we’d been before, but it’s not like the fear didn’t exist before then. I remember an episode of War of the Worlds: The Series from 1988 or ’89 where the secret alien-fighting team was able to get cooperation from local officials just by claiming to be an anti-terrorism task force, which made the officials bend over backward to help them, because even then, “terrorism” was a buzzword that sparked an immediate fear reaction.
@13/ED: Of course I’m not saying there was no conflict in South Asia; I did actually study the history of the region, so I’d never say anything that stupidly simplistic. My whole point is that you can’t resort to facile simplifications like “All religion is bad,” because history is complicated and you need to be willing to do the work to understand the multiple factors that shape any individual event or process, rather than trying to reduce things to a single variable as a lazy excuse to avoid thinking.
@14. jaimebabb: I’m personally of the opinion that sort of condescension needs to be treated like nuclear waste, rather than emulated, but I do understand the driving need to puncture the average Religious Extremist’s force field of “I am Right. I am SO RIGHT. I am SO RIGHT everything else is WRONG and only I can see it. Everyone else needs to be told how WRONG they are as a Public Service. Wait, nobody is listening to me, time to drop a bomb!” energy.
Quite often ‘bomb’ is only a metaphor, but that just means the rest of us keep getting hit over the head with it, rather than being allowed to get this whole unpleasant business over and done with.
@15. ChristopherLBennett: It deeply depresses me that the KKK, an organisation that regularly burns the symbol of Christ’s martyrdom so they can turn it into an unspoken threat, technically qualifies as a ‘Christian’ anything.
It’s even more depressing to think that there’s more than one Christian terrorist group – ‘Christian terrorist’ should be an oxymoron.
God must love us, because otherwise He would have rubbed us out and started over.
Also, my apologies for getting a little tetchy – your point was well taken, but it always bugs me when GB gets treated as THE Evil Empire, while the Mughals get a free pass (Despite their being as foreign to India as William the Conqueror and his Normans were to Old England).
I’ve always enjoyed this episode. Sure it’s a little dated now but the focus on militant extremism was very current at the time. Gotta say I’m beginning to wonder if Krad intends to flame every episode – it seems like light episodes are characterized as offensive and attempts at something heavier are dismissed.
@16/ED: “…the average Religious Extremist’s force field of “I am Right…”
That applies to all extremists, religious or otherwise. I’ve seen atheists who are just as fanatical and closed-minded, and I’ve known religious people who were smart, open-minded, and tolerant. The problem is not religion, the problem is extremism of any stripe.
” It’s even more depressing to think that there’s more than one Christian terrorist group – ‘Christian terrorist’ should be an oxymoron.”
You could say the exact same thing about Islam, Hinduism, or any other religion that people use as an excuse for violence. It’s ethnocentric and historically disingenuous to suggest that Christianity is intrinsically any nobler than the others.
But we mustn’t fall for the oversimplification that terrorism is an evil ideology in its own right. Terrorism is not an ideology at all — it’s a tactic. It’s the last resort of the powerless fighting a superior foe, like the Bajorans against the Cardassians or the French Maquis against the Nazis. When you don’t have the resources of a government and an organized army, when you can’t prevail through open force, sometimes the only available option is to use violence as propaganda, to try to dishearten the enemy and make them want to give up. The people in power naturally want to denounce terrorism as intrinsically evil, but I’ve always found it deeply hypocritical to pretend that firing missiles to kill thousands of people from a distance without getting your hands dirty is somehow nobler or more heroic. It’s just got a bigger budget.
What I liked about DS9 is that it didn’t play those propagandistic word games and pretend that terrorism was something only the bad guys did. Kira Nerys freely admitted that the tactics she and the Resistance used to win Bajor’s freedom were terrorism. She wasn’t proud of it, but she didn’t lie to herself about it either. Terrorism is not a belief system or a cause, it’s a tool. Some people, like the KKK or Daesh, use it for the sake of their own power or hatred, but others use it to defend their communities against tyranny and oppression. As with religion, the good or bad isn’t in the practice itself, it’s in the intentions of the user.
Labels don’t define truth. They just oversimplify it.
@19
” the good or bad isn’t in the practice itself, it’s in the intentions of the user.”
Dunno…..Good intentions can have very bad consequences….
@20/Marion Chandos: Good point. A number of groups that employ terrorism, or any other military tactic, sincerely believe they’re fighting for a good cause, but they often do more harm than good.
Just a little thought regarding terrorists, be they Bajoran or Trianonnian:
It is unfortunate that often the same label is used for groups who use terrorist tactics against an oppressor that does not allow democratic change, and those who use the same tactics against a majority population which does not want democratic change. Except for the quip, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
To make a moral distinction between the two, one has first to judge the society they are fighting against, and then compare the grievances with the damage their fight does. And also they question if they are at least trying to minimize collateral damage. Leveling a city over the difference between 9 and 10 days in the creation story sounds outrageous. Leveling a city over the principle of religious freedom, perhaps less so. I still think that D’Jamat is the bad sort of terrorist. Kira? The Bajoran resistance killed not just Cardassians, after all. Acceptable collateral damage, or crossing the line?
As someone who’s about to publish a scholarly monograph about how important a certain historical theological debate that I’m *pretty* sure the writers were indirectly trying to reference in this episode was for philosophy and politics and anthropology and the overall trajectory of global history (and who has a brother working on Medieval Hindu/Muslim interreligious dialogue and debate)…I should be more annoyed by how thoroughly Star Trek doesn’t get religion? But I mean this is the one constant throughout all the series (with the partial exception of DS9).
It should really go without saying, but I’ve studied the religious and intellectual history for quite a while and across different time periods and religions, and it’s impossible for me to think of any historical religious conflict based around a trivial disagreement over mythological detail. It sounds almost crazy to say, but believe it or not religious debates and conflicts are…mostly like other sorts of debates and conflicts? Which is to say, often exacerbated by malice or arrogance or greed, but nonetheless rationally legible and based around real, substantial differences in perspective or values or interests.
But again, for better or worse, religious discourses are not really legible to increasing numbers of people in the contemporary world–including practically everyone that has ever worked on Star Trek. There’s something charming about how thoroughly Star Trek doesn’t get religion, and I’m not sure I would even want it to change.
@15/CLB: “Certainly 9/11 made Americans more preoccupied with and frightened by religious terrorism than we’d been before, but it’s not like the fear didn’t exist before then. I remember an episode of War of the Worlds: The Series from 1988 or ’89 where the secret alien-fighting team was able to get cooperation from local officials just by claiming to be an anti-terrorism task force, which made the officials bend over backward to help them, because even then, “terrorism” was a buzzword that sparked an immediate fear reaction.”
I don’t imagine there’s been any point since the word was first coined when officials wouldn’t have react with fear to the possibility that a terrorist was operating in their jurisdiction. But then you could probably get the help of the local authorities by convincing them you were trying to stop a serial killer or a bank robber or a cybercriminal intent on destroying the local economy. I think it’s more recent than that when terrorism went from being something bad to being the big evil.
As you say in your other posts, throughout the 90s, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and to a lesser extent Star Trek: The Next Generation, tended to portray terrorists in an even-handed and even heroic manner. The Bajorans are shown as doing what they had to do, no matter how brutal and amoral their actions appear to be. (Even in the seventh season, Kira is denouncing anyone not with her new resistance movement as collaborators who are acceptable targets.) People debated to what degree the Maquis had a point with Star Trek: Voyager then muddying the water further by having unrepentant Maquis terrorists among the heroes. “The High Ground” managed to get banned by the BBC for over a decade, because to be frank, it was a group of American writers trying to talk about a subject they didn’t really understand and writing a terrorist leader who recruits children to bomb civilians as some sort of byronic anti-hero (or at the very least anti-villain). It’s all a stark contrast to the culture of the following decade, when that sort of character tends to be portrayed as the epitome of evil, especially if they’re from one of those strange fundamentalist religions that the writers don’t quite understand.
@4/o.m.: “And why do you believe D’Jamat when he chacaterizes the other Triannon ships as a heretic sect? Just counting heads (or starships), they seem to be the majority. It is D’Jamat and his compatriots who had to flee the planet a year ago. Combine that with his personal hold over his group, and his tactics to keep it, and D’Jamat appears like a cult leader.”
Whilst I wouldn’t refer them as heretics either, neither would I reverse the comparison and portray them as the majority. I don’t think there’s any suggestion that D’Jamat’s group had to flee the planet or that he’s some sort of solitary madman leading a religion that has only a couple of dozen followers. His stated reason for being out there is that they’re on a pilgrimage to the spheres, which may be stretching the truth, but he does seem to attach mystical meaning to the anomalies. Given the end of the episode, it would appear that the two sides in this struggle were even enough in size and power to achieve mutual destruction.
@24/cap-mjb: “I think it’s more recent than that when terrorism went from being something bad to being the big evil.”
To an extent, yes, but not remotely as much as people today assume. We feel like there’s the world that existed before 9/11 and the separate world that existed after it, but we focus so much on what changed that we forget what was similar. A lot of the difference is merely a matter of degree.
I’ve always felt like this episode was just kind of there. It didn’t really say anything new about religious fanaticism and seemed very simplistic. I just wanted the show to get back on track with what was going on with the Xindi and this seemed like an unwanted and unnecessary diversion. That said, the guy that played the main Triannon leader was effective as a guy you just love to hate!
@cap-mjb in 24,
think of the term “Anarchist” a bit over a century ago. Throwing bombs and all that. Or, for that matter, the US reaction to the Weathermen half a century ago. It comes and goes, depending on how threatened the societies with a dominant voice in global culture feel. 9/11 came after the US felt it had won the Cold War, fair and square, and proclaimed the End of History. That means it stung more than considerably higher casualty numbers in the rest of the world, just a few years earlier.
And I agree with
@captain Peabody in 23,
except for the way in which religious discourse does enter contemporary US politics from abortion to welfare. Consider the brief mention of abortion in this episode. Was it intended as a “red herring” or did the writers, 20 years ago, consider Roe vs. Wade settled law and an example where D’Jamat’s people departed from the “civilized consensus?”
After that cheery discussion (and in the absence of anywhere else to post this) I’ve finally been catching up on STRANGE NEW WORLDS: having just watched ‘Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach’ one can safely say that I now understand why they refer to Pike as “Captain Daddy” (Good Grief, that energy between him and that old flame!).
Also, it’s NEVER a good sign when a Star Trek culture reminds one of WARHAMMER 40,000 – never ever.
P.S. To bring things back to ENTERPRISE do we think the Starfleet Security Rules (which I really, really hope will become a ongoing joke/running theme going forward – in the same vein as the Rules of Acquisition – date back as far as Malcolm Reed?
@28 o.m.:
The arrival manifests from Ellis Island are online now, and I looked up my Grandfather’s arrival in the U.S. in 1913 a few years ago. It’s a single line in a ledger, one column of which required him to attest that he was not an anarchist. So yeah, agreed, the penetration of the fear of that label into society was pretty deep.
S
@28/o.m.: “Consider the brief mention of abortion in this episode. Was it intended as a “red herring” or did the writers, 20 years ago, consider Roe vs. Wade settled law and an example where D’Jamat’s people departed from the “civilized consensus?””
The anti-abortion movement has been vocal since the 1980s at least, pushing for Roe to be repealed. It’s been a hot-button controversy for decades.
@austin
“Sometimes it feels like the makeup department doesn’t even try…”
That is entirely unfair. The makeup department worked wonders when given the time and resources. The lack of imagination came from the producers (others may be able to dig out a relevant quote) but I believe it was Rick Berman in particular who favored what I would politely call the “minimalistic” approach to alien creation.
@32/bob: I don’t think that’s fair to Berman, since it was under his watch that we got the Cardassians, Jem’Hadar, Hirogen, and plenty of other imaginative aliens. People love to rag on Berman for his shows’ faults, but they forget that as the executive producer, he was responsible for everything about them, including the good parts.
No, the reason for minimal alien makeups in episode like this is simply that there were so many guest stars and extras that needed to be made up. Memory Alpha lists 28 Triannons that appeared in the episode. The more elaborate the makeup, the more time and work it entails for the makeup department, so when you have that many aliens, you either spend a lot of money to hire a lot of extra makeup staffers for the week, or you give the aliens a simple design that doesn’t take that long to apply. This is just as true of the modern Trek shows, the Stargate franchise, and plenty of others, so it’s got nothing to do with Rick Berman’s or Michael Westmore’s willingness to innovate. It’s simply a matter of time, money, and practicality. People who complain whenever a show is less than perfect always forget that it costs money, time, and hard work to make things happen, not just waving a magic wand. The people who make the shows are even more disappointed when they have to cut corners because they don’t have the time or budget to do better.
@33. ChristopherLBennett
I come to praise Westmore not to bury Berman. I think we should be able to agree that Westmore and the makeup department were certainly not to blame for the practical and story reasons for keeping things simple and I tend to believe the makeup department went above and beyond what was asked of them.
Hard disagree on this one. I think Chosen Realm works pretty well. As @Christopher pointed out, it is what it is. Unwavering fanaticism from people who truly want to believe they’re in the right.
If the Xindi arc is supposed to be Trek’s answer to 9/11, then it goes without saying an episode like this was inevitable. Let’s not forget just how many people went out of their way to demonize and blame muslim society after the towers fell, which of course provided ample ammo for those few extremists amongst them to feel justified in their own way, gaining even more radical support and furthering the violent cycle.
The minute Archer and company started to meddle with the spheres, of course we were going to deal with people within the Expanse who worshipped them. It’s not that different from colonial days when Europeans pretty much invaded indigenous lands and trampled their beliefs not only by forcing other religions down their throats but also by messing with their objects of worship. And I think that’s the real point, and one of the reasons post-Enterprise Trek shows even have the prime directive to begin with. By simply being there, the Enterprise and its crew are having an effect on the region and its denizens.
Is it perfect? Not really, but it gets the job done and it gives us another layer of character and myth to that region, as well as checking off episode 12 out of 24.
@35/Eduardo: I don’t think anyone involved in the episode intended to suggest that Archer and co were somehow at fault because it didn’t occur to them that some random alien race might have decided to build a religion around the spheres. If the Prime Directive was designed to stop starships carrying out a scientific analysis of alien artifacts because of the offence it might cause to people several light years away, then Starfleet would be disbanded and they’d all just sit at home to avoid having an effect on other regions of space.
I thought this episode, while not good, was at least better than “Carpenter Street,” which got a higher Warp Factor rating (I know, I know, the Warp Factor is the least important part of a review).
Something that seriously bugged me was the moment when T’Pol wrapped her arms around the Triannon at the weapons station and tried to pull him away from it, and he shrugged her off easily. That would seem to have been a perfect moment to immobilize him with the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, which D’Jamat might not even have realized she had done.
Also, I’m surprised Taylor Sheridan’s guest appearance didn’t count as a Robert Knepper moment, considering that today he’s the big boss over the Yellowstone Televisual Universe, much of which streams alongside Star Trek on Paramount Plus.
terracinque: There’s a simple reason why I didn’t mention Taylor Sheridan as a Robert Knepper moment from his being on Yellowstone — I haven’t seen Yellowstone or any of its spinoffs, yet……..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who has a ridiculously long “to be watched” list
Honestly, I wish this had been the Xindi. Unwavering believers in the Sphere Builders would have been far more interesting than what we got with the EVIL Insects and Reptiles vs. the Human-Like Goodies.
This was an okay episode if very much on the nose with the suicide bombers. I didn’t mind it. I did have a problem with Dr Phlox suddenly forgetting his ethics and blabbing to Archer about the pregnancy when he has been so scrupulous in the past about confidentiality. Pity that couldn’t have been done another way.