“Damage”
Written by Phyllis Strong
Directed by James L. Conway
Season 3, Episode 19
Production episode 071
Original air date: April 21, 2004
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise is picking up where they left off last time, getting the shit kicked out of them by Reptilian ships, but suddenly the attack ceases. This is only a minor reprieve, as they have no propulsion or weapons, systems failures all over the ship, tons of hull breaches, and many casualties.
We find out that the Xindi Council ordered the Reptilian ships to back off, to Dolim’s annoyance. The Aquatics will transport Archer to the council chambers so he can be interrogated by the council. Dolim is even more pissed about that.
The Aquatics then release Archer to Enterprise via one of their escape pods for reasons the script never bothers to explain. The damage to the NX-01 is extensive: the hull plating is gone, they can’t get at the launch bay, there are fourteen confirmed dead (but nobody in the opening credits, so they don’t bother to say who they are), and only one phase cannon and one torpedo launcher working. Archer orders them to hide in a cometary cloud. He thinks he may have gotten through to Degra, but they still need to hide.
T’Pol’s hands are shaking, which she fobs off as the result of not having time to meditate. Tucker reports that their warp coil is shot and they don’t have the means to repair or replace it. Without it, they’re stuck at impulse.
Buy the Book
The Archive Undying
Mayweather and Sato are examining the Aquatic pod, with Mayweather remaining optimistic that they’ll get home, Sato not so much.
Archer decides to answer a distress call from an Illyrian ship—not that they’re in a position to be much help, but it can’t hurt. He takes a shot and asks the Illyrian captain if he can spare a warp coil. But he can’t, as they need theirs.
T’Pol risks her life to get to the cargo hold in an EV suit, as that’s where the trellium-D is kept. She injects some into herself.
Sato has translated data from the pod, including a schedule that shows where Degra is supposed to be in three days. But they can’t there in time on impulse. Archer then makes the awful decision to steal the Illyrians’ warp coil.
The mysterious “she” referred to in the previous episode is a member of the same species as the alien who tried to sabotage the ship in “Harbinger.” She meets with Degra, Jannar, and the Primate councilor, who have questions, particularly with regard to the accusations of the Reptilians building a bio-weapon in Earth’s past. The alien woman admits that they did facilitate that, mostly to keep the Insectoids and Reptilians from leaving the council. When they mention Archer’s accusation that her species built the spheres, the alien woman deflects the question and demands that she not be summoned again unless it’s to the full council.
The trio are concerned, as she didn’t deny that her species built the spheres, and Archer has actually provided proof in the form of the Xindi doodad Archer brought back from the twenty-sixth century.
Archer makes a plan with the senior staff to board the Illyrian ship and steal their warp coil. Archer also plans to leave them with extra supplies that will help them in their now-much-longer trip home. T’Pol objects to the plan, both publicly and privately, reminding Archer of the Osaarian pirates who attacked them when they entered the Expanse, and also of his words to her on the Seleya that they can’t lose sight of what makes them human.
T’Pol then angrily smashes a padd on Archer’s desk, leading the captain to tell his first mate to get some downtime.
Instead, she goes to Phlox, where she admits that she has been experimenting with injections of trellium-D to allow her to access certain emotions, but she’s become addicted.
Archer leads a raid on the Illyrian ship, using the transporter to beam a boarding party over and also beam over the extra supplies they’re leaving in exchange for the warp coil. It takes Tucker a bit longer to extract the coil, as the warp engine is protected by a force field, but he does it. Archer tells the Illyrian captain that they have no choice.
Tucker installs the coil which will give them warp 3.2, which will get them to Degra’s next location on time. Tucker insists that Archer did the right thing, and Archer laments how often he’s had to tell himself that lately…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Enterprise takes sufficient damage that Reed has no idea how the ship is still intact.
The gazelle speech. Archer continues to sacrifice pieces of his soul to save Earth.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. We finally find out why T’Pol has been overly emotional the last few episodes: she’s an emotion junkie! And has been using trellium-D to experience them, and is now addicted.
Florida Man. Florida Man Assures CO That His Immoral Unethical Behavior Is The Right Thing, Is Unconvincing.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox is stunned to learn that T’Pol is a junkie, and promises to keep her addiction a secret and to help her through it.
Good boy, Porthos! Phlox returns Porthos to Archer’s care. He was a good boy…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. While suffering withdrawal symptoms, T’Pol has an erotic dream involving her and Tucker in the shower. Wah-HEY!
I’ve got faith…
“‘We can’t save humanity without holding onto what makes us human.’ Those were your words to me.”
“I’m no happier doing this than you are—but we’re not going to make a habit of it.”
“Once you rationalize the first misstep, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of behavior.”
–T’Pol throwing Archer’s words back in his face, Archer insisting he can quit any time, and T’Pol speaking the wisdom of the junkie.
Welcome aboard. Old pal Casey Biggs is back, with the erstwhile Damar from DS9 lending his great voice and intense acting style to the Illyrian captain. Meanwhile, we’ve got five recurring regulars, one of whom makes her debut: Josette Di Carlo as the alien woman. We’ve also got Randy Oglesby as Degra, Scott MacDonald as Dolim, Rick Worthy as Jannar, and Tucker Smallwood as the Primate councilor, all back from “Azati Prime.” Oglesby and Worthy will be back in “The Forgotten.” Smallwood will be back in “E2.” Di Carlo and MacDonald will be back in “The Council.”
Trivial matters: This episode obviously picks up directly from the end of “Azati Prime.”
Enterprise dealt with marauders who wanted to steal from them the way Enterprise is now stealing from the Illyrians in “Anomaly.” The crew saw the effects of trellium poisoning first-hand in “Impulse.” The Reptilians were revealed to be constructing a bio-weapon in twenty-first-century Detroit in “Carpenter Street.” The alien woman’s species was revealed to be the people who constructed the spheres in “Harbinger.” Daniels brought Archer to the twenty-sixth century and gave him a contemporary Xindi doodad to show to the council in the twenty-second century to show that Xindi and humans will cooperate in the future in “Azati Prime.”
The aliens our heroes encounter have the same name as the genetically engineered culture that Number One was established as belonging to in SNW’s “Ghosts of Illyria.” However, the Illyrians are never identified by that name onscreen (the name comes from the script) and it’s unlikely that they’re the same.
It’s been a long road… “I’m about to step over a line.” One of the great frustrations of both TNG and especially Voyager was an unwillingness to regularly show consequences. They would occasionally dabble in it—Worf’s discommendation, e.g.—but far more common was it to not explore long-term effects, whether it’s Picard living somebody else’s life or La Forge being brainwashed or Tuvok and Neelix being merged or Voyager sustaining catastrophic damage.
The latter was particularly frustrating because Voyager didn’t have access to starbases or any other kind of Federation repair facility. The ship should’ve become more and more scarred and unrecognizable as the show went on.
So to see Enterprise heavily damaged, and knowing that it will retain that damage for the rest of the season, is extremely gratifying.
But it’s not just the damage to the ship, it’s the damage to the people on board it. T’Pol has become a trellium junkie and Archer is starting to realize that being a square-jawed action hero means doing some really really horrible things.
The latter is particularly well played. The macho posturing that Archer and Tucker were doing in “The Expanse” sounded good—well, truly, it sounded horrible, but it was also the kind of language you expect your action heroes to utter, especially in the time immediately after 9/11.
But now Archer is learning the price of that machismo, and it’s awful. This is the perfect bookend to “Anomaly,” as Archer has become the Osaarians: coming to the Expanse with the best of intentions, and now reduced to piracy.
The episode is denied a perfect 10 score by two factors. One is that Archer’s return to Enterprise makes no sense, either in-story (we were explicitly told he was being brought to the council, not being returned to his ship) or out-of-story (it makes no sense that the council would just let Enterprise go). The other is that it would have been nice if there had been some acknowledgment of who died, but alas, they were all apparently wearing red shirts. This was a perfect opportunity to make it more of a tragedy. For example, Tucker could have reported that two of his engineers were warp-drive mechanical engineer prodigies, and they could’ve whipped up a warp-coil substitute that would’ve done the trick—but, alas, they were among the fourteen casualties. But that would’ve required acknowledging that anybody not listed in the opening credits is important, and Enterprise can’t quite do that.
Hell, they can barely do it with all the ones in the opening credits, though I will give writer Phyllis Strong credit for the excellent Mayweather-Sato scene, the pilot’s determined optimism contrasted with the linguist’s depressed pessimism.
The episode also scores points for casting Casey Biggs and his distinctive voice, last seen in Trek as a thug-turned-folk-hero, making Archer’s treatment of him sting even harder.
After a lot of stumbling, the Xindi arc is finally kicking into high gear. It should’ve happened way sooner, but I’ll take it…
Warp factor rating: 9
Keith R.A. DeCandido has a story in the digital supplement for issue #7 of Star Trek Explorer (a DS9 story focusing on Nog and Ezri Dax, entitled “You Can’t Buy Fate”), and will have a story in the magazine itself for issue #8 (a Voyager story focusing on Tuvok, Janeway, and Neelix, entitled “The Kellidian Kidnapping”).
I’m not rating the episode quite as high as you did.
Think back just two episodes, when the senior officers were prepared to defy a captain who was obviously out of sorts. (Calling that a ‘mutiny’ would depend on the legalese in regulations about insane captains, which we don’t know.) Now Archer is back from being tortured by the Xindi, he makes out-of-character decisions, and nobody questions if he was in his right mind? If it wasn’t Xindi brainwashing, perhaps PTSD?
And did I miss it, or did Captain Archer fail to consult the MACOs in the planning of the raid? They’re the specialists in this stuff.
One could blame the general state of exhaustion of the crew.
They made a bit of a point of leaving trellium and food with their victims, but did they check just what food the Illyrians need? Also, did they even have food for three years for the number of aliens? Sounds implausible after what we learned in Anomaly, which you mentioned.
The other thing is the shower scene with T’Pol. Considering how hard you came down on Acquisition, why give it a pass here? A bit unfanserviced by the monster transformation at the end, of course, but before that it exceeded any number of decon chambers.
Keith, I think you’ll be pleased by how next week’s episode deals with the “redshirt” issue.
As for why the Aquatics released Archer back to Enterprise, I’d assume it’s so he could get medical treatment for his injuries from the Reptilians’ torture. The Aquatics probably didn’t have the means to see to his health as well as his own doctor could.
Apparently this episode contains the chronologically first use of the word “stardate” in-universe, discounting time travel episodes.
On the Illyrian thing — D.C. Fontana posited in the novel Vulcan’s Glory that Number One was an Ilyrian, one L, which was probably a reference to Ilyria VI in TAS: “Mudd’s Passion.” The aliens in this episode were Illyrians, two Ls, and probably unrelated. But when SNW established Number One as an Illyrian, they used the two-L spelling, and there were viewscreen graphics implying that these Illyrians were the same species, just genetically engineered to a very different environment.
It’s a nice touch that the stolen coil gives them a slower max speed. Although the theft solved their issue it has still left them “reduced” in a way from their former glory.
I’m reminded of something that annoyed me here: the idea that there was just one “primary” warp coil, and that it could be replaced with a freestanding unit in the middle of a room. The warp coils are the things inside the nacelles that generate the warp field. They’re massive structures larger than a shuttlepod, and according to Doug Drexler’s own cutaway illustration, there are 18 of them in each nacelle.
I mean, I get the need to occasionally fudge the behind-the-scenes worldbuilding details for the sake of the story, but this is particularly sloppy. It’s like saying that an 18-wheeler’s “primary tire” has blown out and you can replace it with a disk the size of a quarter. Why did it have to be a warp coil? Why couldn’t it have been some more reasonable component?
Love the rewatch Keith. I recently finished ENT myself. Thinking about this episode and Twilight. Perhaps the events of this episode and the one that proceed it are a “in story” reason Archer was able to stop the Xindi and Captain T’Pol was not despite being infinitely smarter and more grown up then him (tho there was no evidence of her addiction in that episode and I am giving Berman & Braga way to credit). Thought I would spit that out there and let ya chew on it for a bit,
The recent SNW comic The Illyrian Enigma establishes that these Illyrians are the same species as Number One.
Won’t they address the casualties in a future episode not too long after this one? I seem to remember Tucker being tasked with writing a eulogy or a letter to someone’s family, or something like that. And I think they explained away Kellie Waymire’s absence by having her character be one of those blown out into space during the Xindi attack.
@7/bgsu98: “And I think they explained away Kellie Waymire’s absence by having her character be one of those blown out into space during the Xindi attack.”
Nope, Cutler was never killed off, and indeed I brought her back in my post-finale Rise of the Federation novels.
This was a good episode, where a number of plot threads came together in a satisfying manner. It is a key moment in Archer’s evolution as a character, with Scott Bakula’s portrayal of the character getting better and better.
So is the Illyrian ship too badly damaged to go to warp? Otherwise I’m not sure why they couldn’t just give Archer a ride to meet Degra (or why Enterprise could catch up to them in the first place).
I wish Netflix would put this back on. I’d love to watch the series again. Even if I did watch it a couple of times. Loved it!
One of the things that stand out for me after all of these years since I last watched ENT, is how much proper lighting can impact a scene. The stand-out example I generally point to is the exchange between Phlox and Archer in his ready room. As Phlox enters, light shines on what is presumable a very dimly lit or unlit where Archer has been brooding over his options He does not even look at Phlox when he asks him the question of ethics, Bakula’s face half in shadow, half out, seemingly teetering on the edge. Only when Phlox gives his answer does Archer rise to face him, grimly deciding on piracy without ever referring directly to it.
Onto my usual “making sense of things people don’t like” by starting with the nameless Redshirt thing: CLB already stated his point about the next episode tackling this subject, and my two cents on the matter concern the remaining crew being more concerned about making sure what’s left of the ship doesn’t explode. Mourning for the dead can wait once everyone is reasonably sure that they’re not in imminent danger of joining said dead.
Next topic of contention: Archer being returned to Enterprise when the dialogue indicated that the Aquatics would transport him to the Council opens up more questions as I think about the “why.” CLB again makes a good point that he required medical attention that the Aquatics couldn’t give him, but I think that it is more strategizing on the part of Degra, Jannar, and Unnamed Primate Councilor. Archer made all sorts of claims while imprisoned, and while the 26th Century initiation medallion is enough to catch the collective eyes of those three, they want more evidence that is onboard Enterprise, as well as a head start to come up with a case to present to the Council.
@1. o.m. I agree on the portion wondering whether or not they knew if their food would suffice for Illyrian biology. Enterprise was supplied enough food to comfortably sustain a crew of 80+ for two seasons/years, so a smaller crew that the Illyrians presumably have (judging on the size of their ship) could be supplied for three years with a portion of what Enterprise stored, along with sending them one of the not-replicator protein resequencers if the Illyrians didn’t have a comparable device on board. Additionally, it’s a shame that we didn’t see Archer or any one of the senior staff tell the Xindi about the stranded Illyrian ship once things settled down: I can absolutely see them feeling incredibly guilty about the whole affair and wanting to right what wrongs were committed.
@12/FRT: “Archer being returned to Enterprise when the dialogue indicated that the Aquatics would transport him to the Council”
Strictly speaking, they didn’t say that. They said “The Council wants Archer for further interrogation,” then at the end of the scene, they said “The Council has agreed that the Aquatics will transport the prisoner.” They never explicitly said that the transport was meant to be to the Council, although it was evidently written to give that impression as a misdirect, so that his return to Enterprise would be a surprise.
I’m okay with them not mourning the dead here. This captain and crew have slowly been losing their moral authority anyway, and it kind of makes sense that they would develop a more indifferent attitude to things that, to paraphase Phlox, make humans human. Stealing that warp coil and salving their guilt by sending over some supplies is all well and good, except they are leaving the Illyrians vulnerable to others who might want to do them even greater harm than merely stealing from them. Meanwhile, the Illyrian captain made it clear that without the warp coil not only would it take them years to get home, but the lives of his crew would be placed in jeopardy. But the needs of humans outweigh the needs of other species, so f*** it.
I’m still not sure how I feel about T’Pol’s Trellium-D addiction; in some ways, it seems like a ploy to “de-Vulcanize” her so that they can more easily set her up with Trip; at the same time, it also seems like it might have been a retroactive way to justify her emotionality in earlier episodes. In any case, I don’t think that they did a great job of setting her up as someone who seemed liable to abuse substances in order to cope (or, indeed, as someone who was having difficulty coping).
That said, I like the rest of this episode. I recently read someone say that, at its best, Enterprise tried to be like Deep Space Nine. I think that this is a good example of that; Archer’s decision here is is framed with the exact degree of seriousness and maturity that we saw with Sisko in “In the Pale Moonlight” (and which was annoyingly lacking when he tortured that guy back in “Anomaly”), and it really drives home the message: no matter how noble the cause, there are no good wars; a hero can never walk away unsullied. Even the silly contrivance of Archer’s return to the Enterprise and the idea that a group of Illyrians would happen to stumble upon them within hours on the outskirts of a system with with a Xindi military base in it doesn’t detract from it. And it’s followed up by what I consider to be possibly the best episode that Enterprise ever made next week.
Well written article by someone who actually watched the show and understands the context of the time this show took place post 9/11.
Thank you for not diluting and denigrating the show through the modern lens so many other sites and so called writers do just to get through their daily article quota.
“What you can’t have, you take by force?”
It’s rather a cop-out that the cliffhanger is resolved by something the previous episode claimed was impossible, Degra and co recalling the ships before Enterprise was destroyed. And a bit of a disappointment that, after their development in the previous episode and a nice tense opening scene here, the Xindi council disappear apart from one scene with their benefactor.
Still, even if plot armour dictates Archer and (most of) his crew improbably survive, Enterprise is falling to bits and their ambitions have been downgraded from nearly destroying the Xindi weapon in the previous episode to simply making sure they stay alive for the next few days. When salvation comes, it’s an extremely warped salvation. Last episode Archer killed a group of enemies who had no way of defending themselves. Here, he decides his only option is to attack and steal from innocent bystanders, probably wrecking any chance of building a relationship with them, and salving his conscience with the token gesture of giving them supplies. Trek veteran Casey Biggs does a good job as the beleaguered alien captain, a casualty of a war he doesn’t understand.
T’Pol’s trillium-D addiction isn’t exactly compelling, despite Jolene Blalock doing her best, but she again gets some good interaction with both Archer and Phlox. (The scene where T’Pol hands Archer a towel and he sees her hand shaking is well done.)
Elsewhere, Tucker and Reed see their bloodlust get a brief hit when they learn of Archer’s plan, although they’re quick to ignore the ethics and just go along with it, and Mayweather and Sato put their skills to use.
The MACOs get used the way they were supposed to be for once, for an insertion in an unfamiliar environment, rather than being used as punchbags by boarding parties, and actually put in a decent showing. I would have thought Tucker could have come up with a better method to see if the forcefield was down than getting his poor escort to stick his hand in it though!
As several people have mentioned, the issue of the deceased crewmembers is addressed next episode. As for Archer being returned to Enterprise, I think we can assume that Degra, Jannar and “Depac” were deliberating misleading Dolim when they told him/implied to him that Archer would be transported to the council for further interrogation. Given that he’s delivered with a coded message with a time and date, it’s obvious that their plan is to have a secret meeting with Enterprise somewhere. The fact the Aquatics are the ones facilitating this is rather out of nowhere though, and it’d be interesting to know what the off-screen conversation was.
Jonathan Archer may be Average White Captain* but when he goes Dark he goes DARK – while Archer is confirmed as one of the All Time Greats as late as the first season of DISCOVERY, I’d bet cash money that he’s an enduringly controversial figure in Federation historiography for doing exactly the sort of thing he does in this episode.
Which is, of course, a **** Good episode (Not least because I’m beginning to suspect that ‘Fan Service with a sting in the tail’ scenes are the show’s way of making earlier decontamination scenes work for the show, but lulling audiences into a false sense of security).
My only real reservation, that the explorers robbed by NX-01 were from an an un-named species not previously known to STAR TREK (or at least to me**), was mitigated by the fact this very namelessness adds to the sense that these are the little guys being made grist for the mill of History in the worst way: I was, however, delighted to learn that not only was this species actually named, it seems to have become part of the background of Number 1 herself (A seriously significant character in TREK history apparently due to get more time in the limelight with STRANGE NEW WORLDS Season 2).
This is mostly because ‘Damage’ is an episode that absolutely begs a sequel, in that it’s the perfect foundation for an exploration of the controversies attaching to any historic figure, no matter how genuinely heroic (“The hero of one story may be the villain, might be the MONSTER of another story” is a dramatically rich theme, to say the least), and the rather tense dynamic between the Federation & Illyria would definitely add something to such a story: if nothing else, seeing such a sequel as part of STRANGE NEW WORLDS would help drive home the truth that it’s not just those who actually commit the offence that will have to live with the consequences of their actions and that it’s not just their contemporaries who will have to deal with those consequences.
The only question is whether it’s more dramatically-compelling for the Illyrian ship to have made it home (circa AD 2156?) or whether their fate becoming a probably-tragic mystery adds more to the story: after some reflection, I tend to support the latter (Since this means that their probable fate would become known to the Illyrians only if the Federation chose to share it – and the Federation choosing to be honest, accepting all the consequences, would be a nicely STAR TREK moment).
I wonder if ‘Old Wounds’ would be a suitable title for such a tale?
*As ever I use this as an affectionate nickname: For me AWC works perfectly as ‘the Dude who did it First, but not the Dude who did it Best’ (In a way that makes me wonder what it must be like for someone to be introduced to STAR TREK by ENTERPRISE, rather than one of the older or more highly-regarded series: that might be a series of articles worth reading in it’s own right).
**Even if we assume that these Illyrians are not the same as Number 1’s Illyrians, it’s mentioned on Memory Alpha that there’s a species called the Tanugans (from THE NEXT GENERATION ‘A Matter of Perspective’) which bears a strong resemblance to their design and might be interpreted as their descendants.
@2. ChristopherLBennett: Making the ENTERPRISE Illyrians Una Chin-Riley’s birth people struck me as a really cool detail, since Illyrians having a look very distinct from humans helps drive home the lengths to which she was willing to go to pursue a Starfleet career (It also suggests a dynamic between Illyrians and the Federation more fascinating than “The Federation really hates Genetic Engineering” since it would allow both sides to have healthy reservations about their opposite number: the future Number 1 may well have been defying her own people, as well as subverting Federation law, when she set out to make a career in Starfleet).
@10. Wyatt Rubal: This is a happy possibility, but the Illyrians would be perfectly justified in flat-out refusing to get involved with a shooting war in which they have no vested interest – even in negotiations that might end this war, given that these are SECRET negotiations that may or may not be shot to pieces once they become public – not least since they’ve only narrowly survived one brush with Death (and especially given that Enterprise, a visibly bigger and more formidable ship armed for war, has just been reduced to a mass of metal and agony with bare minimum forward momentum by their opponents).
Hence Archer going to extremes to get the job done.
@15. jaimebabb: I think the ‘substance abuse’ angle would have worked more elegantly had it been treated as an externalisation of T’Pol finally hitting her limits after spending years as a lone Vulcan amongst humans, after being obliged to further remove herself from Vulcan society by resigning her commission to continue serving with Enterprise, after suffering at least one painful psychic invasion, the lingering consequences of exposure to Trellium-d and now the absolutely brutal hammering suffered by her ship & her crew whilst she held the conn.
After all that (and I’m not even sure that’s the limit of her sufferings to date) T’Pol suffering an especially bad case of PTSD, bad enough for even Vulcan emotional control to start crumbling, would make a horrible amount of sense.
@17. cap-mjb: After a fairly sober series of reflections, it cheers me up to imagine that the Big Secret Chat went something like:
Degra: “Mermaids, gentlemen, events have reached a point where (with your help and a little discretion) we may have a way to avoid the massacre of every single human being with our Planet Killer AND our own mass murder (Just don’t tell the Reptilians, for pity’s sake)”
Aquatics (Translation): “No murder and we get to put one over on the Reptilians? Count us in!”
On a tangentially-related note, it has just occurred to me that (whilst humans may think of Tellarites as just a bit pig-headed) Klingons almost certainly look at one of the Federations’ founding species and think “Targ”.
Now I keep wondering if that would be a good thing or a bad thing (Of nothing else, their love of verbal jousting and the thick skin they consequently develop make Tellarites well-suited to handle Klingon braggadocio … or skewer it).
…
While we’re off topic, I desperately want to see it confirmed that the Federation vessel which made First Contact with the Bolians was largely crewed by the Andorians (Bonus points if the two species have had an “Odd couple” relationship ever since).
@15/jaimebabb: “I’m still not sure how I feel about T’Pol’s Trellium-D addiction; in some ways, it seems like a ploy to “de-Vulcanize” her so that they can more easily set her up with Trip; at the same time, it also seems like it might have been a retroactive way to justify her emotionality in earlier episodes.”
I think it’s more likely the former. We saw the same thing on Voyager: they often did episodes like “Meld” or “Riddles” that took away his Vulcan-ness in one way or another. Of course, “Amok Time” was the first story to do that, but going back to that well over and over is kind of the lazy way to make Vulcans interesting.
Also, given that they introduced Trellium-D and its effects on Vulcans very early in the season, I’d expect that this arc for T’Pol was intended from the start, rather than being a later retcon.
@18/ED: “Making the ENTERPRISE Illyrians Una Chin-Riley’s birth people struck me as a really cool detail, since Illyrians having a look very distinct from humans helps drive home the lengths to which she was willing to go to pursue a Starfleet career”
No, it’s the other way around. The screen graphics in “Ghosts of Illyria” showed that Illyrians are human-looking by default, but some have been engineered with more exotic features. The dialogue also established that they’re a far-flung species with many colonies and that they engineer themselves to adapt to the colony worlds’ environments. In this case, it would be the ENT Illyrians who drastically altered themselves to colonize an alien world.
In reality, of course, the ENT Illyrians were not meant to be the same species as Number One, since the reference to Number One being a “Ilyrian” was only from a single novel (albeit one by D.C. Fontana) and thus wasn’t very well-known. It was no doubt a coincidental similarity of names. But the SNW writers decided to make use of the commonality and invent a background that explained away the discrepancies.
o.m.: Good point about the fact that Hayes should’ve been organizing the planning of the raid on the Illyrians, what with that being what he’s trained for and all. As for the shower dream, that didn’t bother me because (for a change) it wasn’t gratuitous. It was there not just to have Jolene Blalock and Connor Trinneer be naked for an extended period, it also illustrated what T’Pol was going through.
Eric: I’m trying to do both — these rewatches are as much about looking back on the older Trek shows with a modern eye as it is understanding them in context.
Christopher & bgsu98: I didn’t know that they were going to deal with the redshirt issue (my foreknowledge of this season is poor, and this part of the series is much more of a watch than a rewatch), but I think I can be forgiven for not giving Trek the benefit of the doubt. *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@21/krad: That, to me, is one of the best things about ENT — that it was the one Trek show that handled crew death in a more thoughtful and mature way than its predecessors, in marked contrast to most other aspects of the show’s writing.
Testing….
Nothing like a threat of imminent cancellation to push the entire staff to deliver the episodes we knew a show like Enterprise was always capable of. Franchise fatigue is a term used every now and then, but if ratings had been dire like this during Voyager’s run, maybe we would have gotten this kind of creative spur much sooner. It pushed Rick Berman and Brannon Braga out of their comfort zone, and alongside Coto, they’ve managed to finally open up the show’s true potential.
“Damaged” was the episode I was referring to months ago, when we discussed “Anomaly”. We were always going to get the inverse situaiton of what happened on that episode with the Osaarians. Archer and company stealing the warp coil from the Illyrians is outright piracy, even under the best of intentions. It shows just how dire the situation truly is (superb performance by Casey Biggs, I might add – that whole sequence really stings in a moral sense, the way he really calls out the situation for what it is. You know Archer is crossing the line, and he and everyone else knows it).
The episode successfully blends the physical damage and psychological damage everyone is going through. T’Pol’s addiction to Trellium-D and gradual loss of her faculties go hand in hand with the ship’s state of disarray. Everyone’s emotionally and physically spent. As I’ve said last week, this is literally their Year of Hell. This episode is all about consequences. Not only one of Enterprise’s best, but I’d say this ranks up there with Trek’s all-time best.
I’m surprised this was writer/producer Phyllis Strong’s swan song. After four years involved with Trek, leaving the staff having just written her best script. That would the equivalent to Brannon Braga exiting Trek after writing “All Good Things….”. Thankfully, her replacements (the Reeves-Stevens team) were more than up to filling up the workload for season 4.
@20/CLB: “We saw the same thing on Voyager: they often did episodes like “Meld” or “Riddles” that took away his Vulcan-ness in one way or another. Of course, “Amok Time” was the first story to do that”
It goes back at least as far as “This Side of Paradise” and possibly even “The Naked Time”!
@20. ChristopherLBennett: Ho-hum, I think the writers may have been overthinking things a bit on that one.
On a more cheerful note, I purchased your STAR TREK ADVENTURES episode ‘Lurkers’ just today and rather enjoyed it: my compliments on having come up with such an excellently cartoonish plot!
My own preferred resolution to the core dilemma (In the absence of a pre-generated character to channel) would probably involve taking that Nice Scientist’s suggestion to my superior officers, though only after deleting the Classified Intel and doing my level best to avoid confirming that, yes, we are actual Starfleet officers* (Bonus points if I can simultaneously convince the Primers that they’ve got exactly what they wanted for just long enough to get them away from innocents).
Extra bonus points if I can perform the last part of the mission in full ‘Human’ makeup from that earlier comic aside (all the better to leave locals wonder if Real Starfleet Officers could possibly be THAT stupid).
*The Nice Scientist makes a fair point, but Good Tradecraft is Good Tradecraft.
Oh, and for some reason I imagine Shawan II natives having makeup designs (I mean “organic cranial protrusions”) that strongly resemble Starfleet badges on both sides of their forehead (Hopefully a suitably cartoonish way of hinting at their having “Star Trek on the Brain”).
I am torn on the T’Pol addiction storyline. On the one hand, as a clinical psychologist, I appreciate the somewhat accurate portrayal of addiction in ways that humanize (pardon the terran-centrism) people who struggle with addiction and emphasize that recovery is possible and often involves social support, access to medical treatment, etc. All that is good and provides drama and depth to the show and T’Pol’s character arc.
On the other hand, it is written in a way that lacks nuance and it is just more evidence to me that Braga and Berman struggle with their characterization of women. I don’t think they ever had a good handle on the T’Pol character and in this key moment – when she is pushing against Archer crossing the line, she is reduced to a raving outburst. People with addiction can still make compelling moral arguments against possibly condemning a ship of people to death and I hate that T’Pol couldn’t be written and characterized with greater nuance and depth. But I suppose that is asking too much of a this production team.
@26/ED: ” On a more cheerful note, I purchased your STAR TREK ADVENTURES episode ‘Lurkers’ just today and rather enjoyed it: my compliments on having come up with such an excellently cartoonish plot!”
Thanks, but ironically, I actually had the idea many years ago as a TOS story premise. It just happened to be a very nice fit to Lower Decks, and of course I added more LD-ish elements when I turned it into a game.
I’ve always head canoned that Enterprise’s crew told the Aquatics about the Ilyrian ship when they dropped them off at Earth to tie off that loose end. Other than that, it’s clear this is has always been one of the best episodes in the series. Which makes sense, they’ve been trying to do this concept for seven years, it figures they’d have it refined.
@28. ChristopherLBennett: I’d dearly love to know an artist who could channel LOWER DECKS’ art style for a number of reasons (Being able to see the characters from Mr Scalzi’s REDSHIRTS in their natural environment would be high on the list), but seeing what humans made up as aliens made up as human Starfleet officers is almost certainly at the top of that list.
I have to admit that, asked to write a LOWER DECKS episode, I would probably dive into past eras of Starfleet history (To show that there have always been LOWER DECKS sort of stories, whether or not they were entirely true …*).
*I continue to uphold my pet theory that LOWER DECKS is absolutely meant to be Ensign Mariner’s old war stories and nothing like sober history, hence the delightfully cartoonish version of the STAR TREK galaxy seen therein.
@29. mr_d: Another sensible solution that rather breaks the fingers of this episode’s Dramatic Punch!
I don’t want the Illyrians to come to harm, but one feels the episode loses something if it’s a case of “All over, no harm done”.
Well, it’s this one. The “My Partner Lost All Respect For The Captain” episode of Enterprise (though Similitude came close, but somehow not Dear Doctor), which joined a couple different episodes of Voyager (I seem to recall Tuvix was one) as well as most of TOS, leaving Picard as her answer to the age-old question, though Pike’s gotten a fair amount of points so far. Can you tell introducing her to Trek over the last year has been an entertaining ride? The best part is she’s not wrong about most of these takeaways.
I also seem to recall some folks taking real offense to Star Trek: Picard including a main character who was also a drug addict, but for some reason nobody found T’Pol’s arc here similarly, ah, distressing to them. I wonder what the difference could be. :)
@ChristopherLBennett: One last remark before I can let the subject rest – your adventure was good enough to make me start wondering what sort of ship I’d set LOWER DECKS era adventures on and it suddenly struck me that the Miranda-class would fit the bill quite perfectly (As a much, much older ship class that bears something of a resemblance to the California-class, which suggests a natural comedy dynamic of an indomitable, but slightly-rickety grandmother and her promising, but inveterately-goofy grandchild*).
I’m tempted by the name ‘USS Indefatigable‘ but would prefer something a bit more in the spirit of the name Miranda, so I’ll have to keep thinking over that one.
*One could definitely mine the fact that, by the 2380s, the Miranda-class would seem to have been in service forever for a good deal of comedy (Especially given the class tends to show up to be blown up): a beautifully put-together starship that keeps encountering teething troubles because she’s so darned old is another very natural source of comedy (Here’s a thought: have these enormously-old Starfleet classes been kept in service because very, very long-lived or time-lost Starfleet personnel can be assigned to them with minimal retraining?).
It doesn’t hurt that the Miranda-classes tenure in service makes the class a natural stage for “Lower Decks have been doing their thing for just as long as Starfleet has” stories.
I was like 60% sure the alien woman was played by Salome Jens.
I also don’t get, why they didn’t just ask for a ride from that ship instead of robbing them…