“Demons”
Written by Manny Coto
Directed by LeVar Burton
Season 4, Episode 20
Production episode 096
Original air date: May 6, 2005
Date: January 19, 2155
Captain’s star log. On the moon, at the Orpheus Mining Facility, John Frederick Paxton, the mine’s owner, and a doctor named Mercer are checking up on a baby in an incubator, who’s been sick. The baby has the tapered ears of a Vulcan. We’re apparently supposed to just know that she’s a Vulcan-human hybrid, even though she only just looks Vulcan.
Enterprise has been summoned back to Earth to be present for the signing of a treaty that will lead to a Coalition of Planets, which will include Earth, Vulcan, Andoria, Tellar Prime, Coridan, and Denobula Triaxa. Earth’s Prime Minister, Nathan Samuels, is giving a press conference, with the various delegates and the Enterprise “senior staff” (everyone in the opening credits) observing.
The reception afterward includes some rather nasty bitching and moaning from Tucker about how Samuels didn’t give Enterprise credit for their part in this (the Andorians and Tellarites are pretty much only there because of Archer and the gang), and said bitching and moaning is particularly bitter toward Samuels. Archer, for his part, is happy to stay out of politics.
One of the reporters covering the event is named Gannet, and she and Mayweather used to be an item, presumably when he was at Starfleet Academy. It seems to have been an acrimonious split, though Gannet appears interested in rekindling things.
Samuels compliments Sato on the work she did improving the universal translator. Meanwhile, T’Pol quietly and politely agrees with Tucker that Enterprise is due more credit—but she’s interrupted by a medtech named Susan Khouri, who gives T’Pol a vial with a hair sample, says, “they’re going to kill her,” and collapses—only then does her coat fall open to reveal a nasty phase pistol wound.
Khouri eventually dies from her wounds. Phlox examines the follicle and shocks everyone by saying that (a) it’s a Vulcan-human hybrid, and (b) the person to whom this follicle belongs is the offspring of Tucker and T’Pol.
T’Pol maintains that she has never been pregnant (why she needs to insist that when a simple examination from Phlox would provide evidence of that is left as an exercise for the viewer). But she also maintains that this is not a hoax and that there is a child of theirs out there somewhere.
Archer discusses it with Sameuls, with the latter preferring to keep the news of the hybrid quiet. It’s a difficult time right now, and there’s a “Terra Prime” movement that has been growing since the Xindi attack, which wishes to isolate Earth from alien contamination.
Gannet shows up on Enterprise, saying she’s doing a story on the ship and asking Mayweather for a tour. They wind up making out in a shuttlepod, then take the party to his quarters.
Samuels has asked Archer to let Starfleet handle the investigation, but because Archer is the lead in a TV show, he is incapable of allowing people not in the opening credits to deal with things, so he has Reed contact Harris. Harris reminds Reed that Reed told Harris never to contact him again. Reed says he contacted Harris, which isn’t the same thing. Harris says that this means Reed is still working for him whether he likes it or not, a declaration that would have much more weight if this wasn’t the antepenultimate episode of the entire series. Harris reveals that Khouri is also part of Terra Prime.
On the moon, Paxton expresses concern to Mercer over Khouri’s betrayal, particularly that Mercer might also start feeling sympathy for the abomination. Mercer’s assurances that he’s loyal don’t sound all that convincing. Paxton also watches footage of Colonel Green from just after World War III where he’s advocating eugenics.
Phlox has Khouri’s autopsy report, and it includes a growth hormone used in low-gravity environments. It’s hardly ever used anymore since artificial gravity was invented, but it’s still used in a few places, like Orpheus on the moon—which is also, according to Harris’ intel, a hotbed of Terra Prime activity. Sato also reports that there’s a weird glitch in the universal translator.
On the moon, they’re cleaning up from a cave-in, and they find Mercer’s body, the victim of a carefully constructed “accident.”
T’Pol and Tucker go undercover as new employees of Orpheus. Tucker befriends a man named Josiah, who invites Tucker to a meeting of people who are sick of alien influence affecting Earth. Tucker goes to the meeting and is outed by Josiah at the same time that T’Pol is taken prisoner. They’re brought before Paxton, who identifies himself as the leader of Terra Prime. He plans to return Earth to its rightful owners. It’s not clear what role the hybrid child is supposed to play…
Archer, Reed, and Sato interrupt Mayweather and Gannet’s nookie because they’ve discovered that Gannet is a Terra Prime spy. She was listening in on all the universal translators, which triggered an ID protocol that Sato was able to trace. Gannet also made several trips to Orpheus, which were not, according to her editor, for a story as she claims. Gannet demands to have a lawyer, and Archer puts her in the brig, apologizing to a hurt Mayweather.
Paxton’s chief flunky Greaves pilots Orpheus off the surface of the moon and flies it to Mars, which surprises pretty much everyone. Archer orders Enterprise to go after them.
Orpheus lands on Mars near the verteron array that is used to divert comets. Paxton reconfigures it to fire on the moon, and declares that all non-humans must leave the Sol system or there will be more damage done.
To be continued…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, despite all the medical advances we’ve seen in the twenty-second century, somehow the ability to determine if a woman has ever been pregnant has been lost. (This is me, rolling my eyes…)
The gazelle speech. Archer seems to be the only member of his own crew who doesn’t mind that Samuels never mentions them in his speech. He’s just happy to see the Coalition of Planets becoming a thing.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol somehow just knows that she has a daughter out there, even though she was never pregnant. Tucker goes along with this. Sort of.
Florida Man. Florida Man Has Miracle Baby With Alien Lover!
Optimism, Captain! Phlox is the one who moves the plot along by examining the hair follicle and examining Khouri’s autopsy.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Mayweather and Gannet get very hot and heavy, and even start talking about future plans together right up until she’s arrested.
More on this later… The Coridan ambassador having a complaint about Tellarites and trade with the Orions mirrors a similar issue that comes up when Coridan applies for admission to the Federation a century hence in the original series’ “Journey to Babel.”
Also the baby seen at the top of the episode is the first-ever Vulcan-human hybrid, which we know will become a bit more common in the future, given that the most popular character in the entire franchise is a Vulcan-human hybrid…
I’ve got faith…
“It’s estimated that there are at least five thousand unregistered aliens on Earth. Now, another study puts that figure at ten thousand. This insanity is the direct result of our government’s policy and the enforcers of that policy, Starfleet! We need to send a message to the people in power.”
–Josiah, rabble-rousing with depressingly familiar rhetoric.
Welcome aboard. Eric Pierpoint returns as Harris, last seen in “Divergence.” Harry Groener, who previously played Tam Elbrun in TNG’s “Tin Man” and a magistrate in Voyager’s “Sacred Ground,” plays Samuels. Peter Weller plays Paxton; he will later play Alexander Marcus in Star Trek Into Darkness. Patrick Fischler plays Mercer, Adam Clark plays Josiah, and Johanna Watts plays Gannet.
Steve Rankin plays Colonel Green in footage Paxton watches. Green previously appeared as an Excalbian re-creation in the original series’ “The Savage Curtain,” played by Phillip Pine. Rankin previously played a Romulan in TNG’s “The Enemy,” a Cardassian in DS9’s “Emissary,” and a Klingon in DS9’s “Invasive Procedures.”
And this week’s Robert Knepper moment is the appearance of the great Peter Mensah, whom I had completely forgot was in this two-parter as Greaves.
Pierpoint, Groener, Weller, Clark, Watts, and Mensah will all return next time in “Terra Prime.”
Trivial matters: Colonel Green was established in the original series’ “The Savage Curtain” as a fascist from the twenty-first century. He was remembered by Kirk as one of the greatest villains of human history. Here, he’s specifically tied to the chaos of World War III and its aftermath (as seen in the movie First Contact), and is seen advocating eugenic genocide to avoid humanity being horribly mutated by radiation in what was referred to in TNG’s “Encounter at Farpoint” as “the post-atomic horror.”
Green is also a major player in the novel Federation by Enterprise‘s co-producers Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, and also appears in Federation: The First 150 Years by former Enterprise consulting producer David A. Goodman and “The Immortality Blues” by Marc Carlson in Strange New Worlds 9.
The Coalition of Planets is obviously a precursor to the Federation, which will be founded seven years after this episode.
This is the last of 29 Trek episodes directed by LeVar Burton, who also played Geordi La Forge on TNG, Voyager, and Picard and in four movies. Burton has continued to be active as a TV director, most recently having lensed several episodes of NCIS: Hawai‘i.
The Coridanite ambassador has a completely different appearance from the Coridanites seen in “Shadows of P’Jem” (and later in Discovery’s “Far from Home”). The novel The Good that Men Do by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin explains this as the ambassador wearing a ceremonial mask.
It’s been a long road… “Terra Prime forever!” This is a very effective episode generally, and one that has become more depressingly relevant as social commentary, as the rhetoric espoused by Paxton and Josiah is the same anti-other nonsense that’s been getting way too much play in this country about certain illegal immigrants and in the UK during the entire Brexit mishegoss, among many other places.
I’ve said this a lot during this rewatch, but this is the kind of story Enterprise should’ve been doing all along, and while it was nicely seeded in the bar brawl in “Home” particularly, the fact that it took until the penultimate storyline to cover it is annoying.
The Xindi attack especially is something that would prompt a subsection of humanity to go all xenophobic and isolationist. Not everyone, of course—what I especially like is that the rise of Terra Prime is concurrent with the advancing of the Coalition of Planets. Which is the way of things, sadly—progress is often met with violent regressives. Ending slavery led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. More recently, expansion of rights for non-heterosexuals has led to a rise in violence against them.
Josiah’s speech was especially mind-blowing to watch in 2024, as that speech resonates at least as much as it did nineteen years ago. (Though I’m sure writer Manny Coto was inspired by the anti-Muslim rhetoric flying about in the wake of 9/11.)
Peter Weller has aged nicely into the kind of person who is good at angry-white-guy roles (see also his turn in Star Trek Into Darkness, not to mention his recurring roles on Sons of Anarchy and The Last Ship). He absolutely nails Paxton’s confident arrogance here, making him a bad guy to be reckoned with.
The episode loses a few points for a couple of things that twigged me greatly. The first is, as mentioned above, the fact that T’Pol has to say to Tucker that she’s never been pregnant. Unless Vulcans gestate really really really fast, there’s no way T’Pol could’ve had a kid without anyone knowing, as the only time she was away from the ship for a significant period was between “Home” and “Borderland,” which was only a few weeks. And, again, we have the means to medically determine if a woman’s ever been pregnant now, so the notion that it’s not something that could be determined by Phlox waving a scanner over her is ludicrous.
Secondly, Enterprise continues to give us a united Earth that’s mostly Caucasian. Both the prime minister of Earth and the head of Terra Prime are WASPy white dudes. Worse, though, is that we do actually get a couple people of color in the guest cast this week—and they’re both bad guys! As wonderful as it is to see Peter Mensah, and as good as Adam Clark is, it would’ve been nice to see some Black folks who aren’t xenophobic terrorists. And the complete lack of Latin, Middle Easter, or Asian people (beyond Sato) remains tiresome. They even give poor Mayweather a subplot, but it’s all in service of his being duped by his ex, which is only a nominal improvement over how they usually ignore the ensign.
Still, this is one of Enterprise’s stronger social commentary episodes, and one that nicely shows the growing pains of Earth in the transition between World War III and the founding of the Federation.
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be Author Guest of Honor at the inaugural ConVivial in Williamsburg, Virginia this weekend, alongside Music Guests of Honor HipHopMcDougal, Cosplay Guest of Honor Angela Pritchett, and Fan Guest of Honor Candi O’Rourke. Keith will be doing lots of programming, and also will be performing with the Boogie Knights for a few concerts. His full schedule will be posted to his blog soon.
KRAD, you didn’t sprain anything rolling your eyes that hard, did you?
Some more observations about the episode …
I noticed the clothing of Paxton and Mercer. Suit and vest, and in Mercer’s case the vest under the lab coat. A subtle sign that they were rather backwards-looking people? I’ve been trying to recall if we’ve seen other humans in similar clothing. Nice touch, anyway.
The mine, on the other hand. They are seriously trying to tell us that miners on Luna move minecarts with muscle power? Wearing coveralls while they were drilling into the walls? Since this was the last season, they could simply have spray-painted the Enterprise space suits. And I wonder if it would have been much more expensive (or complicated) to shoot in a real mine. Excessive safety regulations or penny-pinching?
Were we supposed to recognize that the baby was a hybrid, or would it have been just as disturbing to think of her as a Vulcan infant in Terra Prime hands? Either way, it was clear that the people holding her were up to no good.
I realize that the TV show format has limitations, but did they have to send two officers who just had been on national news, clapping in the background, on an undercover op? One of them a Vulcan, on top of that.
I really liked Gannet’s reaction in the end, “I want to see my lawyer.” The fact that there is a civilian government and a legal system is all too often lost in shows like this. Archer might be able to make some of his own law out there, but not in the home system.
I disliked the idea that the verteron array, which can shoot at ships and planets all over the system, was just sitting there without even a lonely rent-a-cop. Figurative heads should roll over that, in the investigations and recriminations afterwards.
All in all, I might not have given it an 8 like you, but it was an above-average show.
Just as Star Trek’s best commentary on 9/11 actually aired in 1996 (DS9‘s “Homefront”/”Paradise Lost”), so too did its best commentary on the global rise of the xenophobic right air more than a decade before Trump declared his candidacy. But what really makes this story work as an arc on Enterprise (and as what I’m going to call Enterprise‘s proper finale) is that Terra Prime’s bullshit actually just sounds like a more extreme version of the types of things that Archer himself was saying about Vulcans back in the first season. I doubt that Archer would ever have signed off on the anti-immigrant rhetoric, but the idea that the colonization of space should be an effort by humans for humans was essentially his argument when T’Pol was appointed to babysit him. Thus, these episodes take one of the worst aspects of early-season Enterprise (Archer’s specism) and turn it into an opportunity to demonstrate his growth as a character.
I also love how it shows the dark side of Star Trek‘s humanism, and how easily it can become just another chauvinistic ideology. It’s not lost on me how multi-ethnic they make Terra Prime: a generation or two earlier, the type of people drawn to such a movement would almost certainly have just engaged in race hatred against one another. Now the Earth has been drawn together through its contact with alien life, and the only thing that these assholes have gotten out of it is that it has given them someone new to hate.
It’s not perfect, though. As you note, they don’t extend the multiracial casting to the actual government of Earth. But my main problem is that Terra Prime’s plan in this episode doesn’t really make much sense. What exactly do they hope to gain out of creating a Human/Vulcan hybrid? Do they think that the gross-out factor of combining human and alien genetics outweighs the moral outrage that most people would feel towards Terra Prime on knowing that they either created this child without the consent of its parents, or kidnapped her? Do they think that making the people of Earth watch a baby die on live television will constitute a propaganda victory for their cause? It really just seems like a cheap way to bring the Trip/T’Pol relationship to some kind of a head.
Krad, a little off-topic, but I was wondering if you ever considered writing reviews of the Star Trek novels. Obviously, there’s no way you can cover all of them, but I was thinking you could review selected entries that stand out, whether they’re good, or bad, or just plain weird.
Regarding the subject at hand, I agree that “Demons”/”Terra Prime” is a strong storyline, one of the best in the series. It’s a shame it was followed up by such a horrid finale. I guess we’ll see your take on it in a couple of weeks!
@3 said: But my main problem is that Terra Prime’s plan in this episode doesn’t really make much sense. What exactly do they hope to gain out of creating a Human/Vulcan hybrid? Do they think that the gross-out factor of combining human and alien genetics outweighs the moral outrage that most people would feel towards Terra Prime on knowing that they either created this child without the consent of its parents, or kidnapped her?
I think the point of the hybrid baby was to feed into the fear that allowing in this case literal race-mixing would somehow eventually lead to the demise of humanity. The allegory – I believe – is to miscegenation fears in the 19th, 20th and (most sadly) 21st centuries. It’s the “Great Replacement Theory” writ large across the stars (a sentence that makes me a little sick to have written).
Like others, I consider this arc to be the true series finale. I remember thinking that the episode represented a significant turning point, in that everything Archer and crew had done could’ve been undone in one swift stroke.
This 2-parter is one of the show’s highest points, and it’s good that we got to see the beginnings of the UFP before the series ended, even if it was just a harbinger. Effective social commentary. Although I’ve never been as impressed with Peter Weller as a lot of people are, and I could’ve done without the Section 31 angle.
The verteron array always bugged me. How do you divert comets toward Mars by shooting them with a beam emitted from Mars? It would make more sense to put thrusters on the comets. Also, it seems implausible from a continuity standpoint that they had such a powerful potential weapon in the 22nd century. I think they also ignored the several minutes of lightspeed time lag there would be for a particle beam fired from Mars to reach Earth, and that’s assuming the particles were even relativistic.
@3/jaimebabb: “so too did its best commentary on the global rise of the xenophobic right air more than a decade before Trump declared his candidacy.”
That’s because “the rise of the xenophobic right” has been ongoing ever since Nixon and Goldwater embraced the Southern racists who left the Democratic Party after it made civil rights part of its core platform. Trump is the reductio ad absurdem endpoint of everything that’s happened in the GOP over the past 60 years, and countless fiction writers have seen it coming and tried to warn us through allegory. They weren’t prophetic; we just didn’t listen to them when they pointed out what was obvious at the time.
Something I almost said in the rewatch entry itself, but it was too much of a digression…..
I said of the Terra Prime talking points: “the rhetoric espoused by Paxton and Josiah is the same anti-other nonsense that’s been getting way too much play in this country about certain illegal immigrants.” I said certain there for a reason because it wasn’t all immigrants, just ones with darker skin. I live in a section of NYC that has a large number of Irish immigrants, and believe me when I tell you that not all of them are here legally. Yet not once has ICE shown up to raid homes in my neighborhood. Funny, that……….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Quoth Shaun B: “I was wondering if you ever considered writing reviews of the Star Trek novels. Obviously, there’s no way you can cover all of them, but I was thinking you could review selected entries that stand out, whether they’re good, or bad, or just plain weird.”
I’ve been asked that before, and given that I’ve written 16 of those novels (plus 13 novellas, 10 [so far] short stories, 6 comic books, and a reference book), and also given that I number many Trek fictioneers among my closest friends, I’m not at all comfortable doing that.
However, Alvaro Zinios-Amaro did do a re-read of all the post-finale Deep Space Nine fiction for this here site:
https://www.tor.com/tag/star-trek-deep-space-nine-reread/
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Despite its flaws, this was a pretty strong entry in the series.
Certainly a high point of the series, though I could’ve done without the Section 31 angle.
The verteron array also bugged me. How do you draw comets to Mars by shooting them with a beam fired from Mars? Wouldn’t that push them away? Better to put thrusters on the comets. Also, a beam that powerful in the 22nd century seems too advanced.
Folks, let’s try to avoid discussing current politics as much as possible. Thanks!
“He know how you feel about space exploration? That it’s the last vestige of colonial impulse?”
There’s a bit of a kitchen sink feel to this with the beginnings of the Federation, all the major friendly races coming back as background characters and the return of Section 31 to do little more than provide exposition. I’m finding there’s a lot I don’t remember so we’ll see how much of this gets paid off in the next episode, but it does draw the focus away from the main plotline a bit.
Which is basically that there’s a Bond villain with a rather convoluted plan and a bizarre tendency to bump off people who are on his side. (The death of the doctor doesn’t make much sense and seems to be there just to prove Paxton’s eeevillll, as if there was any doubt. I didn’t even realise the guy was meant to have a name. Mercer? Where does that come from?) By the end of the episode, we don’t have any real idea as to why there’s a child of Tucker and T’Pol out there and I’m not sure the pay-off is worth it: It’s mainly a plot device to get Enterprise involved.
I’ve seen Paul Weller’s performance as Paxton criticised but I think he does well in creating an utterly hateful figure, whose claims of virtue ring false at every turn and who is just using excuses to silence every opinion he disagrees with. It perhaps makes sense that someone like that would be completely uncharismatic except to those who lap up his every word because it’s what they want to hear. And we do get a bit of nuance with Samuels (revealed as having joined Terra Prime after the death of his father and come to regret it) and perhaps Khouri, showing that people can get sucked into this sort of ideology when they’re vulnerable and looking for easy answers, and sometimes are lucky enough to get out again.
Archer gets a couple of decent scenes going head to head with Samuels, and Mayweather gets the most focus he’s had in at least two years. We do at least see everyone contribute something, although Tucker and T’Pol’s undercover mission is an epic fail which sees them captured without learning anything of worth.
(Even after all these years, I’m a bit bewildered that fan lore has decided there actually was something called the Coalition of Planets that preceded the Federation, to the point that Memory Alpha has an article on it. I’ve always assumed that what we see being set up here is the Federation, and “coalition of planets” was either a simple description or a placeholder name that got changed before the alliance was finalised. I will see when we get the next episode whether that opinion holds weight but I’m reminded of just how many names the European single currency went through before they settled on “euro”. In fact I was recently reading one of those dystopian near future Doctor Who novels that were all the rage in the 90s and was amused to see it predicting that by 2006 we’d all be using the “ecumark”.)
I believe at one point Colonel Green was intended to be the main villain of this story, but instead they establish him as being a century earlier. Mayweather and Gannet mention the events of ‘Divergence’ and ‘The Council’. There are several references to the Xindi attack: To be fair, it’s hard not to feel Terra Prime have a point about it being shrugged off as a misunderstanding. Harry Groener completes a trifecta, having appeared in three Trek series.
I’m not sure the attitude towards T’Pol’s non-pregnancy is as annoying as the review claims. Phlox does say without much doubt that she’s never been pregnant, so it’s possible any relevant scans happened off-screen. (Or indeed are unnecessary, given that she presumably has regular medicals.) It’s speculated that she could have had the child translated into someone else (a plot device we will later see in Discovery!) but Tucker and Phlox quickly dismiss it.
Trying not to be too political: Given the current UK government, I think some of the casting here is worryingly apt.
@12/cap-mjb: “By the end of the episode, we don’t have any real idea as to why there’s a child of Tucker and T’Pol out there and I’m not sure the pay-off is worth it: It’s mainly a plot device to get Enterprise involved.”
The why is obvious enough — it’s the old racist tactic of playing up fears of miscegenation and the erosion of racial purity, capitalizing on the most famous human-Vulcan collaboration (T’Pol’s inclusion in NX-01’s crew) to attract more attention.
“I’ve always assumed that what we see being set up here is the Federation, and “coalition of planets” was either a simple description or a placeholder name that got changed before the alliance was finalised.”
No, this is years earlier than the Federation, so the idea is that it’s the looser alliance preceding the stronger Federation that was formed after the Earth-Romulan War. Although I do think there was supposed to be a significant amount of time passing between this preliminary conference and the formal establishment of the Coalition, as opposed to the way the post-finale novels portrayed it, as this conference being the actual founding of the Coalition.
@13/CLB: “The why is obvious enough — it’s the old racist tactic of playing up fears of miscegenation and the erosion of racial purity, capitalizing on the most famous human-Vulcan collaboration (T’Pol’s inclusion in NX-01’s crew) to attract more attention.”
Well, yeah, I nearly said that first bit. To be honest, I’m not really convinced by the second bit. If Terra Prime are meant to be scaremongering about aliens on Earth, why make it look as though hybrids will only happen if humans and other species get stuck in space together?
“No, this is years earlier than the Federation, so the idea is that it’s the looser alliance preceding the stronger Federation that was formed after the Earth-Romulan War. Although I do think there was supposed to be a significant amount of time passing between this preliminary conference and the formal establishment of the Coalition, as opposed to the way the post-finale novels portrayed it, as this conference being the actual founding of the Coalition.”
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m saying. It’s going to be a significant amount of time before this so-called “Coalition” actually exists, and there’s a significant amount of time before the Federation is formed, so doesn’t it seem likely that it’s actually the same amount of time, and some time in the next six years someone will just decide that “Federation” sounds better than “Coalition”?
@krad: I wanted to let you know that I only learned about ConViviality today, thanks to your announcement above; my wife and I live only a couple of hours from Williamsburg, and we decided on the spur of the moment to go ahead and attend. So we may be among your audience on Saturday…
I am happy that we will be providing support to an inaugural con by attending, and I hope that everything goes well!
@14 / cap-mjb Except we already know from “Zero Hour” last season that the Federation won’t get founded until 2161, and this episode is set in 2155. Even if it takes another year or so to set up the Coalition, it’s clear from “Demons” that the Coalition is a thing that’s happening imminently. So it’s not the Federation; it’s an organization that precedes the Federation. Think of how the League of Nations preceded the United Nations, or how the Articles of Confederation preceded the U.S. Constitution.
@krad Slight correction: Nathan Samuels is never actually referred to as “Prime Minister” in “Demons” or “Terra Prime,” only ever as “Minister.” Given his role at the Coalition ceremony, I initially inferred he was the United Earth Foreign Minister. It was the novel “The Good That Men Do” by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels that first established him as U.E. Prime Minister.
@13 quoted @12 and then added his own comments: @12/cap-mjb: “By the end of the episode, we don’t have any real idea as to why there’s a child of Tucker and T’Pol out there and I’m not sure the pay-off is worth it: It’s mainly a plot device to get Enterprise involved.”
The why is obvious enough — it’s the old racist tactic of playing up fears of miscegenation and the erosion of racial purity, capitalizing on the most famous human-Vulcan collaboration (T’Pol’s inclusion in NX-01’s crew) to attract more attention.
I forget if Terra Prime knew that the child would have the issues she did (avoiding spoilers for next week as much as possible), but if they did, they might also be demonstrating the supposed futility of any deep interactions with people from other worlds.
Yeah, T’Pol verifying she’s never been pregnant to Trip would’ve work better with some weirdness acknowledgment. “I’ve never been pregnant, including over the course of any time traveling incidents, that I am aware of.“
Terra Prime is an annoying slice of humanity. The xenophobes are obvious, but that speech points out the ones who don’t trust government too. “5000 unregistered but another study says 10,000” as if those numbers are actually reliable. And then saying that Starfleet is the “enforcer” of the policy, again no capacity to see how the government works. Starfleet has ships with weapons and is therefore automatically the enforcer, because that’s what they’d use Starfleet for.
Executing the child also demonstrates how these people assume everyone will agree with them and their fears, and are incapable of predicting that others would actually be appalled at their actions.
@14/cap-mjb: “If Terra Prime are meant to be scaremongering about aliens on Earth, why make it look as though hybrids will only happen if humans and other species get stuck in space together?”
Because that’s the best example available, because it gets them attention, and because they can just say it’s the first step in the slippery slope, the same as anti-immigrant rhetoric always goes. What, you expect any of this to make logical sense? If their audience thought critically, they’d never fall for it.
“so doesn’t it seem likely that it’s actually the same amount of time, and some time in the next six years someone will just decide that “Federation” sounds better than “Coalition”?”
That’s conceivable, but I’m not convinced it was the intent. I suspect that if the show had continued, we might have seen the Coalition established by the end of a fifth season, after a loose arc about Archer’s crew working to bring it about. After all, the show was unlikely to last all the way until 2161, so they needed something pre-Federation that would allow a sense that the cast had achieved a meaningful goal by the end of the series. That’s probably the entire reason they came up with the Coalition idea.
T’Pol maintains that she has never been pregnant (why she needs to insist that when a simple examination from Phlox would provide evidence of that is left as an exercise for the viewer).
This viewer’s exercise, krad, is to wonder why you’d insist on such an examination by Phlox, instead of just believing T’Pol when she says she’s never been pregnant. Especially since Trip takes her at her word, and especially again since everyone aboard the ship was presumably around her six months ago when she wasn’t giving birth to a baby.
Referring to Memory Alpha, in “Broken Bow” T’Pol appears to be 63 Earth years old (really), so she could have lived a lot before then. I think that almost nothing is established about how Vulcan reproduction works. They could regenerate inside like Doctor Who, but probably not.
Creating a Human-Vulcan baby for Earthist propaganda use does not make sense to me. As something to put Trip and T’Pol together, I suppose it works. Maybe that was a generic mad scientist’s biology experiment before Terra Prime were involved? Maybe the tabloids have been running alien baby hoax stories for months? I expected Memory Alpha to describe two or three story ideas packed into one, yet again. It says almost nothing about development of this story. Perhaps the facts are too embarrassing to reveal.
How about Star Trek Continues for the next rewatch? It meets the quality bar if Gene Roddenberry’s son can be believed (also me).
Amusingly I actually watched this episode last year and was mildly embarrassed when I remembered that the Christmas break meant ‘Demons’ wouldn’t be reviewed until THIS year.
It also bears admitting that, despite being only a casual SPARTACUS viewer, my instinctive reaction to seeing the excellent Mr Mensah was “Salve doctore!” (Such being the power of a deeply OTT sword-and-sandals series to hold one’s affections).
Concerning the actual episode in question, I’m surprised that nobody seems to have considered that T’Pol may be stating that she has never been pregnant (Quite redundantly) because there is a little Trip’Pol out there being held by a faction of murderous terrorists.
Vulcan or no Vulcan, that has to be a bit of a nasty shock (Especially since T’Pol seems to be picking up some sort of psychic broadcast from the child* – it’s possible that this has been tickling the back of her brain for a while and that realising exactly what the sensation was only redoubled the shock).
*Which, along with her unusual connection to Trip, suggests that T’Pol might have unusually sensitive psychic ‘antennae’ for a Vulcan: I wonder if this might be a function of the psychic damage she’s had to rebuild from leaving her more ‘open’ than a Vulcan with a lifetime worth of psychic defences fully-intact?
Also, credit where it’s due, that little scene with Colonel Green was an excellent use of a background villain to enrich our current malefactor: it gives a sense of a deeper, mostly-unseen history that helps explain where Terra Prime comes from while also showing how dangerous even a defeated villain can be, a century or more later (Not to mention making it implicit that Earth’s all-consuming distrust of eugenics isn’t purely grounded in genetic engineering).
Man, I’ll bet Lily’s attitude towards Colonel Green was not warm friendship.
I’m assuming that @krad might welcome a break from rewatches, but given the Gene Roddenberry connection and his own work with the characters, I would be remiss in not submitting ANDROMEDA for his consideration.
Not least because the mental image of his face falling like the Systems Commonwealth at the mere thought makes this a valuable enrichment opportunity for my Imp of Mischief – I need to feed it fresh victims so it’s too busy cackling to whisper baaad jokes* from the darkest corners of my imagination.
Those things ECHO.
*How bad? So bad it takes three ‘a’s to get across how bad they are – if you keep the little blighter giggling, he only has breath for ‘one-a’ bad jokes, which are slightly better, obviously.
@17/Sci: Yes, I’m aware that’s the received wisdom, it’s just that never occurred to me when watching it the first time and I was utterly bemused to discover that’s what the fan consciousness has collectively decided. I will be watching the second episode closely to see where this Coalition plotline is left: It is mentioned here that Samuels is hoping to get the charter drafted in six weeks, which I admit I’d forgotten, but I don’t find it all unreasonable that it would take six years to get this organisation up and running. Have you ever met a bureaucrat? Lots of parties involved with lots of details to iron out seems like a recipe for constant delays.
@20/CLB: “What, you expect any of this to make logical sense? If their audience thought critically, they’d never fall for it.”
Well, it does seem to me like they’ve gone to an awful lot of effort to achieve very little. I can’t remember quite how it’s all explained but pretty much the exact same effect could be achieved by creating a child with the DNA of any human and Vulcan. I’m struggling with why they felt the need to pick two people who in the main cast of a TV show, going out of their way to give Trip and T’Pol, and by extension the rest of Enterprise’s crew, a personal stake in stopping them. Do they even know the pair have an on-off relationship? Is there a gossip mag filling them in on the private lives of the NX-01?
“After all, the show was unlikely to last all the way until 2161, so they needed something pre-Federation that would allow a sense that the cast had achieved a meaningful goal by the end of the series. That’s probably the entire reason they came up with the Coalition idea.”
That’s certainly possible, but while it would be out of character, I don’t think it’s entirely impossible that they expected to have another three seasons to race through the six years to the forming of the Federation. (Fan lore has decided Voyager Season 7 covers about 18 months, although I’m not convinced that was the intention of anyone working on the show, and the post-series novels cover that period in about three or four books.) Alternately, they might just have planned to do a time skip to 2161 for the series finale…which is, in fact, exactly what they’ll do in two episodes’ time (framing sequence and potentially unrealiable narration aside), effectively making the idea of a precursor to the Federation redundant!
@23/ED: “(Not to mention making it implicit that Earth’s all-consuming distrust of eugenics isn’t purely grounded in genetic engineering)”
Except that the kind of “eugenics” Col. Green advocates is radically different from the kind that created the Augments. Green didn’t advocate using genetic engineering to improve on the existing human genome; he advocated euthanizing anyone who was mutated from the existing human genome and was therefore “impure.” It’s the diametric opposite belief, and the opposite practice, destroying variations from the existing genome rather than creating them. Green would have probably seen the Augments as abominations to be exterminated, because their genetics were altered from the “pure” human genome.
Note that the actual episodes (including “The Savage Curtain”) never used the word “eugenics” in connection to Green’s beliefs, so I was surprised when Keith chose that word in his recap. It’s within the range of the term’s real-life usage, but it’s misleading in a Trek context, because Green’s ideology is the complete opposite of Khan’s.
@25/cap: “pretty much the exact same effect could be achieved by creating a child with the DNA of any human and Vulcan.”
Yeah, but Trip and T’Pol are part of the starship crew that saved the Earth the year before, so they’re far more famous than any other human-Vulcan pairing would be. If their goal is to bring attention to their cause, it should be obvious why they’d target famous people over obscure ones. Also, Archer and his crew are symbols of humanity’s interaction and cooperation with aliens, so they’re the natural target for Terra Prime to want to discredit.
And it probably wouldn’t be that hard to track the movements of people as famous as NX-01’s crew and notice, for instance, that Trip Tucker went to Vulcan with T’Pol several months before. A man going to a woman’s home to meet her family can easily be interpreted as evidence of a romantic relationship. They didn’t have to know whether that relationship really existed; they just had to recognize that it would make it easy to insinuate such a relationship and sell their fraud.
“Fan lore has decided Voyager Season 7 covers about 18 months”
“Has decided” is an overstatement at minimum. I’m not even aware of any such assertion, though I would guess it’s a conjectural attempt to reconcile the dating of “First Contact Day” late in the season with the usual chronological assumption that seasons run from January to December. But if that model exists, it’s hardly universally accepted “fan lore,” so it’s misleading to speak as though it is.
“effectively making the idea of a precursor to the Federation redundant!”
The novel version is that the Coalition comes into existence shortly after “Terra Prime,” but falls apart in the buildup to the Romulan War because the other members are unwilling to go to war with the Romulans. This was, of course, the authors’ attempt to justify why “Balance of Terror” called it the Earth-Romulan War — Earth had to wage it alone.
@26/CLB: ““Has decided” is an overstatement at minimum. I’m not even aware of any such assertion”
Well, put it this way: Memory Alpha lists everything from Human Error onwards as occurring in 2378, the year after the first part of the season.
Several comments have been made that the Coalition couldn’t have been founded within the time frame of Demons/Terra Prime; that it would have taken some time for the Coalition to come into being. That is likely true. However, it is possible that historians have specified this point as the founding even if “the details” took time to be settled.
We’re used to believing that organizations have definite beginning points. We say the US came into being on July 4th, 1776. That’s what Americans celebrate. But in reality, there wasn’t a nation formed then. Not everyone even signed on that date. The colonies had a war to fight. Details of a country were formed later; and then reformed when the first attempt proved unworkable.
@28/costumer: “However, it is possible that historians have specified this point as the founding even if “the details” took time to be settled.”
I’m talking about the post-finale novels that pick up the story literally the next day after “Terra Prime” ends. Rechecking, I see that they do assert that it should take six weeks after that to hash out the final details of the charter, as stated in “Demons,” but the Coalition is talked about as something that effectively exists already, from the perspective of characters immediately after “Terra Prime,” rather than the perspective of later historians.
@6/ChristopherLBennett – I didn’t mean to say that the episode was prophetic; merely that it does a much better job of reflecting the actual characteristics of real-life authoritarianism than does, say, T’Kuvma’s “Remain Klingon” movement or the synth ban on Picard.
Also worth noting, soon afterwards, Peter Weller became a villain the following season on 24. Manny Coto had taken a writer/producer (and eventual showrunner) job on that franchise following Trek’s cancellation, and it was likely him who recommended Weller for the role of Jack Bauer’s mentor turned antagonist. He excels at this type of role, which is why I wasn’t surprised to see him resurface on Trek nearly a decade later (and I’d say Admiral Marcus is a little too reminiscent of Paxton, almost like a second draft of the character – a ‘What If’ scenario where the radical terrorist becomes part of the government).
This two parter was a great culmination of the Xindi arc’s repercussions and the inevitable Earth-based xenophobia movement. It’s the unfortunate reality of what we see in real life every time there’s a shred of progress happening within mankind. Someone always goes full Newtonian, pushing back against a good thing because they can’t accept that people grow, evolve and move on. It reminds me a little of The Undiscovered Country, especially Kirk’s admission that he’d gotten used to hating Klingons, making it that much harder to let go of the hatred.
I’m a little torn as to whether having Miracle Baby as the big plot device was the right choice, but given how good Blalock had become playing this emotionally compromised version of T’Pol since the Xindi arc, I guess it makes sense on a character level.
My one complaint with the episode is the use of Gannet. It’s the old tired trope where every girl who flirts and oozes the tiniest bit of sexuality has to be a villain or a spy. For once, I wish we could get a female character who can be openly sexual and not be portrayed in a negative light because of that trait. It’s a tired trope and it should be retired (and I’m not surprised – this was Manny Coto’s teleplay and Rick Berman’s show, after all). But I do like it that she asks for legal defense at the end. She certainly has the right to do so.
Hoshi had a very good time on shore leave in one story. I have to look up the name of the NX-02 captain that Archer hooks up with. Or what happened with that princess that got trapped in a tiny escape pod with Starfleet’s finest. She was annoyed and she was annoying… also, Trip got pregnant in a very early episode. Now, after the first two sexes, representation is patchy.
Did anyone else take a look at the ‘New Star Trek film on the Horizon’ article and it’s line ‘decades earlier’, then start wondering if members of the NX-01 crew and/or the ENTERPRISE era will finally be getting their shot at the Big Screen? (Or am I just letting almost four full seasons of a re-watch do my thinking for me?).
@32/ED: The articles seem to say that it’s decades earlier in the Kelvin Timeline, which is odd, since the Kelvin Timeline was literally created at the opening moment of the 2009 film, which was 25 years before the main body of the film. So it can’t be more than 2.5 decades before, which would technically be during the ’09 film, unless it’s set in the Prime Timeline.
Anyway, so many proposals for a fourth Bad Robot film have come and gone over the years that I wouldn’t hold my breath.
@33/ I don’t know if it’s canon, but Simon Pegg has said he assumes changing an event sends ripples through time into the past as well as the future, changing both. A la the Flash storyline, “Flashpoint,” in DC Comics.
@33 – Simon Pegg has stated that when the timeline changed, it changed in both directions. The past of the Kelvin universe is different
““Spock’s incursion from the Prime Universe created a multidimensional reality shift. The rift in space/time created an entirely new reality in all directions, top to bottom, from the Big Bang to the end of everything.
Simon Pegg’s Website
@35/kkozoriz – That doesn’t even begin to make sense, but I’ve always figured that the Kelvinverse was just a separate, unrelated universe to begin with, so *shrugs*
It makes as much as any other instance of time travel in Star Trek
@34/terracinque: “I don’t know if it’s canon, but Simon Pegg has said he assumes changing an event sends ripples through time into the past as well as the future, changing both.”
That wasn’t Pegg’s idea, even though he was the first to publicize it. He was referencing the upcoming revised edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia, which he’d gotten an advance look at. In the new edition, Michael Okuda suggested that the creation of the Kelvin timeline might have caused some slight discrepancies in the past as well as the future. This was presumably an attempt to handwave the elements in the first two Kelvin movies that were difficult to reconcile with Prime canon, like the much more built-up San Francisco. It didn’t mean everything was different, just that there could be an explanation for the few small details that didn’t seem to fit.
It’s ironic that everyone mistakenly attributes this to Simon Pegg, because Star Trek Beyond, which Pegg co-wrote, is the one Kelvin film that’s easiest to reconcile with the known past of the Prime timeline. The only major discrepancy is the reference to Captain Edison fighting the Xindi, but NX-01 was sufficiently out of touch with Earth during most of season 3 that we can’t rule out the possibility of other Starfleet ships having clashes with Xindi ships.
Or maybe Edison was one of the MACOs assigned to Enterprise in the third season. I mean, I know that Scotty also says that the Franklin was the first ship to reach Warp 4, but its registry already suggests that it came after Enterprise, so maybe he misspoke and it was actually the first human ship to reach Warp 6 or the like,
@40/jaimebabb: The filmmakers’ intent was that the Franklin was a MACO ship, explaining why it wasn’t part of the Starfleet lineage seen in ENT — I think of it as a military knockoff of the civilian program, like how the US Air Force developed its own classified uncrewed space plane as a knockoff of Space Shuttle technology. The Franklin predated NX-01, and did indeed reach Warp 4 first, but the idea was that it was recommissioned under a new registry number when the MACOs were dissolved and folded into Starfleet in 2161.
I thought for sure you’d flag Tom Bergeron’s Coridanite ambassador as your Robert Knepper moment. Can’t mask that voice, man. I totally forgot he was an alien trader way back in season one.