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Star Trek: Enterprise Rewatch: “Demons”

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Star Trek: Enterprise Rewatch: “Demons”

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Star Trek: Enterprise Rewatch: “Demons”

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Published on January 8, 2024

Image: CBS
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Image: CBS

“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.

T'Pol holds a vial containing several hairs in a screenshot from Star Trek: Enterprise "Demons"
Image: CBS

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.

Screenshot from Star Trek: Enterprise "Demons"
Image: CBS

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…

A laser fires at the moon in a screenshot from Star Trek: Enterprise "Demons"
Image: CBS

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…

A baby with vulcan ears in a screenshot from Star Trek: Enterprise "Demons"
Image: CBS

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.

T'Pol and Tucker go undercover in a screenshot from Star Trek: Enterprise "Demons"
Image: CBS

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.

 

About the Author

Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Keith R.A. DeCandido has been writing about popular culture for this site since 2011, primarily but not exclusively writing about Star Trek and screen adaptations of superhero comics. He is also the author of more than 60 novels, more than 100 short stories, and more than 70 comic books, both in a variety of licensed universes from Alien to Zorro, as well as in worlds of his own creation, most notably the new Supernatural Crimes Unit series debuting in the fall of 2025. Read his blog, or follow him all over the Internet: Facebook, The Site Formerly Known As Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, YouTube, Patreon, and TikTok.
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wiredog
1 year ago

KRAD,  you didn’t sprain anything rolling your eyes that hard, did you?

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o.m.
1 year ago

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.

Avatar
1 year ago

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.

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Shaun B.
1 year ago

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!

twels
1 year ago

@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. 

ChristopherLBennett
1 year ago

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.

Avatar
1 year ago

Despite its flaws, this was a pretty strong entry in the series.

ChristopherLBennett
1 year ago

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.