“Extinction”
Written by André Bormanis
Directed by LeVar Burton
Season 3, Episode 3
Production episode 055
Original air date: September 24, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. We open on a planet where one set of aliens (each wearing some manner of EVA/Hazmat suit) tracks down another set of aliens and burns them to death with flamethrowers.
Tucker shows up for his latest Vulcan neuropressure session—which as presented is indistinguishable from a massage. He also gives T’Pol a couple of freshly picked peaches that he got on Earth and had Chef keep in stasis, by way of thanks. She bites into it and agrees that it doesn’t suck.
The sexy massage neuropressure session is interrupted by Archer having doped out a bunch of the Xindi database they scavenged, including figuring out what the last planet they visited is.
Enterprise heads there and Archer takes a shuttlepod down with T’Pol, Sato, and Reed. Within minutes of their arrival, the three humans start to mutate, their hair growing, their bone structure changing, and their personalities completely altering. Oh, and now they speak a different language and move more like primates.
T’Pol is unaffected. She calls for the other shuttle to come down with a security detail, just in time to have the crap kicked out of her by all three. They take her prisoner, tying her to a couple of logs and bringing her on a journey while speaking in an alien language. When T’Pol wakes up, she eventually convinces them to let her use Sato’s universal translator, and they are able to communicate, though they all now speak with funny accents. They say they’re looking for Urquat, which is apparently the lost city of their people. They also forage for food and fight over it.
On Enterprise, Phlox can only find one Vulcan biosign and three alien ones. There’s no sign of the rest of the landing party. They’re also on the move. Tucker takes a shuttlepod down with two MACOs. A scuffle ensues, during which Reed is stunned, but Archer and Sato run away. Tucker wants him and the MACOs to give chase, but T’Pol orders him to take Reed back to Enterprise for examination while she stays with the other two, whose trust she’s starting to finally earn.
An alien ship shows up and the captain, Tret, announces that they’re under quarantine, as there’s someone with a deadly virus on their ship—that’s Reed in the decon chamber. Tret insists that Reed be exterminated, as there’s no cure—his own people have searched for sixty years for a cure to no avail. Tucker refuses to allow a boarding party, but does permit Tret to come alone and observe that there’s not an outbreak on Enterprise, that Reed’s in isolation.
Tret comes on board and sees Reed. He explains that the virus is the last remnant of the now-extinct Loque’eque. They created the virus when they could no longer biologically procreate as a way of keeping their species alive. The virus turns other species into a Loque’eque, er, somehow and gives them the urge to go home.
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Tret’s people inform him that there are three more infected on the planet. Tucker explains that it’s their landing party plus a Vulcan who’s immune. Phlox thinks he can create an anti-virus, but he needs an active sample of T’Pol’s DNA for some reason. With T’Pol herself still on the planet, Tucker remembers the peaches, which are full of T’Pol’s saliva.
Archer dreams about Urquat, a beautiful underground city, but is awakened when he sees his own human form. Eventually they find the city, but unlike the version in the dream, it’s in ruins and abandoned.
Tret sends a party to the surface to wipe out the outbreak, but everyone fights back. One of the aliens’ suit cracks and he starts to get the virus. His companions unhesitatingly whip out their flamethrowers and crispy-fry him.
T’Pol, Archer, and Sato are surrounded by the aliens when Tucker and two MACOs transport down and stun the aliens. (Tucker allows as how this was too dire an emergency for him to abide by his prior oath to never use the transporter ever again.) T’Pol convinces Archer and Sato to come aboard the shuttlepod and return to Enterprise, now that they’re at cross-purposes, having fulfilled their function only to find Urquat abandoned and derelict.
The nanosecond the pod docks, Mayweather legs it, with Tret giving chase. They keep ahead long enough for Phlox to hit Archer with the anti-virus, which works. Tret is stunned, but breaks off his pursuit and attack. Archer shares the anti-virus with Tret, who will bring it to his people as a more humane alternative to torching people.
Phlox wants to destroy the virus, but Archer orders him not to. This is the last piece of an entire civilization that is otherwise extinct—or will be, once Tret and his people wipe out the virus. And so Phlox puts it in stasis, the last vestige of the Loque’eque.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? T’Pol is immune to the Loque’eque virus because the script says so of K-cells, whatever those are.
The gazelle speech. Normally, Mayweather would pilot the shuttlepod down, but because Something Bad Must Happen To The Away Team, Archer flies the shuttle himself and then gets to spend the entire episode as a bizarre alien.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol does her usual superb job in handling a crisis, calmly and meticulously working to gain the Loque’eques’ trust.
Florida Man. Florida Man Suffers From Neuropressurus Interruptus.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox apparently needs “active” DNA to synthesize the anti-virus. It’s not clear what makes DNA “active” in this context, but apparently a peach T’Pol slobbered on suffices, but why that works when it’s been hours, possibly days, since she bit into it while whatever DNA samples Phlox must have around doesn’t is left as an exercise for the viewer.
Better get MACO. Chang and Palmer accompany Tucker to the surface and proceed to not do anything that Reed’s security detail couldn’t do. Chang doesn’t even have any dialogue, which is pretty much the biggest waste of Daniel Dae Kim ever…
I’ve got faith…
“Your ship is in restricted space.”
“Sorry—it wasn’t very well marked.”
–Tret playing bad cop and Tucker playing ignorant tourist.
Welcome aboard. Daniel Dae Kim is back as Chang from “The Xindi”; he’ll be back again in “Hatchery.” Troy Mittleider makes his only appearance as Palmer.
And then we have our Robert Knepper moment, as Canadian actor Roger Cross—probably best known as Agent Curtis Manning, one of the few people on 24 who were allowed to be competent beyond Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer—playing Tret.
Trivial matters: This episode saw a title change to the show, as it went from being called Enterprise to being dubbed Star Trek: Enterprise, as the powers-that-be at Paramount Pictures belatedly remembered how branding and marketing works. This renaming would be retroactively applied to the entire series going forward, as reruns and home video/streaming releases of the show (and rewatches of it on web sites, ahem) have had the title be Star Trek: Enterprise starting from “Broken Bow.”
Despite Archer’s desire to preserve the Loque’eque, they’ll never be mentioned again onscreen, though the virus is used in the Romulan War novel To Brave the Storm by Michael A. Martin.
This episode was dedicated to the memory of the show’s first assistant director Jerry Fleck, who died in his sleep at the age of fifty-five shortly after working on this episode.
It’s been a long road… “You’re saying these alien biosigns could be our people?” The really hilarious part is that this episode was written by the guy who got his start as the science advisor…
One of the best places to read reviews of space opera shows is “Jammer’s Reviews,” written by Jamahl “Jammer” Epsicokhan. Jammer has reviewed every Star Trek series and movie, and also covered Star Wars, Andromeda, The Orville, and Battlestar Galactica. One of the things he refers to is Fun With DNA™, discussing the (many) times in Trek productions when DNA becomes rewritable, like a CD or a flash drive or a disk drive. It’s a bit of nonsense science that TNG and Voyager particularly liked to indulge in (e.g., TNG’s “Identity Crisis” and “Genesis,” Voyager’s “Threshold” and “Demon”), and this may be the worst example of it, because there’s no buildup to it, no slow burn, no trying to figure out what happens as our heroes slowly start to change.
Nope, it happens right away before Act 1 is done, so we’re “treated” to virtually an entire episode of Scott Bakula, Dominic Keating, and Linda Park hopping around like goons while making nonsense noises and wearing facial prosthetics.
The plot dolefully checks all the boxes without making any attempt to make what happens in any way interesting, whether it’s the transformed crew (whose antics wear thin pretty quickly) or the expected conflict between Tret and the Enterprise crew. Roger Cross, at least, presents a scary adversary, as his deep scratchy voice is always good for intimidation purposes, but overall this is a sequence of events we’ve seen a gajillion times before and André Bormanis’ script makes no effort to give us anything specific to hang onto to make this interesting. Just to cite the four previous examples of Fun With DNA™ mentioned above, “Identity Crisis” gave us La Forge’s friendship with Leijten, “Genesis” went full-out balls-to-the-wall horror-movie, “Threshold” had the whole breaking-the-warp-ten-barrier stuff happening, and “Demon”—well, that had some decent Kim-Paris banter, at least, though it was pretty leaden. And hey, look, Bormanis co-wrote that one, too!
(The existence of those previous episodes makes Phlox talking about how the laws of biochemistry are so weird here in the Delphic Expanse particularly absurd—I mean, cah-mon, we’ve seen this crap all over the entire galaxy on these shows…)
I was going to give this a 1, but for the one interesting thing in this sodden episode: the notion of the virus being the method by which the Loque’eque try to keep themselves alive as a species. But it only raises it to a 2 because that notion should have made for a good episode, as opposed to whatever this is. There was a chance to do a fun little horror-movie version of TNG’s “The Inner Light.” Instead, we got this, alas.
I will give them one other bit of credit for the ending. Given the whole macho we’re-gonna-git-them-aliens-no-matter-what attitude the show has taken on since “The Expanse,” I fully expected Archer to tell Phlox to save the virus to use later as a weapon against the Xindi. Instead, his response was a very refreshingly Trekkish one: this may be the only way to save the Loque’eque species. Fitting that they remembered that in the episode where the studio forced them to put Star Trek back in the title of the show…
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s latest Star Trek work includes co-authoring the Klingon-focused Star Trek Adventures gaming module Incident at Kraav III (with Fred Love) and writing the DS9 short story “You Can’t Buy Fate,” which will be appearing in issue #7 of Star Trek Explorer this spring.
