“Horizon”
Written by André Bormanis
Directed by James A. Contner
Season 2, Episode 20
Production episode 046
Original air date: April 16, 2003
Date: January 10, 2153
Captain’s star log. Mayweather is summoned to the bridge, as Enterprise has been asked to reverse course in order to document a planet that is having multiple volcanic eruptions. This backtracking will put them fairly close to the Horizon. Since he hasn’t visited home in four years, Mayweather asks permission for leave to visit home, which Archer happily grants.
Since the survey mission is pretty much on automatic, Tucker decides that, for the duration of the mission, every night is Movie Night. They’re going to do a marathon of James Whale’s Frankenstein and its sequels—Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, and maybe even Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. T’Pol is less than enthused by the notion, but agrees to attend at least the first night against her better judgment, partly out of a sense of crew camaraderie, mainly because Tucker pouts, Archer offers her a nice dinner ahead of the movie (and a promise to never ask her again if she doesn’t like it), and Phlox is unable to provide a legitimate medical reason for her not to attend.
When they get within comm range of the Horizon, Mayweather is devastated to discover that his father, the captain of the freighter, has died. The last he heard was that he was ill, but it wasn’t that serious—the later death notice from his mother that had been sent six weeks earlier never made it to Mayweather.
Armed with some of Tucker’s photos that he’d taken, and also a request from Tucker to take a gander at Horizon’s engine when they come back to pick him up, Mayweather goes across and meets up with his mother Rianna. They hug and commiserate and catch up. Mayweather is touched to see that he’s sleeping in his former cabin, which Rianna has redecorated with all his old stuff, including the star chart he created labelling all the stars he wanted to visit.
Mayweather is reunited with his brother Paul, now the freighter’s captain. Their brotherly banter is tinged with some awkwardness, partly at least because of their father’s recent death. Mayweather is also happy to see that the cargo holds are more full than ever, which means business is good.
Later, Mayweather does some upgrades on the bridge, which pisses Paul off, both because Mayweather didn’t consult with his brother on those changes and because what happens if these upgrades fail, who’s going to fix them with Mayweather back on Enterprise?
One of Mayweather’s childhood friends, Nora, visits him in their cabin, and confides in him that things are not all skittles and beer on Horizon. Paul has been struggling with the role of captain.
Their talk is interrupted by Horizon being fired upon by a couple of small ships that take some potshots and then leave, after depositing a booby-trapped beacon onto the hull. The ships’ configuration and MO is the same as ones that attacked the Constellation a few weeks earlier. Paul’s plan is to give them what they want rather than try to fight back. Mayweather points out that pirates like this will just be encouraged to keep doing it, and they should fight back—he has a way to boost the power of their weapons with a trick he learned from Reed. But Paul refuses, not wanting to endanger the ship.
On Enterprise, T’Pol does some research and discovers that Frankenstein is based on a work of literature. Her alternative suggestion to Tucker of a dramatic reading of the novel falls on deaf ears. However, when she attends the movie, she starts getting into it, going so far as to shush Phlox when he starts babbling. When she discusses the movie with Archer and Tucker in the captain’s mess the next day, T’Pol surprises the pair of them by referring to the monster as the protagonist and sees how the villagers treated the monster as a good metaphor for how Vulcans were treated by humans when they arrived on Earth.
On Horizon, Mayweather talks with Rianna, who tells him about what a pig’s ear his father made of being captain when he first ascended to the role. But he settled down eventually, and so will Paul.
Buy the Book
Wild Massive
The pirates come back, but Paul’s plan to just hand over the cargo doesn’t quite work because the pirate captain demands that they abandon ship. Paul will not let them have his ship, so he asks Mayweather to enact his plan. They detach the cargo modules, which gives them more maneuverability, and then Mayweather uses the souped-up weapons to mess up the pirates’ engines.
Enterprise and Horizon rendezvous, with the Mayweather boys having reached a rapprochement. Mayweather also offers to have Reed look at the beacon to try to get it off.
When he comes back on board Enterprise, Archer greets him and mentions the damage to the cargo modules. Mayweather fobs it off as meteorite damage. How he will reconcile this lie with his request to Reed to pry off the booby-trapped beacon is left as an exercise for the viewer.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? If you tie your plasma turrets into the impulse engines, they’ll be super-awesome.
The gazelle speech. Archer continues the efforts he started in “The Catwalk” to get T’Pol to be more friendly with the crew with the communal experience of Movie Night. He offers dinner beforehand as an incentive, which strikes me as an odd offer, since she dines with the captain, like, all the time anyhow…
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol spends most of the episode resisting watching Frankenstein, but then finds it extremely compelling when she finally does, to the point that she plans to recommend that Soval watch it.
Florida Man. Florida Man Bullies First Mate Into Attending Movie Night, Later Regrets It Because He’s Narrow-Minded.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox has sufficient medical ethics that he won’t make up an illness to help T’Pol get out of Movie Night. He also has insufficient human social skills to realize that you shouldn’t talk during the movie…
More on this later… Mayweather and Reed have a conversation in the mess hall that “predicts” the status quo on TNG, with Mayweather saying that families should be allowed to serve on starships and Reed countering that if so, he’d need a therapist on board to help deal with that much exposure to his parents.
I’ve got faith…
“This Doctor Frankenstein, his technique is not dissimilar to a practice on B’Saari II. They successfully used an isolytic current to reanimate the bodies of the recently deceased.”
“Really?”
“Of course, the revived individuals weren’t capable of more than basic cellular metabolism. However, the B’Saari have developed a procedure that shows promise in repairing the synaptic—”
“We can stop the film if it’s disturbing your conversation.”
–Phlox babbling at Tucker in the middle of the movie (and inadvertently providing a lovely plot notion for a zombie story) before being interrupted by T’Pol shushing him.
Welcome aboard. Joan Pringle and Corey Mendell Parker play Mayweather mère et frère, respectively, while Ken Feinberg plays the pirate captain.
Nicole Forester plays Nora. Forester previously appeared on DS9 as the image of a dabo girl in “Distant Voices” (her first TV role, that) and will go on to play Cassie Winslow in Guiding Light, which would earn her a Daytime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2008.
Trivial matters: The Horizon shares a name with the ship that visited Sigma Iotia II and gave them a gift of a book called Chicago Mobs of the Twenties, which they then patterned their entire society after, as established in the original series’ “A Piece of the Action.” The set design of this episode hints that it was this same Earth Cargo Services vessel that made that visit, as there’s a book that says Chicago Gangs on the spine on the bookshelf in Mayweather’s cabin. The novel Kobayashi Maru by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin makes this connection explicit.
Rianna refers to the events of “The Catwalk” and “Minefield” when querying her son on the subject of the dangerousness of Enterprise’s mission. Tucker also references “The Catwalk,” as that was the first time T’Pol participated in the groupwatches on board Enterprise, and also, apparently, the last time she did before this episode.
This is our first time seeing the low-gravity “sweet spot” since “Broken Bow.”
Paul references the difficulties ECS vessels have hiring people in the wake of the Warp 5 Project that was also a plot point in “Fortunate Son.”
Deneva was established as a human colony in the original series’ “Operation—Annihilate!”
Phlox mentions some B’Saari medical techniques during the movie. The B’Saari were established in “Future Tense” as the first alien species Denobulans ever encountered.
Tucker’s proclivity for photographing their missions was first seen in “Strange New World.”
According to Tucker, the J-class engines were put together by Zefram Cochrane his own self, and he’s heard a rumor that he personally autographed the housings. Cochrane was established as the inventor of warp drive in the original series’ “Metamorphosis,” that invention being seen in First Contact.
All of Tucker’s proposed movies are actual movies that adapt or spin off of Mary Shelley’s famous novel. Frankenstein was released in 1931, directed by James Whale and starring Colin Clive and Boris Karloff. Bride of Frankenstein was released in 1935, also directed by Whale, with Clive and Karloff returning, joined by Elsa Lanchester as both the author in a framing sequence and the titular bride. Son of Frankenstein came out in 1938, directed by Rowland V. Lee, starring Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein came out in 1948, starring the famous comedy duo of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, along with Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., Glenn Strange, and an uncredited Vincent Price.
It’s been a long road… “You’re not part of this crew anymore.” I mostly liked this somewhat flawed episode, but three aspects of it angered me a great deal, so let me rant about each of them and get them all out of my system…
Rant the First: Okay, here’s a little bit of Scriptwriting 101: in a show with the format of Enterprise (and all the prior Trek shows), there’s a bit before the opening credits. While the stuff after the credits is structured the same way theatrical productions are, as acts (Act 1, Act 2, etc.), that prior bit is specifically in teleplay writing referred to as the teaser.
A teaser is defined by Dictionary.com as “a person or thing that teases,” as “presented to generate interest.”
You know what totally doesn’t generate interest or tease much of anything? A guy sitting in low-G reading a book and being summoned to the bridge for a course change.
I’ve rung this bell a lot in this rewatch, but I’ve also been rewatching Enterprise for a year now, and the thing that has really stood out more than anything over the past twelve months is the spectacular inability of most episodes to actually tease in the teaser. Combined with the sheer awfulness of the theme music that follows these unteasing teasers, it makes it incredibly difficult and challenging to scrape up any enthusiasm for the subsequent episode.
Rant the Second: In 1818, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was published, with a revised edition published in 1831. It has remained, not only in print, but incredibly popular and iconic for all of the two centuries since then. It was a pioneering work in both the science fiction and horror fields, which is pretty impressive for a book that Shelley wrote when she wasn’t yet twenty years old. It inspired stage plays, a radio drama, and many movies, including the one in 1931 that has become even more iconic (and which the Enterprise crew watched in this episode). It is one of the most famous and important works of literature in the English language.
So for Tucker to describe the author of the book to T’Pol as “Mary Shelley, the wife of a famous poet” is fucking ridiculous. It’s like referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as “the wife of a famous lawyer,” or Olympic gold medalist Corey Cogdell as “the wife of a Chicago Bears lineman” (which the Chicago Tribune did in 2016 and got justifiably reamed for it), or actor Cate Blanchett as “the wife of a famous playwright.” Hell, it’s like referring to Joe Biden as “the husband of a famous educator,” which no one would ever do.
On top of that, T’Pol’s notion that the monster is the protagonist of the story not only isn’t the radical notion that Archer and Tucker seem to think it is, but it pretty much how the novel is often interpreted, and is also not even a little bit of an unreasonable reading of the text of the book or the movie. That particular bit wouldn’t have bothered me so much except Archer and Tucker’s reaction is out-and-out confusion and revulsion. Instead of portraying our two main male protagonists as open to new ideas and reconsidering the movie, we show them instead as hidebound assholes who can’t handle the new concept, which is the exact opposite of what humans are supposed to be like in the twenty-second century (recall Archer’s rant on the subject of humanity’s enlightenment to Soval in “Cease Fire”). T’Pol seeing the villagers as analogues to humans responding to the Vulcans’ arrival should be food for self-reflection on Archer and Tucker’s part, not cause for them to look at her like she’s crazy and not let her watch movies anymore.
On top of that, Tucker’s nauseated reaction to T’Pol’s alternate suggestion of a dramatic reading of Shelley’s novel instead of watching the James Whale film made me nauseated. Tucker’s disgusted dismissal of the notion of a dramatic reading of fiction is the type of anti-intellectual snottiness that I encountered from the people in high school who used to torment me and make fun of me for a) being smart and b) watching things like Star Trek.
Rant the Third: Why the hell is it the captain’s son who takes over the Horizon and not the captain’s wife? Seriously, Paul obviously doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, and Rianna is obviously smarter, more experienced, and more qualified. Yes, she’s the chief engineer, and maybe that means she isn’t right for command—except her late husband also was the chief engineer before he was made captain, so that excuse doesn’t fly.
There is, bluntly, no reason presented in the episode why Rianna shouldn’t be in charge instead of her dumbshit son, and the only reason she isn’t is because of good old-fashioned sexism. So nice to see that nothing has changed since Janice Lester’s idiotic comment in 1969…
Okay, rants over with, let’s get to the parts of the episode that didn’t anger me.
One of the most fascinating parts of the setup of Enterprise was the “boomer” subculture that Mayweather was said to be a part of. We’ve gotten glimpses of the community of freighters that were a big part of early interstellar travel, mostly in “Fortunate Son,” and it’s fun to see it again here. I particularly like how it instantly becomes clear that this is not a military vessel. While there’s still a hierarchy, this is civilians doing a job rather than military personnel in a chain of command. The casual banter, the multitasking, the focus on doing the job right and making a profit over serving an ideal. André Bormanis’ script does a good job of showing the more casual, more lived-in life on Horizon.
This almost makes up for a bog-standard plotline that follows the same tired beats as every other person-is-reunited-with-family-and-struggles-to-reconnect-with-them storyline that every TV show has done at some point or other. Trek has dipped into this well many times (the original series’ “Journey to Babel,” TNG’s “The Icarus Factor” and “Family,” DS9’s “Prodigal Daughter,” etc.). That it works at all is entirely on the backs of good acting by the guest stars. Corey Mendell Parker does a particularly good job with the initial scene between him and Anthony Montgomery’s Mayweather, with a conversation that modulated entertainingly between awkward and affectionate.
And Joan Pringle is superlative as Rianna, doing the usual Mom thing of cutting through the bullshit. Why wasn’t she made captain again?
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s favorite novel is Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. He recently wrote a short story that dealt with how the author was perceived both in her lifetime and afterward, called “What You Can Become Tomorrow” in Three Time Travelers Walk Into….
