“Oasis”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga & Stephen Beck
Directed by Jim Charleston
Season 1, Episode 20
Production episode 020
Original air date: April 3, 2002
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. A trader named D’Marr is having dinner with Archer, T’Pol, and Tucker, having traded with them for some stuff. They also need some engineering equipment, and D’Marr doesn’t have that, but turns them on to a ship with no life forms that crashed on a planet. D’Marr himself didn’t salvage the ship because it’s haunted.
Archer and his crew ain’t afraid’a no ghosts, so they head to the planet. They read no life-forms, and take a shuttle down, including Archer, T’Pol, Tucker, and a very apprehensive Mayweather. (Archer teases him about this becoming another of his ghost stories.)
As they explore the ship, T’Pol and Tucker see someone moving about, despite still not picking up any life signs. Eventually, they track the person down to a hold where there are dozens of people waiting for them, armed. There’s also a ton of vegetation, none of which registered on sensors—turns out there’s a dampening field.
The people are from Kantare. The captain, Kuulan, and the chief engineer, Ezral, explain that they were attacked and crash-landed three years earlier. The dampening field is to stay hidden from their attackers. Tucker offers to repair the ship; the Kantares are reluctant at first, but eventually agree.
Tucker is aided in repairs by Ezral’s daughter, Liana. They enjoy each other’s company, which leads to T’Pol giving Tucker shit about the last time he was on an alien ship and got close to a female member of the ship’s crew…
When Tucker says he needs some stuff from Enterprise, Liana asks to go back with him to check out the ship. Her mother objects, as does Ezral, but she goes anyhow. Tucker shows her around, introducing her to ice cream, among other things.
While Tucker is giving her the grand tour, Reed reports some inconsistencies. There’s no evidence of weapons damage on the Kantare ship, and the stuff they’re growing in their airponics bay isn’t enough to sustain the number of people they met. Sato decrypts and translates the data module they salvaged before meeting up with the Kantares, and that reveals that the ship wasn’t attacked, they had engine failure and crashed.
The kicker: it was twenty-two years ago, not three.
The ship’s escape pods were ejected, and one is still in orbit. They pull it on board to reveal the desiccated corpse of Shilat—who is one of the people they met on the ship.
T’Pol, while working on the computer, discovers the truth as well, but is imprisoned at gunpoint before she can contact Enterprise.
Tucker confronts Liana, but she refuses to confirm or deny anything, insisting that she be returned to the planet. When the shuttlepod lands, Archer learns that T’Pol is a prisoner, and the Kantares insist that Tucker finish the repairs and Archer return to Enterprise. They agree, but Archer assembles a rescue team to return to the ship. Firefights break out, but to the Enterprise crew’s shock, the phase pistol beams pass harmlessly right through the Kantares.
Liana finally tells Tucker the truth: Ezral and Liana were the only survivors of the crash, and Liana was just a little kid. The rest of the people on board are holographic re-creations of the dead crew. Armed with this knowledge, Tucker is able to disable the holograms, leaving only the Enterprise crew, Ezral, and Liana on board.
Ezral comes clean. The ship encountered an ion storm. Ezral left his post to save Liana’s life, and that led to the catastrophic damage that killed the crew. Eventually, he figured out a way to bring the crew back, after a fashion, but he’s hiding on the planet, not because of fear as he originally said, but out of guilt.
Tucker and Archer convince Ezral to let Tucker truly repair the ship and allow them to go home, finally. Ezral says he really just needs components from Enterprise, and his holographic crew can do the rest. They get on that, and Tucker and Liana kiss goodbye.
Buy the Book
The City Inside
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Tucker recognizes some of the technology on the Kantares ship as being similar to that of the Xyrillians, the first hint that there are holograms on board, since those aliens from “Unexpected” had the same holographic technology…
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol rather nastily brings up the events of “Unexpected” to Tucker, who exasperatedly asks if she’s going to hammer on that for the rest of their lives.
Florida Man. Florida Man Falls For Another Alien Woman But Doesn’t Get Pregnant This Time.
Good boy, Porthos! When Liana asks if everyone on the Enterprise is human, Tucker mentions the three non-humans: T’Pol, Phlox, and Porthos. It takes him a bit to properly explain to her what a dog is, however…
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… According to T’Pol, Vulcans don’t tell ghost stories. Tucker finds this massively disappointing.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Tucker and Liana hit it off almost instantly and smooch at the end of the episode.
More on this later: Tucker snidely points out that he or Liana might get hurt, and then what? “Program a holographic doctor?” Of course, Starfleet will eventually have holographic doctors, as introduced with Voyager’s EMH in “Caretaker,” and also seen in DS9’s “Doctor Bashir, I Presume?” and the movie First Contact, and also on Picard.
I’ve got faith…
“I’ve made all the friends I need.”
–Ezral, whose words are more literal than Tucker realizes when he says it to him.
Welcome aboard. The big guest is the late great Rene Auberjonois. Having previously played Colonel West in The Undiscovered Country and starred on DS9 as Odo, he returns in this episode as Ezral. Rudolph Willrich—who previously played a Betazoid in TNG’s “Ménàge à Troi” and a Bolian in DS9’s “Paradise Lost“—plays Kuulan. Claudette Sutherland plays Liana’s mother, while Tom Bergeron plays D’Marr. Bergeron will return in the fourth season’s “Demons” as a Coridanite ambassador.
And we’ve got a most unusual Robert Knepper moment! I had totally forgotten that Annie Wersching’s first TV role was as Liana. Wersching—probably best known for her two-season role on 24 as Agent Walker—is currently appearing on season two of Picard as the Borg Queen.
Trivial matters: There are several references to Tucker’s adventures aboard a Xyrillian ship in “Unexpected.”
Mayweather was telling ghost stories to the landing party in “Strange New World.”
It’s been a long road… “Maybe you can tell me how I’m being guarded by a dead man.” This episode shares a lot of DNA with other Trek episodes. The most obvious is “Shadowplay,” especially given the prominent role Rene Auberjonois plays in both that DS9 episode as well as this Enterprise episode, but there’s also hints of “The Cage” and “Requiem for Methuselah” on the original series, as well as Discovery’s “Su’Kal.”
Plus, of course, there’s the obvious influence of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest…
For all that it’s derivative, though, it’s actually quite an enjoyable episode. The teaser sets things up nicely, though “teaser” continues to be a misnomer. This writing staff’s obsession with treating commercial breaks as just a place to momentarily pause the story without any kind of dramatic tension is, looking back, likely one of the reasons why Enterprise is the only Star Trek spinoff so far that has failed in the marketplace. Still and all, I love the idea of Enterprise being out there and trading both goods and rumors, and I also love that the spicy food they ate was really spicy (and T’Pol avoided it completely).
The mystery of what happened to the Kantares unfolds rather nicely, and yes, it’s the exact same plot twist as “Shadowplay,” but it plays out very well. The chemistry between Connor Trinneer and Annie Wersching is very sweet, I love T’Pol giving Tucker shit about the events of “Unexpected,” and I like that Reed is the one who figures things out at first thanks to his tactical smarts. I would’ve liked more done with Mayweather’s apprehension regarding the “ghosts,” but that’s going to be a running theme on this show, sadly.
And the fact that it’s not original doesn’t bother me, mainly because it’s a riff on The Tempest. William Shakespare’s plays weren’t hardly original at all: either they were riffs on history or they were stories that were already familiar to the audience. Because originality is far less important than the execution of the idea. (Though, ironically, The Tempest was one of Shakespeare’s few wholly original plays…)
Now to be fair, “Oasis” ain’t Shakespeare. But it is a good little science-fiction mystery with—not surprisingly—a strong, heartfelt, tragic performance by Auberjonois as Prospero—er, that is, Ezral.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at Fan Expo Philadelphia this coming weekend at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. He will be at Bard’s Tower selling and signing his books alongside fellow authors Claudia Gray, Dan Wells, and Brian Anderson and comics creators Wendy & Richard Pini. Other Trek folks who’ll be there include actors William Shatner, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, Brent Spiner, John deLancie, Chris Sarandon, Ron Perlman, and Carlos Ferro (Carlos will also be at Bard’s Tower with Keith).
Warp 6? My DVD edition has two cut scenes which might have gone that high, but for some strange reason they were removed while other parts remained. Especially the extended chat about Vulcan fears …
And I wondered about the ghost angle. The Enterprise crew might have seen enough by now, after the better part of a season, to make their default answer weird alien lifeform and not ghost. Wouldn’t alien replace ghost for a society where alien species are an established fact? One could still tell stories about blood-sucking fiends, and etheral beauties, and all that, by calling them alien.
Hmm, I think I found this one rather uninspiring, largely because it was just a rehash of “Shadowplay,” with Auberjonois’s presence just calling attention to the fact. It’s also difficult to reconcile with continuity, because the Kantare holograms seem sentient, so why did it take the Federation more than 200 years after this to come up with its first sentient holograms?
If this had been posted yesterday, it would have been exactly 20 years after the air date.
I remember reading an interview with Rene Auberjonois where he was saying that he was talking to Scott Bakula during filming. Bakula said he thought it was a good script and Auberjonois replied he thought so too the first time he did it on DS9.
I’m very glad @krad likes this episode, because I do to – it’s a little sad, a little spooky (even at moments just a bit eerie) and has an admirably fair play mystery at it’s heart (Also, I’m reasonably sure that the only reason we’re cheated of a Liana-Porthos meeting is that the ensuing scene would be so cute people might mistake it for a Disney movie).
Also, I’d be lying if one pretended that T’Pol playing Big Sister to Trip in that inimitably stiff-upper-lip Vulcan style isn’t one of my favourite things.
p.s. It bears pointing out that this story simply wouldn’t work in any other period of STAR TREK history (except perhaps the era of James T. Kirk and even that would be a huge “Maybe”).
@2. ChristopherLBennett: It’s quite possible that Kuulan & Liana never made it home – whether through accident or design – meaning that their holocrew technology never reached the wider scientific community (and given that Earth didn’t possess holodeck technology at this point, possibly not even the rudiments of that technology, it’s not surprising that their report on the achievements of this lonely duo was completely unable to provide anything more concrete than inspiration).
It’s equally possible that the two of them made it home, but refused to let their ship be taken apart by the scientific community, in the interests of keeping their holo-family intact, making it much harder to work out how the heck they’d rigged up something like Sentient Photonic Beings in a wreck, with a bunch of scraps!
This is, admittedly based on the presumption that the Holocrew is a prodigious (even epochal) achievement based on a mix of existing technology put to unprecedented uses, Mad Science and raw desperation (not to mention the energy & computing systems of a whole darned ship) rather than a straightforward spot of programming.
This was always my biggest problem with Enterprise and a big reason why I stopped watching when it was first on. They kept recycling the same ideas from earlier shows, and the series just wasn’t living up to its promised premise — at least, not until it was waaaaay too late (Seasons 3 and 4).
When I first sat down and watched through Enterprise, long after it had aired, it was really really jarring for me to see Annie; we’d grown up in the same neighborhood in St. Louis, and both moved away around the same time.
I don’t watch much television, so to see my old neighbor was a treat. :D
This was the first, but certainly not the last, episode of Enterprise to outright copy an episode from one of the earlier series. Other examples that come to mind include “Dawn” and “Doctor’s Orders.” I always thought Liana bore more than a little resemblance to Kes, right down to the pixie-style haircut and wardrobe. And that was the same Tom Bergeron from America’s Funniest Home Videos and Dancing With the Stars.
@5/ED: “It’s quite possible that Kuulan & Liana never made it home – whether through accident or design – meaning that their holocrew technology never reached the wider scientific community”
Ezral never said he invented the entire technology, just that it took him time to create the specific holographic individuals. You can’t invent an entire technology from scratch on a derelict ship with limited resources — you can only adapt or repurpose what’s already there. And Ezral was the chief engineer, which means he focuses on practice, not theory. So I took it to mean that the Kantare already had the necessary holographic and AI technology, and it took Ezral years to refine it (or his skill at using it) to the point that he could create convincing replicas of individuals.
Even if he had invented it, nobody can pull an entire scientific revolution out of thin air. New breakthroughs are made when the foundations for them have already been laid, which is why so many things are invented or discovered by two or more groups at once. Ezral wouldn’t have been able to achieve a breakthrough (certainly not on a wrecked ship with no support system) if his civilization didn’t already have the necessary ingredients for that innovation. So even if one inventor’s breakthrough is lost, someone else is bound to recreate it before long.
More to the point, the Enterprise crew became aware of the holograms and worked with the systems that created them. That should’ve given Starfleet knowledge of how to create sophisticated holograms two centuries before it became commonplace.
I would’ve preferred it if the fake crew had just been something other than holograms — maybe some kind of indigenous life form that projected illusions of the crew from Ezral’s memory. That would’ve let them tell the same story without the anachronistic tech.
Worth it for Annie Wersching’s first Trek role. Yeah, it’s derivative of Shadowplay, but at this point there’s no avoiding comparisons to prior Trek incarnations. Pretty much agree with @krad on this one. It comes at a point in the season where the writers are no longer trying to avoid the old Trek tropes, embracing them instead. It’s nice when it works – even though I saw the twist coming a mile away (of course it had to be holograms). Not perfect by any means, but its heart is in the right place.
It’s an effective use of Connor Trineer’s talents and natural chemistry with the guest stars. I like it that Unexpected introduced this idea of Trip travelling to fix other people’s ships and mingling with the natives. I like that it became an ongoing plot scenario, which finally pays off when we get to next season’s unsettling Cogenitor.
I guess I’m not sure how we’re making the leap to sentience for these holograms, especially since most other holograms we’ve seen in Trek (outside of the Doctor and Vic Fontaine) are non-sentient but if you were to interact with them for a period of time, they could “seem” real but really just be adaptive algorithms that prevent their speech/actions from coming off as scripted. Not trying to come off as a Bruce Maddox here but it’s more a criticism as to how sentience / self-awareness is defined and shown in Trek (i.e. how an ExoComp is sentient but the kids hologram Flotter isn’t).
@11/navibc31: Yeah, you may be right about the holos not being sentient. Still, with such an advanced tech in existence already, holo-sentience shouldn’t be 200 years away.
Hmm, I wonder if maybe the Zhat Vash exterminated the AIs that were around in the 22nd and 23rd centuries and that’s why AI technology seemed so undeveloped in the 24th.
I give the producers a little bit of a break because the DVDs of DS9 were not yet available in 2002 when “Oasis” first aired, and DS9 on VHS was exorbitantly expensive.
When the original version of a story is available, however, I expect the newer version to bring something new to the table, whether it is improving the overall story, someone giving a killer performance, or tweaking the designs a bit. This new version of the story has its merits and is fine on a rewatch, but it did not deliver as satisfying an hour of viewing as “Shadowplay” did.
Yeah, I never got the impression that these holograms were sentient, just copies of the crew, much like the Brown and Korby androids in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“They’re all dead. Apparently, I didn’t do enough.”
Similar to Voyager’s “The Thaw”, my big problem with this episode has always been that if you think about the situation for more than a couple of seconds, you realise that the set-up only makes a lick of sense if everyone involved is stupid and incompetent. So let’s get this right. The ship was crashing. Liana was in the lowest part of the ship and apparently wouldn’t have survived the crash so Ezral left his post (we’re not told exactly what he did to save her, presumably moved her to another part of the ship). There was then an explosion that killed half the crew and the survivors made it to the escape pods which, for reasons the episode doesn’t bother to explain, are floating around in orbit twenty-odd years later with the crew dead inside. (Were they already injured? Did they eject themselves and then realise they had no idea what to do next so just sat in the pods until they starved or suffocated?) So, basically, the person who was in a part of the ship that meant she wouldn’t survive the crash is the only one that survived the crash and the best thing the rest of the crew could have done is get down there and join her?!
It was around this time that someone pointed out that all Enterprise’s Special Guest Stars were…actors from Star Trek. (Although at least that changes next episode!) After spending most of the episode standing around looking like he’s going to be significant, Rene Auberjonois gets to come into his own in the closing scenes as he takes centre stage (although I’m not surprised he found the script familiar!) It’s a decent mystery although it doesn’t really live up to the ghost ship tag and it helps if the answer to the mystery actually makes sense.
I’d completely forgotten about the pre-credits scene of Archer, T’Pol and Tucker hearing about the ship from an eccentric alien trader: It’s a nice quirky scene (complete with typically stony reaction shots from Jolene Blalock). Tucker gets his first alien girlfriend, with T’Pol recalling his previous not-quite-romantic encounter. Mayweather gets a bigger share of the action than he often does accompanying the away teams, although the trade off is Sato and Phlox getting one scene each. (We don’t even get to see Sato do her fancy decoding thing, she just gets a couple of token lines in the bridge scene.)
I’m not concerned about the anachronistic tech. Continuity is never something I get hung up on. But yeah, this does feel like a rehash of a much better story. Glad Rene Auberjonois thought so too.
I didn’t like this episode at all, partly because it’s a retread of “Shadowplay,” and partly for other reasons.
In several episodes, including this one, T’Pol keeps snidely insinuating Tucker is some sort of xenophilic hound dog, but she has no reason to think that of him—she didn’t even have any reason to think that in “Unexpected.” Does she just assume all human men are like that?
The technobabble this season has made me never want to hear the word “resequence” ever again.
Tucker’s arguments why Ezral should want to take his daughter home instead of staying on that barren planet in the wrecked ship were all good ones—so good, in fact, that the vehemence with which Ezral argued the point didn’t make any sense.
Bringing up ghosts in the teaser scene turned out to be completely irrelevant to the story. Enterprise could have just stumbled onto this world by accident and the story wouldn’t have gone any differently.
It was nice to see Annie Wersching, although I didn’t recognize her! I’m familiar with her from Picard and Marvel’s Runaways; she looks completely different here! I guess it’s the Kes hairdo.
Actress Annie Wersching has sadly passed away.
