“Rajiin”
Written by Paul Brown and Brent V. Friedman and Chris Black
Directed by Mike Vejar
Season 3, Episode 4
Production episode 056
Original air date: October 1, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. We look in on the Xindi Council. Degra has suffered setbacks in creating his world-destroying weapon, and Dolim wants to revisit the notion of a bio-weapon that will target the human race instead of their homeworld. The others continue their opposition to it (except for the Xindi-Insectoids), but Kiaphet Amman’sor warns that they’ll have to consider it if Degra doesn’t show progress soon.
Enterprise’s search for trellium-D—which will protect them from the Delphic Expanse’s anomalies—leads them to a planet with a large bazaar. Archer—who is still recovering from the Loque’eque virus—goes down with Reed and Tucker to meet with a chemist named B’Rat Ud. B’Rat provides them with a recipe to make their own trellium-D, and he also has information about the Xindi. Apparently some Xindi-Reptilians visited the bazaar, specifically Zjod, who is a space pimp, specializing in selling women as slaves. While Tucker negotiates price with B’Rat, Archer approaches Zjod, who tries to convince Archer to purchase one of the women he has for sale. As far as the Xindi are concerned, all he knows is that they came and went two days earlier.
Buy the Book
Wild Massive
Tucker gets the recipe for making trellium-D in exchange for exotic spices: mustard seed, pepper, paprika, and cayenne.
One of the women, Rajiin, runs away from Zjod and begs Archer for asylum, which he grants after fisticuffs ensue with Zjod.
Tucker and T’Pol start working on putting trellium-D together in a space on E deck, with emergency bulkheads down, as the stuff is unstable.
Archer provides Rajiin with a meal, and also finds her homeworld in the Xindi database they downloaded, and he offers to take her home. She says she knows very little about the Xindi, thought she confirms that the ones who came to see Zjod were reptilian. Archer says she can move freely about the ship, though some sensitive sections will be off-limits.
Tucker and T’Pol’s first attempt to create trellium-D is a rather explosive failure, and they have to go back to the proverbial drawing board.
Rajiin shows up at Archer’s quarters, saying that she wishes to thank him for his help. Archer demurs, and what appears to be the Standard Hot Babe Sedcues The Captain scene takes a quick left turn as Rajiin runs her hands over Archer’s body in a manner that makes him glow—as if she’s performing a medical scan of him. When she’s done, he has no memory of what just happened, and Rajiin politely excuses herself.
Rajiin bumps into Sato in the corridor, and she does the same seduction setup on her that she did on Archer.
When she tries it on T’Pol, however, the Vulcan is able to resist. Rajiin pushes, and T’Pol winds up lapsed into a coma. Tucker shows up for his neuropressure session only to find T’Pol unconscious and Rajiin in her cabin. Rajiin throws things at Tucker and runs away; Tucker calls security.
Rajiin manages to seduce one of Reed’s security people and get his phase pistol. She also communicates with someone off-ship and says she’s going to use the transporter. But when she arrives in the transporter room, Archer is waiting with a security detail, who take her to the brig.
Rajiin refuses to talk at first, but eventually she reveals that she works for Xindi-Reptilians who want medical information on humans in order to create a bio-weapon.
Two Xindi-Reptilian ships attack Enterprise, knocking it out of warp. They board the ship and have a tiresomely easy time getting past Reed’s security force and the MACOs. They free Rajiin and bugger off through a subspace vortex through which Enterprise cannot follow.
The rest of the council is pissed off that Dolim went ahead and sanctioned this mission without approval from the rest of them. But now, thanks to Rajiin, they have all the biological data they need to make a weapon that will wipe out humanity.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, to synthesize trellium-D, you need to infuse with delta radiation and theta radiation in such a way that the pressure doesn’t increase. If you fail to do that, it goes boom.
The gazelle speech. Archer has itchy rashes on his skin, a byproduct of the Loque’eque virus, and it’s making it hard for him to sleep. When he does sleep, he dreams about the Lorque’eque’s underground city of Urquat.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol talks Tucker out of cancelling the neuropressure sessions. Tucker’s argument is that the ship’s gossip machine is on overdrive wondering why Tucker’s going to T’Pol’s quarters all the time. T’Pol’s counterargument is that the neuropressure sessions are working and the ship’s gossip machine is a silly goose.
Florida Man. Florida Man Belatedly Worries About What The Neighbors Will Think.
Good boy, Porthos! Archer’s inability to sleep is keeping Porthos up at night. Poor puppy!
Better get MACO. The MACOs, working with Reed’s security detail, utterly fail to repel or contain the Xindi-Reptilian boarding party or keep them from taking Rajiin. What are these guys bringing to the table, exactly?
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Rajiin wears cleavage-y and/or form-fitting outfits and uses her sex appeal to fulfill her mission, being all flirty and seductive with Archer, T’Pol, Sato, and a security guard.
I’ve got faith…
“On our planet, wars were fought over these—careful!”
[sneezes] “What’s this one called?”
“Black pepper. There’s paprika, mustard seed—I’m partial to the cayenne, myself. I’m sure you’ll find these all very exotic.”
–Tucker overselling some condiments to B’Rat Ud.
Welcome aboard. Nikita Ager plays the title role, while Steve Larson plays her pimp. The other merchants are played by Dell Yount (B’Rat Ud) and BK Kennelly (the marmot merchant). Yount previously played a Boslic in DS9’s “Sons of Mogh.”
Plus, the Xindi Council officially becomes recurring in this episode, as Tucker Smallwood (Xindi-Primate councilor), Randy Oglesby (Degra), Rick Worthy (Jannar), and Scott MacDonald (Dolim) are all back from “The Xindi.” Oglesby will next appear in “The Shipment,” while the other three will next be seen in “Proving Ground.”
Trivial matters: Though Kelly Waymire doesn’t appear, Cutler is mentioned as having suffered a broken arm when Enterprise passed through one of the Expanse’s anomalies. This is the last time she’ll be referenced, as Waymire died a month after this episode aired, and the producers decided not to make use of the character even in dialogue after that.
Archer is still recovering from having his DNA rewritten in “Extinction.”
It’s been a long road… “Some of our calculations may have been slightly off.” We’re now four episodes into the third season, and I’m starting to understand why it didn’t do what it was supposed to do.
The whole point of the alleged radical change in direction in season three was to goose ratings, to try a different tack, to move away from blandly going where no one has gone before without rhyme or reason to a proper story arc that would give our heroes a goal and stuff.
The problem is the same problem with seasons one and two: they’re half-assing it. The Delphic Expanse was sold in “The Expanse” as this incredibly dangerous and very strange and totally incomprehensible region of space that the Vulcans and Klingons didn’t make it out alive from. And since then it’s turned out to be—um, just another region of space. And what we’ve gotten plotwise has been pretty standard stuff from The Prison Episode at the top of the season to The Fun With DNA™ Episode last week The Slave Woman From Outer Space Episode this time.
What’s maddening is knowing what they could have done, but they keep defaulting to the easiest possible storyline or plot point without giving any thought to it beyond the obvious. So on the Xindi Council, the reasonable ones are the ones that look like humans or like humans’ pets, while the ones that look like icky animals or vermin are the more intransigent and nasty ones. So the one female slave being sold who looks most like a traditionally pretty Western white woman is the one who infiltrates the ship.
They even half-ass the episode-to-episode continuity. Archer starts the episode being all itchy and scratchy and talking about dreams, which is a nice callback to the previous episode—except that’s all there is. We don’t see how it’s affected Sato or Reed, we don’t see Archer scratching his arms or talking about his dreams or anything else after his visit to Phlox in Act 1.
And we’re back to redshirting the extras. It’s pretty clear that several security guards and MACOs were killed by the boarding party, but they’re not even mentioned or mourned or cared about. And, to repeat myself for what already seems like the millionth time, why are the MACOs even here if they can’t repel a boarding party or keep the prisoner from being freed from the brig?
The Xindi plan continues to confuse. If it’s so difficult to create a planet-destroying weapon, why did they send their teeny tiny prototype to Earth in the first place? And the bio-weapon doesn’t make that much sense, either, given that humanity isn’t on just one planet anymore, so a genetically targeted weapon is way less useful.
I will give them credit for using the “exotic” spices that you can find in most any kitchen cabinet on Earth as currency. But it’s sad when the novel use of condiments is the cleverest thing about a script…
Warp factor rating: 4
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.
Well, spices did play a major role in the Spanish and Portugese conflicts/conquests in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. More valuable than gold, pound for pound …
I also noticed the replicating MACOs. We know that the regular crew are about 80, right? How many could they add without making the crowding a plot issue? We don’t know for sure they’re dead, but with Reptilians that’s the way to bet, I suppose …
My personal fanwank on the matter of the Xindi tipping their targets off by testing the weapon on Earth itself – and of course, it’s a shame that it has to be fanwanked instead of making sense in the first place – is that the Xindi thought they could get away with it because, as far as they knew, the humans had no idea the Xindi existed. Presumably that was part of the Sphere-Builders’ plan – get them before they even know we’re a thing. The Xindi-Reptilian pilot was so disfigured as to be unrecognisable – perhaps by design – and the fact that no human, Vulcan or Klingon had ever entered the Delphic Expanse and survived meant it was very unlikely anyone would trace it back to them. So the Xindi thought, hey if we’re gonna blow some sh*t up, may as well kill some humans while we’re at it, they’ll never know it was us. It was Future Guy – from a counter-faction of the TCW – who told Archer who was responsible, otherwise he’d never have known. That’s why the second test (“Proving Ground”) was conducted closer to home – because by that point they knew the humans were onto them.
In all fairness, it makes perfect sense that the Xindi who most closely resemble humanity biologically would have the easiest time putting themselves in our shoes (and hope those least like us would have an easier time thinking of us as dangerous alien things): for my money a far greater failing in this episode was to misuse the title character, who would have been far more interesting as a POV character who offers a perspective flip on the crew of NX-01 AND a valuable insight into Xindi society (or at least Xindi Government) beyond the Ruling Council.
Instead we only see the character from the outside, making her way amongst the crew by hook and by crook, and therefore have absolutely no idea who this woman she actually is, why she works for the Xindi, what her preconceptions about the crew were or what her genuine reaction to Enterprise was (beyond some last minute “Oh they’re not so bad” which by virtue of not really being explained comes across as somewhat half-hearted).
Quite frankly I think this character would be far more coherent (and the episode more interesting) if we followed her perspective on events, I’d only so we can get a clearer sense of who she is and what she’s actually thinking and WHY she’s doing it.
Also, a little less incidental sleaze would have been appreciated (the scenes on-world work fairly well, but those on the ship sometimes seem wastefully exploitative).
I thought that using seasonings to barter with the shifty alien trader was one of the cleverest things that this show has done, but the episode falls completely flat otherwise. The actress playing Rajiin is just dreadful and the story feels like yet another misguided attempt to be “sexy” by giving us porn scenarios with a PG-13 rating. If I hadn’t been cursed by the gods to keep watching Star Trek no matter what, I might have given up on Enterprise after this one.
Quoth ED: “In all fairness, it makes perfect sense that the Xindi who most closely resemble humanity biologically would have the easiest time putting themselves in our shoes.”
Sure, you can justify the decision that way, but it’s still a very simplistic, reductive, and lazy way to write it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
A weak attempt driven mainly by titillation — although the actress playing Rajiin is pretty striking, and Paul Baillargeon’s leitmotif for her has a nice TOS-ish quality.
I agree that the cleverest part was the use of Earth spices to bargain for information. We tend to take it for granted that we can pop down to the grocery store and pick up any spices we want, but for much of history, exotic spices have been one of the main drivers of global trade and exploration. It’s nice to see the show acknowledge that the same would probably be true of interstellar trade.
This is the last mention of Cutler on the show, but she was referenced later in the ENT novel Rosetta, though she was mistakenly called Nurse Cutler there. And I brought her back in my Rise of the Federation novels, IIRC.
It occurs to me, thought, that if they had just gone with the bio-weapon plot all along, it would have made the entire season stronger. Why did they attack Earth? They needed to test its virulence in a human population. They could even connect it to the Loque’eque virus from the previous episode and explain why there’s that one cowboy planet in the expanse (they needed a human population for their research).
@2/DS9Continuing: That’s a fairly good handwave. It’s true enough that without Future Guy’s intervention, Earth would have had no idea who’d launched the attack. The counterargument, though, is that it would still have put Earth on its guard against further attacks, even if we didn’t know from where. And Earth would’ve had a year to build up its defenses, maybe even enough to fight off the final weapon. So I’m still not convinced it made sense for them to test the probe on Earth itself.
Although it could be that the Reptilians or Insectoids thought the way you suggest and were overconfident that Earth couldn’t build up enough defenses in time, so they may have rammed it through over the others’ cautions. I guess they would’ve had to convince at least one of the other species to go along with it, though.
It’s been 3 years since I last watched Enterprise. Somehow, I’d completely forgotten this episode even existed. And for good reason, it seems. Up to this point, season 3 has been trying to slowly approach the aesthetics of classic TOS. Rajiin openly tries to emulate it on a story level, more than a bit reminiscent of episodes like Elaan of Troyius, minus the shrew aspect. Almost as if the staff forgot they did an episode called Precious Cargo the previous year.
Rajiin isn’t that bad, and it serves as enough of a cautionary tale to not trust someone seeking asylum based on their looks. But that’s about it. Pretty lazy episode, otherwise. I’m surprised this went through at least three drafts (little bit of trivia: Paul Brown worked the story for VOY’s Child’s Play).
Some minor advancement on the Council side of things, but they were deliberately taking it slow with the overall arc. It should be noted that the first five episodes or so were written before Manny Coto joined the staff as a producer to help shape the remainder of the season.
“We must proceed on both fronts!”
Maybe I have an odd set of priorities at times, but I’ve always found Archer deciding to violently “liberate” Rajiin (and only her) because he’d rather use violence than follow local laws and customs more than a little discomforting. (I changed it in my rewrite to buying her. I don’t know if that’s better morally or not, but I was more comfortable with it.) Of course, he gets to regret it later. Not only does he have difficulty handling an institutionalised slave loose on Enterprise (he’s thrown when her only concept of family is her previous owners), but it turns out he’s brought a Trojan horse onto his ship. One he does a spectacularly poor job of containing, actually holding his fire when he sees the Reptilians taking her away.
Archer’s rather hard attitude when T’Pol is injured is disappointing, but I guess it demonstrates how he’s suffering from a great deal of tunnel vision. (He does at least tell Tucker to get his head wound checked out and ask T’Pol if she’s okay before giving her a new assignment.) I guess we have equal opportunities ogling with Rajiin running detailed (intimate) scans of Archer and T’Pol. (It feels like her encounter with Sato was meant to go somewhere but then she immediately turns up in T’Pol’s quarters.) The eccentric chemist B’Rat, whose greatest prize is black pepper, adds some welcome humour to a rather po-faced episode. T’Pol’s opening conversation with Tucker suggests she’s softening towards him.
It’s a relief to see Reed’s security team being allowed out to play when Rajiin tries to escape the ship: Given that Major Hayes said they were the best people to deal with intruders on the ship, there’s been an annoying tendency to use the MACOs for that sort of thing. But just as it looks as though the show might leave its new toy in the box for an episode, the MACOs get wheeled out to deal with the Xindi boarding party. I didn’t say anything fatal happen to any of them here (I think only one MACO got hit, and she was shown being dragged away alive), but things didn’t look good for the three guards on the brig.
Degra actually gets a name, but no-one else on the Council does. First signs of the dissent between the different races, with the Reptilians acting on their own. (Possibly with help from the Insectoids, see below.) This will be important later. Despite her ambiguous fate here, Rajiin isn’t seen or mentioned again, which on balance I kind of like, since it would be a bit of a cliché to have her won over by the power of humanity and become an ally of Archer: Not everyone gets to take a bad decision back. Although it’s not dwelt on, there’s a Xindi-Insectoid among the boarding party who Reed gets a clear look at, so that’s at least four Xindi species Enterprise’s crew have identified. Given that we saw the Xindi weapon emerge from a similar vortex in ‘The Expanse’, it’s a bit odd that it’s taken until now for the crew to look into it.
Crewman Cutler is mentioned for the first time since Season 1. Apparently, there was active discussion at the time to featuring the character again, but real life intervened.
I’d completely forgotten that the episode opened with Archer still dealing with the after-effects of his Loque’eque mutation. It’s a nice touch that emphasises that they’re not hitting the reset button after every episode, although I do take the point that it’s glossed over pretty quickly.
I didn’t think this one was that bad, but it did feel like yet another throwback episode, which seems odd for a series that is trying to shake things up. I share the reviewer’s feelings about the uselessness of the MACOs.
I don’t remember this episode. From the recap, I suspect I did see it, but that it was pretty forgettable.
@@.-@ Do you mean T’Porn scenarios?
We know the Xindi-Reptilians’ solution to this one several episodes onwards …
Whoops. I said in the comments for last week’s review that the following episode was one of my favorites of the series but I was thinking of the Vulcan zombie episode. This one, not so hot. This episode makes Rajin out to be some irresistible woman but personally I didn’t think she was all that hot, at least up close.
My main issue with this episode is that T’pol is sexually assaulted by Rajiin and the moment she says No/Stop and the scene carries on is abhorrent as it’s shot “sexy” to show how hot this this. T’pol is then put in a coma and is then awake at the end of the episode with no mention of what happened. It’s disgraceful that Star Trek as a whole has sank that low.
@16/Marc Sharp: “It’s disgraceful that Star Trek as a whole has sank that low.”
Whaa? It was one series made two decades ago. ENT’s approach to titillation was undeniably juvenile, at least while Berman & Braga were the showrunners, but where do you get “Star Trek as a whole” from that?
One thing that keeps on irritating the hell out of me is how often in the early part of the third season where they ask people if they know where they can find a Xindi, and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and go “never heard of them” or “I saw two of them a few days ago” like they’re some kind of cryptid. I get that the Delphic Expanse is supposed to be like 2000 light years in diameter, but the Enterprise is able to reach one of their PLANET-scale mining operations in the very next episode. The Xindi are very clearly active in this part of the Expanse, and presumably have all the hallmarks of an interstellar civilization (trade networks, rivals, diplomacy, etc.). But until “The Shipment,” every person the Enterprise crew asks about them responds to the question as though they asked if they saw fucking Bigfoot.
@18/Santos: I don’t see a problem with that. Space is big. There are a lot of civilizations in it (in the Trekverse) and finite time to travel around and meet them all. Heck, it’s no worse than Earth and Andoria being unaware of each other for a century despite Andorian space being adjacent to Vulcan space, while Vulcans are only 16 light-years away. Worse, Star Trek Star Charts improbably puts Andoria at Procyon, only 12 light-years from Earth.
And the nasty stuff going on in the Expanse would presumably inhibit warp travel, so it would be even harder for a given civilization to get to know anyone beyond its immediate neighbors.
See, the only issue I have with that argument (and don’t get me wrong, Earth somehow not knowing about the Andorians was a VERY dumb plot contrivance given that they were the main rival of their only major interstellar ally) is that the Xindi are very clearly active in this part of space, and this planet specifically. They find a Xindi being held in a penal colony in the very first episode of the season. They meet a dude who attacked a Xindi ship in the second episode. Two Xindi came to this very planet to drop this woman off as a trap less than a week earlier. The Xindi are active basically everywhere these mooks have gone, and the next episode reveals they have private corporations that mine on a planetary scale on a number of planets in the immediate vicinity of basically everywhere the Enterprise has been thus far. And yet, people keep talking about them like they’re some kind of urban legend. It’s very weird…
@5. krad: On the other hand it does have the virtue of being fairly intuitive, meaning the writers don’t have to spend time on exposition beyond what is immediately useful – sometimes cliches can be tools, rather than a waste of space (which TV Tropes exists).
The problem is that in this case the writers don’t really do anything particular interesting with the spare time they acquire.
@18. Santos L Halper: The real question is whether those being questioned are genuinely ignorant, are being wilfully unhelpful or simply can’t be bothered with Q&A from these uniformed strangers.
Degra and Dolim are not named on screen until much later, especially Dolim. It’s really dumb. It’s just nameless guys at a table who are mad at each other each time they redo this scene.
@22: As I said, Degra actually gets named for the first time here, in his second appearance. (His name is mentioned twice in the opening scene.) His name’s mentioned several times in his next appearance, which is only three episodes’ time. Otherwise, you’re right: Dolim, Jannar and the Aquatic councillor don’t get names until the antepenultimate episode of the season, and the other two don’t get names at all. (We’re told the Insectoid’s name is unpronouncable but it’s strange that there seems to be no official name for the second “Xindi-Primate” councillor despite him being a major character.)
cap-mjb: Apparently Tucker Smallwood took it upon himself to name his character after Deepak Chopra, since the writers couldn’t be arsed to come up with a name for him, so when he signs autographs at conventions, he refers to the character as “Depac.”
Derek: cap-mjb is correct, Degra is named in the teaser of this episode, in the third line of the episode. However, your general point is accurate — the Enterprise writers have often not bothered to name species or characters unless they absolutely have to, which is annoying….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The fact that Rajiin is handled with kid gloves and then taken alive by the enemy is inexcusable. There’s a war going on, and she’s been exposed as an enemy spy at this point, not to mention her being guilty of putting one of the senior officers in a coma. In a real-world war scenario, she would be interrogated at least as harshly as the Osaarian prisoner two episodes ago – and then the first Xindi shot at the Enterprise would have resulted in a bullet through Rajiin’s head, to prevent a leak of valuable intelligence to the enemy.
@jamiebabb: “…cursed by the gods to watch Star Trek no matter what…” I see you and I had the same curse back in the day; It’s the only way I watched this series at all, apparently.
I will admit, the brief scene with Sato and Rajiin in the corridor was hot; unfortunately the scene with Rajiin T’Pol was uncomfortable to watch. Why does T’Pol have to suffer so much?
My memory of the MACOs was them being way more effective than they actually were. I do like there are women MACOs doing missions and giving orders: Reed’s security is just dudes, most of them white. I never clocked there were no women security officers until now.
Archer was pretty brusque with T’Pol, which was indeed disappointing, as was most of this episode.
@25: I don’t think summary execution should have been the first resort, but I was bewildered that Archer deliberately avoided shooting her when he saw her leaving with the Xindi, and then does a belated “Don’t let those ships leave” thing. That’s kind of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
@27: logically, execution would have to be the first and immediate resort – because at this point the Enterprise has very little knowledge of the Xindi’s technological capabilities. Who’s to say Rajiin won’t be transported off the ship if they get too close? She’s an enemy combatant and a grave risk of valuable intelligence reaching the enemy, risk that has to be neutralized. Archer’s conduct is both inexcusable for a commanding officer during a war, and out of character, considering how war-minded his behavior was during the previous episodes.
@28: Not a fan of the Geneva Convention then? To coin a phrase, you can use logic to justify anything, that’s the danger of it. I don’t think it’s remotely in character for Archer to kill an unarmed prisoner just because there’s a chance she might escape: He let the Ossarian go after getting the information he needed from him. Maybe that sort of behaviour would be excusable for a military commander if this was the 12th century, but it’s set in the 22nd. If you wanted to, you could use logic to argue in favour of keeping her around as a source of intelligence, since she knew how to contact the Xindi. And given that Raijiin tried to use Enterprise’s own transporter to escape, it’s unlikely the Xindi had such technology of their own, logically.
@29: applying the Geneva Convention to interstellar conflict is a fascinating discussion in itself :)
For a local planetary conflict of the 21st century, the Geneva Convention doesn’t outright forbid the use of weapons against an escaping POW — article 42 states that “use of weapons against prisoners of war, especially against those who are escaping or attempting to escape, shall constitute an extreme measure, which shall always be preceded by warnings appropriate to the circumstances”.
Back to Rajiin, she did not formally surrender or lay down weapons in order to be treated as a POW with Geneva Convention rights – in fact, I would argue that she was armed the whole time because she had the ability to paralyze and inflict significant damage with her touch. And I specifically mentioned the Osaarian because he was treated more harshly by Archer, despite the fact that he was not an enemy combatant but merely a robber who possessed valuable intelligence – and didn’t pose danger when disarmed.
What Archer did was sacrifice crucial intelligence and the lives/health of his crew in order to keep this woman alive for the episode plot resolution… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@30: Can a prisoner be classed as “escaping” if they’re just sitting in their cell while other people attack you? Sure, once Raijiin’s free and trying to get off the ship, Archer could and should have used whatever means necessary, including lethal force, to stop her. But just killing a prisoner who’s not resisting and co-operating in their cell doesn’t seem right legally or morally, even if you can justify it militarily. (As for Archer treating her less harsh than the Ossarian, maybe he’d have given her the airlock treatment if she’d kept quiet, but it’s best not to start with your biggest threat.)
I’m not sure what’s required for a “formal surrender” but she doesn’t offer any resistance once Archer has her cornered and her escape route’s gone, and she’s diarmed (ie they take the phase pistol she was using). Her natural abilities, which seem to require her to be in touching distance, would perhaps be analogous to a prisoner being adept at unarmed combat and potentially dangerous without a weapon.
I guess it’s a trade-off: Keeping her alive for interrogation let Archer get a heads-up on the bioweapon. It also let the Xindi retrieve her and gave them a way forward with that weapon, but thinking about it, grabbing just about anyone on Enterprise for analysis would have produced the same result in the long run.
I’m playing catch-up with the rewatch, but, Wow, this episode!
I understand it’s hardly worth discussing, but the dialogue in that opening T’Pol/Tucker session hit the lowest level of schoolboy double entendre yet.
And, then Rajiin. Yes, they were recycling the ‘Space Siren’ trope that extends all the way back to the beginning with “The Man Trap”. But without developing it, at all. At the market, she appears to have an effect on Archer, even at a distance. Later, Phlox mentions her unusual retinal structure. I was waiting for the reveal of her possessing, let’s say, hypnotic eye contact, most effective at close range, which could explain Archer’s out of character assault on the pimp. And, of course, the close encounters with Archer and Sato, scanning both genders, then the resistance from T’Pol. (Like ChristopherLBennett, I did appreciate the hints of Kirk’s Love Theme sneaking into the scene with Archer.) Then, when they’ve figured it out and she’s captured, let’s slap a blindfold or glasses on her to block the effect. Which the rescuers then remove, allowing her to distract Archer enough to effect their escape. Oh,and by the way, since she came on board with literally just the appropriately skimpy clothes on her back, where did that succession of not-quite-so revealing tops come from? But, as others have said, I’ve already put more effort into this that the writers apparently did. And it’s been a rule of mine that when I, a mere amateur, can revise a script this easily, it’s sorely lacking. On to next week!
@DanteHopkins Yeah, I too remember the MACOs as being more go-in-fast-and-kick-ass types. I guess because their debut appearance has them very impressively rapelling into a combat situation and shooting a bunch of people? It all looked so impressive that maybe I didn’t notice how bad their actual track record is?
(They also have some pretty impressive looking martial arts later in the season; I look forward to @krad’s take on whether their martial arts are actually good or not.)
Just so everyone knows, the Enterprise Rewatch is taking a week off because I’m doing a special thing in anticipation of the Picard season three premiere this week…..
We’ll be back with “Impulse” next week.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
One more postponement of the rewatch of “Impulse” — it’ll go up tomorrow. Tor dot com’s offices are closed today for President’s Day.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I find it more appalling that “Ranjin” and “Cogenitor” seems to reject the idea of giving asylum to people. There’s actual SLAVERY going on with our protagonists meant to turn a blind eye to it because its conveinant for them. That is not remotely heroic Starfleet behavior.