“Strange New World”
Written by Rick Berman & Brannon Braga and Mike Sussman & Phyllis Strong
Directed by David Livingston
Season 1, Episode 4
Production episode 004
Original air date: October 10, 2001
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Crewmen Cutler and Novakovich are eating in the mess hall, the former reading an exobiology text and eating plomeek soup, the latter teasing her about her choice in food. They and everyone else in the mess hall are surprised to see the ship going into orbit around an Earth-like planet, which is a surprise.
On the bridge, T’Pol’s readings indicate that this is a Minshara-class planet, which can support humanoid life, while Reed can detect no signs of beacons, artificial satellites, or anything else that indicates that anyone else claims this planet. Archer orders a pod prepared. T’Pol urges a more cautious approach: a week’s worth of scans from orbit and with probes before setting foot on the planet. Both Archer and Tucker think that’s wussy and insist on going down right now. T’Pol’s reminder that the planet has been there for millions of years and will still be there in seven days falls on uncaring ears. Archer laughs derisively in much the same way jocks have laughed at nerds for millennia, says fuck that noise, and tells Tucker to prepare the pod. The captain then shows how magnanimous he is by letting T’Pol pick the survey team.
Said team includes Cutler and Novakovich. In addition, Archer goes down, taking Porthos with him, as do Mayweather (to fly the pod) and Tucker (because, um, he’s in the opening credits, I guess). They arrive, with Archer ordering T’Pol to put the scanner away and enjoy the moment when they arrive. Tucker also takes a picture of the team, with everyone but T’Pol smiling.
Once the photo op is done, they go to work. Novakovich at one point picks a flower and sniffs it, which will probably be important later. Archer, Mayweather, and Tucker lose track of time enjoying the scenery, and T’Pol has to remind them that they have a rendezvous. When Archer returns to the pod, T’Pol requests to stay overnight to observe some nocturnal marsupials. Archer agrees, and also accedes to Tucker’s request to let him and Mayweather stay the night as well.
After Archer and Porthos go back to Enterprise, the rest of the gang make camp. Mayweather tells a Boomer ghost story, and then Novakovich complains of a headache and asks T’Pol if he can take a nap before they get to work observing marsupials.
Later, when they’re trying to sleep, Tucker finds a big bug in his sleeping bag and wants to squash it, and then a major wind storm kicks up. They retreat to a cave, but they forgot to grab the food. Mayweather goes back to retrieve the food, and swears he saw and heard some people, though he didn’t get a good look at them.
On Enterprise, Reed reports to Archer about the storm and that the survey team has taken refuge in a cave. Archer orders a pod prepared.
In the cave, Novakovich also swears he sees and hears someone and retreats deeper into the cave, and then disappears. Tucker and Mayweather go after Novakovich. T’Pol goes to investigate something deep in the cave, leaving Cutler alone. Not liking that idea at all, Cutler follows T’Pol, and sees her talking to some shadowy aliens.
Tucker and Mayweather return unsuccessful in their attempt to find Novakovich, though Tucker did see a humanoid figure seemingly emerge from solid rock, and Cutler then accuses T’Pol of secretly talking to aliens. T’Pol denies this, but Tucker starts getting incredibly paranoid, accusing T’Pol of conspiring with the aliens to sabotage Enterprise’s mission and keep humans stuck on Earth forever.
Archer and Reed attempt a rescue, but the storm is too intense for them to land. Returning to Enterprise, they are able, at least, to locate Novakovich, but he’s gone completely binky-bonkers and refuses to return to the cave to rejoin the survey team. They risk beaming him up, and he immediately goes to sickbay, as some local flora got embedded in his body.
Phlox is able to save him, and determines that he’s suffering from a hallucinogenic that is probably given off by the pollen in the local plant life. It didn’t come up in scans because it was dormant earlier, but it probably got kicked up by the storm.
Archer tries to communicate this to the survey team, but they’ve gone completely over the edge. Tucker is holding T’Pol at phase-pistol-point, convinced that she’s been plotting against them all along. T’Pol is still mostly rational, but she too is feeling the effects of the pollen. Archer orders them to go deeper into the cave, and they’ll rescue them when the storm passes.
Unfortunately, going deeper doesn’t solve the problem. Mayweather and Cutler are insensate with delirium, T’Pol and Tucker are pointing weapons at each other, with the former speaking only in Vulcan.
Phlox synthesizes an antidote, which Archer beams down to the surface. Archer contacts the survey team. T’Pol says in Vulcan that Tucker wants to kill her, which Sato passes on to Archer. After playing on Tucker’s friendship and trust with Archer fails rather spectacularly, Archer decides to play along with his delusion—he says that T’Pol was meeting with aliens, but it was a classified meeting that only Archer and T’Pol were permitted to be aware of. This at least gives Tucker enough pause for T’Pol to subdue him, and then administer the antidote.
The next morning, Tucker is suitably abashed at his behavior, but T’Pol is not concerned, as he was under the influence of a hallucinogen. A pod comes down to rescue them.
The gazelle speech. Archer wants to travel down to the planet NOWNOWNOW, because waiting around for probes to do their job is for wimps. This completely unnecessary overeagerness results in nearly getting his survey team killed.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol recommends a cautious approach, but does follow Archer’s orders once it becomes clear that he insists on being a dumbass. She also snarks off his and Tucker’s insistence on taking photographs.
Florida Man. Florida Man Holds Superior Officer Hostage While Under the Influence of Hallucinogenic Alien Pollen.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox is able to save Novakovich from being the show’s first redshirt.
Good boy, Porthos! Archer takes Porthos down to the planet with the survey team. He immediately pees on a tree. I’m sure that introducing alien microbes to the planet via puppy urine won’t have any deleterious effects on the ecosystem…
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… A Vulcan ship would spend a week scanning a Minshara-class planet before setting foot on the surface because they’re not impatient jackholes.
More on this later… “Class-M” planets have been a part of Star Trek lore all the way back to “The Cage.” This episode establishes that the term comes from Vulcans, who refer to a planet with an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere that can support hominid life as “Minshara-class.”
I’ve got faith…
“We have Novakovich.”
“And I have a phase pistol pointed at my head.”
–Archer and T’Pol filling each other in.
Welcome aboard. Kellie Waymire debuts the recurring role of Cutler. She’ll appear twice more in season one. Waymire previously appeared in Voyager’s “Muse.” Her character of Cutler might have appeared more often, but Waymire tragically died at age 36 in 2003.
Henri Lubatti plays Novakovich. He previously provided the voice of Kolanis in the Away Team videogame.
Trivial matters: In the original script, Novakovich was to have died, but Scott Bakula felt it was wrong to have a character die without any kind of acknowledgment or fanfare. This very heartening anti-redshirt philosophy will continue, with the result that there are no crew deaths until the early third season of the show.
A bio of Archer that will be seen in “In a Mirror Darkly, Part II” will say that this planet was later named Archer IV. That planet is the site of a battle between Starfleet and the Klingons in the alternate timeline of TNG’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”
Archer will discuss the events of this episode with Captain Erica Hernandez in “Home.”
The page Cutler is reading from in the Handbook of Exobiology includes a reference to Hodgins’ Law of Parallel Planetary Development, which was first mentioned in the original series’ “Bread and Circuses.”
It’s been a long road… “Where no dog has gone before.” This is a depressingly standard things-go-wrong-on-an-alien-planet story of a type that Trek has done millions of times before, from “This Side of Paradise” to “Natural Law,” and while this does stand out from the others in one particularly important way, it’s not one that speaks well of our protagonists.
Basically, the only reason anything bad happens in this episode is because Archer doesn’t listen to T’Pol. He’s impatient, he’s stupid, he’s moronic, he’s imbecilic, and what’s especially frustrating is that nobody actually points this out after T’Pol’s initial objection. The episode should have ended with Archer apologizing to every single person on that survey team, especially T’Pol (whose good advice he disregarded in a snotty and mean-spirited manner) and Novakovich (who nearly died).
On top of that, they just stumble around this new alien world without any regard for safety protocols or any of the other things that people on this planet do right now when exploring a region they’ve never been to before, whether it’s Novakovich just randomly picking up an alien flower and putting it to his nose (an action that almost gets him killed) to letting Porthos blithely piss on a tree.
After watching this episode, I almost wanted Tucker’s delusion to be real so that they’d send a ship with smart people out into the unknown…
The episode has some good moments. I like getting to know more of the crew, though seeing Kellie Waymire’s Cutler is bittersweet knowing of Waymire’s too-young death a couple years later. Still, the opening in the mess hall is wonderful, and the sort of thing Trek has only sometimes been good at, and should have been doing all along. I especially like Cutler trying to understand T’Pol and Vulcans better by being friendly with the sub-commander and trying out Vulcan cuisine. It’s certainly a more mature approach than that taken by the captain and chief engineer…
I also must confess to adoring Mayweather’s ghost story because it’s the perfect space-age update of your standard urban legend. Anthony Montgomery tells it so very well, too. It, combined with his discomfort with being on a planet, does a nice job of showing the Boomer subculture, one that the show would’ve done well to show more of.
And major points to Scott Bakula for insisting that Novakovich live if the episode didn’t have time to mourn him properly. Enterprise’s insistence on avoiding Trek’s morally repugnant redshirt tendency is one of the show’s most noble and worthy qualities, and it started here.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido is amused to see that there’s now going to be a show called Strange New Worlds, and there was an anthology series called Strange New Worlds, plus the photonovel-style comic book by John Byrne called Strange New Worlds and a Star Trek Adventures role-playing game supplement subtitled Strange New Worlds, and then there’s this episode. That’s not confusing at all!
Again, I am baffled and irritated by the seeming lack of any plan for the ship and exploration. They really seem to just be bopping from place to place, poking at anything that interests them. What the heck was the big rush to get the Warp 5 project operational if there was no actual end state for it? Were they just trying to beat the Soviets to Warp 5? Also Archer continues to be a jerk to his first officer for no good reason and for some reason we are supposed to find him sympathetic.
That said, props to ENT for largely avoiding the Red Shirt effect. It’s a cheap tactic most of the time anyway, and I honestly didn’t notice how long they kept it up- so I think they did a good job of giving the appearance of fatal danger without a ridiculously high body count.
I can’t really judge this episode too harshly for the crew’s reckless approach to exploration, because it’s consistent with the later Trek series where Starfleet is exactly this reckless, constantly beaming down into unknown situations without sending advance probes or wearing any kind of safety gear. (Not to mention the persistent lack of seatbelts, security armor, shuttlecraft airlocks, etc.) It would’ve been more plausible if they’d taken T’Pol’s advice, certainly, but it would’ve also been a continuity problem if these inexperienced early explorers had been more sensible than their supposedly wiser successors a century or two later. So I guess I grade this episode — this show, really — on a curve.
And it’s a decent attempt at a standard kind of Trek story, using alien phenomena to bring character tensions to the fore, in this case the crew’s mistrust of T’Pol. They’re still going for a smaller approach at this point, giving us simpler problems that are more opportunities to explore character than anything else.
I also appreciate it that they established a Vulcan origin for “M-Class.” Trek has always had a tendency to portray the supposedly multispecies Federation as far too human-centric. ENT counteracted that somewhat by establishing that some Trek conventions have non-human origins. In addition to this, we see later on that Vulcans and Andorians had deflector shields and tractor beams before humans did, so presumably the Federation got those technologies from them.
I have mixed feelings about Novakovich’s transporter accident. On the one hand, I agree with Bakula that crew deaths shouldn’t be casually dismissed. But I liked the idea of showing that transporters weren’t yet reliable enough for human use. Not only did I think their inclusion in the show at all was premature, but it’s realistic to show that newly adopted technologies can have major failures, sometimes disastrous ones. (That’s why I established in my post-ENT Rise of the Federation novels that transporters were discovered to cause long-term genetic damage and got restricted to emergency use until they could be redesigned more safely.)
This is the episode that got me on the writer’s lack of subtlety in showing the difference between Human and Vulcan approaches to space exploration. We could not simply show Archercand crew making an error in judgement, they had to show them being foolhardy and utterly smug about it. In a way that showed Starfleet had no institutional memory of the Apollo program. Where NASA had used probes to determine likely landing sites and even sent a fully equipped mission with LM in Apollo 10 and did not land just to test the equipment design. Archer at the beginning of this episode is unlikable and incompetent.
At leas we see that there are good reasons not to fully trust this iteration of transporter tech with people.
Hey, give the dog a break. He’d been holding that in since Alpha Centauri!
It’s also interesting to see a transporter without an Annular Confinement Beam meaning anything can get in with you when you’re beaming up. It was a wonderfully freaky effect having Novakovich with pieces of leaves embedded in him. I like seeing the reason behind technologies.
Yeah, Archer wouldn’t have come off like a bull in a China shop if he had compromised instead, three days of scans, or just one day of scans. Doing an analysis at range just seems sane. You would think they would’ve been scanning before they arrived though, Enterprise’s long range sensors if I recall are pretty decent.
I’m surprised Bakula had to even make the argument against red shirting Novakovich though. I would’ve thought that Star Trek’s chronologically first Red Shirt would’ve been built into the script to be something that was a deep wake up call, something that would shake them out of their hyper gung-ho-ness and get them to listen to T’Pol a little. The first death on a deep space exploration mission one would think would be pretty serious and handled as such. Well at least they do it right come Season 3.
Oh the Florida Man headline, fantastic.
Why were they acting like this was the first explorable planet they’ve found on their entire mission? There was the planet they picked up the slug on, then the planet where they dropped the slug off, both with enough in the way of ecosystems to support slug life, and for humanoids to walk around without environmental suits apparently. Is it because this one had greener trees? Some vertebrates?
Alternative Florida Man: “Florida Man challenges Flower Power camping trip”.
I actually liked this episode a bit; not especially impressive (and Captain Archer really comes across as the political placement at the top of this episode), but I honestly enjoyed the sense of “Gee whiz, we’re on ANOTHER PLANET” enthusiasm, that rather entertaining Starfleet camp out, T’Pol being a pillar of professionalism in a swamp of sloppy thinking, as well as Hoshi being the unsung hero of this episode (Tell me she didn’t help Captain Archer Work Work out this particular solution and I must call thee fibber!) and, it has to be said, the little “This is STAR TREK” mementos where people have to keep checking to confirm that, NO, there do not appear to be living rock people on this planet.
It’s not a possibility Starfleet can afford to dismiss out of hand, after all!
I completely agree with the tone of this review. CLB sagely points out that this iteration of Trek isn’t the first in which what would seem like normal safety protocols like advance probes, environmental suits and seat belts were simply ignored, but here they actually were not ignored. T’Pol pointed them out and she was smugly rebuffed. This episode is but one of many that could be exhibit A to support my disdain for Archer as a captain. He seems to go out of his way to publicly decline, almost mockingly so, the advice of his first officer, who has a lot more experience visiting strange planets that he does.
After t’pol points out the protocol that the Vulcans would typically employ in this circunstance, Archer pulls her aside “I’d like you to put together the survey team. I assume that’s not a violation of protocol?” Was the snark really necessary? And as you said krad, after this mission he should have got down on his knees in front of her and apologized. But Archer doesn’t roll that way. He just bumbles his way into the next avoidable crisis, saved by the writers every time. ;)
To me, it was beyond weird that they let the dog be on the first shuttle. Archer seems to consider this mission as his own personal pleasure cruise.
An episode that would have had more of impact if Trek hadn’t had similar outings previously as KRAD says.
Like previous comments I appreciate the approach of avoiding red shirts but I do think they should have had Novakovich die and show the impact for the crew – it really would have shown the transporter as being a more primitive, untested and dangerous technology and also give some consequence to the inexperienced decisions being made on the first deep space voyage.
As much as showing continual death and danger would have created too dark a show, it stretched credibility for me that the crew went through two seasons and numerous dicey situations and we didn’t see a single loss.
Christopher: Two wrongs don’t make a right, and just because they did it stupidly in shows that aired 35 years previous doesn’t mean they should perpetuate the main characters being stupid. It’s one of a thousand reasons why doing a prequel was a fraught choice, and the world would’ve been a better place if they’d just moved the story forward……..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This feels like it should have been the second episode. They would have been excited after pulling off a rescue mission and staging what seems to them to have been a successful first contact. A “full warp ahead, and damn the spatial torpedoes” attitude would have been understandable under those circumstances. Then the events of this episode could have been a solid reality check to the ship’s complement that maybe they don’t have a full grasp of the situation.
@10 KRAD:
Agree agree agree! Or, if they were going to do a prequel, they should have (gasp) abandoned devotion to continuity. It was 30-odd years later, the show was willing to update some things about technology and how it would look even though it contradicted the now-primitive-looking tech on TOS, they should have been willing to do the same with many other things, with all of the thinking we’ve done in the meantime about how to encounter alien ecosystems being near the top of the list. If you can’t do that, you’re just locking yourself into making a show that sounds and feels like one that was produced in the late 1960’s, and ENT did far too much of that. It would have been much better to accept a discontinuity in behavior between characters on ENT and TOS.
S
I think we have to come to grips with the fact that Archer is a specist that learns how to not be a specist as the show goes on. He seems to specifically ignore or refute the suggestions of T’Pol simply because she’s Vulcan and he is prejudiced because of perceived slights against his father. If T’Pol suggested orange juice, he would drink apple just to spite her. Thankfully he evolves as the show progresses, both as a captain and as a human being.
That image of Porthos bounding happily across the meadow is really the only memorable scene from this episode.
@13. I generally agree with this. It’s interesting at the end of Broken Bow, Archer talks about putting his preconceptions about Vulcans behind him as a pretense for asking T’pol to stay on the Enterprise. But he’s such a weasel about it he won’t even make the request through channels himself. He has her do it. Then he spends a good part of the first season trying to make her regret it, LOL
“Challenge your preconceptions or they’ll challenge you.”
The message of this one is a little muddled. The crew roll their eyes at T’Pol recommending a week of detailed analysis of the planet before letting anyone set foot on it, but if they’d done that, they might have avoided a situation that put five crewmembers’ lives at risk. But if they only ever visited planets they knew were completely safe, then there wouldn’t be much of a show. So despite this experience, they tend to carry on rushing in where angels fear to tread in later episodes. That’s not only necessary to tie in with how Starfleet has always been portrayed, it’s necessary to make this show work.
Archer seems to have moved on from being automatically confrontational towards T’Pol to simply enjoying winding her up. I’d say that’s progress but no-one else seems to agree. But once again they have to come together at the end to deal with a problem… and it resonates more because the problem in this case is a paranoid and delusional Tucker, and the fact Archer doesn’t even consider his old friend’s claim that T’Pol is working against them shows how much he’s come to trust her deep down. And again the solution relies on Sato’s linguistic skills.
Star Trek cliches being avoided: We’re primed to expect at least one, possibly both, of the non-regular members of the landing party to get redshirted, but instead they both survive. They’re perhaps less cyphers than your usual cannon fodder, getting an introductory scene at the top of the episode, although they fade into the background a bit when forced to share screen time with the big seven. We get our first transporter accident to underline that it’s still unproven technology that they don’t want to use except in an emergency, although it does seem to work when it needs to! Since it keeps coming up, I have to say I’m not convinced that sidelining the transporter in either the series or the novels was either necessary or a good idea: There were good narrative reasons for Gene Rodenberry giving his starship a transporter in 1964, and they were still good reasons in 2001. I do appreciate the fact we’re seeing it from the ground upwards and letting the crew get used to it, but I think the attitude towards it bordered on luddism at times. Saying the luddites were right and transporters actually do hurt people just makes it worse.
To be honest, it feels as though Archer and Phlox play the fact that Navakovich might die with such weight that it’s hard to see why the show would have not given equal weight if he did die. (Let’s be honest, is the actual first crew death in Season 3 given any more prominence than Navakovich’s would or could have been?)
Interesting that Mayweather seems to feel comfortable calling the more senior Tucker “Trip”. First of three appearances for Crewman Cutler. Tucker says there’s 82 people on Enterprise, which is slightly less than the figure in later episodes. He seems to think fondly of his old Vulcan teacher, given that he hallucinates him giving him advice on the surface. Bit odd that a five-man team had a case of four phase pistols: It’s lucky Novakovich ran off! A first hint of Archer’s fondness for water polo. T’Pol knocks Mayweather out with a neck pinch but decides against telling him next morning. There’s a nice stirring use of the end music when the shuttlepod arrives to collect the landing party at the end.
@16/cap-mjb: “There were good narrative reasons for Gene Rodenberry giving his starship a transporter in 1964, and they were still good reasons in 2001.”
Not really. The main reason for the transporter was logistical, not narrative — it was cheaper than filming miniature sequences of a ship landing on different planets. Narratively, the transporter probably creates more problems than it solves. It’s so powerful that you constantly have to contrive excuses for why it can’t extricate a landing party from danger — the ship is under attack so it can’t drop the shields, or the crew had their communicators taken, or there’s interference from the unobtainium in the rock strata, or someone just happened to blast the transporter circuits, or whatever. And it has so many amazing potentials that have to be either handwaved away or just ignored. If it can de-age people in two or three episodes, why can’t it keep people young forever? Why do you need surgery when you can just edit someone’s transporter pattern to make them whole again? Why do you need phasers when a transporter is an unstoppable disintegrator beam that can even operate through walls?
No — from a strictly narrative standpoint, Trek would’ve probably been better off without transporters.
“Saying the luddites were right and transporters actually do hurt people just makes it worse.”
No, it’s realistic. As I said, new technologies often have unforeseen dangers and have to be refined. How many people were poisoned by leaded gasoline fumes before the problem was recognized (or rather, before the auto industry’s cover-up of the problem was defeated) and cars were made safer? How many factory workers got radiation poisoning from making radium-based glow-in-the-dark watch faces? It’s not Luddism to recognize real dangers that need to be corrected. It’s responsible progress.
If you’re going to do a prequel about the growing pains of the things we know, it’s simplistic to have everything work perfectly from the get-go. Real history is full of mistakes and hard lessons, and fiction should be too.
“To be honest, it feels as though Archer and Phlox play the fact that Navakovich might die with such weight that it’s hard to see why the show would have not given equal weight if he did die.”
I always had the impression that he did die in the episode as filmed and they adjusted it in post-production with looped dialogue, which would explain why they performed it with such gravitas. Memory Alpha says the revision came in the script phase, though.
I think the issue was that the episode left no room for reactions/mourning after he died, that it was pretty quickly set aside in favor of other matters. In season 3, they took the time to show that, the crew coping with the aftermath of losing one of their own.
@17/CLB: Certainly there was a logistical element to it. But having the transporter also cuts out the need to fill screentime with characters travelling to and from the ship if they just push the button and they’re there. Yes, you then have to find a way for them to not use it when they need to, but if it’s done well, then that’s no different from the need to separate them from their shuttle to keep them on the planet. (See the early episodes of Doctor Who, where nearly every story has to have the TARDIS either disabled or inaccessible to stop the heroes just getting in and leaving.) It did become a bit of a problem in later iterations when the transporter began to be used as a cure for the problem of the week rather than simply a way of getting from A to B, leading to the question “Why don’t they do that all the time?”. But that doesn’t mean the original idea was bad.
I think the problem is that a transporter that’s a public health risk doesn’t really feel like a Star Trek idea, in the same way that “Force of Nature” announcing warp travel was destroying space never felt like a Star Trek idea (and was quietly forgotten once TNG finished). Maybe it would make sense in “our” world but Star Trek has always been an idealistic, optimistic future where things are better: Where something wouldn’t be rushed into service before it had been checked out and where big business wouldn’t ignore health and safety issues in favour of profit. I get the point that it’s a prequel and that gives you the opportunity to see how we got to that point. But when the show’s put a working, certified safe transporter on the ship (and shows that it’s working and safe in the first episode), you can’t really backtrack on that.
“I always had the impression that he did die in the episode as filmed and they adjusted it in post-production with looped dialogue, which would explain why they performed it with such gravitas.”
Yes, I’ve heard you say that in the past so I was looking out for it, but there’s too many on-camera references to him still being alive for that to have happened. Script rewrites would make sense of the mood whiplash that results: We abruptly go from Archer and Phlox devastated that he’s probably going to die, to Archer cheerily telling the landing party that he’s probably going to live in a slightly schizophrenic speech, and then being casually told “Yeah, he’s alive” at the end. It’s hard to see what would have been so bad about the first revision. Archer puts the grief to aside to focus on the four people he can still save, and then there’s room for a moment of reflection on the cost of the mission at the end.
Really, how different would that be from the death of Crewman Fuller in “Anomaly”? That’s really all that happens there: Archer and Phlox look upset over the body in Sickbay, then there’s a couple of offhand references to it later in the episode. Unlike Navakovich, who was a character we actually got to know, we don’t even see him alive. It’s true that the casualties from “Azati Prime”/“Damage” later in the season are given weight and still weigh heavily on the rest of the crew two or three episodes later, but again, they’re people that the characters might have known but we didn’t, so they don’t have the same impact as when Degra, Hawkins and Major Hayes die later in the season. Maybe it was felt it was a bit early to start “redshirting” crew, but to be honest, Navakovich dying here would probably have had more impact than the eventual first crew deaths.
@18/cap-mjb: “But having the transporter also cuts out the need to fill screentime with characters travelling to and from the ship if they just push the button and they’re there.”
Countless other shows have managed just fine without having the ability to teleport their characters to a location. We don’t need to see the cops driving to the crime scene every week. We can just cut to the part where they’re already there. And plenty of sci-fi shows have used the same principle with surface-to-orbit shuttles. A shot of a shuttlecraft touching down and opening its doors doesn’t have to take significantly more time than a shot of a landing party beaming in. (TOS’s creators figured it would be too expensive to film different miniature shots of a ship landing on different planetscapes every week. Some shows like Space Academy avoided this by having the camera look straight up at the ship as it descended, so you couldn’t see the landscape.)
Also, how many Trek episodes had people having a conversation in the turbolift on the way to the transporter room? You could have that same conversation in a shuttle or landing craft instead. Same amount of time either way.
“Yes, you then have to find a way for them to not use it when they need to, but if it’s done well, then that’s no different from the need to separate them from their shuttle to keep them on the planet.”
It’s very different. The shuttle is in a specific place that they’d have to get back to. They might have hiked hours away from it, or be locked in a cell. But a transporter is theoretically able to retrieve them instantly from any location, even indoors, so you have to handwave a lot more to justify not being able to use it.
“But that doesn’t mean the original idea was bad.”
That wasn’t my point. My point was that it was created more for logistical and budgetary reasons than strictly narrative ones. In Gene Roddenberry’s own words, from The Making of Star Trek, pp. 43-4:
So Roddenberry agrees with you about the pacing — and I think he’s being oversimplistic, as I said — but he also states clearly that they were “forced” into it by strictly budgetary considerations, and any narrative benefits were a lucky aftereffect. I also think he’s trying to put a positive spin on it, glossing over the many narrative drawbacks that come with it. Neither approach is fundamentally superior; each has its own pluses and minuses, as most things do. But in this case, it was money that was the determining factor.
“Where something wouldn’t be rushed into service before it had been checked out and where big business wouldn’t ignore health and safety issues in favour of profit.”
That’s twisting it. I never said anything of the sort. Even when a new technology is introduced as responsibly and carefully as possible, you can’t always anticipate every problem, because nobody can ever know everything. In my novels, for instance, the problem that’s discovered with the transporter is a gradual, cumulative effect that only emerges after years of heavy use, and then only occasionally, so it would’ve been impossible for even the most conscientious safety engineers to discover it until personnel transporters had been in regular use for more than a decade.
Optimistic storytelling does not mean that nothing ever goes wrong. It means that when things do go wrong, it’s not because of personal pettiness or greed, and that people respond to it in the most responsible way — in this case, suspending regular transporter use until it can be redesigned to be safer (which, of course, we know full well that it eventually is).
“Yes, I’ve heard you say that in the past so I was looking out for it, but there’s too many on-camera references to him still being alive for that to have happened.”
Do we actually see the speakers’ mouths moving on camera when they say it? New dialogue is often snuck in by cutting away to a shot of the listener.
You know, while we discuss the merits and demerits of showing Transporter technology in it’s infancy we’re missing the really important question – would having native plant life capable of making Humans trip the light fantastic be a plus or a minus in the eyes of the first settlers on Archer IV?
@8. fullyfunctional: I’m not saying T’Pol was hoping to use Porthos the way miners used a canary, but wouldn’t it be rather amusing to pretend she was? (On a much more serious note, I’d suggest that a key part of the reason Captain Archer is so keen to land on this particular planet is to let his Best Friend stretch his legs after a long, trying time spent being a Good Boy in a plus-sized tin can; not the most sensible motivation, but it’s hard to deny it’s potency in the mind of a Dog Person).
@11. TheresaW: There has been sound reflections throughout these comments, but this might well be the shrewdest of them all – my compliments on having shared it. (-:
@13. JasonD: ENTERRISE does seem to have been one long learning curve for Captain John – quite appropriate, really, though that curve might have been even longer and less sharply defined than it might have been.
@14. bgsu98: I’d argue that the scene where a previously-raving crewman shows up on the transporter pad with unwanted extras embedded in his skin was pretty darned memorable (and I’m even willing to go to the mat for that camp-out scene, especially the campfire yarn), but I definitely agree that seeing Porthos have a field day has to rank with the most endearing moments of “Wagon Train to the STARS!” enthusiasm in the series.
Also, I actually enjoyed that scene with the Expedition Selfie (You just know that picture will breed some memes, given the context – I’d suggest “Crew members making a rookie mistake … and T’Pol of Vulcan”).
…
Now I get the mental image of the Archer IV tourist agency marketing the Site of Cultural Significance in which this episode climaxes as “The Cave of Shots”.
The camera is on Mayweather when he asks how Novakovich is doing, and then on T’Pol clearly saying the words, “The captain says he’s going to be fine.” This was a script change, not a last-minute post-production change.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@21/krad: Okay, thanks. That clears that up. Although it does make it odd that they play it so gravely.
p.s. Did ENTERPRISE ever do an Officer Exchange Program episode where we see a Human officer serve on a Vulcan vessel? It strikes me that an episode where NX-01 suddenly had two Vulcans serving on board and a Vulcan ship was left thoroughly bemused by the fact their exchange officer was someone like Reed or Sato* would have some potential as a comedy, possibly even a comedy of manners.
Especially if the Vulcan officer is a much, much more disruptive element.
*Who could definitely be trusted to get the work done with no McCoy-isms, making it even funnier when elements in the Vulcan crew start generating a storm in a teacup because their resident Human is being so … atypical; For a more conventionally dramatic episode, using Hoshi Sato makes more sense (because the everyday fears and sense of being out of her comfort zone underlying her ability to get the job done make an interestingly subtle root cause for some disquiet amongst the Vulcan crew**); on the other hand, making Reed the focus is especially tempting from the perspective of somebody writing a more comedic story (because then the episode could finally settle the age-old question “When Vulcan Reserve meets the Stiff Upper Lip, which cracks first?”).
**It has just occurred to me that the Vulcan Interstellar Fleet would almost certainly have employed Ship’s Counsellors, given the cultural imperative to surmount and master their passions is all the more important when a ship-full of tactile telepaths are going to be cramped together for months and years at a time (most often a very long way from Home and very frequently exposed to disruptive elements).
With this notion in mind, an officer who just lives with the occasionally bubbling up of “What the heck am I doing out here?” might act as the catalyst in a saturated solution, even if they really just want to keep their head down and get on with business.
This episode (and much more in Enterprise) reminds me of this:
The Answer to Why Humans Are So Central in Star Trek | Tor.com
@19 and @21: The camera is also on Phlox when he says “I’ve injected him with inoprovalene but I think it may be too late” (emphasis mine) and on Archer when he says “He’s responding to medication”.
Perfectly average and bland. Not very memorable. Porthos is cute. Nice to see Kellie Waymire’s debut as Cutler here. It’s too bad she wasn’t used at all in the second season or even part of the third season already filmed prior to her untimely death.
I do like the visual aesthetic of Archer’s quarters feeling like a cramped cabin in a submarine. It creates such a dramatic contrast when compared to the relatively huge space of Picard’s quarters on the Enterprise-D or for that matter, even compared against the size of the junior officers’ quarters on the latter ship.
I have to say that the only aesthetic quibble I have with ENTERPRISE is that Starfleet lacks a really dressy dress uniform – I came to Space Opera through a fondness for the Napoleonic Era (via Honor Harrington), I need a little Costume Porn in the dress uniform department!
Star Trek’s morally repugnant redshirt tendency? Are you kidding me? People dying in a TV show is morally repugnant? Why? Don’t you think you are taking it much too far? I certainly do.
@30/Edward: What’s objectionable is treating death as a casual plot beat that the other characters just shrug off. That’s what the word “redshirt” implies — not just characters being killed, but characters being treated as cannon fodder whose deaths are incidental and unimportant.
@30 It isn’t so much the tendency for people to die as it is the tendency for none of the other characters to give a shit that people find repugnant.
Personally I was disappointed to see the transporter this early in the ST timeline. Now if they just use it for cargo…
Edward: If you click on the link that came with that declaration, you’ll see my lengthy rant on the subject (which I originally wrote as part of my rewatch of DS9‘s “The Ship”), but the short version is, as Christopher and wildfyrewarning said, what’s morally repugnant is the tendency for the characters’ response to those deaths to vary depending on the billing of the actor playing the part.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The one thing that baffles me is that Archer goes with the away team, brings Porthos for a piss, and then goes back to the ship, leaving the ‘kids’ to go camping for the night. Why would Archer stay on the ship? Why not stay and explore? It’s what he signed up for, right? It’s not as if Starfleet was even remotely close to establishing safety regulations forbidding captains from beaming down on unknown planets. The only reason they keep him off the story is to allow the writers the freedom to explore the T’Pol/Trip tension without getting hampered by the third member of the trio.
I don’t like it as much as Fight or Flight. Parts of it do feel stale – a feeling of been there, done that.
But thankfully it still has its moments. Yes, it’s been done plenty of times before, but we’re still dealing with a crew that’s never spent any time out in deep space. Of course they’re going to make the stupidest mistakes this early on. And any time an episode focuses on Mayweather telling a ghost story is always a plus. Montgomery was sorely underused throughout the show. And Livingston, as usual, makes the bad weather a character of its own right. And any episode that makes Trip look this stupid is usually beneficial for T’Pol. Once again, she’s the voice of reason and by far the best, most competent officer, and still able to save the day.
No redshirts was a sound policy (I didn’t know Bakula enforced that; good choice), and I adored the low-key introduction of Cutler – one of my favorite secondary characters on any Trek show. I didn’t know of Waymire’s passing until a couple of years ago. Really sad. I wish it had been otherwise. I recall Rick Berman once said they had plans to bring back Cutler had Waymire not passed. It would have been fascinating to see her dealing with the Xindi arc, especially on a psychological level. As it is, the only secondary shipboard characters during that period were the MACOs.
@35. Eduardo S H Jencarelli: I’d suggest that Captain Archer’s decision to pop back up to the ship after a fairly brief sojourn on the planet’s surface makes a lot of sense – as a sign that the character is fairly Gung Ho, but not completely irresponsible (hence his willingness to pop down without exhaustive reconnaissance, but not to leave the ship without her Captain for a seriously long stretch of time).
In fact, I would be surprised if it wasn’t Captain Archer’s decision to return to NX-01 that persuaded the Chief Engineer that he could get away with spending a night on the New World (Since the ship would clearly not be left without a senior officer on board).
Eduardo: The original plan was for everyone to go back. T’Pol asked to keep Cutler and Novakovich for marsupial observation, and then Tucker volunteered to stay and go camping with Mayweather. For Archer to stay on the planet also leaves Enterprise without its three seniormost officers when they’re all originally scheduled to be on board, which is not very responsible. Also, Archer could have had other duties on board that needed to be accomplished, which he couldn’t fob off on his first officer while he stayed on the planet because his first officer was also down there.
Plus Porthos was probably tuckered out and needed to be back in his puppy bed……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@36/ED @37/Krad: The reason I also bring this issue up is because this pretty much happened all the time in TOS. How many times did the Enterprise landing party consist of Kirk/Spock/McCoy, leaving the ship with Scotty/Sulu as backup command on the ship?
It didn’t make sense back then, but it would make much more sense on this show to have Archer sharing both the experience and danger involved, given it’s Starfleet’s first ever deep space mission. I expect mistakes and questionable choices from them.
Now granted, Archer does tend to step back and let the crew take the lead in a lot of missions throughout these early seasons, taking more of a backseat approach. There’s definitely a pattern. But it still feels as if this particular episode was visibly staged to put Trip and T’Pol at odds with each other in a more private setting – and Archer was purposefully left out to let their tension shine without interruption.
@38/Eduardo: Obviously, the episode wants to have T’Pol and Trip down on the planet without Archer there to play referee (at least not in person), but that doesn’t mean it’s a strange decision on Archer’s part. He went down to the planet with them and shared the experience, but he’s not irresponsible enough to stick around for another ten hours (or whatever) just so he can goof off around a campfire when there’s a ship to run and about 80 other crew that might need his attention. They weren’t expecting anything of note to happen.
This episode should show how inexperienced folks are, but overshot the mark and ended up showing how dumb everyone is.
Yeah, it’s standard shit-goes-wrong, but the threat is interesting, and I like how the events play into the ghost story (which I also enjoyed). I think it’s an interesting payoff to the mystery that provides a skewing of the idea of finding new life — which they’re all so eager to do.
To be fair, no one on Trek takes appropriate precautions when exploring a new world. From the lack of PPE to just going around sticking their noses in things with just a few scans, it’s a stupidity shared across all Trek (witness the engineer in “Naked Time” who touches a surface, then his nose under his “protective hood”, as well as taking off his glove to reach under a console before absorbing an alien pathogen). The only real advancement in Trek stupidity here was letting a dog run wild on the planet.
I keep wishing Bakula away but it doesn’t happen. However, I am getting better at hitting fast-forward before the music starts.