“Stratagem”
Written by Terry Matalas and Mike Sussman
Directed by Mike Vejar
Season 3, Episode 14
Production episode 066
Original air date: February 4, 2004
Date: December 12, 2153
Captain’s star log. Degra wakes up in an unfamiliar shuttlecraft, looking bedraggled and with much longer hair. In the cockpit is Archer, who also has much longer hair. Archer says that they just escaped from a Xindi prison, where they’d been for the last three years. Degra is, to say the least, confused.
Archer explains that they were cellmates. After the Xindi weapon Degra created was successful, Archer was taken prisoner, the Enterprise destroyed. But after Earth was destroyed, the old Xindi rivalries came back out again, and the Insectoids successfully conquered the other Xindi races. Degra was also imprisoned, and the Insectoids thought it’d be hilarious to put Degra and Archer in the same cell. At first they tried to kill each other—Archer points to a scar that is from the first time they fought—but eventually they came to a rapprochement.
After showing Degra their matching prison tattoos, Archer hypothesizes that Degra’s amnesia is due to the bloodworm the Insectoids put inside him for interrogation purposes. It sometimes has that side effect. The bloodworm is still in Degra’s arm, and Archer removes it at the Xindi’s request.
They manage to escape an Insectoid attack and work together to fix a coolant leak. Archer has nowhere to go—his ship and homeplanet are long gone—but they can get Degra to his family. He says they’re at a planet orbiting a red giant, but he doesn’t think they should go there yet, not until they’re sure they’re not being followed.
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Some Desperate Glory
After they settle down for the night, Archer uses a hypospray on Degra and then leaves the shuttle—
—which turns out to be inside Enterprise. It’s not three years later. A flashback informs us that three days earlier, Enterprise returned to the test site from last episode and found Degra’s ship. They incapacitate it and take Degra and his two crew prisoner. The prisoners aren’t talking, and Degra ordered all data deleted from his ship’s computer before the Enterprise crew boarded. Sato manages to retrieve a few things, including a letter from Degra to his family.
Phlox says that, based on his examination of Xindi brain chemistry from the various Xindi he’s been able to examine (including the three prisoners), he can erase their short-term memory. This prompts a notion in Archer. Tucker builds a flight simulator around a modified shuttlepod, Phlox stimulates the hair growth of both Archer and Degra, creates the tattoos, and injects a Regulan bloodworm (which is harmless) into Degra. The MACOs provide a subcutaneous communicator so they can talk to Archer without Degra knowing. T’Pol helps Archer create a backstory for the pair of them, based on what they know about the Xindi.
They also have to leave the test site area, as the residual radiation from the weapons test is starting to affect Enterprise’s systems.
Mayweather jostles the shuttle around when the sedative wears off on Degra, and Archer tells him that they’re flying through an anomaly. The shuttle they “stole” isn’t lined with trellium-D, so they’re vulnerable to the anomalies. They’re stuck in place, as they can’t risk moving forward with this many anomalies around. This convinces Degra to send out a distress call.
Reed reports to T’Pol that there’s a Xindi ship on approach, about six hours away. Given that the Xindi have superior sensors, T’Pol orders Reed to take them back into the radiation-filled test site area.
Sato responds to Degra’s distress call, disguising her voice as that of Thalen, one of the other prisoners, saying that he’s safe on Azati Prime. (One of Degra’s letters to his family mentioned that he visited there recently.) Degra asks if his wife is still there, and Sato says yes. The communication line goes dead before Degra can ask any further questions, but Degra inputs the coordinates for Azati Prime into the navigation computer—and encrypts them, as he still doesn’t entirely trust Archer.
However, T’Pol and Sato decrypt the coordinates and find that Azati Prime is a) in orbit of a red giant, so is likely the right spot (especially since Degra went to the trouble of encrypting) and b) three weeks away at maximum warp, so they’d better be damn sure it’s the right place.
The radiation in the test site messes with the simulator, and the image outside the window flickers. Degra sees this, and starts to quiz Archer, asking the names of his children. Sato feeds him that from the letter home, but then Degra asks which one is older. He hesitates—even though he’s got a 50-50 shot at guessing right—and that’s enough for Degra. Luckily, T’Pol and Sato are watching on a security camera and they’ve already warned Archer that Degra is about to attack him with a knife.
They put Degra back in the brig. They can’t do another simulation, not with that Xindi ship looking for them (and which will be searching for Degra once they discover he’s not there), and Tucker hasn’t been able to dope out the Xindi vortex technology. Archer asks for all his data on it.
We cut to Archer ordering T’Pol to engage. The ship starts to shake a lot. Archer goes to the brig and brings Degra and Thalen to Tucker. Archer says that they’ve adapted the vortex technology to their engines, but something’s gone wrong and Tucker needs help stabilizing it. Degra orders Thalen to do nothing. But then the ship stops shaking, and Tucker checks his console, discovering that Mayweather inverted the warp field, and that did the trick.
Archer orders Thalen taken back to the brig, while he brings Degra to the bridge. Azati Prime is on the viewscreen, to Degra’s shock and horror. He cries out that Enterprise will never get at the weapon, as they’ll never get past the planetary defenses.
That’s all Archer needs. He switches the viewer back to what’s actually out the window: the test site. They never left, Mayweather just shook the ship and they put an image of Azati Prime (presumably from the reconstructed Xindi database) on the screen.
They do the memory-wipe thing on all three Xindi and put them on Degra’s ship, faking a plasma leak to explain their falling unconscious. Then they set course for Azati Prime, leaving Degra to be found by his fellow Xindi.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently the Xindi subspace vortices use “some kind of phase deflector pulse,” whatever that means.
The gazelle speech. Archer does a very good job of pretending to be Degra’s comrade in arms after a three-year prison bit. He only betrays how much he dislikes Degra after the jig is up.
I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations. T’Pol masterfully runs the deception from the command center.
Florida Man. Florida Man Builds Awesome Flight Simulator Out Of Spare Parts.
Optimism, Captain! Phlox is able to erase short-term memories of Xindi Primates because if he couldn’t the plot wouldn’t work.
Better get MACO. The MACOs use subcutaneous communicators, one of which Archer borrows for the deception. You gotta wonder why everyone doesn’t use those…
I’ve got faith…
“You gave us the coordinates of a red giant!”
“I gave you what you thought you wanted.”
“I guess I’ll just have to wipe your memory clean again, go back into the simulator, and start this whole thing over.”
“I doubt there’s time for that. We both know my people are searching for me.”
“I think you didn’t figure it out until after the malfunction—I’d be willing to bet those coordinates are real.”
“Then I suggest you proceed there at maximum warp.”
–Archer trying to figure out if Degra gave the right coordinates for Azati Prime, and Degra messing with his head.
Welcome aboard. Only two guests in this one, both recurring characters last seen in “Proving Ground” in the previous episode: Randy Oglesby as Degra and Josh Drenner as Thalen. Oglesby will be back in “Azati Prime,” as will the character of Thalen, who will be played in that episode by Christopher Goodman.
Trivial matters: This episode takes place very shortly after “Proving Ground,” with Enterprise and Degra both returning to the test site of the weapon from that episode. Archer shares one of the bottles of Andorian ale Shran gave him in that episode with Degra on the shuttle. Degra discusses watching the prototype weapons test in “The Expanse.”
Regulan bloodworms were first referenced in the original series’ “The Trouble with Tribbles,” written by David Gerrold. The bloodworms have been used by Phlox for medicinal purposes in previous Enterprise episodes. In his TNG script “Blood and Fire,” which was never produced as a TNG episode, Gerrold had the creatures be disease carriers. (The script was rewritten, with Gerrold’s blessing, as an original series story by Carlos Pedraza for the fan film series Star Trek: New Voyages.)
This is the second story co-written by Terry Matalas, at the time a production assistant, who has most recently been the show-runner of seasons two and three of Picard.
It’s been a long road… “Thanks for your help.” My first instinct—and likely many people’s—upon seeing the opening of this episode was, “Really? Again?” We’d already done the jump-ahead-into-an-alternate-future-where-the-good-guys-lost scenario in “Twilight.” And we know Earth isn’t really going to be destroyed, because we’ve seen it in every other Trek production prior to this (and all the ones since, for that matter).
But they didn’t do that. Instead, they pulled a beautiful Mission: Impossible-style fakeout. The episode is perfectly structured, from the viewers initially going along with Degra in their confusion and belief that three years have passed, then having Archer (and his comedy wig) step out of the simulator.
There are so many things I love about this episode, and not just because I’m a fan of the M:I TV series (among other things, Leonard Nimoy’s landing spot after Trek was cancelled, starring on that show as Paris for two seasons). I like that the crew get information, not by threatening to throw people out of an airlock, but by using actual humane interrogation techniques. (Okay, you can argue that wiping out someone’s short-term memory isn’t that humane…) Yes, it involves trickery, but as anyone who does interrogations for a living can tell you, trickery is a very important part of a good interrogation, especially when the person you’re questioning is hostile.
The episode also proves to be an important step forward for both Archer and Degra, as each learns that the other is a person, not just an abstraction. To Degra, humans are just the people they were told will wipe them out. To Archer, the Xindi are the bastards who killed seven million people. But by the end of this episode, they’ve both come to know each other, and now they know each other as people rather than enemies. Credit to Scott Bakula and especially Randy Oglesby, who really sell the characters’ tentative, hesitant, inconsistent steps toward understanding.
Every war throughout history has ended when people stop fighting and sit down and talk to each other. This is the first time—well, second, really, following “The Shipment”—that Xindi and human have sat down and talked to each other, and for all that it’s part of a deception, it’s a critical component to the possibility of peace.
What really makes the episode shine for me is that second fakeout at the end. Because it’s just like Star Trek to go for a technobabble problem at the climax, and it turns out to be another clever trick on Degra.
Contrary to the tiresome macho expectations of “The Expanse,” our heroes are being smart and proactive and clever and not violent assholes who are doing, as Archer said, “whatever it takes.” I particularly like that all our regulars have a role in the deception, even the oft-neglected Mayweather, whose piloting skills are critical to making the both simulations convincing, as well as the not-quite-as-neglected Sato, whose skills are equally critical.
Just an excellent episode that puts a face on the enemy and allows our heroes to be heroes again.
Warp factor rating: 10
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author guest at HELIOsphere 2023 this coming weekend in Piscataway, New Jersey. Check out his schedule here.
“Stratagem” is a pretty good one, excellent for adding nuance to the Xindi and making Degra a sympathetic character. The title scheme is pretty fun, and I like it that they don’t immediately reveal what’s really going on, though I think I guessed in advance that it was a ploy (maybe because we didn’t get any exterior shots of the ship they were in).
The “make someone think it’s years in the future so their information no longer needs to be secret” interrogation tactic is indeed one that’s been used in Mission: Impossible at least a couple of times, and in other works of fiction too, including TNG: “Future Imperfect,” and the 1988 TOS novel Timetrap by David Dvorkin — which came out early in TNG’s run and had Kirk believe he’d been flung a century into the future when Klingons and the Federation were at peace, so that it faked out the audience into thinking it might be a TNG crossover.
Nice! This is one I don’t remember seeing. Gonna check it out. Thanks for the review.
FYI, there’s an excellent movie from 1964 called 36 Hours that uses this trick. James Garner plays an intelligence agent who wakes up from a coma or something at an American military base in Europe and the people there want to get a firsthand account about his role just before the D-Day invasion — strictly for the historical record, of course. Well, you can imagine who’s really behind it, right?
Anyway, worth a watch if you can find it.
I agree that this is a first-rate episode and especially interesting as a reminder that Doctor Phlox can be SCARY (“Memory wiped, cosmetics altered and infested with leeches from space as ordered Captain”), not to mention another strong indication that Jonathan Archer could have been a very, very scary man if he weren’t so busy being Starfleet Captain 1.0 (This gaslighting a Prisoner of War into giving up valuable intelligence strikes me as the sort of scheme more appropriate to STAR TREK villains, which makes me rather relieved it failed and had to be replaced by a more classic “Gotcha” moment improvised on the fly).
This is, honestly, a feature rather than a bug – since it helps sell the fact that (A) This is most definitely pre Federation and (B) The Federation didn’t just happen – there was potential for a much darker path and it’s a d*** good thing Humanity chose not to walk it.
A neat episode, but I would not rate it higher than Proving Ground.The second I-know-you-know-I-know episode in a row.
A little point, Archer and Degra get to know each other, and then Archer brainwipes the experience right out of Degra. So Archer might have learned something, Degra hasn’t.
And I wonder why the Enterprise crew did put the Xindi back into their ship, brainwipe or no brainwipe.To conceal the fact that they did capture and interrogate them? Couldn’t that be be accomplished by making them disappear? Space is big, and a missing ship in such a dangerous system is hardly evidence of a security breach. The moon still looks like someone took a bite out of it, it should re-form as a sphere soon (and violently …).
@1. ChristopherLBennett: The mid to late24th Century as imagined by the late 23rd? Fascinating.
Seriously, the future as imagined by our ancestors (I believe such superseded speculations are known as “paleofutures” in some corners of the internet) are quite intriguing – I stumbled onto a book called THE REIGN OF KING GEORGE VI that was written in AD 1763 (When George IV was only a year old, more or less) and it was downright entertaining to read this version of the early Twentieth Century (Complete with ships of the line under sail, the British conquest of France and His Majesty’s loyal province of Massachusetts, amongst other strange vistas) and wonder what all this looked like in the imagination of the author.
DASH IT ALL, why must I be cursed with a tragic lack of the Absolute Power and/or Immense Wealth to command legions of artists to execute such commissions at my whim?
Oh yes: God loves all his children and knows that being a God Emperor wouldn’t be good for my soul.
@ed in 4,
good point, where did his vaunted medical ethics go? Degra hardly consented to that brainwipe. In earlier episodes, Phlox was much more insistent to play by his code, come hell or high water.
@5. o.m. Captain Archer knows Degra and has some insight into how he thinks – he might prefer to leave the man in play, rather than hand control of the ‘Bigger Boom’ project to someone he does not know and cannot anticipate.
Or, indeed, to someone he’s cannot be confident of outwitting.
This is definitely one of my favourites, and one of the only episodes ever to make me impressed with Archer’s cleverness.
That Terry Matalas guy could have a real future in television ahead of him.
A genuine classic Star Trek episode from Enterprise. It’s clean as a whistle and one that sticks with you. Degra on his path to being one of the best guest characters too. There’s nothing to dislike about this episode.
When it first came on I was wondering if Archer was going to have to lean into the Temporal Cold War angle and send Archer and Degra back in time with knowledge of the future to stop the Xindi weapon or something. I like what it was a whole lot better though.
Degra’s evolution is a large reason as to why the Xindi arc and season 3 as a whole work so well in retrospect. This episode is crucial to putting him on that path. I’d almost forgotten how this episode almost plays like a retread of “Twilight” at first. But we get a beautifully crafted detective story instead. One that indirectly helps to build the bridges between mankind and the Xindi.
Degra’s characterization is not unlike the time spent on many Cardassians on DS9, namely Damar, who grew past the militarism and paranoia and was capable of putting the bottle aside in order to the right thing for Cardassia as well as the whole quadrant. Degra’s journey parallels his in many ways. He only went along with the weapon because of irrational fear. Fear for his home. Fear for his family. Fear instilled by the Sphere Builders. Seeing the two sides come across common ground and begin to peel the lies and fear away go a long way to resolving this arc. Now, having seen mankind up close, he can’t just hide behind that fear. He’s seen people who are just as scared as he is. People who are only trying to prevent more loss. People who have left him alive and unharmed. Trekkian values and storytelling at its finest.
My only quibble is one I’ve brought up before. The implicit racism in making the alien-looking Xindi Insectoids (and Reptilians) yet again the real bogeymen of the alliance, while keeping humanoid Degra as the moderate voice of reason. But that’s a small issue considering the depth of the character and his season-long arc.
Any episode that puts Archer and the crew working this professionally deserves all the praise it gets. Mike Sussman (and Terry Matalas) really made this one work. And anyone who’s watched Babylon 5 knows how good Vejar is at making this type of episode really come alive on the small screen.
Eduardo: Why would you need to have watched Babylon 5 to understand how good a director Mike Vejar is? “Stratagem” was the 29th Trek episode he’d directed between 1988 and 2004 (including some great episodes of DS9 and Voyager), plus he’d directed tons of other genre shows (Lois & Clark, The Sentinel, Seven Days, The X-Files, F/X: The Series).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I really enjoyed this episode even if the premise has been done before. Though I’m not convinced that brain-wiping, operating on, and tattooing a prisoner without their consent is terribly ethical, at least it feels slightly less icky than waterboarding them, which is what was happening to enemy combatants in the real world at the time. As the review mentions, it’s also nice that the whole cast gets in on the ruse.
@13/Krad: I’m not downplaying his prior Trek work at all. Between episodes like VOY’s “Latent Image” and DS9’s “Rocks and Shoals” (also “Empok Nor”), it’s clear most of his Trek episodes are visual delights in the same way a Livingston episode would be. He brings out the creative side out of what could easily be a thankless traffic guard-esque directing job.
But Babylon 5 had an insanely lower budget, and he pulled off visual masterpieces out of thin air at times on that show. Season 2’s “Comes the Inquisitor” is basically a stage play on a dark blackground with some sinister lighting, framing, staging and standout performances. Season 3 had both the CGI-laden space battle episode “Messages from Earth” as well as the quieter character-centric “Late Delivery from Avalon” with some superb cross-cutting between Michael York’s Arthur persona and his actual past trauma (without getting into spoiler territory).
Admittedly, it’s a bit of a shameless B5 plug-in more than anything else. I just think Vejar’s B5 work popped out more compared to Rick Berman-era Trek. And considering the budget differences, that’s saying something.
@5 o.m.
Were the ship and system any other pair of the two, the Xindi Council would probably think just that. However, the ship in question belongs to the guy in charge of engineering your giant planet-busting superweapon, was performing a closer inspection of a recent test site for said weapon, and said test site was known to be found by a Human vessel. Why wouldn’t they send the nearest ship to look for Degra?
“The conflict between our people is over. We both lost.”
As with ‘Twilight’, no-one’s going to think this episode is going to introduce a new status quo with Archer and Degra flying around on their own, Earth destroyed and the rest of the regulars dead. Still, the fact that that episode showed us one “bad future” means, as Keith points out, viewers might be better inclined to take what we’re seeing here at face value, as a possible future that will somehow be prevented. It’s ironic that what Archer briefly suspected was going on in that episode, an elaborate deception to get information, is what’s going on here, with Archer as the one doing the deceiving. I’d forgotten just how far we got into the episode before we found out what was going on, my memory is that it was a lot earlier.
It’s a key episode in many ways, the most notable being putting some much-needed meat onto the character of Degra, who up until now has been a rather flat antagonist. By pretending to already be his friend, Archer brings out a side of Degra who could be his friend. Archer seems genuinely surprised when Degra admits he’s haunted by the number of children killed by his weapon. A lot of what we see here prefigures how their relationship will develop in the latter part of the season. But for the moment, he’s still the enemy and is very quick to snap back to ranting about Xindi superiority once he realises he’s been tricked. So it’s a very satisfying moment when Archer gives him that triumphant look and we realise he’s pulled off a clever trick.
Degra declares Gralik would be executed for sabotaging the kemosite, so it’s a good thing he loses his memory of that! (Worryingly, I think this is the last we ever hear of him…) Archer previously saw Degra from a distance in ‘The Shipment’, which he alludes to here, although he doesn’t seem to realise who he is until Sato finds his name in the ship’s database. I imagine it’s no-one’s surprise that the blood worm is one of Phlox’s pets! (Him being a skilled tattoo artist…bit more surprising.)
A good episode, but not a great one, in my estimation. A bit too tricksey and razzle-dazzle to be believable.
It’s a very entertaining episode but at the risk of being labeled a pansy liberal snowflake, from an ethical point of view I have issues with the manipulation of Degra. Yes I don’t live in an Ivory Tower and I know that in the real world, interrogation can sometimes be uncomfortable and even coercive. And of course those that perpetrate it are always convinced of the righteousness of their cause as justification.
The last refuge of self is the mind, and invading that sanctuary without consent is in my opinion appalling. JMHO
@19. fullyfunctional: I think it helps to imagine this particular plot as a demonstration of the ENTERPRISE era being a very different time to the ORIGINAL SERIES and NEXT GENERATION eras – a point in time where history could conceivably have taken a far darker turn – with Archer’s treatment of Degra (Amongst other incidents) likely fuelling some degree of historical controversy.
It also helps that the plan doesn’t work out in the end, requiring Our Heroes to think up a different and much less invasive (though no less devious) approach.
@20. Well that does make me feel a little better. Thank you 😊
@19, 20 It does occur to me that not only was the Federation on a curve of increasing ethics, the American viewing audience is on one as well. The audiences of the 60s and 70s would have totally accepted the invasiveness, no questions asked. The audiences of to 90s and 00s have some qualms. The audiences of the 20s have some hard questions to ask.
Something to keep in mind: Degra is a confessed murderer of seven million people. He’s a mass-murderer on a scale rarely seen in human history, and those others are considered among the most evil people in that history. More to the point he intends to murder a great many more than that. And his minor bit of self reflection in the shuttle notwithstanding, he isn’t all that put out about it.
Now two wrongs don’t make a right, but the wrong we’re talking about is, frankly, appalling.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@23/krad: But Degra believed he was developing a weapon in necessary self-defense. He was misled into believing that humans were out to annihilate the Xindi, so that the Xindi had to wipe them out first. He’s the analogue of Robert Oppenheimer or Edward Teller on the Manhattan Project — probably closer to Oppenheimer, since Teller was more sanguine about developing bigger and deadlier bombs after the war. Do you consider Oppenheimer one of the most evil people in history?
As I said before, they were all acting out of fear and paranoia – much of it based on the unknown, and the rest of it based on lies and deception by the Sphere Builders.
@24/Christopher: Speaking of Oppenheimer, I’m eager to see his portrayal on the Nolan film later this year, and what exactly would have been going through his mind throughout that period.
@24. ChristopherLBennett: Evil or no, Degra is already a danger to human life and actively working to generate a still greater threat to Humanity – I’m not keen on Captain Archer’s initial approach to getting the information, but cannot fault his willingness to go to extremes when seeking actionable intelligence on a weapon built to shatter his homeworld, human civilisation and our entire species.
For the record I tend to believe that while Degra is not personally malicious or malevolent, he is still responsible for an act of truly horrifying Evil and working to make another possible.
@26/ED: But you could say the same about the scientists on the Manhattan Project. Part of what’s so horrible about war is that there is no good side, that otherwise good people and institutions are forced to do great evil in order to survive.
@ChristopherLBennett: On the one hand war is an undoubtedly hellish impulse that drives all it touches to extremities – on the other hand it’s difficult to accept as a blanket statement that each and every side in each and every war is equally bad (Especially since World War II itself gives us an interesting study in the complexities of wartime alignments – we count the USSR as part of the Allied side, but Stalin opened his Second World War with an attack on Poland – unquestionably a member of the Allies from the start – and by putting his willingness to work with the Third Reich in writing*).
It also bears pointing out that parallels with the Manhattan Project can be overstated, as applied to the Xindi: the latter, after all, were the ones who launched an attack in the style of Pearl Harbor, rather than the ones seeking to end the bloodshed precipitated by such a very nasty surprise (and sustained by a Regime’s refusal to DO THE MATHS – or rather, to accept the logical conclusions of a comparison between the resources available to Japan’s enemies and those available to the land of the rinsing sun).
*Though not in that exact order, if I remember correctly.
@28/ED: “on the other hand it’s difficult to accept as a blanket statement that each and every side in each and every war is equally bad”
I never said anything remotely like that. I said that the very nature of war makes it so that the participants often feel obligated to suspend such moral judgments entirely in the name of necessity, and so they become capable of far worse things than they normally would consider. So there’s a difference between who a person intrinsically is and who they’re forced to become in war. As seen in stories like “In the Pale Moonlight” with Sisko.
In short, if you don’t believe Oppenheimer was a mass-murdering monster, then it’s inconsistent to define Degra as a mass-murdering monster. He’s a scientist who was convinced (by malevolent people who lied to him) that he had no choice but to commit mass murder to save his people. That’s different from someone like Dukat, who committed mass murder in the name of his own power and domination.
@22/gwangung: That’s true, but only up to a point. American audiences in the early to mid 2000s were all to happy to not ask too many questions about some pretty gnarly torture in the furtherance of national security goals. Remember, this show was on the air at the same time as 24, and the guy that saves Season 4 of Enterprise is the same guy that later becomes showrunner on 24.
Heck, it’s not like Enterprise is afraid to have otherwise-sympathetic characters pull the trigger on straight up torturing people with no sci-fi handwaving. Shran does it in practically every other scene he’s in.
I’ve been thinking about Christopher’s Oppenheimer comparison a lot since he made it, but it wasn’t until today that I finally figured out my issue with it.
Degra’s analogue in World War II history isn’t Oppenheimer and the rest of the scientists working in the Manhattan Project. It’s Emperor Hirohito. Because the Manhattan Project was working to develop a weapon by a country that was in a state of war, a war that was being waged all across Europe, North Africa, and the South Pacific. Degra developed a weapon to use preemptively against a people who were perceived as being a threat, which is what Japan did in December 1941 at Pearl Harbor.
The Manhattan Project was to design a weapon to fight a war the country was already in. The attack on Pearl Harbor — and the Xindi attack on Earth — was to start a war.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@31/krad: It’s inaccurate to say that the attack on Pearl Harbor was intended to start a war. While Japan did declare war on the US at the time, it was peripheral to their true goal. The intent was to cripple the United States Pacific Fleet by simultaneously attacking its bases, so that America would be too weak to prevent Japan from conquering Southeast Asia. So the attack was not meant to start a war per se, merely to remove an obstacle to starting a war of conquest. But it backfired by making America a bigger obstacle in the long run.
As for Degra, surely Emperor Hirohito is the wrong comparison, because Degra was not the monarch of the Xindi, he was just one member of the Council. Wouldn’t a better comparison be Wernher von Braun, the scientist appointed by Hitler to lead the Nazis’ military rocket project? Von Braun was a problematical figure, given that he voluntarily worked for the Nazis and evidently wasn’t too troubled by what he knew of their human rights abuses, even though he didn’t share their ideology. And of course, the US chose to “rehabilitate” von Braun through Operation Paperclip, and he helped humanity reach the Moon.
Also, this is getting ahead of things, but starting the war wasn’t the Xindi’s idea, it was something they were tricked into believing was necessary for their own survival. So I don’t think it seems fair to define any Xindi as “the quintessential devil in these matters.”
A lovely spin on various other episodes we’ve seen where Romulans, Section 31, etc. have pulled similar Operation Headf**ks on our heroes. Very slyly executed, and, I think, the first Enterprise episode I’ve seen (certainly the first this series) that’s had me really focused on it all the way through.